Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
.. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
.. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.
.. zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009.
.. Educated parents live in neighborhoods with the best teachers, they top off their local public school budgets and they benefit from legacy admissions rules, from admissions criteria that reward kids who grow up with lots of enriching travel and from unpaid internships that lead to jobs.
.. I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop.
.. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette.
.. the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
.. To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
The Quiet Rise of the American Upper-Middle Class
So different to the countries of old Europe, still weighed down by the legacies of feudalism. British politicians have often felt the need to urge the creation of a “classless” society, looking to America for inspiration as, what historian David Cannadine once described, “the pioneering and prototypical classless society.”
.. A key attraction in socialist systems — the main one, according to Orwell — is the eradication of class distinctions. There were few to eradicate in America. I am sure that one reason Downton Abbey and The Crown so delight American audiences is their depictions of an alien world of class-based status.
.. Class division becomes class stratification when these advantages — and, thus, status — endure across generations. In fact, as I’ll show, upper-middle-class status is passed down to the next generation more effectively than in the past and in the United States more than in other countries.
.. But I think some of the most popular efforts to date have diagnosed the class fracture incorrectly. Some analysts have let the upper-middle class off the hook (yes, that would be you) by pointing at the “super-rich” or “top 1 percent.” Take the new rock star of economic history, Thomas Piketty. For him, inequality is pretty much all about the top 1 percent.
.. This class, according to Murray, is defined as much by elitist culture — tastes and preferences — as by economic standing, and accounts for just 5 percent of the population.
.. Robert Putnam, in Our Kids, has a broader group in mind. “When I speak of kids from ‘upper class’ homes,” he writes, “I simply mean that at least one of their parents (usually both) graduated from college.” This represents, Putnam estimates, “about one third of the population.” Putnam’s concern is really with the bottom third, who he fears are being left behind.
.. my editors would have preferred me to use “upper class,” too. But I stuck with the longer, uglier, wonkier “upper-middle class.” This is not just semantics. If people are encouraged to think inequality is an upper-class problem, something important is lost. Most of us think of the upper class as the thin slice at the very top, but the tectonic plates are separating lower down. It is not just the top 1 percent pulling away, but the top 20 percent.
.. one in seven — adopts the “upper-middle class” description. This is quite similar to the estimates of class size generated by most sociologists, who tend to define the upper-middle class as one composed of professionals or managers, or around 15–20 percent of the working-age population.
.. America’s growing class division does not mean that categorical inequalities on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender have disappeared. If anything, the relative position of black Americans has worsened in recent years
The Hoarding of the American Dream
the top quintile of earners—those making more than roughly $112,000 a year—have been big beneficiaries of the country’s growth. To make matters worse, this group of Americans engages in a variety of practices that don’t just help their families, but harm the other 80 percent of Americans.
.. if we are serious about narrowing the gap between ‘the rich’ and everybody else, we need a broader conception of what it means to be rich.
the upper-middle class has pulled away from the middle class and the poor on five dimensions:
- income and wealth,
- educational attainment,
- family structure,
- geography, and
- health and longevity
.. They dominate the country’s top colleges, sequester themselves in wealthy neighborhoods with excellent public schools and public services, and enjoy healthy bodies and long lives.
They then pass those advantages onto their children, with parents placing a “glass floor” under their kids.
- They ensure they grow up in nice zip codes,
- provide social connections that make a difference when entering the labor force,
- help with internships,
- aid with tuition and home-buying, and
- schmooze with college admissions officers.
All the while, they support policies and practices that protect their economic position and prevent poorer kids from climbing the income ladder:
- legacy admissions,
- the preferential tax treatment of investment income,
- 529 college savings plans,
- exclusionary zoning,
- occupational licensing, and
- restrictions on the immigration of white-collar professionals.
.. As a result, America is becoming a class-based society, more like fin-de-siècle England than most would care to admit, Reeves argues. Higher income kids stay up at the sticky top of the income distribution. Lower income kids stay down at the bottom. The one percent have well and truly trounced the 99 percent, but the 20 percent have done their part to immiserate the 80 percent, as well
Reeves offers a host of policy changes that might make a considerable difference:
- better access to contraception,
- increasing building in cities and suburbs,
- barring legacy admissions to colleges,
- curbing tax expenditures that benefit families with big homes and capital gains.
.. Expanding opportunity and improving fairness would require the upper-middle class to vote for higher taxes, to let others move in, and to share in the wealth.
.. Prying Harvard admission letters and the mortgage interest deductions out of the hands of bureaucrats in Bethesda, sales executives in Minnetonka, and lawyers in Louisville is not going to be easy.
The Cuomo College Fiasco
He could have spent more to help students become academically ready for college, which is the biggest barrier to graduation.
.. But in 2016 Bernie Sanders made a big splash on the campaign trail with a plan to make college “free.”
.. If he runs for president, this will be an outstanding talking point. Unfortunately, the law will hurt actual New Yorkers.
.. First, the law is regressive. It does nothing to help students from families earning less than $50,000 a year. Their tuition is already covered by other programs. But it does pay for tuition for New Yorkers who make double the state’s median income. The higher up the income scale you go, until the ceiling, the more you benefit.
.. Second, it doesn’t make a dent in reducing the nontuition fees, like living expenses, textbooks and travel, which for many students are far more onerous than tuition.
Third, it doesn’t cover students who don’t go to school full time and don’t complete in four years. In 2017 this is the vast, vast majority of all students, especially poorer students.