3 replies to this topic

[Russ Winter]

There is a revealing book by Charles Murray called Coming Apart:  The State of White America, 1960–2010″ .  This has a big focus on what nobody really wants to talk about, the white American working class. Santorium’s preaching about social values has merits but he panders and makes it mostly about black people or illegal immigrants. And so does Gingrich. Obama is an enabler.  This is just one more  elephant in the room that is being politically ignored: the ghettoization of the white working class. I am not even sure the 99% term really defines this one.

In the book the white working class is defined: no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist. Murray calls this community Fishtown. People who qualify for Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. Some of this data is from 2008, it is worse now, see food stamps chart below.



-In 1960, an extremely high proportions of whites in Fishtown were married— 84% in Fishtown, now just 48%.

- In 1960,  just 2% of all white births were non-marital. In 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital.

- Men 30-49, not available for work—they are “out of the labor force.” That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. 10% worked fewer than 40 hours a week in 1960, a figure that grew to 20% by 2008.

-Fishtown, today has a violent crime rate that is 4.7 times the 1960 rate.

-”De facto secular” is someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 38% of Fishtown fell into that category, now 59%.

According to Murray, the best thing that the educated upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending “nonjudgmentalism.” Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

This is hard hitting stuff although I DO NOT AT ALL AGREE with this strange Murray observation: “Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won’t make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won’t make a difference.

If there is a silver lining for the less educated working class, it is that they haven’t incurred a trillion plus in student loans to feed the “so called education” beast.

 



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[Lee Adler]

Fishtown is south of Kensington and north of Northern Liberties. It is 3 minutes from Olde City and 5 minutes from heart of Center City by subway. It is enjoying the beginnings of urban yuppiefication. Now effectively marginalized, the long time working class residents will become invisible and disappear. The working class will be pushed out of enjoying the fruits of their neighborhood's rebirth. This is a process that has been going on for decades in every major city on the East Cost. It's sad, and it's unfair. Once the property taxes start to increase, the families who built and maintained the neighborhood, often for more than a century, are forced out.

[qqqbear]

The absolute classic-

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

[CharlesInVermont]

Why does Charles Murray get any press at all?  His Bell Curve was a willfully ignorant book that was frankly a racist diatribe.  I suppose he has credibility the same way that financial advisers have credibility.  It doesn't matter whether they are right or wrong, what matters is whether or not they sound like they know what they are talking about.  Maybe we really are a nation of suckers.