/blog-gone

The difference between the rich and the poor in America is rapidly increasing.

I think I first heard this in political rhetoric. Then I read about it in The Economist. Then the "smart guy" in my life took it so far as to suggest potential class-based conflict in America within the next 5 years. Well, I dunno. Despite all the experts and policy wonks, I'm still on the fence. But David Brooks of the NY Times, has written about income disparity (registration required) in a way that seems to make more sense to to me.

In the information age, education matters more. In an age in which education matters more, family matters more, because as James Coleman established decades ago, family status shapes educational achievement.

At the top end of society we have a mass upper-middle class. This is made up of highly educated people who move into highly educated neighborhoods and raise their kids in good schools with the children of other highly educated parents. These kids develop wonderful skills, get into good colleges (the median family income of a Harvard student is now $150,000), then go out and have their own children, who develop the same sorts of wonderful skills and who repeat the cycle all over again.

In this way these highly educated elites produce a paradox - a hereditary meritocratic class.

It becomes harder for middle-class kids to compete against members of the hypercharged educated class. Indeed, the middle-class areas become more socially isolated from the highly educated areas.

And this is not even to speak of the children who grow up in neighborhoods in which more boys go to jail than college, in which marriage is not the norm before child-rearing, in which homes are often unstable, in which long-range planning is absurd, in which the social skills you need to achieve are not even passed down...

Now, the upper class doesn't so much oppress the lower class. It just outperforms it generation after generation. Now the crucial inequality is not only finance capital, it's social capital.

Not only that, but it sounds like what my parents have always taught me. Who knew?