The exhibit I've pasted above was taken from an online New York Times interactive piece, the link to which arrived in my inbox this morning. (It's here, but I'm not certain whether or not you need to subscribe to access it.) The article describes a study which finds that cross-class friendships are the best predictors of a poor child's ability to be elevated out of poverty as an adult.
From the article:
Previously, it was clear that some neighborhoods were much better than others at removing barriers to climbing the income ladder, but it wasn’t clear why. The new analysis — the biggest of its kind — found the degree to which the rich and poor were connected explained why a neighborhood’s children did better later in life, more than any other factor.
The effect was profound. The study found that if poor children grew up in neighborhoods where 70 percent of their friends were wealthy — the typical rate of friendship for higher-income children — it would increase their future incomes by 20 percent, on average.
These cross-class friendships — what the researchers called economic connectedness — had a stronger impact than school quality, family structure, job availability or a community’s racial composition. The people you know, the study suggests, open up opportunities, and the growing class divide in the United States closes them off.
My simple observation is based on the color patterns. A brief glance shows that two areas of the country do better than others:
- The New England states
- The upper prairie states (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas)
I don't think the article is behind a paywall, it appeared in my e-mail too this morning. It is part of "The Morning" newsletter, by David Leonhardt.
ReplyDeleteI can't help but think that they are talking about some lower middle class kids hanging out with some upper middle class, rather than kids from poverty level homes being friends with the 1%. I just don't think we see much of that, even in the "green" areas. My experience (which is limited) with high school kids indicates that most of them hang out with other "birds of a feather".
I grew up in Michigan and was raised with a distinct sense of who and what your own class was and that ambitions much above that were frowned on. My girlfriends all came from the neighborhood, but I consistently dated boys who were above my class, which my parents seemed to think made me more likely to "get taken advantage of," and my mother was always nagging me to go on the Pill.
ReplyDeleteRaber and I have a few friends who, like us, were "tweeners," first generation in the family to get degrees beyond an associate's. Generally, working class families are skeptical of anybody with advanced degrees, if not outright ashamed of it. My parents consistently told people that I was a "teacher," letting them assume I taught K-12 because they felt teaching at a higher level was "hoity toity."
The Tweeners we know who have done the best economically "married up" above their birth class and/or moved far away from family and the old neighborhood. I guess you could say they sought more social capital. We did not, so whatever an advanced degree might have done for us financially was an utter waste. We were dumb.
I don't sense that was Stanley's or Jack's experience with their working class families, so maybe it's just Michigan.
Without looking at the article, I assume that these cross-cultural friendships among children occur in public schools.
Consistent high ETS scores beginning in ninth grade and ending with National Merit Finalist status plus my decision by age sixteen to study for the priesthood with the Jesuits carved me an exit from the local working-class culture of SW Pa steel mills.
ReplyDeleteMy adolescent rebellion essentially was against the high school football culture. The math, chemistry and physics teachers were my personal friends and supporters. The football coach who taught biology hated me. He was against the space program, and once told me to stop smirking while he was pontificating, or he would ram a microscope down my throat. (I do have a quiet habit of getting under the skin of authoritarians with my questioning).
In 1960 when I graduated the steel mills were going strong; most guys did not plan to go to college. A Catholic math teacher who spent most of his life with the Father Serra club that promotes vocations befriended me. He was a graduate of Harvard; had gone there under the GI Bill. But he was also from a prominent family who owned their own impressive bookstore (also sold tobacco products, news papers, magazines etc.). He had gone to high school with my mother.
If I had decided not to enter the Jesuits, I suspect he would have helped me at least with advice to get into Harvard or elsewhere. In those days there was still much mixing across classes in residence and in education. He was an example of the merchant class befriending my working-class self. In our hometown both management and labor lived side by side except in different size houses. We went to the same school systems.
Both my parents had become adults by the end of eight grade. My Dad went to work in the mines and my mother took over household duties from her ailing mothers. So, they essentially let me become an adult by the time I entered high school and make all my own decisions. That is what had happened to them.
My first take when looking at the map is that the blue- green dots are mostly in liberal, urban, suburban areas, while the rest are more rural and less wealthy parts of the country. I’m not familiar with the Midwest, but it’s plain as day in the maps of Maryland, and in the Denver/Boulder area, California, and the Phoenix-Scottsdale area of Arizona. These are all areas that I am personally familiar with.
ReplyDeleteWealthier, more liberal communities are usually willing to support public schools with higher taxes. This benefits all the students, including those from poor families in the same overall school district, not just the immediate neighborhood schools.. There are two historic black communities in our neighborhood public school district - founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. Some families are working class, some are poor, and some are a bit higher on the demographic scale. They live there because they are descendants of the founders. I think a lot of friendships are formed between the wealthier students and the poor students due mostly to shared interests - sports, music, drama club etc. And the kids from the poorer neighborhoods are getting the same high quality academic environment as everyone else. I often see mixed race groups of kids walking down the street towards the local strip mall with several fast food places. The schools here are predominantly white ( maybe 50-60%). but there are many minorities besides African Americans too - Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern. But not many Latinos, except for the upper class kids whose parents work at the embassies. The working class Latinos live in other neighborhoods Where they create Latino cultural communities with restaurants, grocery stores, etc that fulfill their consumer preferences. But their public schools receive the same financial support as those in the wealthier neighborhoods.
Anne - the article states that this business of inter-class friendship is significantly more effective in fostering the ability of poor children to escape poverty as adults than school quality or racial composition.
DeleteWe might think of it this way: every urban area in the US has rich people and poor people, and politically, virtually every large city pursues liberal policies, including education policies. But why do Minneapolis and San Diego have better outcomes (and seemingly more social capital) than Chicago and Austin?
The fact that there are regional differences suggests that the successes and failures are rooted in history. Is there something about English Reformed in New England or Swedish Lutheranism in the Upper Midwest that leads to more social capital? Beats me.
Putnam’s book Our Kids includes interviews with Putnam’s high school graduating class of 1959 at Port Clinton, Ohio. He is one year older than me). That situation was a good example of bridging capital between social classes. Three quarters (including the two black students, Jesse and Cheryl, who have postgraduate degrees) now at retirement have greater educations than their parents, and most have had better incomes.
ReplyDeleteJesse made it because of his sports skills. He had grown up in Mississippi where being nice to white people was an essential survival skill. He was so good at it that he was chosen as student council president over Putnam! In his senior year he was recruited by a college athletic program. Jesse understood that while he was good friends with white students on campus, there were limits outside the classroom and carefully avoided challenging them. His high school experience likely helped him succeed in his career in secondary education higher management.
Cheryl succeeded because her mother was a model worker as a housekeeper for a rich woman. Cheryl got along with her fellow students and did well in school taking the college track even though both her and her mother thought there was no possibility of affording college. When her employer found out that the high school was not encouraging Cheryl to go to college, she made repeated visits to the principal’s office and finally convincied him to accompany Cheryl to college interviews.
Cheryl summed up her experience (and Jesse) by saying to Putnam that the while she appreciated all the education, friendship and help that she had received from her high school, she never really saw it as a place that she was really comfortable with and was her own.
Yes, interclass bridging relationships (even interracial bridging relationships) do happen, but they are not really the friendships of people who are truly at home with one another that we normally think of as social capital.
I grew up in a row home in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby.
ReplyDeleteThe East West subway had and has a terminal five blocks from my childhood home. Though mostly working class, there seemed to be a general expectation that a new Catholic middle class was forming with the Catholic boomers. I'm not sure how many of my elementary school group made it to college but I hear of teachers, doctors, even a mathematician. I was in the equivalent of a STEM group in HS. I think everybody in that crew went to college.
I generally only had a couple friends who were all exactly in the same socioeconomic class. But I never sensed any disapproval of moving into a degreed profession.
Didn't matter. I always knew what I wanted. Since I ended up an engineer, working with physical reality made me feel connected to all those steelworkers and even farmers.
Yes, I think people in the sciences and professions generally have an easier time with the working class. My friend Jeremy has a PhD in history. His mother always said, "My son's a doctor, but not the kind that helps anybody."
DeleteMy Catholic high school classmates came from a relatively wide range of family incomes. (Racially, we weren't very diverse.) I guess there was some sorting, based on having an honors track. But there also was a good deal of mixing, brought about by football, theater and other extra-curriculars. There also was some ethnic sorting. Our school had quite a few students of Italian and Sicilian heritage, and they seemed to hang out together. My close friends (some of us are still pretty close) tend to be from Irish and German backgrounds. Most of us went to college and ended up in corporate or professional careers. That represents a lot of people making the leap from their parents' working class families. But I guess that is the history of American Catholics writ small.
ReplyDeleteThere was a bit of a town and country divide when I went to high school. It really wasn't economic, most of us were middle class. Most of the moms stayed home.The farm and ranch kids hung out together. A lot of the town kids went home for lunch, because we got a full hour for noon break. The country kids brought sack lunches and ate in the history classroom, and played cards. If we wanted to, we could get hot lunch, but you had to walk 8 blocks over to the grade school to get it. None of us did that (nowadays everyone has hot lunch on site, even the Catholic and Lutheran schools).
ReplyDeleteBack then there was a TRW plant in town. If your dad was an executive or had a desk job there, your family had a higher social status. Which gave the farmers and ranchers a large pain. They called them the "men in the gray flannel suits", and had the attitude that they wouldn't know a day's work if it bit them in the behind.
We didn't have much racial/ethnic diversity, though there were a few Latino kids (back then they were just called "Mexican", whether they actually were or not.) I had two Latino friends. One of them was born here, but her parents were from south of the border. The other had ancestors who had been in the US longer than some of mine.
DeleteI grew up in an industrial town, home of Dow Chemical and Dow Corning. They were the biggest employers in town by far. Your dad was either hourly or a "salaried puke" who walked around in a suit drinking coffee all day and telling the hourly guys to work faster.
DeleteThat's interesting about the office workers having higher social status. I think some of that is sort of the legacy American split between the guy in the factory (or on the farm) who works with his body, vs the guy in the office who works with his mind - or more likely, his social skills.
DeleteIn the middle-class-ish neighborhood I live in, some are sedentary workers like me, and some are tradespeople (plumbers, electricians et al) who work with their hands. Many of them earn a decent wage. Our kids all go to the same schools. But they are sort of in a different subculture. I think a lot of it has to do with college - not necessarily what is taught in college, but college has a sort of finishing-school aspect to it.
My neighborhood in LA was middle class, as was my Catholic elementary school. All white neighborhood, and all white school. My community and public school in the mountains are harder to describe in those terms. My parents were among the few in the community who had college degrees. Since it was a mountain resort with a lake and skiing not too far away, the truly rich people were the summer residents with second homes there. The summer people included some very wealthy executives like members of the Hilton family, and TV and movie people like Doris Day. I understand that the star of NCIS has a home there now, along with some other more recent celebrities. It’s only a 2 hour drive from LA. The really rich summer people had homes on the north shore - very big, fancy homes. The rest of us lived in normal homes and in rustic cabins. A lot of summer people had homes in the normal neighborhoods too. Probably 80% of the homes on our street were second homes. The high school had 300 students. The elementary was k-8 and probably about 300 students also. Some people thought my family was snooty because of our parents being college graduates and because my older sibs and I were the top students. But they were often from families that I thought of as rich - many of their parents were small business owners or in the hospitality business. They had nicer, larger homes than ours ( ours was about 900 square feet), often lakefront with docks and boats. They could shop in the local clothing boutiques and go to Palm Springs for sun in the winter, or to Mammoth for better skiing than we had locally. The high school had 3 tracks - the 4 year college bound (most of the kids in this group did not have college educated parents but they wanted their kids to go to college), the junior college group - many of whom transferred to 4 year colleges eventually - and the vocational Ed group. A couple of my friends lived in cabins even smaller than our house. We had 2 bedrooms, an open sleeping loft, and 1 bathroom for a family of seven but my oldest sister was in college when we moved there, so she wasn’t home much. My dad left soon after we moved.,
ReplyDeleteThere was no diversity. Most people went to the non- denominational Community Church. The small community of Catholics went to the local parish. No other religious groups in the community except for a few Mormons. My LA neighborhood was mostly Jewish, because it was close to the studios and most of our neighbors there worked for one of them. But there were no Jewish people in our mountain community. No racial diversity at all except for two students who were Native American who had been adopted by white parents ( two different families). Both were Navajo. Both were accepted because it was kind of exciting to have Native American classmates. Exotic. I suppose then that the top of the demographic social hierarchy in our town were the successful small business/hospitality industry owners. There were two medical doctors, several nurses, and a handful of other “ professionals” but very few. The rest were infrastructure support workers - plumbers, building trades, electricians, retail and resort workers etc.
Anne, your childhood town sounds interesting. Did your family move there for job reasons, or did they just think it was a good place to live?
DeleteThey moved there because my aunt foreclosed on our house in LA. My dad’s brother had lent them the money to build the house. They had 3 kids with one on the way. To afford a house they had to move to what was then the boonies - the San Fernando valley. It was 2 bedrooms and 1 1/2 bath, biggish kitchen, living room, dining room, big yard. The size was restricted because of wartime rationing of building materials, but there would be room to add a third bedroom at some point. This was 1946. I was the 5th child, born in 1947, and the third bedroom was added when I was 6. Until then the dining room was the third bedroom. After my uncle died, his widow demanded full repayment of the loan which my parents couldn’t handle so she foreclosed. My mother found a small cabin in the mountains that they could afford. So we moved. I didn’t know any of this until I was in my 40s. My dad sold hospital supplies and traveled throughout the western states to sell them so he was seldom home. His degree was in chemistry from UCLA . So he was originally a chemist, but thought he could earn more in sales. But he was a lousy salesman. My mother’s degree from UCLA was in education because most women in college in the late 20s and early 30s had few career paths open to them. Once children arrived she stayed home. Teaching was a pretty sure thing though. She hated teaching and after the divorce, refused to become certified again. She did clerical jobs after the divorce when she was in her 50s. During the divorce, she lost our home in the mountains because my dad had run up a lot of debt. There was nothing left except for one thing. My dad had invented and held a patent on a piece of hospital equipment. His «best friend» from college funded production of it and bought my dad’s patent rights in exchange for royalties. His « friend » made millions on the device. But at least there was a small income stream from the minimal royalties, divided between my parents to supplement social security. So my mom could rent an apartment in a good neighborhood and work at a minimum wage job and be ok until retirement. When she retired, my sisters and our husbands bought her a lovely condo in a nice retirement community.
DeleteYour poor mother! (and you and your siblings). I'm so glad her family members were able to get her a nice condo to retire in.
DeleteThanks for the compassion, Katherine. We kids were fine. I was effectively homeless my sophomore year because my mom was working at a conference center that gave her a room as part of her meager compensation. No home for her, not even a rented apartment. So I stayed with friends and older, out of college siblings when I couldn’t be in the dorm. I didn’t realize then that it was brutal on my mother. But she recovered and survived, a feat that I didn’t totally appreciate until I was much older. I was Ok, and being a self- centered 18 year old with good friends to help me ( their moms), on my way to France for junior year courtesy of scholarships and financial aid, I was oblivious. I’m sad that I never told her that I had too belatedly realized what a trauma it had been for her and let her know how much I admired her strength in dealing with it and starting over at 55.
DeleteMichael Gershon has an interesting bit in the WaPo about how Democrats could become more attractive to the working class:
ReplyDeleteSandel and Bennet’s argument — that the dignity of production is more important than the level of consumption — hearkens to the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy. He argued that the most important things in our lives do not come from “just buying and consuming goods together.” What people need is “dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that lets a person say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, ‘I helped to build this country.’”
The Gerson article is good. And this bit is worrisome: "Republicans ascendancy ( if they take over the House, which seems likely). will almost certainly release a torrent of committee investigations and impeachment proceedings..." Some of them have promised to impeach Biden, for no good reason, that I can discern. And they may succeed , where two attempts to impeach Trump had failed
DeleteThere is some good Catholic social teaching buried in that quote.
DeleteI help build...something. I work in hi-tech. Not the same as pointing to a skyscraper downtown and saying, I riveted those I beams, or I poured the concrete, or something similar.
I think this year's election and the ensuing impeachment and 25th Amendment efforts against Biden will serve to solidify exactly where the GOP and the nation as a whole is headed. The anti Biden moves will either marginalize the crazies. Or it will make them the mainstream. My suspicion is that they will go mainstream, and we will be in for a complete overhaul of life as we know it--severe criminalization of abortion, reversal of civil rights for marginalized groups, public executions, increased gun ownership, demise of public education, deep cuts to social safety nets, slashing of environmental protections, reworking of domestic violence laws to accommodate "Christian values," hawkish pro-Israel stance, lots of public displays of piety ... the usual rogue nation stuff.
DeleteI'm not quite that pessimistic. The sane people still outnumber the crazies. But the crazies aren't afraid to cheat to get what they want.
DeleteYikes, Cassandra! If a GOP-controlled House decides to impeach Biden (which I had not previously heard of, and which would be a travesty), all of us will need to resist, especially those of us with affiliation with the GOP.
DeleteThe remainder of those predictions aren't in my crystal ball. But my track record for foretelling the future is fair-to-middling.
Jim - But my track record for foretelling the future is fair-to-middling.
DeleteYou definitely missed all the many signals sent out by the trump camp ( starting during the spring of 2020) that clearly warned that he would attempt to stay in office by any means he could think of. Now almost all Republicans believe the Big Lie. You also dramatically underestimated the damage that would be done to individual women and to our country by overturning Roe. The full extent of this damage remains to be seen, but I think that it will get much, much worse. I honestly see no signs of compromise on either side even though most Americans would limit abortion on demand to the first trimester, with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. That is what I would like to see. You hope that the states will make these compromises but so far there are no indications that moderation will prevail. Instead the signs are that the abortion laws and penalties will become more draconian. In addition, the SC is moving towards breaking down the separation of church and state and allowing a certain conservative understanding of Christianity to be imposed and supported by the governments, including using tax money to fund religious schools.
You and Katherine are optimists. Jean and I are pessimists. But I like to think that we are realists. I hope that we are pessimists though.
Jim, Jim, don't you read? Troy Nehls (R-Tex) grilled Sec Pete Buttigieg about using the 25th Amendment to get rid of Biden for being senile. Steve Bannon and his friends on conservative radio are jabbering on about Hunter Biden and his nefarious Chinese deals.
DeleteMy guess is that the only thing that gives them pause is the prospect if President Kamala Harris. They'd have to get rid of her so that Spkr Kevin McCarthy could succeed. Yee haw! White Power and Patriarchy for breakfast, lunch, and supper!
It used to be that the wingdings had to type up their screeds on mimeograph stencils and send them in the mail, which limited their audience because they a) had scant postal funds and b) couldn't spell very good.
Now the same people get funding from ED quack cure manufacturers and reverse mortgage companies and get on the Internet and blab out all kinds of crap.
A revenant Republican Congress will definitely impeach Biden and McConnell will lead the charge. National equilibrium and compromise is of no interest to them. Their dirty tricks have worked much too well for them to quit now.
DeleteAs for the crazies, there are more than enough of them to destabilize the democracy. It's Weimar Republic versus the Nazis all over again. Does that get me in the pessimists' club, Anne.
Jim says
DeleteBut my track record for foretelling the future is fair-to-middling.
Thats true of most of us. After Obama's election who would have predicted Trump. After Benedict's election who would have predicted Francis. Who would have predicted COVID? Some did but no one paid them any attention.
I believe in optimistic realism, confronting the facts but planning for the best, and not being surprised when the future unfolds very differently.
I don't consider myself a pessimist, just someone who doesn't turn away from the handwriting on the wall. The leftists are dithering about pronouns for the trans people and defending their drag queen story hours, while the rightists are trying to enforce their abortion bans with all kinds of punitive and possibly unconstitutional measures (penalties for linking to Websites of abortion clinics in other states, penalties for sending abortion pills across the state line, penalties for traveling across the state line for an abortion, prison terms for women and doctors who plot abortions, penalties on teachers who discuss homosexuality or say that white people weren't always nice to people of color, party planks that promote secession).
DeleteAs I said, I prefer the descriptor realist to pessimist. I don’t think that you are a Cassandra.
DeleteCassandra was cursed to be right in her prophecies but nobody would believe them.
DeleteYes, I remember that nobody believed them. So maybe Jean is a realist, as was Cassandra.
DeleteIn Atlantic today - trump and the GOPs dark vision
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-america-first-speech-analysis-gop/671004/
This part has me doing an eye-roll; "Trump is positioning himself as the indispensable man, a selfless public servant who, because of his boundless love for America and its people, will give up his life of comfort and ease to reluctantly reenter the political arena", because Trump only cares about one person.
DeleteBut he is surely good at triggering the fear button. We were discussing awhile ago about fear being at the root of most evil. It is the thing that makes people consider what they previously thought was off limits, " the end justifies the means". But at some level, people have to know he is playing them. I can only conclude that they want to be played.
Cassandra here.
ReplyDeleteGiven the way the Kansas election went, it may be that the culture warriors if not Trumpers are losing steam in the GOP. Apparently the state's constitution that bans abortion after 22 weeks except in dire cases, was deemed pro-life enough by quite a large margin.
Also the PACT (burn pit) act passed the Senate, proving that all but 11 senators are not impervious to being shamed by a celebrity with a megaphone. Thirty-two senators who initially opposed the bill caved. Those voting no on the final bill were:
Mitt Romney of Utah
Rand Paul of Kentucky
Mike Crapo of Idaho
James Lankford of Oklahoma
Mike Lee of Utah
Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming
James Risch of Idaho
Richard Shelby of Alabama
Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania
Tommy Tuberville of Alabama
Thom Tillis of North Carolina
Finally, Pete Meijer, a Michigan congressman who voted to impeach Trump, was defeated by know-nothing Trumpist John Gibbs ... with help from the Michigan Democratic Party. Their anti Meijer ad was designed to try to upset Meijer and provide a weaker cabdidate for Dem Hillary Scholten to run against. This is dirty and dangerous, given that the West Side is deep deep red, and I expect the plan will backfire. Plus it loses a GOP moderate willing to work across the aisle.
All this makes the GOP look slightly less in the thrall of the crazies. But it sure makes the Democrats look like cruds.
The Kansas vote reinforces my intuitions that Democrats who support abortion need to recognize that the public also supports abortion. In the states, if pushed, the public will support it by a constitutional amendment as in Kansas.
DeleteNow gerrymandered Republican legislatures may pass drastic laws against abortion. Democrats will have to assess their strategies. Try to pick off Republicans by portraying them as out of touch with the majority of the public or pass reasonable laws or constitutional amendments that both limit and give abortion rights.
The thing the Democrats need to avoid is pushing abortion rights as a partisan issue that gets everyone voting according to party lines.
Fat chance.
DeleteMy guess is that the gov's race in Michigan will boil down to abortion. Gov Whitmer has used the courts to temporarily block the 1931 ban, which allows abortion only to save the mother's life. Opponent Tudor Dixon, another woman, supports the 1931 law, no exceptions for maternal age, health, rape, or incest. Democrats will argue that if the November referendum to overturn the 1931 law is defeated, Democrats are the only ones who will stand up for abortion rights in the legislature.
Abortion also means Dems don't have to talk about inflation, recession, or Whitmer's covid policies that Republicans decried.
Sadly, abortion will once again suck all the air out of the room.
Write-in James Craig may be a wild card. Whitmer does not enjoy much support from African American voters. Craig, while a Republican, is also black. He could siphon votes from Dixon and Whitmer. Or black voters could just stay home, which would hurt Whitmer.