Pinched (16 page)

When I listen to Gates and to other meritocratic winners reflecting on good works or good policy or their legacy, I can’t help but think that Christopher Lasch was perhaps too harsh, or at least too sweeping, in his characterization of the new rich. Breaking into the elite requires neither virtue nor vile character, and the elite as a whole contains both elements in ample supply. Yet I also can’t shake the sense that, among the elites who are publicly minded at all, what many care most about, in the end, is perfecting the meritocracy—ensuring that every boy and girl has the same educational and entrepreneurial chances that they did so that the cream might always rise to the top. This is an admirable and, indeed, an essential goal. Yet it seems incomplete. It isn’t so much that today’s elites think poorly of Americans who lack the genetic endowment of IQ required to climb the modern economy’s ladder; by and large, many elites just don’t think about them much at all.

D
OWNTOWN
A
SPEN SITS
perhaps half a mile from Aspen Meadows, the campus on which the Aspen Ideas Festival takes place. It is lovely in July; cafés and upscale shops line leafy streets and boulevards, arranged in miniature blocks that march out primly from the feet of stately green mountains.
But the town has not escaped the recession. Many of Aspen’s wealthy homeowners were swindled by Bernie Madoff, and foreclosures have multiplied. The depth of distress is difficult to gauge; as a
New York Times
article published during my stay in Aspen noted (albeit using data that are merely suggestive), high-income Americans appear more likely than other classes to treat a home like any other investment, and simply walk away when it slips underwater.

Whatever their depth, from these troubles one can trace quite clearly the trickle-down effect of the plutonomy, and better appreciate the livelihoods that elites’ spending sustains.
COMPLETE STORE CLOSING LIQUIDATION
read the large banner outside Ingrid Antoni Designs, one of several tony stores in town bearing out-of-place signs advertising store closures or deep discounts. On the other hand, business was “way up,” a cashier told me, at the Thrift Store of Aspen, a nonprofit that’s been in operation since 1947. Most of the new demand was coming from the small army of contractors and construction workers and maids and waitresses who live in the area (though rarely in Aspen itself) to serve wealthy residents and vacationers.

I spoke with Diane Turner, an agent for the Aspen Real Estate Company, at her street-front office in town. She is a gregarious, middle-aged brunette, quick to smile. As we talked, her husband, an erstwhile builder, came in from a mountain-bike ride—“that’s what you do here when there’s no work,” he said, not altogether unhappily. Turner told me how fully “the town’s working class depends on the rich and the skiing industry,” and described how tough things had been.
She showed me the front page of the
Aspen Daily News
, which announced a bank’s plan to foreclose on a big resort at nearby Snowmass. Turner asked me about my job and my current reporting, and I gestured vaguely toward her and said I was trying to see how the recession was affecting middle-class people around the country. “We’re working-class,” she said, interrupting me. And indeed, they are. In Aspen, you are one or the other, rich or the rest. There is nothing to bridge the gap in between.

I
N HIS
1996
BOOK
,
W
HEN
W
ORK
D
ISAPPEARS
,
THE
H
ARVARD SOCIOLOGIST
William Julius Wilson connected the loss of jobs from inner cities in the 1970s to the social ills that overwhelmed many inner-city neighborhoods after that. “The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness,” he wrote, “are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”

In the mid-twentieth century,
most urban black men were employed, many of them in manufacturing. But beginning in the 1970s, as factories moved out of the cities or closed altogether, unemployment began rising sharply. Between 1973 and 1987, the percentage of black men in their twenties working in manufacturing fell from roughly 37.5 percent to 20 percent.
As inner cities shed manufacturing jobs, men who lived there, particularly those with limited education, had a hard time making the switch to service jobs. Service jobs and office work of course require different interpersonal skills and different standards of self-presentation from those that blue-collar work demands, and movement from one sector to the other can be jarring. What’s more,
Wilson’s research shows, downwardly mobile black men often resented the new work they could find, and
displayed less flexibility on the job than, for instance, women or first-generation immigrant workers. As a result, employers began to prefer hiring women and immigrants, and a vicious cycle of resentment, discrimination, and joblessness set in.

The community breakdown that followed—drinking and drug sales and addiction; an accelerating decline in the prevalence of nuclear families; the sclerosis of church groups and other social institutions—has been well documented. But it is nonetheless troubling, as an outsider, to witness everyday life in a nongentrified inner-city neighborhood today. In October 2010, I visited Kensington, a large, multiethnic neighborhood in Philadelphia, where the
death rate of young black men during the early aughts was comparable to that of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and where it was plain to see how the neighborhood’s character and economy combined to stifle the life chances of its residents.

Storefront businesses are not altogether absent from Kensington; on and around the main strip is a collection of pawnshops, takeout restaurants, strip clubs, bail-bond offices, hair salons, and furniture-rental stores. But even at noon on a Monday, some of the more obvious signs of economic activity involved streetwalking prostitutes and “corner boys” just beginning to emerge from dilapidated row houses to sell drugs.

Many of those row houses once had screen doors and metal sashes, but metal can be sold for scrap, and the doors and sashes have mostly been taken. On one street, two women, working separately, pushed shopping carts filled with metal piping and other scavenged junk down the sidewalk. Other neighborhood women get work as babysitters or day-care providers or hairstylists; relatively few young men work regularly, at least in the formal economy. According to the sociologist Maria Kefalas, the high-school dropout rate in Kensington is above 50 percent for boys, and heavy daily absences from school are common.

These sorts of problems are not exclusive to inner cities. In
The
Big Sort
, Bill Bishop describes the economic decline of the Coal Belt in rural Appalachia and the social dysfunction that followed. Although
Appalachia has long been associated with poverty, in fact much of the area has made great material progress over the past fifty years. But the region’s “coal counties” suffered greatly during the 1980s and 1990s, shedding tens of thousands of mining jobs (between 1980 and 1995, coal-mining employment in West Virginia fell by more than half). In the early ’90s, unemployment topped 20 percent in parts of the region.
It has since come down, partly because so many people have left the area—“rational people leave, if they can,” the president of Concord University in Athens, West Virginia, told Bishop—and partly because so many who’ve stayed behind have instead left the workforce, in many cases for a place on the disability rolls. Today, jobs remain scarce and poverty high.

In McDowell County, West Virginia, about 6 percent of the adult population has a bachelor’s degree; 40 percent didn’t finish high school. The term
shotgun wedding
has sometimes been associated with Appalachia, perhaps unfairly, but whatever the circumstances, in the past people did marry.
That’s less often the case today; more than one in three children in McDowell County were born out of wedlock in 2010. According to Bishop, “civic dysfunction” and political corruption are rife throughout the region.

Abuse of drugs like OxyContin has ravaged coal country, and is especially prevalent among former miners. In 2005, FedEx stopped delivering prescription drugs to several counties in eastern Kentucky. Its trucks were being surrounded by staggering addicts eager for their delivery; drivers feared being robbed or mobbed. “Everybody here has a close personal friend or a relative who is on OxyContin,” the director of a drug-treatment clinic director in Evarts, Kentucky, a town of just 1,000 people, told Bishop. In Harlan County, one young woman talked about what it’s like to live in the area: “The quality of life is so low.… When you deal with what people have to deal with here. I don’t know how to say it.… Me and my son
were on our own and everywhere I went I began to feel like a failure. I never dreamed I would turn to drugs but it seemed to be the easy way out.” She’d been selling her furniture to pay for her habit.

Pockets of chronic joblessness, poverty, and social dysfunction have of course been a part of the nation’s geography for a long time. Every now and then, a book or television show will come along that brings some national focus to these areas—
The Other America, The Wire
—but because such places are so cut off from mainstream American life, they generally have been easy to ignore.

The Great Recession has deepened the misery in many of these places. Year by year, it is also creating more of them. It’s a long way, both economically and culturally, from most blue-collar neighborhoods or less affluent suburbs to Kensington or Harlan County. But the distance is slowly growing shorter. The steady disappearance of nonprofessional middle-class jobs is creating the possibility that a larger underclass could form in the United States, one that becomes self-perpetuating and extends across generations. The elements that ultimately produce a true underclass are varied, and they interact in complicated ways. But the ingredients for such a soup are present today, and the recession has stirred them. One of the most important—the one that typically sets everything else in motion—is the failure and frustration of working-class men.

T
HE WEIGHT OF
this recession has fallen most heavily upon men, who suffered roughly three-quarters of the 8 million job losses in 2008 and 2009. Male-dominated industries (construction, manufacturing) have been particularly hard-hit, while sectors that disproportionately employ women (education, health care) have held up relatively well.
In January 2011, 18.8 percent of all men in their prime working years, twenty-five to fifty-four, did not have jobs; since the recession began, fewer prime-age men have been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking
the statistic in 1948. During the recession, for the first time in U.S. history, women came to hold a majority of the country’s jobs.

In this respect, the recession has merely intensified a long-standing trend. Broadly speaking, the service sector, which employs more women, is growing, while manufacturing, which employs more men, is shrinking. The net result is that men have been contributing a smaller and smaller share of family income—and working less and less over time.

One of the great puzzles of the past thirty years has been the way that men, as a group, have responded to a declining market for blue-collar jobs. Opportunities have expanded for college graduates over that span, and for nongraduates, jobs have proliferated within the service sector (at wages ranging from rock-bottom to middling). Yet in the main, men have availed themselves of neither of these opportunities.
The proportion of young men with a bachelor’s degree today is about the same as it was in 1980.
And as the sociologists Maria Charles and David Grusky noted in their 2004 book,
Occupational Ghettos
, while men and women now mix more easily on different rungs of the career ladder, many individual industries and occupations have remained astonishingly segregated, with men continuing to seek work in a dwindling number of manual jobs and women “crowding into nonmanual occupations that, on average, confer more pay and prestige.” Between 2000 and 2009, for instance,
the ratio of women to men in education and health services remained unchanged at about three to one.

As recently as 2001,
U.S. manufacturing still employed about as many people as did health and educational services (roughly 16 million each). But since then, those latter, female-dominated sectors have added about 4 million jobs, while manufacturing has lost about the same number. And while men made no inroads into these growing sectors over that time, they did consolidate their hold on manufacturing jobs—those dwindling jobs, along with jobs in construction, transportation, and utilities, were more heavily dominated
by men in 2009 than they’d been at the beginning of the decade.

“
Forty years ago, thirty years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”
And men have yet to adjust. In 1967, 97 percent of thirty- to fifty-year-old American men with only a high-school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were. Declining male employment is not unique to the United States. It’s been happening in almost all rich nations as they’ve put the industrial age behind them.

In her 2010
Atlantic
essay “The End of Men,” the journalist Hanna Rosin posed the question “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” What if the exodus of men from the workforce that began in the malaise of the 1970s, and has continued at a more measured pace since then, is once again gaining speed—especially in the bottom half of the economy?