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E
VEN AS WEAK
job prospects have spread family and community problems more widely, they have also deepened them in many of the same neighborhoods that were plagued by joblessness in the 1970s and ’80s, and that have been struggling unsteadily to make their way back ever since. Urban minorities tend to be among the first fired in a recession, and the last rehired in a recovery. Overall, black unemployment stood at 15.7 percent in January 2011; among Hispanics, that figure was 11.9 percent. Even in New York City, where the financial sector, which employs relatively few blacks, initially shed tens of thousands of jobs, unemployment increased much faster among blacks than it did among whites.

In June 1999, the journalist
Ellis Cose wrote in
Newsweek
that it was then “the best time ever” to be black in America. He ticked through the reasons: employment was up, murders and out-of-wedlock births down; educational attainment was rising, and poverty less common than at any time since 1967. Middle-class black couples were slowly returning to gentrifying inner-city neighborhoods. “Even for some of the most persistently unfortunate—uneducated black men between 16 and 24—jobs are opening up,” Cose wrote.

But many of those gains are now imperiled. “It’s like someone bombed my city,” A. C. Wharton told the journalist Michael Powell in 2010, describing how foreclosure and unemployment have hollowed out neighborhoods in Memphis. Memphis was poised to become one of the country’s first black-majority metro regions that year, and Wharton was the city’s mayor. The median income of Memphis’s black homeowners, which had been growing through the middle of the aughts, is now as low as it was in 1990, and black middle-class neighborhoods like Orange Mound, Whitehaven, and Cordova have been decimated by foreclosures and vacancies. “It’s done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement,” Wharton said.

At the start of 2011,
unemployment among black teens ages sixteen to nineteen was more than 45 percent, and the unemployment
rate for black men age twenty or older was almost 17 percent.
With so few jobs available, the sociologist William Julius Wilson told me, “many black males will give up and drop out of the labor market, and turn more to the underground economy. And it will be very difficult for these people”—especially those who acquire criminal records—“to reenter the labor market in any significant way.”
The sociologist Glen Elder, who’s done fieldwork in Baltimore, said, “At a lower level of skill, if you lose a job and don’t have fathers or brothers with jobs—if you don’t have a good social network—you get drawn back into the street. There’s a sense in the kids I’ve studied that they lost everything they had, and can’t get it back.”

In New York City, 21 percent of low-income blacks and Hispanics reported having lost their job in 2010 as a result of the bad economy, according to a survey by the Community Service Society. More still had had their hours or wages reduced. About one in four low-income New Yorkers often skipped meals in 2010 to save money, and one in five had had the gas, electricity, or telephone turned off.
Wilson argues that once neighborhoods become socially dysfunctional, it takes a long period of unbroken good times to undo the damage—and they can backslide very quickly and steeply. “One problem that has plagued the black community over the years is resignation,” Wilson said—a self-defeating “set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how to respond,” passed from parent to child. “And I think there was sort of a feeling that norms of resignation would weaken somewhat with the Obama election. But these hard economic times could reinforce some of these norms.”

Wilson, age seventy-five, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the “very bleak” future he sees for the neighborhoods that he’s spent a lifetime studying. There is “no way,” he told me, “that the extremely high jobless rates we’re seeing won’t have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods.” As economic weakness persists, Wilson
believes that “we’re going to see some horror stories”—and in many cases a relapse into the depths of decades past. “The point I want to emphasize,” he said, “is that we should brace ourselves.”

B
AD SOCIAL NORMS
spread like colds through communities. When their neighbors are idle, people are less likely to find and keep work, whatever the level of local job availability.
When a couple divorces, the odds of divorce increase among their friends, coworkers, and other acquaintances.

One of the larger long-term risks to U.S. society is that the norms of a very large class of people, in a very large number of places, are now changing in unhealthy ways. Many of the social and, especially, family changes described throughout this chapter are steadily creeping into the heart of the middle class. The recession did not cause these changes—although they are inextricably linked to economic changes over the past thirty years. Nor has the recession suddenly turned the middle class into an underclass—although the forces that are winnowing the nonprofessional middle class will remain strong even once recovery is complete. The long-run economic troubles that haunt the nation are not limited to a few disadvantaged places. Left unaddressed, they could produce an unwelcome sea change in American culture.

“
The newest and perhaps most consequential marriage trend of our time,” wrote Brad Wilcox in a 2010 national study of the American family, “concerns the broad center of our society.” Among what Wilcox describes as “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school but not a college degree, who make up 58 percent of the adult population—an array of measures of family dysfunction have begun to blink red. Overall, “the family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans”—which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates—now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”

“The speed of change,” writes Wilcox, “is astonishing.” By the late 1990s, 37 percent of moderately educated couples were divorcing or separating within ten years of their first marriage, roughly the same rate as among couples who didn’t finish high school and more than three times that of college graduates. By the aughts, the percentage in “very happy” marriages—identical to that of college graduates in the 1970s—was also nearing that of high-school dropouts. In 2006–8, 44 percent of all births among moderately educated women occurred outside of marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among college-educated women, that number was just 6 percent.

The same pattern emerges—the actions and attitudes of nonprofessional middle-class families diverging from those of the college-educated and converging with those of high-school dropouts—with norm after norm: the percentage of fourteen-year-old girls living with both their mother and father; the percentage of adolescents who say they’d be embarrassed if they got (or got someone) pregnant; the rate of infidelity and number of sexual partners; the percentage of adolescents wanting to attend college “very much”; the percentage of never-married young adults using birth control all the time.

One stubborn stereotype in the United States is that religious roots are deepest in blue-collar communities and small towns, and more generally among Americans who have high-school diplomas but not college ones. That was true in the 1970s. Yet in fact,
attendance at religious services has plummeted among moderately educated Americans, and is now much more common among college grads. So, too, is participation in civic groups. High-school seniors from affluent households are more likely to volunteer, join groups, go to church, and have strong academic ambitions than they used to be, and are as trusting of other people as they were a generation ago; high-school seniors from less affluent households have become less engaged on each of those fronts. A cultural chasm—which did not exist forty years ago and which was still relatively small twenty years
ago—has developed between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society.

The interplay of economic and cultural forces is complex, and changes in cultural norms cannot be ascribed exclusively to the economy.
Wilcox has tried to statistically parse the causes of these changes, finding that about a third of the class-based changes in marriage patterns, for instance, are directly attributable to wage stagnation, increased job insecurity, or bouts of unemployment; the rest he attributes to a decline in civic and religious participation and broader changes in the attitudes and outlook of the middle class.

In fact, all of these variables seem to influence and reinforce one another. Nonetheless, some of the most significant cultural changes within the middle class have accelerated in the past decade, as the prospects of the nonprofessional middle class have dimmed.
The number of couples who live together but are not married, for instance, has been rising briskly since the 1970s, but it really took off in the aughts—nearly doubling from 3.8 million to 6.7 million from 2000 to 2009. From 2009 to 2010, that number jumped even more sharply (by 868,000, or 13 percent). In six out of ten of the newly cohabitating couples, at least one person was not working, a much higher fraction than in the past.

The increasing segregation of American communities by affluence and educational attainment has doubtless reinforced the divergence in the personal habits and lifestyle of Americans who lack a college degree and those who have one. In highly educated communities, families are largely intact, educational ideals strong, connections between effort and reward clear, and good role models abundant. None of those things is a given anymore in communities where college-degree attainment is low. The natural leaders and role models of such communities—the meritocratic winners who do well in school, go off to selective colleges, and get their degrees—generally leave them for good in their early twenties.

In their 2009 book,
Creating an Opportunity Society
, Ron Haskins
and Isabel Sawhill wrote that most Americans believe strongly that opportunity is widespread in the United States, and success primarily a matter of individual intelligence and skill. But the reality is more complicated. Mobility—up and down—from the middle class has traditionally been high. Among people who were about forty years old near the turn of the millennium, those born to middle-class parents had widely varied incomes. But class was more sticky among those born to parents who were either rich or poor. Thirty-nine percent of children born to parents in the top 20 percent of earners stayed in that same bracket as adults. Likewise, 42 percent of those whose parents were in the bottom income quintile remained there as adults, and only 6 percent reached the top quintile; rags-to-riches stories were extremely rare. A large, healthy, vibrant middle class is essential to the goal of mobility and opportunity. But one must speculate that if the economic and cultural trends under way continue unabated, class mobility will decrease in the future. How could it not?

The prospect of two nations—one wealthy and well educated, one poor and of limited hope—living apart and divided by largely impermeable cultural barriers, seems distant. And in most respects it probably is. Yet
one indication of the degree to which American society has already cleaved into two can be seen in the geographic pattern of U.S. military recruitment. Bill Bishop and the statistician Robert Cushing have tracked recent U.S. military casualties by hometown, finding that generally, “the bigger the city, the smaller the percentage of its young people were likely to die” in the wars of the aughts. By early 2007, the casualty rate among military-age residents of Bismarck, North Dakota, was almost ten times that of San Francisco. The Department of Defense, in a 2001 study, found that the “propensity to enlist is lower for high-quality youth, youth with better-educated parents, and youth planning to attend college.” In its recruiting, it has zeroed in on places with limited prospects for good jobs or higher education. In Iraq and Afghanistan, “the death
rate among military-age residents living in America’s high-tech cities has been half that of military-age people from rural America,” writes Bishop. “There has been a form of economic conscription at work.”

Is a large underclass in America’s future? It need not be. The cultural changes now at work on America’s middle and working classes are slow-acting, though the recession has sped them for a time. Frank Massoli is not the only blue-collar worker who has found work again; manufacturing jobs have rebounded, albeit very weakly, since the depths of the recession. Some opportunities in construction will come back, and many other nonprofessional middle-class jobs will rebound, too, though the long-term trend for these jobs may remain downward sloping. Indeed, one small service the recession may have done us is to underline men’s struggles, the struggles of high-school graduates more generally, and the deterioration of family life in many communities—providing a warning of what may be to come. Yet warnings matter only if we heed them. Should we fail to do so, the very idea of America could change profoundly in the years to come. And American politics—as contentious as they seem already—may take on a new and unwelcome cast.

O
N THE EVE OF THE
G
REAT
R
ECESSION
, A
MERICAN SOCIETY WAS
, by many measures, as open, culturally vibrant, and socially tolerant as it had ever been. Economic connections to the rest of the world were growing stronger year by year. Racial and ethnic tensions were by many measures diminishing. Volunteerism and political participation had begun to rise, particularly among the young, after a long period of decline. Just weeks after the crash, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency seemed—to many independents who supported him, at least—to promise a political renewal that would transcend the divisive issues of the past and bring the country together, into a more hopeful future.