Class Matters: Chapters 1–5

At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe.

With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals

a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Washington, regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Massachusetts, musing over the cachet of his two-hundred-foot yacht

"I don’t think life is necessarily fair. But if you persevere, you can overcome adversity. It has to do with a person’s willingness to work hard, and I think it’s always been that way."

Do you favor or oppose programs that make special efforts to help people get ahead who come from low-income backgrounds, regardless of gender or ethnicity?

As societies grew increasingly complex, the old classes became more heterogeneous.

I find these ‘end of class’ discussions naive and ironic, because we are at a time of booming inequality and this massive reorganization of where we live and how we feel, even in the dynamics of our politics.

The original exemplar of American social mobility was almost certainly Benjamin Franklin, one of seventeen children of a candle maker.

About twenty years ago, when researchers first began to study mobility in a rigorous way, Franklin seemed representative of a truly fluid society, in which the rags-to-riches trajectory was the readily achievable ideal, just as the nation’s self-image promised.

Because income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor parents can invest in their children.

Anything that creates turbulence creates the opportunity for people to get rich

Horatio Alger’s books have made his name synonymous with rags-to-riches success, but that was not his personal story.

He had been regaling his fiancee with the details of an all-you-can-eat dinner he was beginning to regret.

Instead, she tried a home remedy: salt water, a double dose of hypertension pills, and a glass of vodka.

Some researchers now believe that the stress involved in so-called high-demand, low-control jobs further down the occupational scale is more harmful than the stress of professional jobs that come with greater autonomy and control.

The risk factors—smoking, poor diet, inactivity, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and stress—are all more common among the less educated and less affluent, the same group that research has shown is less likely to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to get emergency room care, or to adhere to lifestyle changes after heart attacks.

Then Dr. James N. Slater, a fifty-four-year-old cardiologist with some twenty-five thousand cardiac catheterizations under his belt, threaded a catheter through a small incision in the top of Miele’s right thigh and steered it toward his heart.

A triage nurse found her condition stable and classified her as “high priority.”

Two hours later, a physician assistant and an attending doctor examined her again and found her complaining of chest pain, shortness of breath, and heart palpitations.

“I walk down the street and I feel good about it every day,” Miele, a gregarious figure with twinkling blue eyes and a taste for worn T-shirts and jeans, said of his neighborhood.

He played host to a large family reunion, replaced the heat exchanger in his boat, and transformed the ramshackle greenhouse into an elaborate workshop.

But on a snowy night in the early 1980s, a car skidded into a stanchion, which hit him in the back.

He needs to be more compliant with his medications.

Alone and bored, Gora started smoking again, then called Bellevue’s free smoking cessation program and enrolled.

A counselor supplied her with nicotine patches and advice, not always easy for her to follow: stay out of the house; stay busy; avoid stress; satisfy oral cravings with, say, candy.

But to the extent that education serves as a proxy for class, they seem to be declining.

And when he lost his job not long after, Woolner began paying him a monthly stipend—he sometimes refers to it as an allowance—that continued, at a smaller level, until she quit her long-standing job at a local antipoverty agency.

I didn’t understand their nuances, and I didn’t make a single friend there. In working-class life, people tell you things directly, they’re not subtle.

They are mostly oblivious of the extended Croteau family, and have barely met the Croteau cousins, who are close to their age and live nearby but lead quite different lives.

Despite her success, Justice worries about what people might remember about her, especially about the time when she was fifteen and her life with her mother and stepfather imploded in violence, sending her into foster care for a wretched nine months.

Joe Justice had never even met his cousin until he saw her in the trailer, but afterward he told his wife that it was “abhorrent” for a close relative to be in foster care.

I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn’t have any idea what the right clothes were.

“What is happening now is good,” Bennett said, “but it is like a finger in the dike of keeping back the flood of immorality.”

Just as his mother feared, Havens, a broad-shouldered former wrestler with tousled brown hair and a guileless smile, wavered some his freshman year and dated several classmates.

In his sophomore year, though, his evangelical a cappella singing group, a Christian twist on an old Ivy League tradition, interceded.

With its support, he rededicated himself to serving God, and by his senior year he was running his own Bible-study group, hoping to inoculate first-year students against the temptations he had faced.

There were also demographic forces at work, beginning with the GI Bill, which sent a pioneering generation of evangelicals to college.

But like the Southern Baptists and other conservative denominations, the Assemblies gradually dropped their separatist strictures as their membership prospered and spread.

Instead, its wellsprings were places like the Reverend Ed Young’s booming megachurch in suburban Houston or the Reverend Timothy LaHaye’s in Orange County, California, where evangelical professionals and businesspeople had the wherewithal to push back against the secular culture by organizing boycotts, electing school board members, and lobbying for conservative judicial appointments.