A Guided Tour of Class in America

BE: There still is a real big earnings gap between college and non-college graduates, but it's begun to shrink. Jared tells me that the reason it was growing so fast in the nineties was not that college graduates were doing so well, but that low-wage people, blue-collar people, were doing so poorly. Their wages were being held down -- and that remains true.

TE: For people I've known, leaping classes tended to be a complicated, painful experience.

BE: Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about. Periodically, we'll have some little focus on poverty, like post-Katrina, but then it goes away again.

I couldn't get over it, how beaten down people were, how they had internalized obedience. The fear of standing out in any way that might be noticed seemed to grip them.