In which ways of thinking about the nature and magnitude of the new lower class are presented.
BECAUSE THE NEW lower class consists of a continuum of people, there are no sharp edges for deciding who belongs and who doesn’t. Still, it is possible to get a sense of the order of magnitude by considering three nonoverlapping groups that are problematic for America’s civic culture.
I want to identify a population that is heavily populated by men who are economically ineffectual or worse. To do so, I use the idea of making a living, and put men who are not making a living into that population. I define making a living as earning an income large enough that it puts a household of two above the poverty line—in 2010, an income of $14,634.1
Failing to meet that goal is full of implications because it asks so little. As of 2010, a married man without children could have done it if he worked 50.5 weeks at a minimum-wage job. But the minimum wage is seldom relevant for men ages 30–49 who have stayed in the labor force. Only 6 percent of hourly paid workers have wages that low.2 Suppose that in 2010 you held the job that is synonymous with low prestige and low pay—janitor. If you made exactly the average hourly wage of all janitors, $11.60, and you worked forty-hour weeks, your income in 2010 would have passed my definition of making a living in the thirty-first week of the year.3
My point is not that the poverty line is a good measure of poverty. Nor am I against women working to help put together an adequate family income.4 Rather: Healthy men who aren’t bringing home enough income to put themselves and one other adult above the poverty line are failing to pass a low bar. Among this population of men are a large proportion who are economically ineffectual.
Figure 13.1 shows the percentage of white males ages 30–49 who met that definition of making a living from 1959 through 2009. (Recall that CPS income figures are based on the year preceding the survey.)
FIGURE 13.1. MEN NOT MAKING A LIVING
Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to white males ages 30–49.5
Things were getting better for Fishtown men between 1959 and 1967. Not only that; we can infer that they had been getting better since at least 1939. Scholars have retrospectively calculated the poverty rate back as far as the 1940 census, showing that poverty then stood at more than 50 percent of the American population.6 For Fishtown men, the percentage who weren’t making a living started to increase in 1974 and continued to increase through good times and bad except for a dip in the late 1990s. In 2007, when unemployment was still low, that percentage had hit 27 percent, more than triple the proportion in 1973.
Being a single mother is tough, and it is appropriate to sympathize with women who are in that situation, but that doesn’t make single parenthood any less problematic for the functioning of America’s civic culture. In Figure 13.2, I include all prime-age women with minor children living in the household. I ignore the white families with minor children headed by a parent and stepparent (whose children’s outcomes are about the same as those of divorced parents who have not remarried), because the CPS does not break out this category.
FIGURE 13.2. SINGLE WOMEN RAISING MINOR CHILDREN
Source: IPUMS. Sample limited to white women ages 30–49.
The trends in the graph are not surprising given the similar information about single-parent households you have already seen in chapter 8. As of 2010, the percentage of prime-age white women in Fishtown who were single and raising minor children had quadrupled since 1960. Once again, the changing composition of Fishtown explains nothing. The proportion of single mothers among the bottom 30 percent in 1960 was almost identical to those among all Fishtown women.
Men who aren’t making a living and single women raising minors do not exhaust the problematic populations in Fishtown. Still another group consists of men who are making a living and women who are not single mothers, but who are disconnected from the matrix of community life. You probably recognize the type: They have friends, but purely for social purposes—friends good for going out and having a good time, not ones who are good for helping out in tough times. They live in the neighborhood, but are not of it. They don’t get involved in anything—not so much as a softball league, let alone taking an active role in the PTA or chairing a civic fund drive.
The GSS offers a way of estimating the size of this population through its data on group memberships. Figure 13.3 shows the percentage of prime-age adults who belong to no organizations whatsoever (the GSS asked about fifteen specific categories, plus an “all other” category) and attend church no more than once a year.
FIGURE 13.3. COMMUNITY ISOLATES
Source: GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49.
Limitations on the GSS’s income data and sample sizes prevent an accurate estimate of the overlap between the isolates and the other two populations I have discussed. But clearly the isolates add new people to the new lower class. As of the most recent GSS survey that asked these questions, in 2004, 24 percent of Fishtown women who were not single mothers were community isolates as I have defined them, compared to just 3 percent of such Belmont women. Twenty-seven percent of Fishtown men whose total income put them above the poverty threshold for two adults were community isolates, compared to 3 percent of such Belmont men.7
Figure 13.4 combines prime-age white males who weren’t making a living and single mothers raising minor children, and assumes that a quarter of the isolates in Fishtown were not part of either of those populations.8
FIGURE 13.4. A WAY OF THINKING ABOUT THE SIZE OF THE WHITE NEW LOWER CLASS
Source: GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49.
The percentage of Fishtown residents who are problematic in one way or another rose from 10 percent at its low throughout the 1960s to 33 percent in 2007, the last year before the recession, while remaining low in Belmont—4 percent in 2007.
If we include all whites ages 30–49 regardless of neighborhood, adding in the half of all whites who are in neither Belmont nor Fishtown, the percentage who qualified for the white new lower class more than doubled from 8 percent at its low in the late 1960s to 17 percent in 2007. In 2009, a year into the recession, that percentage had passed 19 percent and probably passed 20 percent in 2010.
My discussion of the size of the white new lower class should be treated as conservative in two senses. First, the percentages are arguably underestimated. If marriage with children is crucial to America’s civic culture, it might plausibly be required that a man in his thirties and forties who is “making a living” be able to support a wife and at least one child above the poverty line, not just himself and another adult as my definition specified. I have also assumed that the entire criminal class is captured by my measure of men not making a living, when in fact criminals are underrepresented in the CPS. Second, the raw numbers implied by my presentation are too low. The prime-age adults include only a minority of the whites who fall into the new lower class. My presentation ignores all the men under thirty and older than forty-nine who are economically ineffectual, all the women under thirty and older than forty-nine who are raising children alone, and all of the social isolates under thirty and older than forty-nine.
Reaching an exact estimate of the white new lower class is neither feasible nor necessary, however. If the overall percentage of whites ages 30–49 who qualify for the new lower class has doubled since the 1960s and is moving anywhere close to the 20 percent of the white prime-age population indicated by the definition I have used, it is a lower class that is changing national life.