In which I describe two fictional neighborhoods called Belmont and Fishtown, and explain how I will use these neighborhoods to track the founding virtues from 1960 to 2010.
THE NEW UPPER class is a subset of the upper-middle class and the new lower class is a subset of the working class. I have devised what I hope you will find an intuitively understandable way to think about the trends in the larger classes from which they are drawn by creating two fictional neighborhoods named Belmont and Fishtown. The details are given in appendix C, but the following will give you the essentials.
The real Belmont, zip code 02478, centile 97, is a suburb of Boston and the home of people who are mostly in the upper-middle class. Many people in the professions live in Belmont—physicians, attorneys, engineers, scientists, university professors—alongside business executives and managers of nonprofits and government agencies. The people of Belmont are highly educated—63 percent of the adults had BAs in 2000. It is affluent, with a median family income of $124,200 in 2000.
The fictional Belmont that I will be using in part 2 differs from the real Belmont in that there are no exceptions. For whatever database I am using, I assign unmarried persons to Belmont if and only if they have at least a bachelor’s degree and are managers, physicians, attorneys, engineers, architects, scientists, college faculty members, or in content-production jobs in the media (e.g., journalists, writers, editors, directors, producers). I assign married persons to Belmont if either they or their spouse has at least a college degree and is in one of those occupations.
The real Fishtown, zip code 19125, centile 8, is located in the northeastern part of Philadelphia. It has been a white working-class neighborhood since the eighteenth century. In the real Fishtown, some people still don’t finish high school, but most get their diploma and go straight to work. Some have gotten technical training after high school. Some have attended community college or given a four-year college a try for a year or two. Some have been in the military, where they have received technical training. But completed college educations are rare in Fishtown—only 8 percent of the adults had college degrees in 2000.
Fishtown has many highly skilled blue-collar workers, such as electricians, plumbers, machinists, and tool and die makers, but also many people in midskill occupations—drywall installers or heavy-equipment operators, for example. Low-skill jobs are also heavily represented among the breadwinners in Fishtown—assembly-line workers, construction laborers, security guards, delivery truck drivers, or people who work on loading docks. Most families in Fishtown have incomes somewhere in the bottom half of the national income distribution—the median family income in 2000 was only $41,900—and almost all the people who are below the poverty line live in a place like Fishtown.
In my fictional Fishtown, I once again lop off the exceptions. To be assigned to Fishtown, the basic criteria are a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation, and no academic degree more advanced than a high school diploma. The detailed rules for assigning married couples with various permutations of occupation and education to Fishtown are spelled out in appendix C.
The occupations that qualify people for the two neighborhoods leave out a lot of others—owners of small businesses, mid-level white-collar workers, K–12 teachers, police officers, insurance agents, salesmen, social workers, technicians, real estate brokers, nurses, and occupational therapists, to name a few. It leaves out people without a college degree who succeeded in becoming managers. I omit them not because they are unimportant, but because of what I discovered when I worked through the topics we will be covering in the next four chapters. On every indicator, this group was in the middle. It made no difference whether the indicator was about marriage, industriousness, honesty, or religiosity, their results were somewhere between the results for Belmont and Fishtown. Moreover, there were no themes in the degree of their in-between-ness. Occasionally the people in the middle became more like either Belmont or Fishtown as the decades went on, but not consistently. Concentrating on Belmont and Fishtown allows a presentation that is easier to follow and that can focus more efficiently on the important trends.
Belmont: Everybody has a bachelor’s or graduate degree and works in the high-prestige professions or management, or is married to such a person.
Fishtown: Nobody has more than a high school diploma. Everybody who has an occupation is in a blue-collar job, mid- or low-level service job, or a low-level white-collar job.
Everybody Else: A wide range of occupations and education, but a strong central tendency toward mid-level white-collar and technical occupations and thirteen to fifteen years of education.
There is an additional oddity about my two fictional neighborhoods. Except for a few instances that I will clearly specify, the numbers and graphs you will see in the following chapters are based on people who are no younger than thirty and no older than forty-nine. I want to focus on adults in the prime of life, with their educations usually completed, engaged in their careers and raising families. People in their twenties and fifties are in decades of transition—people who end up in Belmont are often still in school in their twenties, and people in Fishtown are increasingly likely to be physically disabled or to have taken early retirement in their fifties. I eliminate them altogether to simplify the interpretation of the results. I often use the term prime-age adults to refer to persons ages 30 through 49.
Throughout part 2, I present trendlines showing the percentages of people in Belmont and Fishtown who behaved in certain ways or held certain opinions. These trends are interpretable as changes in the way that an upper-middle-class and a working-class neighborhood look and feel. But the proportions of white Americans living in those neighborhoods changed. In 1960, 64 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Fishtown and only 6 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Belmont. By 2010, only 30 percent qualified for Fishtown and 21 percent qualified for Belmont.
This raises a problem of interpretation. Perhaps things changed in Fishtown because the most able people in the Fishtowns of the 1960s had moved up into the middle class by the 2000s—what is known in the jargon as a creaming effect. Perhaps things changed in Belmont as the college-educated population expanded. We need to have an idea of what the trends would have looked like if Fishtown had consisted of 30 percent of the white prime-age population in 1960 instead of 64 percent, and what Belmont would have looked like in 1960 if (using a round number) it had consisted of 20 percent of the white prime-age population instead of 6 percent.
I therefore created an index combining educational attainment and the cognitive demands of occupations that enables everyone to be rank-ordered from top to bottom. Appendix C describes what “cognitive demands of an occupation” means and how the index was constructed. Every graph includes a marker showing the percentages for the people who ranked in the top 20 percent and bottom 30 percent on this index for whatever year marks the beginning of the trendline and whatever year marks the end of the trendline. I also occasionally add markers for the top 20 percent and bottom 30 percent when a trend changed direction. You should look upon these markers as a way of judging how much of the change in the trendline is owed to changes in working-class behavior and how much to a creaming effect. In most cases, changes in the composition of the neighborhood make remarkably little difference, for reasons that are discussed in appendix C.
You now know enough to read the rest of part 2. There are many details about the analyses that I have put in appendix C, trying to keep the main text as uncluttered as possible. I recommend that you begin with the main text, and then use the technical material in the appendix to explore whatever questions you might have.