It's strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they've fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.
When America installs a minimum income, it's going to be doing it in a very different historical context than Switzerland or Sweden or Germany, or any other country might do it. And we're doing it in a context where it has the potential, I think, for much better consequences than in those other countries.
More humility, in terms of recognizing our luck, and more realism, in understanding at a deep level that being smart doesn't make you good, doesn't make you valuable, doesn't make you wise.
When 'The Bell Curve' came out, I'd have lectures with lots of people chanting and picketing with signs, but it was always within the confines of the event and I was eventually able to speak.
When I'm talking about the white working class, here's what I'm defining: high school degree, no more, and working in a blue-collar job or a low-skilled service job. When I'm talking about the white, upper-middle class, I'm talking about people who work in the professions or managerial jobs and have at least a college degree.
The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.
I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and - as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump - I can sympathize with that.
I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician - that's hard.
My professional background consisted of evaluating specific programs the government was sponsoring in education or social services or, when I was in Thailand, rural development.
Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families.
The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.
If you don't start your career until thirty, that still gives you thirty-five years to make it professionally. If you can't make it in thirty-five years, you weren't going to make it in forty or forty-five.
The relationship between heredity and IQ in human beings is well established. But that does not mean that if you have a group difference, an ethnic difference, that difference must also be genetic.
The feminist revolution has tied writers into knots when it comes to the third-person singular pronoun. Using the masculine pronoun as the default has been proscribed. Some male writers get around this problem by defaulting to the feminine singular pronoun, which I think is icky.
I want the new upper class to start preaching what it practices. They are getting married and staying married in large numbers. They work like crazy, long hours. They even do better going to church than lots of the rest of America. Why not just say, these are not just choices we have made for ourselves. These are rich, rewarding ways of living.
Illegitimacy is important for the socialisation of little girls and especially little boys. If you have large numbers of young men growing up who never see an adult male doing the ordinary things men do, then you get chaos. This is not a moral statement, it's an empirical statement.
Hardly anybody realizes that the first couple of chapters of 'Coming Apart' were basically a recapitulation of the argument in 'The Bell Curve.' That's how little people focused on 'The Bell Curve's' real message.
We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that's increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America.
People are starting to notice the great divide. The Tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets.
We are under a moral obligation to do our best to realize the best that human beings can be. To neglect that obligation is to waste our lives.
