realitybase - Journal

In a previous post, I presented a chart showing that real incomes for the bottom half or more of American families have been stagnant since 1973 and have declined markedly since 2000. In his column today, David Brooks describes the endemic problems and pessimism of the non-college educated. (Lack of education is strongly correlated with lower incomes.)

"High school grads are much less optimistic than college grads. They express less social trust. They feel less safe in public. They report having fewer friends and lower aspirations. The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated, the dialect of sef-fulfillment."

But they are grounded in reality, are they not? If the past 35 years, and especially the last 8, are any guide, there is no American dream for them: They should not expect to rise higher economically than their parents or that their children can do so. Their incomes are stuck, public K-12 education is declining in quality, higher education (even "public" colleges and universities) is increasingly unaffordable, as is health care, energy, and recently food.

Brooks makes the interesting observation that many more of these folks support Clinton than Obama. Apparently, Obama's hopeful message does not resonate because they have given up hoping for something better and simply want a champion to help them struggle to keep what they have. Could be, but then why did Edwards not do better with his much stronger champion-of-the-little-guy message? Maybe it was not the message but the messenger.

Update on Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 09:42AM by

Skeptic

This article reports that voters earning less than $50,000 per year favored Clinton while those earning more than $100,000 gave majority support to Obama. The author describes Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, "The Inland Empire" of California, as being the "unofficial capital of the working class." He quotes USC demographer Dowell Myers saying, "The inland areas are full of people struggling to hold onto middle-class status. They're not risk takers." It seems like Brooks's story told in economic terms instead of educational terms, and it seems equally insightful.