Ryan Streeter
What do Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have in common?
In the past 24 hours, right in the middle of the heated debate about "middle class tax cuts," they have injected a disquieting idea into our heads about what the middle class is.
Yesterday, commenting on the recent unemployment numbers, Bernanke said: "The unemployment rate we’ve been talking about. If you’re a college graduate, unemployment is 5 percent. If you’re a high school graduate, it’s 10 percent or more. It’s a very big difference.”
Wilcox, commenting on a new study his National Marriage Project has released, says: "From the 1970s to the 1990s, divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage became less likely for the highly educated (15 percent down to 11 percent), somewhat more likely for the moderately educated (36 up to 37 percent), and less likely for the least educated (46 down to 36 percent)." The "moderately educated" for Wilcox is the 58 percent of the population that has a high school degree and went to college without attaining a degree.
Douthat, commenting on Wilcox's study, points out that the more highly educated class in America has actually grown more socially conservative, less likely to divorce, and more religious, while the "moderately educated" and the less-educated are more likely to divorce and less likely to value the positive contribution of faith. He says that this "means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club."
Somewhere between the 5 and 10 percent unemployment range that Bernanke cites is an increasingly perplexing divide in America. It is NOT an economic divide. It's cultural and social. No one completely understands what's going on, but somehow higher education - one of the most secular and socially liberal set of institutions in America - is conspiring with the people it educates to produce more intact families committed to the values of family and faith.
The middle class, meanwhile, is exhibiting traits that not long ago were commonly ascribed to the "welfare class."
The lesson for policymakers is that access to higher education, regardless of the debate about how much smarter it actually makes us, is a key driver of social stability these days. And the lesson for everyone else, as Douthat so aptly puts it, is that "no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the 'moderately educated middle' (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class."
Forget tax cuts for a minute. The situation of the middle class is much worse than any of us probably realizes.
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