Notes from the growing bifurcation

Shorter David Brooks:

The poors are very different from you and me.

No, really; David Brooks has been hearing about social inequality in America, what he calls a "growing bifurcation of American society," and he's very worried. He's been hearing about it from Robert Putnam, author of the famous Bowling Alone, and I figure he's been hearing about it at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where Putnam just gave a talk on his recent research.

The research is pretty hot, too, and nowhere near publication, but if like me you just couldn't make it to Aspen this year (oops! I forgot all about that gosh darn mortgage and all them credit card bills, and I didn't have anything to wear anyhow), you can still read about it in writing by someone who is not David Brooks; I found a very nice liveblog by David Weinberger at Joho the Blog, and I imagine there's more out there too.

From Tales from the Lou's Blog.

Putnam has been looking at children, and seeing hard class differences right from infancy, when more women who haven't finished college are giving birth than women who have, over the past 30 years, and more kids (obviously) are getting brought up in single-adult homes. The numbers are pretty much the same, by the way, for white Americans on their own as they are for people of all races (Putnam's study is limited to white people).

Parents from the upper level invest more money in their kids and they invest more time as well; up to an hour a day of additional quality time. Their kids are more active in sports, lessons, volunteering for the community. Kids from the lower level have fewer people they can trust, are less trusting anyway, and—of course—do worse on the reading and math tests.

Color me not terribly surprised by any of this, and why? I guess I always thought poverty was more of  a problem than teachers' unions. But Brooks is pretty shocked, almost to the point of understanding, briefly, what is going on: notice how he pulls back as if in terror at his own audacity from reality into surreality between paragraphs:

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. Their single parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world. Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

(Yes, it can't have that much to do with unemployment, can it? Must be those selfish intelligent people marrying their own kind and leaving the rest of us stranded.)

From The Final Edition (and a very funny though slow-starting Brooks parody from sometime last year).

And in the end, as he's trying to establish his left-right equivalence for the day, he really loses control:

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

That's all he wants us to do? I'll take it! If you can't afford to get married you shouldn't have a baby. It would also help if Brooks's friends would loosen up some on abortion....