Review of We Have Never Been Woke

Continuing with some common blog themes I am here reviewing We Have Never Been Woke by sociology professor Musa al-Gharbi. The book, though provocatively titled, is actually a detailed and substantial discussion of the professional class in America, what al-Gharbi terms “symbolic capitalists.” These are, more or less, the top quarter or so of American income earners, who mostly have (at least) a bachelor’s degree and work with ideas. As he says in an interview, symbolic capitalists are “people who work in fields like consulting, finance, law, education, media, science and technology, or human resources.”

His book has a wealth of data, is very informative and thought-provoking, and contains damning criticism of professional class elites, their political influence, and their self-regard.

Why read this book? Simply put, it will help you better understand America, especially the 2024 Presidential election and the ongoing political realignments currently roiling American politics. In addition to the book I will draw on al-Gharbi’s interview with Nathan Robinson because it is also helpful at times to have him describe these ideas in a more conversational manner.

As he asks, “Why is it that the winners in the prevailing order seem so eager to associate themselves with the marginalized and disadvantaged in society? What functions does “social justice” discourse serve among contemporary elites?” (302). These are the questions that drive the book.

As al-Gharbi says in the interview with Robinson, “the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around knowledge economy professionals. This matters because, as I show in chapter four of the book, especially for this group of elites that I call symbolic capitalists, we talk and think about politics in ways that are very different from how most other Americans talk and think about politics. And so, as the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around symbolic capitalists, many other Americans have started to feel like their values and perspectives and interests are not well aligned with the Democratic Party, and they've been migrating the other way.”

This helps to explain how, especially over the past decade, as a movement toward more “woke” rhetoric, focused on identity, came to influence the professional class, it drove  working class voters away from the Democratic Party and drew in more professional class voters. This all leads to 2024 where there is a huge education gap in voting, where Americans with BA’s heavily favor Harris and those with high school diplomas heavily favor Trump. This education gap persists, to varying degrees, across all racial groups.

Okay, this is true, if well-known by now. The novel point that al-Gharbi makes is that these “awokenings” as he calls them, have happened before. In brief, you get “awokenings”, i.e. elite-driven justice movements, when there is an overproduction of elites and they struggle to secure a livelihood. These struggling elites then seek to condemn the system they struggle in. There is plenty of truth to this. In the 1960s the draft drew thousands of young people, including elite college students, to the anti-Vietnam War movement. Was this partly driven by self-interest? Sure. 

More recently, the recession and post-recession economy hurt millenials. As al-Gharbi notes, “nearly half of upper-middle-class children born in the 1980s failed to replicate their class positions by age thirty”, including yours truly. (p. 96). 

These economic “anxieties were then channeled into a Great Awokening. Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” (96).

I think there is great truth to this and it helps to explain young, well-educated people, struggling with student debt and grim post-recession job prospects, joining Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and then flocking to the Sanders campaign in 2016. It doesn’t explain as well the Great Awokening though, from say 2014-2024. Certainly they overlap heavily. And a feeling that America is unfair informed both OWS and woke identity politics on campus a decade later. But they are also different.

The awokening focus on identity politics has been driven, arguably, not by precarious, downwardly mobile elites who are struggling (adjunct professors, unemployed lawyers, English majors working at Starbucks), but rather by the most successful elites—faculty, staff, and students at premiere colleges, staff employed in HR and DEI departments at major corporations as well as in medicine, media, publishing, etc.

The woke movement, I would argue, was not led by adjunct professors at state colleges commuting up and down the freeway, working out of their cars, and struggling to pay the bills. Rather, at universities, just to give one example, it is high-level staff, tenured and tenure-track faculty, and high-status, ambitious students leading the woke identity push.

Even if the latest awokening was driven more by successful elites than struggling ones, al-Gharbi’s basic analysis still rings true. Times of struggle for elites lead to broad dissatisfaction within the educated professional class, which then in various ways filters into and informs social movements among them.

Why do elites struggle at times? Because of elite overproduction. Here is Al-Gharbi, drawing on Peter Turchin’s ideas: “elite overproduction occurs when a society produces too many people who feel entitled to high status and high income relative to the capacity of that society to actually absorb elite aspirants into the power structure. Under these circumstances, growing numbers of frustrated erstwhile elites grow bitter toward the prevailing order and try to form alliances with genuinely marginalized populations in order to depose existing elites and install themselves in their stead.” (99).

As an example, consider that from 2000-2019 America produced 22 million new college degree holders but only 10 million jobs requiring a college degree. So I think clearly this is a key part of the story. And higher degrees tell the same story—too many JDs, not enough jobs for lawyers, too many PhDs, not enough jobs for professors, too many MAs, not enough jobs in publishing and journalism. And on and on it goes.

This explains a huge part of the discontent of the past ten years, especially among young people on the left. It is a counterpart to the decades of frustration among working class people whose towns have been deindustrialized and hollowed out and who have flocked to the right in recent years. These groups are not the same but they are each part of the story of America’s changing political and economic dynamics. To simplify, the struggling educated young flocked to Sanders and the struggling older working class flocked to Trump.

The problem, again, with Al-Gharbi’s account is that it is precisely not “disenfranchised elites” leading the awokening. Harvard Law students are not disenfranchised elites. High level admin at elite universities, high level HR staff at global corporations, are not disenfranchised elites. It is successful elites pioneering the awokening. The adjunct with a PhD, the barista with an MA, regardless of their individual beliefs, don’t have the power to lead the way on these issues. I and many of my friends are confirming examples of this. (I suspect the downwardly mobile PhDs are much less woke than the conventionally successful ones.)

With that said, I think al-Gharbi is onto something profound here. His analysis, as much as any in recent years, offers key insights into American politics. He is right that when symbolic capitalist professionals get involved in justice movements they often focus on symbolic topics that don’t matter rather than real, material issues. He rightly gives the example of renaming schools and buildings as a cause celebre for woke elite. A cause, of course, that neither matters to nor helps poor people of any race.

And more broadly, he argues that all these social movements and “awokenings” have achieved little, for “America in 2020 eerily resembled the United States of the gilded age in many respects.” (105). I largely agree with this, though I would place the emphasis more on the successful implementation of neoliberal economic policies and less on the failures of social movements. But it is true that by many metrics America has become much less equal since the 1970s.

In sum, he argues that “awokenings tend to be driven by elite overproduction, and they tend to collapse when a sufficient number of frustrated aspirants are integrated into the power structure or come to believe their prospects are improving.” (110). Again, although I don’t agree with all the specifics, this does by and large seem to be true.

There is much more that could be said in a review of al-Gharbi’s engaging and provocative book. (I have many pages of notes). I will conclude by saying that al-Gharbi’s account of elite behaviors and attitudes lends much insight into some of the central political, economic, and cultural changes of the past couple decades.

Three Cheers for Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery

Evan Mandery, a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) published an excellent book in 2022 titled Poison Ivy. It merits a brief review because it provides a very compelling critique of the role played by elite universities in American culture. Mandery specific focuses on the economic role that elite universities, what he terms the Ivy-plus, have in reproducing our ruling class.

For clarity, the Ivy-plus refers to the most elite universities in the US, basically the Ivy League as well as universities like Stanford, Duke, MIT, and the University of Chicago.

Here, in Mandery’s words, is the “basic premise” of the book: “That, whatever they may say to the contrary, elite colleges are engines of class stratification.” (preface, xi). Much later in the book he sums his thesis again: “the fundamental mission of elite colleges remains class reproduction.” (224).

What is Mandery’s point? Why did he write this book? His argument is that, when you dive into the data as he does, you see that America’s elite universities primarily admit and graduate only wealthy, elite students. In other words, although they may claim to promote diversity and mobility, they primarily funnel America’s elite teens through their doors and out the other side into America’s elite jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. In one telling statistic, he shows that for every poor student Princeton graduates they also graduate nearly 50 rich students. What do elite universities do? As those numbers illustrate, they reproduce and maintain the elite class in its position of power.

And this means in turn that America’s most elite institutions, from Wall Street banks to IT firms to media are populated by the highly credentialed children of the wealthy. This makes them increasingly disconnected from those who have not attended such elite institutions, let alone those with no college degree whatsoever.

To illustrate this point, Mandery asks “why should someone from Appalachia trust journalists if they’ve never met one? By the same logic, why should they trust scientists, academics, and elite colleges in general if neither they, their children, nor their neighbors have any chance of ever attending such an institution? Democracy depends in part on elite colleges democratizing access to the elite.” (preface, xvi).

Now consider how things work in practice: the average salary for Harvard grads at their tenth reunion is $200,000 per year. There are more Harvard students from the top 1% than the bottom 50%. The average family wealth of a Harvard student was over $500,000 last decade and is likely even higher now.

Why does this matter? Because, as Mandery rightly points out, “the story is the same at every elite college. Their core business isn’t lifting poor kids out of poverty. It’s keeping rich kids rich.” (from Introduction, xxv). I’m listing some emblematic quotes but it is worth noting that Mandery provides abundant data to back up his claims. Indeed that is part of what makes it such worthwhile reading. It is engaging, enraging, and full of data. Mandery is also great at summarizing his key findings in pithy quotes.

As he points out in an argument that resonates with William Deresiewicz’s equally good Excellent Sheep, “it would be one thing if elite colleges turned affluent high-school graduates into do-gooders. They do the opposite. They steer them into careers in finance and consulting, further exacerbating inequality. Elite colleges are essentially the only means of access to the most elite jobs—at Goldman Sachs, Mckinsey, and the like.” (intro, xxvi). Much of the book shows how elite universities actively steer idealistic or aimless undergrads into careers in finance and consulting.

Why are things like this? A fair question. Mandery notes, for example, that “what’s so confusing is that elite colleges are populated almost exclusively by liberals. Yet these institutions are conservative in every sense of the word—their policies favor rich white people, and they have invested a fortune in protecting the status quo.” (intro, xxvi). Indeed. After all, these institutions could dramatically expand enrollment or work to recruit large numbers of under-privileged teens in the cities where they are located. They do not do this because it would undermine their actual mission—to provide credentials for ruling class individuals and to network them and shepherd them into ruling class jobs. This is why the Ivy-plus exist.

But how can anyone believe in a game that is so rigged? Mandery tackles this question in a chapter on the role of the SATs that is both informative and funny. The history of the SAT and the institutionalized interests behind it also makes for useful reading. In perfect summary he notes that “tests like the SAT convert the natural advantages of birth and wealth into a neutral score, which has a veneer of scientific validity that makes it feel fair, or at least not grossly unfair.” (68). Unfortunately, as the author notes, colleges that go “testing optional” generally aren’t any better. All the non-testing options for admissions also reflect class inequality, sometimes even worse than standardized tests do. And thus middle and upper class suburban kids compete in a rat race for access to these institutions that they have been led to believe are meritocratic.

This is a problem, for “belief in meritocracy changes the very nature of education. It places emphasis on who wins the education beauty pageant over what is learned. It treats intelligence as static, instead of something that can be nurtured.” (138). This of course takes all the hope and idealism out of education. Instead of a place where you learn and grow, colleges are a place where the supposedly already smart and talented meet their fellow ruling class members before moving from Cambridge or Princeton to Manhattan. This is because “elite colleges convert advantages of wealth, like high SAT scores and extracurricular opportunities, into a tradable currency—a prestigious diploma.” (168).

In a later section of the book, Mandery notes how most professors lean liberal. Among sociologists studying elites this is especially so. Therefore he asks, rightly, “how can a system run by liberals be so conservative?” (176). One could push back and say that a bloated bureaucracy of administrators actually runs the universities.This is in many respects true. But Mandery’s point remains relevant because the elite university administrators identify as liberal in similar numbers to the faculty. This especially poses a problem for credibility in a highly polarized country that is also deeply populist. Yes, conservatives will doubt the credibility of elite university leadership but so will ordinary citizens.

On this exact point Mandery asks,“how can anyone be expected to continue to follow the academy’s leadership when the nation’s top colleges and universities have been so thoroughly exposed as bastions of inequality—when the average Harvard professor makes over $250,000 per year, and the average Harvard student comes from a family making more than twice that?” (286).

Is there any positive takeaway from this admittedly depressing critique? Thankfully, yes! As Mandery repeatedly points out, many public universities do the hard work of mobility that the Ivy-plus only claim to do. His own system CUNY, as well as the State University of New York System (SUNY), the Cal State system, and the University of California system, for example, provide world-class education to working and middle class kids and produce genuinely dramatic upward mobility. It is public institutions like this that produce a deep dose of service to the public good, opening new pathways for first-generation college students and opening doors for those who were previously excluded.

Mandery presents considerable data for this claim and then sums it up evocatively: “The CUNYs and Cal States of America produce our nation’s teachers and public servants. The Ivy-Plus colleges produce investment bankers, management consultants, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.” (123). One of these serves democracy in America and the other undermines it.

For related reading I can recommend Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent, Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders, and Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All.

 

Class Realignment: What Democrats Don’t Understand

There are certain concepts that help you get a better grasp on the complex reality of the social and political world. When combined they can help shed light on the ever-changing present. The devastating impact that neoliberal policies had on thousands of working class towns over the past few decades is one such point of stress for understanding the 2020s.  A second is the class realignment currently underway in American (and global) politics.

In brief, poor and working class voters used to to vote for the Democratic Party in the US. Globally, the poor and working classes voted for left-leaning parties. As one scaled the income and education ladder they were more likely to vote for the parties of the right. This was the case in the US as well, where voters became more Republican as they became wealthier and more educated.

This is no longer the case. In the past few elections the top ten percent of income earners have voted Democrat. In 2024 the bottom 50% of income earners voted Republican for the first time in generations, maybe ever. This is part of the rise of what Thomas Piketty has termed the Brahmin Left, i.e. the left-leaning parties, from the US to Europe, and much of the rest of the world, are now the parties of the professional classes and the right are becoming more and more the parties of the less-educated and lower-income.

This is new. Go into any Republican district today and you will hear that their grandparents and great-grandparents voted for FDR in the 1930s and 1940s.

Furthermore, this has obvious electoral reverberations: If you are the party of the professional classes, say the top third or so of income earners, how do you win the majority vote in a Presidential election? But it has other, more far-reaching cultural implications.

Democrats now dominate the professions. Universities, laboratories, hospitals, national media, publishing houses, HR departments and upper management at blue chip corporations, law offices, government bureaucracies, much of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And their perspectives, ideas, and language increasingly dominate the Democratic Party. They are the party of the successful, high-income, dual earning family.

This is the important point that mainstream Democrats and liberals have failed to grasp. It explains conservative distrust toward elites, experts, and mainstream institutions. As the Democratic Party and liberalism have become more connected to the professional class, to the point now where professional class suburbanites are arguably the base of the Democratic Party and the main site of liberalism in America, they have come to play a larger role in institutions like the media, corporate HR offices, academia, medicine, entertainment, publishing, government bureaucracy, and so on. 

As these sources of information, reality claims, knowledge production, etc., have become more liberal, they have come to seem more suspect to conservatives. All the more so in an age of intense polarization. Even though the conservative view of many of these institutions as full of liberal activists primarily engaged in partisan activities is wrong, the conservative view that they are full of liberals is not wrong. 

And it makes it harder and harder to convince conservatives, as well as apolitical down-and-out rural and small town working class people, that the well-off denizens of liberal institution world can be trusted. After all, these people are well-off while much of rural and small town America truly is struggling, often massively so. As these poor areas have become more Republican, they have become less trusting of mainstream institutions that they see as populated by hostile partisans. And in a more and more partisan era, we are less and less likely to grant good will to partisans of the opposite side. 

I’m not endorsing the conservative critique that all important institutions are controlled by liberal activists, let alone more conspiratorial views. I align with the general leftist view that the economy, and other key institutions, are more or less run by capitalists. But as the Democratic Party has moved further and further from a working class base, and become more aligned with a professional class that has good jobs, they are having a harder time winning over working class votes. They speak a different language, they see the world differently, they have a more meritocratic and positive view of the status quo, and the world makes more sense to them (until Trump came along/save for Trumpworld). Conservatives in turn are less trusting of these mainstream institutions the more they see them dominated by liberals.

The default liberal response to these developments too often is just to lecture, scold, and condescend about expertise and reality, impotently pounding their fists that Trumpworld, especially its more down and out and conspiratorial denizens, won’t just accept the truth claims of liberal professionalism world. But this will never work. 

Only a working-class centered perspective, critical of the status quo and much of the complacency (and arrogance) of the professional class, not to mention the more powerful oligarchs, will speak to and recapture working class voters.

Consider the following: mainstream liberals say “trust the science, trust the facts.” Take big Pharma, for instance. Yes, it gives us life-saving vaccines, albeit often with government involvement and cajoling. But it also gives us the absolutely devastating and ongoing opioid epidemic. Is it really a wonder that medical conspiracy theories are flourishing, especially when the epidemic hits poor, rural areas the hardest, the exact places that feel most distant from the professional world and its glittering successes? 

Vaccine opposition is stupid. But professional class liberals, however well-intentioned, are the least qualified people to deliver this message. “Trust the science”, coming from well-off experts and comfortable elites, tends to sound indistinguishable from “trust the status quo.” No surprise this message doesn’t work. And you see this more broadly in much of the liberal world’s reaction to Trump, where professional class liberals are constantly flirting with turning the Democratic Party into an updated version of the mid-20th century Republican Party--well-heeled, complacent, defending the status quo, and lecturing the less well off to trust their betters. $200,000 income, whole-foods shopping people with good jobs lecturing struggling "deplorables" is a recipe for electoral loss. And I’m saying this as someone on the left.

Let this fact sink in: the poorest Congressional districts across America are all heavily Republican. The wealthiest are all heavily Democratic. 

A key takeaway? To win back working class voters of all races, and turn out working class people who are apolitical or dejected, you need people from their communities to speak to them and deliver a populist economic message. Clueless outsiders can’t do it, especially not when they are focused, as the professional class so often is, on identity symbolism and policing language norms. There is a growing body of research backing up this point.

Coming Unstuck: Three Books on Stagnation and How to Reclaim the American Dream

I’m going to discuss three interrelated books, each of which deals with the American Dream, although none of them focus on the term. First, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, which is generating plenty of buzz. Second, Yoni Applebaum’s Stuck, and third, Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class, which is a few years older than the other two but concerned with similar topics. All three books, in their own ways, ask similar questions: Why do things feel so stagnant in America? Why is it so hard to build new homes, roads, rail lines, and more? Where did the American dream, of picking up and moving, taking on a new job and a new life, go?

Klein and Thompson’s vision of abundance concerns the question of how to build things in America. More specifically, they focus on the fact that Democratic-run states, like California and New York, have built up so many veto points that these liberal states can’t build the very things they want, like affordable housing and public transportation. This is a pretty damning point.

As they correctly note, big cities like New York and San Francisco are not the drug-infested, crime-ridden hellholes that conservatives claim. They are much more the opposite—highly desirable places to live that have priced out all but the superrich. But far from a minor flaw, this should be seen instead as an absolutely devastating failure on the part of blue-city and blue-state governance.

Consider this example—Tyler Cowen, in The Complacent Class, cites the median rent for a two bedroom apartment in San Francisco at $5,000 a month, and his book was published in 2017! All three books dwell on the fact that middle-class life feels increasingly unaffordable and that we no longer seem to build things in America, especially new housing.

Applebaum powerfully captures this dynamic, specifically the loss of control experienced by many Americans in a less mobile America. “When people can choose where to move, they can also choose not to move. But either way, it is their choice. Today, too many Americans no longer feel as if they can make that choice for themselves. They live where they are able, not where they want; they experience their lives less as the result of their own decisions than as the consequences of vast and impersonal forces. And with that decline in agency has come a deep embitterment.” (19).

Does this mean that regulations alone are the source of these problems? Can we simply deregulate our way out of the affordability crisis? Harold Meyerson notes in a review of Abundance that market factors are also a big part of the story—for instance, many people in the building trades (carpenters, electricians, plumbers), lost their jobs during the great recession or moved into different industries, making it hard to build houses post-recession. Similarly, small, high-demand neighborhoods in Manhattan will likely not return to affordability with the creation of more skyscrapers—they will also require publicly-administered affordable housing. There is a difference between the claim that continued construction will keep Houston affordable and the claim that expanded construction will return New York to affordability.

Applebaum, concerned with the same general themes, draws our attention to the fact that Americans used to move more. Put simply, most Americans used to rent rather than own and many of them moved regularly, at much higher rates than we do now. Moving was so common that many cities had ultra-busy moving days where huge numbers of tenants would vacate their apartments on the same day. “Moving day embodied the very American expectation that change would be the constant of their lives and that it would bring expansive opportunities.” (77).

What about the worry that constant moving would undermine community ties? As Applebaum points out, the period when we moved regularly was a period of thriving civic associations. “Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Americans formed and participated in a remarkable array of groups, clubs, and associations. Religious life thrived. Local businesses prospered. Democracy expanded. Communities flourished.” (77). This relates to the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited America, particularly regarding our propensity to join and form civic organizations. On this point, Robert Putnam famously sounded the alarm bell around the turn of this century with his Bowling Alone, which demonstrated in painstaking detail how Americans were no longer joining voluntary organizations like we used to.

Now we move less, so we are in the same place longer, and yet we also join fewer groups. This feels counter-intuitive but appears to be true. And it is likely one among many factors contributing to our current political, social, and economic disfunction. Americans need to spend more time in person and less time online.

A key concern of all three books is the impact of NIMBY, the not-in-my-backyard efforts of residents in rich neighborhoods to prevent change and keep out newcomers. In Applebaum’s words, “progressive communities like Cambridge and Shepherd Park, which pride themselves on their openness and tolerance and diversity and commitment to social justice, are the worst offenders.” (22).

Why? Because “progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish. How could that happen?” (23).

It is a difficult question to answer, although all three books offer some insights. In part, people settle into an area that they like and then oppose further changes. As Applebaum points out, the urban activist Jane Jacobs moved into a Manhattan neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century, was awed by its dynamism and vibrancy, and subsequently joined up with others to prevent any further changes, a decision sure to kill off the very lifeblood of the neighborhood and erode its most likable traits.

Specifically, nimbyism among the wealthy is a serious and hypocritical problem. Environmental reviews, for instance, may be used to slow or stop the building of new multifamily housing in California cities. But of course the best way to serve Californian ecosystems is for large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles to build up, not out. Nimby zoning regulations, however, have the opposite effect, leading to the ever-sprawling suburbs of single-family homes, which are far worse for the environment!

In Applebaum’s words, “far from preventing sprawl…the empowerment of local communities accelerated it by making the production of new housing in dense urban areas incredibly difficult and forcing construction out to the exurban periphery.” (218).

This was strikingly apparent on a recent southern California visit, where I observed the $1-2 million price for small, suburban homes that aren’t even very close to Los Angeles or San Diego. Reflecting this trend, the median home price in the state was $900,000 in 2023. This is not only the product of nimby efforts to oppose development. But that is clearly part of the reason why we can’t build things anymore.

On this point a piece in National Affairs has the following to say, “But whether it's Gretchen Whitmer running for governor of Michigan on a platform of "Fix the Damn Roads" or Josh Shapiro trumpeting his eagerness to cut through bureaucratic hurdles to fix I-95 in Pennsylvania, Democratic officials have sensed that infrastructure dysfunction is a thorn in the side of blue-state governance.” (The piece is called “Minoritarianism is Everywhere,” by Steven M. Teles).

What is so damning is that this disfunction is basically imposed by a tiny, rich, unrepresentative minority. As Applebaum notes, “when state legislatures delegated the power to regulate land use to local governments, they were putting decision-making authority in the hands of a group of voters who are remarkably unrepresentative of the broader public (221). Specifically, very wealthy, vocal homeowners who are opposed to change near them while also being liberal on national political issues. It is a potent brew that does not help the cause of liberal and left politics.

To repeat, all three books discuss how America has become stuck. Consider now how Cowen characterizes it: “For all the revolutionary changes in information technology as of late, big parts of our lives are staying the same. These days Americans are less likely to switch jobs, less likely to move around the country, and, on a given day, less likely to go outside the house at all.” (6).

Later, echoing Klein and Thompson, he notes the loss of imagination: “what has been lost is the ability to imagine an entirely different world and physical setting altogether, and the broader opportunities for social and economic advancement that would entail.” (7). I discussed this point in an earlier blog post titled “In Defense of Dreaming.”

In addition, America is becoming more segmented into two separate classes, one higher and one lower. “There is more assortative mating of high earners and high achievers” (15). Cowen, for instance, gives the example of two investment bankers marrying each other rather than a neighbor or high school sweetheart. Maybe this makes people happier. It definitely makes high income houses even richer, since they often now have two high earners, and low income houses struggle because they, at best, pool together two low income workers. 

What are some of the impacts we can expect from these developments? In a prescient passage, Cowen lists some disruptive changes that are likely to bubble up in the coming years. For instance, “impossibly expensive apartment rentals in the most attractive cities; the legacy of inadequate mobility and residential segregation; a rebellion of many less-skilled men; a resurgence of crime…” (22).

Whereas Applebaum focuses more on housing, Cowen focuses more on jobs. We are moving less, in part, because we are changing jobs at a much lower rate than we used to. In addition, as regional variation has shrunk, there is less incentive to pack up and move. In Cowen’s example, the suburbs of Cincinnati and Denver have pretty similar jobs, so why move?

“The American economy is evolving into a tiered system of high-pay, high-productivity companies on one hand and lower pay, lower-productivity jobs on the other.” (34). Have you seen how hard it is to get a good job? This helps explain why so many people don’t change jobs—if you manage to get a good one you stick with it. And this explanation is coming from a very free market economist! 

As a consequence, the well-off may fight all the more, at least at the local level, to preserve what they have, leading into nimby politics. Cowen recognizes one implication of this inequality, which “is that the affluent and well educated in America may be especially out of touch, no matter how ostensibly progressive their politics.” (57). Indeed.

Cowen also looks at median wage stagnation after the great recession, lower productivity growth, less innovation, and the fact that the median male wage peaked between 1969-1973. Is it any surprise voters rebelled in both primaries in 2016? Or consider how the US has less class mobility than it used to and less than many similar European countries. We actually have more mobility for immigrants than much of Europe but less mobility for native born workers. Relevant to understanding our current times? Yes!

I will close with two Cowen quotes on change. Referring to Trump and Sanders in 2016, the fallout from the Great Recession, the influence of the Tea Party and Occupy, and burgeoning black lives matter protests, Cowen suggests that “maybe these incidents are just the beginnings of deeper fissures in American life, fissures that will in due time rip open our sense of calm and tranquility.” (180).

Finally, “the mood of the times really matters, and those moods can, if enough pressure builds up, flip fairly suddenly and set off new dynamics and unfavorable and unseemly trends.” (188).

These three books offer different insights into how we are stuck, with a focus on the cost of living crisis. None of this means that markets alone will resolve these problems. But it should be clear by now that the combination of restrictive zoning, organized and well-off nimby advocates in nice neighborhoods, and a massive shortage of housing, is not working. Blue states and blue cities are the worst culprits here and they need to engage in considerable policy changes, including the creation of affordable public housing as well as removing barriers to construction, to address the affordability crisis. For that is what it is. A crisis.