Coming Apart II, 2017

(Taxes are not the main problem here.)

THE BUBBLE

This item, by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed, bears directly on our discussion of the Murray book:

In 2008, 55.9 percent of such high school graduates enrolled in college. By 2013, that figure dropped to 45.5 percent. While overall enrollment rates increased just after the economic downturn hit in 2008, they have fallen for all income groups since. However the drop for those from low-income families has been the greatest.

College Enrollment Rates for Recent High School Graduates

	2008	2013
All	68.6%	65.9%
High income	81.9%	78.5%
Middle income	65.2%	63.8%
Low income	55.9%	45.5%

The analysis is based on U.S. Census Bureau data. For the above comparisons, the ACE study defined low-income families as those from the bottom 20 percent, high income as from the top 20 percent, and everyone else in the middle group.

The sorting machine and acceptance rates (Murray, pp. 52-61).  In 2016, CMC had a lower acceptance rate than Dartmouth.  "Demonstrated interest" gives an edge to Belmont.

Things are even worse than Murray suggests

Jonathan Rothwell at NYT:

Almost all of the growth in top American earners has come from just three economic sectors: professional services, finance and insurance, and health care, groups that tend to benefit from regulatory barriers that shelter them from competition.

The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

  [see explanation of Gini coefficient here.]

Geography: Coming Apart in a Very Literal Sense

This week's epigraph: "Insulation! That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. 'If you want to live in New York,' he once told Sherman, 'you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate,' meaning insulate yourself from those people." -- Tom Wolfe, in Bonfire of the Vanities

Employment in metro and non-metro areas

More and more people are living in poor and rich neighborhoods, fewer in the middle:

• Zips and SuperZips (Murray, ch. 3)
• The geography of inequality: the case of California, the "hourglass state"
• Education and the 2016 election