[Marxism] US working class atomization: 2 instances from today's NY Times

["Sayan Bhattacharyya" <ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx>]

January 21, 2007
Soul-Searching by Missouri Suspect's Neighbors

By SUSAN SAULNY and LIBBY SANDER

KIRKWOOD, Mo., Jan. 19 — For more than four years, the residents of
the South Holmes Apartments here in this quiet suburb of St. Louis
lived alongside Shawn Hornbeck and the man who is accused of being his
kidnapper and captor, Michael Devlin, a pizzeria manager.

They did laundry together, came and went through the same small
parking lot, and let their children run through sprinklers in the same
barren courtyards.

Still, Shawn was not found and freed until Mr. Devlin, 41, who lived
in a ground-floor unit, became the suspect in another kidnapping, the
abduction of William Ownby, 13, from a nearby town just over a week
ago. Mr. Devlin has since been charged with felony kidnapping in both
cases, and is in police custody awaiting court action.

[..]

The six low-slung brick buildings are home to many short-term renters,
mostly low-income workers like waitresses, house painters and health
care aides. They pride themselves on being friendly but not nosy, and
on working hard to get by.

"This was just a perfect place for it to happen, bottom line," said
Matthew Cole, a cook whose kitchen window looks out onto the courtyard
where Shawn used to play. "Life's so hard now, it takes all your
energy just to focus on your own trouble. The people around here are
good people, but they're just trying to make the rent, keep the lights
on. Then something like this happens, and you can't say you noticed a
thing."

January 21, 2007
Ideas & Trends
Why Are There So Many Single Americans?

By KATE ZERNIKE

THE news that 51 percent of all women live without a spouse might be
enough to make you invest in cat futures.

But consider, too, the flip side: about half of all men find
themselves in the same situation. As the number of people marrying has
dropped off in the last 45 years, the marriage rate has declined
equally for men and for women.

[..]

But when it comes to marriage, the two Americas aren't divided by
gender. And it's not the career girls on the losing end. It's their
less educated manicurists or housekeepers, women who might arguably be
less able to live on their own.

The emerging gulf is instead one of class — what demographers,
sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about
the wedded state call a "marriage gap" between the well-off and the
less so.

Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to marry
than non-college educated women — although they marry, on average, two
years later.

[...]

But that gap widens among older men. Among men ages 25 to 34, 50
percent of college graduates are married, compared to 47 percent of
those who did not graduate from college. In older age brackets, there
is a difference of 12 percentage points.

The class gap happens in large part because, as Christopher Jencks, a
professor of social policy at Harvard, said, "like marries like."

"If you wanted to predict the characteristics of who I would marry,"
he said, "knowing my education, the strongest correlation you could
observe is that someone who is educated is more likely to marry
someone who is educated, and someone who is not educated is more
likely to marry someone who is not educated."

[...]

"Women are saying, 'I'm not ready, I want to work for a while, the
guys I hang around with don't make enough money and they don't want a
commitment,' " Mr. Jencks said. "It's the same thing a lot of
African-American women in poor neighborhoods are saying. But there's
the difference that they're having children."

Women of all education levels figure their earning power will flatten
out after they have children, he said. "The longer you wait, the
higher the level it flattens out at," he said. "That's a good argument
to wait. For the less educated, there isn't a steep increase in
salary, so there's less incentive to wait."

Maybe in the past, a man with little education nevertheless had a
good-paying manufacturing job, with a health care and pension plan. He
was a catch and represented stability.

Today, it may be hyperbolic to talk about the emasculation of the
blue-collar man. But it is not only liberals concerned with the wealth
gap who are watching these national trends with alarm. Social and
religious conservatives have called on society to do more to address
economic strains faced by this class.

[...]

"The way we used to look at marriage was that if women were highly
educated, they had higher earning power, they were more culturally
liberal and people might have predicted less marriage among them," Mr.
Martin said. "What's becoming more powerful is the idea that economic
resources are conducive to stable marriages. Women who have more money
or the potential for more money are married to men who have more
stable income."

All this leads to a happiness gap, too. According to the Marriage
Project, the percentage of spouses who rate their marriage as "very
happy" has dropped among those without a college education, while it
has risen or held steady among those better educated.

The better educated husbands and wives tend to share intellectual
interests and economic backgrounds, as well as ideas about the
division of household roles. They also have more earning power. And as
in so many other things, in marriage, money helps ease the way.

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