The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.
The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.
People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. - there is no government money - because they think the work we do is valuable.
Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? Because my feeling is, if you can't answer yes to that question, you are in big trouble in trying to understand the country you live in.
Well, do I think watching 35 hours of TV a week is a terrific thing to do? Not particularly. But do I think you're shutting yourself off from a lot of American culture if you are so completely isolated from what goes on, on popular TV? Yeah, you are!
The new upper class devotes incredible amounts of effort to raising their kids but that also includes incredible amounts of effort in getting their kids into the right preschool in some elite communities which I think is going a little bit too far.
This is what old guys do. They get dark and pessimistic.
When I'm talking about the white working class, here's what I'm defining: high school degree, no more, and working in a blue-collar job or a low-skilled service job. When I'm talking about the white, upper-middle class, I'm talking about people who work in the professions or managerial jobs and have at least a college degree.
By the end of writing 'Losing Ground,' I realized I was a libertarian.
A part of me always felt like an outsider and still does.
My whole career has been one wrong answer after another as far as the left is concerned.
I want to keep the government out of the business of giving incentives to have or not have kids, or incentives to marry or not marry.
When America installs a minimum income, it's going to be doing it in a very different historical context than Switzerland or Sweden or Germany, or any other country might do it. And we're doing it in a context where it has the potential, I think, for much better consequences than in those other countries.
America's always been very good at providing help to people in need. It hasn't been perfect, but they've been very good at it.
I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do.
I did not want my children to grow up only knowing other upper-middle-class kids like themselves.
I love Europe, but I don't want America to become like Europe.
The '60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.
I want the new upper class to start preaching what it practices. They are getting married and staying married in large numbers. They work like crazy, long hours. They even do better going to church than lots of the rest of America. Why not just say, these are not just choices we have made for ourselves. These are rich, rewarding ways of living.
It's strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they've fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.
