(Community Matters) notes while reading:
Symbolic Analysts (Robert Reich), Cognitive Elite (Murray & Herrnstein), Bourgeois Bohemians (David Brooks), the Creative Class (Richard Florida) – the managerial & professional occupations of the upper middle class. Those who run the nation’s economic, political and cultural institutions the new upper class.
Murray defines the new upper class as top 5% of adults ages 25 & older in managerial positions in medicine, law, engineering, architecture, sciences, universities & content-production jobs.
Status-income disequilibrium.
Cognitive ability and cognitive segregation – this resonates. Plus, cultural capital is an advantage to entry into the elite universities (read: Daniel Golden’s *The Price of Admission*), or is it homogamy?
Socialeconomic segregation. I’ve been talking about this for years – the real culprit & increasing risk in Austin. Austin is even cited as one of three cities.
How thick is your bubble? Too many Americans today know nothing about the lives of other Americans.
Murray’s The Founding Virtues – industriouness, honesty, marriage & religiosity. Ok, my turn to drive now
Community Matters 
Income inequality is the single biggest problem in America today. Blast the “rising tide lifts all boats” mentality and characterization of attempts to mitigate this problem as “populism” – discrimination against a beleaguered minority of wealthy people – analogous to racism.
Charles Murray, however, has always struck me as clueless. “managerial positions in medicine, law, engineering, architecture, sciences, universities & content-production jobs.” Is that what he said? Managerial positions, maybe. But the non-managers in those jobs aren’t in the upper class. How many people working in engineering, architecture, science, content-production make big bucks? (Do you know how much money the average architect makes?) Content-production is a winner-take-all game where Steven King and Diane Sawyer may get rich but most people working at newspapers, TV, etc are middle class. Same with law – some lawyers are wealthy but the majority are in the lower 95%.
Ownership is still a big source of income for the wealthy. Collecting rents, dividends, capital gains – not working. Our system taxes wages at a higher rate than capital gains! What logic is there in that? And we wonder why the unemployment rate is high. We celebrate and reward people who own – not who work