Category Archives: Books

How does the Net boost “fraud anxiety”? How is workplace equality responsible for income inequality? Here’s Elisabeth Eaves of Forbes on modern times and one of its rising explicators, Dalton Conley:

David Kirp, a public policy professor at UC, Berkeley, who has known Conley since Conley was a postdoctoral student, calls Elsewhere, USA “audacious in its scope” and says that Conley’s goal is to become one of his generation’s public intellectuals.

At the age of 39 he appears to be well on his way. His books include a memoir, Honky, about growing up white in a black and Latino neighborhood, an academic study of the relationship between race and wealth and another on the effects of sibling birth order.

“He is the wunderkind,” says Kirp, noting that Conley won tenure at New York University when he was 29 and became chairman of the sociology department when he was 36. Married with two children, Conley says he is also his family’s “primary caregiver.” On the day he misplaced his BlackBerry, he had just come from walking one of his kids to school. He’s got another memoir, unpublished, in the drawer, and is studying for a Ph.D. in biology. In other words, ever distracted and ever working, he’s the living embodiment of the thing he describes.

As for income inequality:

The arrival of women in the paid workforce, meanwhile, dramatically affected mating habits. Conventional wisdom, as promulgated by Maureen Dowd, holds that highly paid professional men want to marry their secretaries. In fact, the research shows they want to marry someone of around their own income level, which means that low earners end up mating with other low earners. It turns out that marrying the secretary, so to speak, was a good way of redistributing income across society. The changing nature of marriage, writes Conley, probably explains about 40% of the rise in income inequality.

Ross Douthat discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book Outliers.

This means that while meritocratic success tends to be inherited, in an important sense — because the whole culture of obsessive hyper-achievement is just that, a culture that some Americans are raised in and steeped in and some aren’t — everybody doesn’t inherit the same level of success. Getting into the right kind of schools because you have the right kind of parents is generally a necessary condition for ascending the meritocratic ladder, but it isn’t a sufficient one; it tends to create a floor for failure, but it doesn’t guarantee a ceiling for achievement.