Vice President Kamala Harris is counting on record support from college-educated voters to help propel her candidacy across the finish line. https://t.co/noqrlhDt2V
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 26, 2024
Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff and Aatish Bhatia at NYT:
Take white men working without a college degree. In 1980, they made more than the average American worker.
But over 40 years, even as their inflation-adjusted income has remained relatively flat, they’ve fallen well below the average income.
In the reordering of the U.S. economy since 1980, white men without a degree have been surpassed in income by college-educated women.
What this captures is a sense of relative standing — not just how well you do on your own terms, but how you fare compared with everyone else. In short, a sense of status.
As the American economy has shifted over the past 40 years away from manufacturing and toward services and “knowledge” work, this less visible hierarchy within the economy has shifted, too. Jobs that helped build the nation, like the machinists and metalworkers who were mostly white men without college degrees, today make a shrinking share of what the average American worker does. Newer kinds of work, like financial analysis and software development, have come to pay much more.
The economy has effectively devalued the work and skills of some Americans, while delivering mounting rewards to others — reordering the status of workers along lines that increasingly shape the country’s politics too.
