Coming Apart 2: SuperZips

I began this miniseries on Charles Murray’s new book a bit out of order. I jumped ahead to the sociological information that seemed closest to my own heart—the manner in which the changes in social policies and the social contract over the past 50 years have left the upper class elites relatively unaffected while tearing apart the lower classes. While this constitutes the core of Murray’s analysis of the past 50 years, he begins with a much simpler tale: the lack of interaction between classes that prevails today and allows for this fragmentation to go almost unnoticed by the elites.

Murray identifies what he calls SuperZips, which are zip codes meeting specific socioeconomic criteria concerning income and education levels (again, none of this is predicated on political affiliation). Essentially, the criteria for SuperZip status amounts to nearly 2/3 of adults in the zip code having a college education with a median income level of $141,400 in the zip. In other words, they constitute the top 5% of zip codes in America. There are 882 such zip codes in our country containing 9.1 million people. They are substantially whiter and more Asian than the rest of the country. Crime is lower, the inhabitants are more likely to be married, and unemployment is extremely low.

The amazing thing about these SuperZips is that they all seem to butt up against one another. Murray gives the example of Washington, D.C. The D.C. area is a contiguous region of SuperZips abutted by zip codes in the 90th-94^th centiles of all zip codes. I don’t have the space to lay out all of the data, but essentially, and as Murray’s chapter title asserts, what the isolation of SuperZips spells out is a new kind of segregation. Those who live in the SuperZips rarely have any interaction with those from poorer zips and even less often have significant interaction.

The problem here, as Murray is quick to note, is that the residents of the SuperZips are the power brokers in this country, the politicians, businessmen, high-power lawyers, and artists. The major decisions—politically, economically, artistically, socially—are made by a cohort of individuals who for all meaningful purposes are entirely isolated from the majority of the population. And, as I argued in the first post, it is this majority that reaps the (ill) fruit of their decisions.

We all chuckle at the politician in the $5,000 Brooks Brothers suit who claims to be a “man of the people,” but this is the reality of the current sociopolitical situation in America, on both sides of the political aisle. The social upheavals and economic policies that leave the wealthy elite relatively untouched have ravaged “Middle America” in the past 50 years in ways we are just now able to take measure of. And as the availability of blue collar jobs and the pay for such work (not to mention the social capital inherent in such positions) continues to decline the situation only appears as if it will get worse. It truly is a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But there is more than economics at stake here. Another part of what has been undone is any sense of social cohesion. Those who speak for the poor have no idea about the lived realities of the poor; the poor on the other hand are taught to despise the rich for their wealth (and given the growing disparity this often seems justified). America is fragmented in a very real way along class lines in nearly every significant metric. Surprisingly (this is perhaps for another post), against the stereotype of President Obama’s infamous comment about poor hillbillies clinging to “guns and religion,” the reality of religiosity in this country has been felt most prevalently in the lower classes, with people leaving organized religion in droves from Fishtown. Religiosity in Belmont holds strong.

More to come.