Author: Andrew Sullivan

While visiting an amusement park, McArdle bought a fast pass that allowed her to jump the line, but she was put off by the attitude of some of her fellow fast-passers:

The real problem with fast passes isn’t that they allow a tiny number of people to jump the queue; it’s that those people start feeling that they should never have to mingle with the people who don’t have the passes. They act like entitled jerks who have the right to shove everyone else out of the way.

Her broader point:

[M]ore people are living a fast pass Life. Getting a special queue with special service isn’t a rare treat, something to indulge in on your first vacation in three years. It’s a permanent condition.

Jump the security queue at the airport because you’re a frequent flyer. Walk straight into your rental car because you’re a Hertz#1 Club Gold member. Don’t like the kids your children are hanging around with? Push them into an elite program, or buy a house in a more exclusive school district. Join a gated community so the wrong people can’t even walk near you.

The economic elite used to just buy more of the things we all enjoyed. Now they have access to a different set of experiences entirely. No, that’s not quite true — of course the rich used to be able to afford better vacations and nicer cars. But increasingly they’re enjoying an exclusive version of the things we all do — right there in front of us, where we can resent them for it.

Joyner adds:

I’m not sure how one gets around the “entitlement” problem. Rich people have always had ways to avoid the worst aspects of life but, as the divide between the rich and everyone else widens, they’re able to buy their way out of more of them.

Alice Dreger, a professor of bioethics, revised her views on gender dysphoria after receiving a letter from a mother of a “pink boy” – one “whose manner of play and dress has often tended toward what’s common in girls”:

The approach I called “therapeutic” seeks to see a child’s gender dysphoria evaporate, if at all possible. This typically involves strictly limiting the child’s access to gender-atypical activities and trying to help the child adjust to fit a social environment that (supposedly) requires gender divisions. It also often involves family therapy. Though it would seem to promise to make a child more comfortable with his body, there’s very little data that the therapeutic approach “works.” Moreover, the proponents of it have tended to be obsessed with measuring outcomes in terms of ultimate gender identity and sexual orientation rather than ultimate well-being, which surely is what should really matter.

By contrast, the approach I called “accommodating” seeks to prepare the gender dysphoric child for a transgendered life—a life that will ultimately involve hormonal and surgical sex change. Though it seems superficially more gender progressive, the problem I have with this approach is that it may end up sending more children down a high-medical-intervention path than is really necessary to maximize well-being in the population of children who go through gender dysphoria.

“You’ve done a good job of outlining the warring factions,” Sarah told me. But, she added, “I think that there is a third, quieter point of view:

the perspective that, sure, transgender kids exist, but really, most of these gender-nonconforming kids are just kids who don’t fall to the most-masculine or most-feminine ends of the spectrum, and that’s okay. They don’t need treatment, they don’t need sexual reassignment, they just need a supportive home life, schools with anti-bullying protocols, and therapy for any harassment they face for being different.”

I felt kind of stupid reading Sarah’s message, because I realized that I had, in fact, left out this approach. I had targeted my article to parents who report that their male children are insisting they are girls or that their female children are insisting they are boys. But the truth is, as Sarah was suggesting, that a lot of “gender nonconforming” kids don’t have a simple story of being “trapped in the wrong body.” They are expressing more subtle, more complex, and more varied messages of self. What they need isn’t therapy; what they need is to know that it’s OK to be gender non-conforming. It’s perfectly OK be a male who has feminine-typical interests, behaviors, and desires, or a female who has masculine-typical interests, behaviors, and desires.

(Video: A father tells the story of his “pink boy” wanting a pink bicycle.)

San Jose State University has put its massive open online course (MOOC) project on hold because more than half the students in the pilot program failed their online courses, with pass rates for some classes as low as 20 percent.  George Anders suggests that Silicon Valley philosophies don’t translate well into higher education:

Will Oremus wonders what will come next:

It’s a sure bet that somehow, at some point, online instruction will indeed reshape higher education, if perhaps in more modest ways than its most ardent backers assume. Missteps are part of the process. Still, this is not the first heavily hyped online-learning venture to make headlines for going dramatically awry. The question is, what university will be eager to offer up its students as the next lab rats in what amounts to a massive pedagogical R&D program by for-profit Silicon Valley startups?

Douthat notes that fewer and fewer Americans are marrying fellow churchgoers or neighbors. More and more are meeting online:

[T]he data on unions formed online looks pretty encouraging, and it’s possible that the internet is helping to compensate for the eclipse of other forms of community, rather than contributing directly to those other forms’ eclipse.

But it seems fair to assume that there are still a lot of people who would prefer to meet their future spouse the old fashioned way — through initial flesh-and-blood encounters embedded in a larger pre-existing social network. If that’s your preference, the university campus is one of the few flesh-and-blood arenas that seems to be holding its own as a place to form lasting attachments.

Millman expands on the possible social consequences of widespread online dating:

The hidden costs of internet dating aren’t some much to the romantic “market” as to the rest of society. How many young people don’t go to church or synagogue because there’s no reason to go there to meet marital prospects? And once that dynamic starts, it inevitably accelerates, as the residual group who does show up is increasingly untenable romantically (because they are there for other reasons – or can’t find an “adequate” mate digitally). Then there’s the problem that if you meet someone digitally, you’re probably meeting someone with a distinct social circle – as opposed to someone from within your own social world. That’s good if the relationship doesn’t work out – less risk of collateral damage. But it creates complications if the relationship results in marriage, as now you have two circles to navigate that don’t overlap well. That happens plenty if you meet in meatspace, of course, but it’s much more certain to happen if you meet digitally than if you meet, say, at church.

Several readers have voiced skepticism over our coverage of this map and the accompanying piece from the NYT:

I would be interested to see that map compared to a map of “chances anyone in this county is an earner in the top fifth.” Some parts of the country simply have no or very few opportunities that earn at those levels, so it should be no surprise that you find few people “rise” to that level – with the inverse true for places like NYC, SF and Seattle. To study mobility, unobscured by regional differences in wealth, one would need to re-calibrate to the quintiles within each county, rather than comparing local samples to national averages.

Another reader:

Quite clearly the map shows (and the original paper makes clear) the importance of race, whether that be African-American or Native American. But this does not mean that somehow the Red States only care about taking care of their “white, GOP brethren,” as one reader implied. What does the data (pdf) from the paper say? Check out Table 5. Two of the best negative correlations with intergenerational mobility are the county’s rate of divorce and its share of single moms – two things that disproportionately affect African-Americans and Native Americans.

Utah, meanwhile, confounds your “two Americas” reading. Look at the blue area in Utah in the map you posted. This is because of Mormonism. Check out this blog post, for an interesting discussion on the similarities between Utah and Denmark, two places of high intergenerational mobility.

Another goes into much more detail on the previous points:

The graphs you’re presenting from the New York Times article are HIGHLY misleading.

First off, they look at social mobility without taking into account the regional differences in cost of living. From the chart: “The top 5th is equal to family income of more than $70,000 for the child by age 30, or more than $100,000 by age 45.” Anyone who’s anyone knows that living on $70,000 per year income on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is vastly different than living on $70,000 per year in the rural South.  In one place you are “poor” and the other you can live like a king.  I’ll gladly earn $65,000 and live in Tuscaloosa, Alabama vs. earning $75,000 and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Yet, in one case I haven’t reached the top 5% of income earners while the other I have.  This is clearly not true in reality.

Without a cost of living adjustment, the data is essentially meaningless. Income tells you next to nothing. What you can buy with that income is what matters! And that varies greatly by region. The chart essentially tells you where the dollar is worth more and where it is worth less.

Secondly, look at the people presented in the article as the “poor” struggling to attain a middle-class lifestyle. Stacey Calvin is presented as a “poor” person struggling to enter the middle class in suburban Atlanta. She has three kids. Is a single mom. Works only part time. Yet, from the picture of her, has the latest in smartphone technology, a three-bedroom home, and remote-control cable television. She and her kids are wearing fashionable clothing. This is NOT the picture of someone mired in poverty.

The next example is Michael Novajovsky, who is an educated network engineer.  He is married, three kids, has a beautiful house (as far as one can tell from the picture), earns $27/hour for a temporary job. From his Facebook page, you can see he isn’t mired in poverty either.

Lastly, how about breaking the data down by zip code or neighborhood.  New York City is not homogenous.  It includes Harlem, the Upper West Side, etc.  Simply aggregating numbers of very different neighborhoods as one is highly misleading.  Especially compared to a place like Atlanta that is spread much further about geographically.

Another:

I happen to live in Atlanta and recognize the difficulty in getting from the south side of the metro Atlanta area to where jobs are located to the north side of the metro Atlanta area if you rely on public  transportation. However, I respectfully submit citing the NYT article in support of your contention “the South” (which I guess does not include Red State/low-tax Texas by your assessment of the NYT map) seems at times to be a different country is cherry picking items from the story. As evidenced by the map itself, the NYT reporter stated “Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus.” Would be interested in your thoughts on why the same problem being present in the industrial Midwest fits with your interpretation of the article.

I think the map can bear many different interpretations. I focused on the obvious fact that race is a factor, and that the band in the South correlates very closely to slave-ownership patterns in the past. There may well be other explanations for other regions – but the Southern aspect is what immediately struck me, and, I’d say, anyone who looked at it. Update from a reader:

I wish you would stop saying that race explains the differences in social mobility found in the recent study.  The authors, in their summary of their findings (pdf), explicitly state that the differences remain after controlling for race.

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