Christopher Caldwell writes,

Guilluy doubts that anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve traditionally understood them. Paris offers the most striking case. As it has prospered, the City of Light has stratified, resembling, in this regard, London or American cities such as New York and San Francisco. It’s a place for millionaires, immigrants, tourists, and the young, with no room for the median Frenchman. Paris now drives out the people once thought of as synonymous with the city.

…As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public—which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidized servants’ quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim.

Pointer from Glenn Reynnolds. Read the whole thing. This is one of those articles that one cannot excerpt enough.

From Tucker Carlson, profiled by McKay Coppins.

“Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”

“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”

Of course, assortive mating is only one of the four forces. But he is talking about it as a political force, not as an economic force.

My concern is that we are losing the ability to discuss ideas with people who disagree. Instead, we keep getting better and better at closing the minds of people on our side.

Laurie DeRose and W. Bradford Wilcox write,

By showing that cohabiting families are more unstable, even among the highly educated in Europe and the United States, our research suggests family instability is not only about socioeconomic forces. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry observed in response to our findings on cohabitation, education, and family instability, “The point about educational status, in particular, is important: The vaguely pseudo-Marxist idea that our family and life outcomes are entirely driven by economics is not credible; values, norms, and institutions also matter.” And, at least today, the values and norms associated with the institution of marriage remain clearly and powerfully tied to family stability. That’s why, as marriage becomes less likely to anchor the adult life course across the globe, growing numbers of children may be thrown into increasingly turbulent family waters.

As the authors point out, one cannot necessarily interpret their findings as a simple causal model running from choice of cohabitation to instability. I would add that, at least in the U.S., the rate of marriage is much higher among the affluent.

No, it’s not a love match, just an interview. Kotkin says,

the valley that I used to cover back in the 80s, and even 90s, was filled with people who had been boat people, who had started PC board companies. You know, kind of somewhat people being able to make a career for themselves in the tech industry even if they didn’t, let’s say have a PhD or an MBA from an elite school. That’s just not the case anymore. I mean, you have a much more hierarchal order in Silicon Valley than you used to have and that is really reflected throughout most of this economy. I mean, what you see particularly here in California is wealthy, older property owners who are in pretty good shape because their property up, but young people can’t possibly buy a house.

He calls this “neo-feudalism” because it creates an order that is stable, but stagnant. I would argue that it is due mostly to natural forces, but there are policies at work as well. Read the whole interview.

The natural forces are the four forces that I often talk about.

1. The New Commanding Heights, as demand rises faster than productivity in education and health care.
2. Assortative mating and bifurcated family patterns.
3. Factor-price equalization (globalization).
4. The Internet and other new technology, which complements some skills and substitutes for others.

The policy forces at work include:

1. Credential requirements, which protect some workers by excluding others.
2. Subsidizing demand and restricting supply in health care and education. Credentialism does both, in that it adds to the demand for credential-providing schools and while restricting supply.
3. Subsidizing demand and restricting supply in housing markets. Environmental and other building restrictions in high-demand areas help to hold down supply and enable young professionals to outbid others for housing in places like San Francisco and Brooklyn.
4. The system of public education, which creates neighorhoods with “good schools” (meaning schools that have a lot of affluent students attending), leading people to bid up prices for those neighborhoods. If you had vouchers instead, parents probably would still bid up the prices of schools that attract affluent students (that is what happens in colleges–it is what the competition to get into “elite” colleges is all about), but at least this would not be linked as tightly to housing.
5. Various policies that redistribute income upward, particularly to the affluent elderly. Social security, Medicare, and public-sector pensions come to mind.

James Pethokoukis puts up a chart showing that over the past 25 years several other countries have lost manufacturing jobs at a faster rate than in the U.S. And of course, manufacturing output has increased.

I should point out that the statistics on manufacturing jobs include white-collar workers, which have been increasing as a share of manufacturing jobs. The percentage of the labor force doing manufacturing production work has shrunk even more.

Manufacturing is in a situation that is comparable to agriculture, where a tiny share of the work force produces a tremendous amount of output.

So say Rania Gihleb and Kevin Lang.

Some economists have argued that assortative mating between men and women has increased over the last several decades, thereby contributing to increased family income inequality. Sociologists have argued that educational homogamy has increased. We clarify the relation between the two and, using both the Current Population Surveys and the decennial Censuses/American Community Survey, show that neither is correct. The former is based on the use of inappropriate statistical techniques. Both are sensitive to how educational categories are chosen. We also find no evidence that the correlation between spouses’ potential earnings has changed dramatically.

I have not read the paper. It certainly would throw cold water on one of the four forces.