Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
If this piece by Charles Murray isn't a natural Ricochet conversation-starter, nothing is.
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).
If you're in America, do you live in Belmont or Fishtown?
What's odd to me is realizing that I grew up in neither and have never lived in either. And some of his observations make a kind of dismaying sense of the feeling I have, when I go back to the US, that there's no place I'd fit in. When I ask myself, "Where would I live if I moved back to America?" I always have this uneasy thought--thus far unarticulated--that I couldn't bear the complete unreality of Belmost, but what on earth would I do in Fishtown?
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Comments:
May '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Lucy Pevensie
The government is responsible for both of those changes, by the way. Well-intentioned subsidies of tuition and housing prices, in the form of government guarantees of student loans and mortgages, have shifted the demand curve such that the actual purchase price of a house and an education have skyrocketed. · 29 minutes ago
The higher education bubble and the home ownership bubble have been hugely important in the stratification and isolation of our society that Murray laments but I am not sure that it has anything to do with the cultural decline that has accompanied that stratification. I blame it on the liberal media of course but I blame everything on that.
Oct '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Tommy De Seno
Let me take a better stab then:
Back in the 1950's, a house cost a man not much more than a year's salary. By the 2000s, it rose to 5x or more of his salary.
<snip>
Has the cost of living having so outstripped a man's salary that it has caused a hopelessness, a sense of "I can't win no matter how hard I try" that our parent's generation did not have?
Maybe economy has killed the family and values - not the other way around.
I'm not sure the two arguments really conflict. I tend to support the policy prescriptions of both, myself. Economic issues and cultural issues feed into each other. You have to address both.
I've commented on the unbalanced price structure of our economy myself, mostly a result of our government's habit of blowing up consumption bubbles (and the capital inflows that go with them). Causation is a fickle thing (see Thatcher's wiring diagram) and more likely a feedback loop is in play.
Apr '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
I grew up in Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Md. Our end of the street was suburban Fishtowny, the other more Belmonty. We moved across River Rd. to a more Belmonty neighborhood, but stayed in the same parish. Our next-door neighbors (the father was a physicist like my father) moved, too, to a house just down the street from our new house.
Upper Darby Township, PA, is a mix. I ride my bike to the Trader Joe's in Ardmore on the Main Line. Our neighbors on one side are black, on the other Sikh. Which brings up a slight artificiality to Murray's conceptualizing: the racial diversity on the ground. The better parts of "Fishtown" have a lot of South and East Asians, while "Belmont" has more and more blacks.
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Charles Starnes
Tommy De Seno
Maybe economy has killed the family and values - not the other way around.
· 1 hour ago
Tommy - If it is reversed, wouldn't you still find his article interesting and with merit?...
Please correct me if this doesn't apply to you, but there seems to be some Charles Murray animus in the comments.
I find the piece very interesting Charles. I did see a couple of anti-Murray comments but no that does not apply to me, as I'll admit I'm not that familiar with this work.
I hope my comment did show I was taking it seriously, and it seems to have generated a few replies itself so I hope so.
Actually, I've been giving it much more thought and have a great deal more to say about it.
For starters, most folks in Belmont come from Fishtown. They move on up, in Jeffersonian fashion (George that is; not Thomas).
Charles doesn't address that in many Fishtowns, you'll find the Belmont folks moving back. They prefer the arts and entertainment scene the Fishtowns tend to offer, so they build condos. and begin to gentrify.
See Hoboken, NJ.
Nov '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Here in the North Carolina Triangle, I agree with Leslie Watkins that these categories just don't apply. For example, I know one couple who both are Fishtown by birth, halfway between by income, and predominantly Belmont in taste and style (private schools, organic foods, etc.) Another couple I know is much more "Belmont" by income, and yet closer to the Fishtown category in taste: they have their kids in public schools, he carries a gun and hunts--you get the picture. Heck, the handyman who was fixing my sink today mentioned that his son is in school with John Edwards's kids.
I really think that this piece is wrong in its analysis of the upper income strata, at least outside of a few large population centers. Most places, as long as you're in that group of people who marry before they have kids, you will have features of both ends of the spectrum.
On the other hand, he's dead right about the problem of the lower socioeconomic group--which is, specifically, that group of people who have kids without getting married. That's the problem. The solution is not particularly clear.
Dec '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
I live in neither.
Instead, I choose to live out in the hinterlands where few other souls ever think to go looking for people (much less live there).
I like it this way. Nobody knows where I went to school, and nobody cares (or if they do, they keep it to themselves). In return, I do not treat the people I meet like they are stupid, until their actions force me to reconsider this position.
You are welcome to come out and visit if you like, Claire, but I'm not sure this part of the country is ready for your personality full time yet.
Your cats are welcome, but if they crap on my deck, all bets are off.
Feb '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Feb '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Robert Barraud Taylor
But hasn't Fishtown, like everything else, changed?
I also feel that these categories are a bit contrived, especially when regarding generational differences.
Right now Fishtown has become a lot younger, somewhat hipster, but mostly young professionals (i guess that would be myself). I think the issue I see more prevalent is the recent college graduates (everyone has a degree in something these days) aren't quite sure what they believe. Many young professionals who are successful have become so because they believe in hard work and are essentially closet conservatives (economically at least).
However, culturally they seem afflicted with a cognitive dissonance that comes from wanting to believe what they were taught in college (and what they hear on the daily show) contrasted with the whispers of their parents voices in their heads that sound more like common sense.
(cont)
Feb '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Example: I was speaking with my neighbor about OWS and I saw her, during our conversation, move from her default position of, essentially, "throwing a tantrum is a legitimate form of adult speech" to being quite skeptical (and confused) of the whole mess. She essentially had never thought through it until then.
I think that is the difference, the previous classes might not have been educated similarly but experience, common sense and an understood sense of absolutes grounded them. Today's post-modern education has delegitimized "common sense", while institutionalizing a group think that doesn't survive the real world.
Feb '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
For those who didn't read Murray's essay, Murray confined himself to whites to leave out any racial distinctions. He developed two groups with statistical analysis and posited them in two fictionalized neighborhoods. Such class isolated zip codes do in fact exit. The difference in cultural deterioration over the years in the pillars he cites is dramatic. That the elites "cling" more to religion, marriage and family as well as hard work is somewhat of a surprise, to me, anyway. He acknowledges the government policies that started or accelerated the decline of the "American Way of Life" will not be scrapped and makes some simple but worthwhile suggestions as to how the decline might be halted and reversed. Niall Ferguson in his review of Murray's book (in the Daily Beast) believes the welfare programs can be dumped and suggests tax code changes to create work incentives and expanded school choice.
Sep '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Ah, yes, nostalgia. The lens through which we all view our personal pasts and with which we often write our personal histories. I find that my perspective is aided by keeping in mind that this period we are living through, in the long view of human existence, is what future historians will surely depict as a transitional period of great social, political and technological upheavals. As a mere participant, hurtling through space and time, I will not live long enough to see, or recognize, what emerges at the end of this transition. My daughter, quoting who knows who, reminded me many years ago that wherever I go, there I am. My sense of fitting in is not based upon externals; and, left to my own devices, I choose where I want to be. Thank you for being nostalgic and opening up this conversation.
May '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Claire, As an international expat (always a guest in someone else's country) you would fit into either environment. Having learned early on that no one wants to hear bad stuff from an outsider, you would not create enemies easily. Having learned to understand all, but focus only on the good, you would probably enjoy either one. Unless of course you view pretentiousness as a red flag to a bull - even then, Belmont isn't all that bad. I've lived on three sides of Belmont: Watertown, Arlington and Waltham at various points of my life - and I have seen much worse in snobishness than Belmont.