2024 US Presidential Election

[Mister Agenda]

The NYT speculates that the backlash against "elites" is the reason for the result. The gulf between college educated elites and high school diplomaed is reflected in the Trump win. The Times excoriates the elite class for not seeing how education affects social class.

"That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys. Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.

Society worked as a vast segregation system, elevating the academically gifted above everybody else. Before long, the diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life. High school graduates die nine years sooner than college-educated people. They die of opioid overdoses at six times the rate. They marry less and divorce more and are more likely to have a child out of wedlock. They are more likely to be obese. A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that 24 percent of people who graduated from high school at most have no close friends. They are less likely than college grads to visit public spaces or join community groups and sports leagues. They don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue."

The opioid crisis was engineered by a wealthy big pharma family. Just because there's overlap between the wealthy and the educated doesn't mean people with college degrees are somehow responsible for the the health problems of people who didn't go to college. It's the educated who conducted the studies that reveal this. If there are effective ways of improving the outcomes for the less educated, it will be more educated people who figure it out.

The divide is unfortunate, it's a shame that people who don't get degrees have poorer outcomes, but the main reason people get degrees is to try to have better outcomes for themselves and their families. They're not collectively committing some kind of moral outrage because it works.