There are days when I think I should hang up my blogging hat and instead just continually point to a list of people that you should be reading instead of me, or if you’re reading them already then you should reread them, as they’ll probably say everything I would, much better, and then so much more. Reihan would definitely be on that list, and you should definitely read this whole thing instead of whatever else I might have written today:
There is no denying that the neoliberal order has been particularly beneficial for novelty-seeking elites, for whom the rise in geographical mobility, economic dynamism, and cultural diversity and the concomitant decline in social trust has been a boon on balance. Given that loss aversion is deeply ingrained and that most people prefer stability to novelty, the neoliberal turn may well have imposed a regressive psychic tax. The good news, from my perspective, is that our cultural make-up is being remade. America is becoming a more expressive and creative society, yet the country is also building a model of multigenerational kinship that bears more resemblance to pre-Fordist than Fordist social forms. Indeed, the specialization of women into household production was very much a post-1920s development, and our era of delayed marriage and declining birthrates, immigration-fueled diversity and densification, relative economic freedom and wage and wealth dispersion, etc., looks a fair bit like the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only richer and more inclusive.

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Friday ~ April 1st, 2011 at 11:13 am
Barry
“…yet the country is also building a model of multigenerational kinship that bears more resemblance to pre-Fordist than Fordist social forms. ”
Um, evidence?
Friday ~ April 1st, 2011 at 12:56 pm
Th
He means the women, children and grandparents all have to work in the fields, uh, no, factories, uh, no, Walmart to make ends meet unlike the ’50′s and ’60′s.
Saturday ~ April 2nd, 2011 at 10:14 pm
Jimmy
And die at age 45!