Class Matters

In a series of articles which are the fruits of a year-long journalistic project, The New York Times examines "ways that class ...influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of unbounded opportunity."



Rather than having disappeared, the newspaper concludes that "over the past three decades, [class] has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening. And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe."