If you've got time for a somewhat long read, this City Journal article by Kay S. Hymowitz is a good one. Once again, it is a riff on Charles Murray's book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010.
Except Hymowitz is a solid demographer in her own right, so her riff is worth your time. She adds a lot of interesting stuff about the state of America's underclass. She helps you understand that economics isn't the only cause.
Hymowitz's most interesting stuff, however is her take on the overclass, her writeup of "assortative mating" (scroll down); we've commented on it before. The idea of lawyers marrying lawyers and then spending the money and energy to see that their children are also achievers thus creating a hereditary overclass is a strong one.
However, if you drill down you'll think of many exceptions including the whole "tiger mother" phenomenon. I'll bet Mitt Romney is a product of this.
She also overlooks the whole middle 40% or two quintiles (fifths) which Murray leaves out, a place where arguably most of the American interclass mobility (up and down) always did happen. We wrote about this phenomenon on May 19 of this year, commenting on another review of the Murray book.
