From Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Anne Case & Angus Deaton, 2020) pp52-3
The worlds of the more and less educated have split apart, a divergence that we will see over and over in this book.° At work, companies are today more likely to be segregated by education, and as we shall see later, firms are outsourcing many low-skill jobs that used to be done in-house, where people with different levels of education worked together and were part of the same company. The more and less educated are now more segregated in where they live, the successful in places where house prices are high and to which the less successful do not have access. Greater geographical segregation has widened the gap in the quality of schools attended by the children of the more and less educated. The power couples have less time to participate in community activities, other than with their children’s schools, so that the more and less educated are less likely to know each other, to understand each other’s concerns, or to participate in common social activities. The tastes of the two groups are different; they eat in different kinds of restaurants, visit different websites, watch different television channels, get their news from different sources, worship in different kinds of churches, and read different books. And, as we shall see later, their attachment to the institution of marriage is different and increasingly so. More educated people marry later, they are more likely to stay married, they have children much later, and they are less likely to have children out of wedlock.
Gallup asks a large sample of Americans to rate their lives on a “ladder of life” from 0 (“the worst possible life you can imagine”) to 10 (“the best possible life you can imagine”). From 2008 to 2017, more than 2.5 million people answered this question, and their average life evaluation was 6.9. For those with a bachelor’s degree or above, the average was 7.3, compared with 6.6 for those with a high school diploma or less. About half of this ladder-of-life advantage comes from the higher incomes that the more educated enjoy, leaving a very substantial advantage attributable to education itself, or at least to the nonincome benefits that education brings. Gallup also asks people about whether they get to do something interesting or something they like every day; once again, the educated have a huge advantage.
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