Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. - JD Vance

We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people — that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course — for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers — but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

...bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs.