You can now catch my conversation with Beatriz Kamps on The Listening Bea podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
The Free Press:
Here’s my latest piece for The Free Press
Excerpt:
For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.
According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.
Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem—the petty disappointments of a small slice of America—but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.
To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.
Read the whole thing here.
The Only Reading App I Use:
I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:
These screenshots come from my Readwise app.
Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.
Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.
Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use this link → https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).
I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.
Links and recommendations:
The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping by Grant Bailey and Brad Wilcox
What is Blueskyism? by Nate Silver
Finally Men Got in Touch with their Feelings. How’s that Working Out? by Roy Baumeister
Can We Still Trust the Experts? The Siren Song of Influence by Cory Clark and Bo Winegard
In Defense of Inequality by Carlos Carvalho
The Overdiagnosis and Mistreatment of Autism by Hannah Spier
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. People with narcissistic and/or psychopathic personality traits are attracted to certain ideologies and forms of political activism. They use activism as a vehicle to satisfy their own ego-focused needs instead of actually working toward social justice. (source: Rise Above by Scott Barry Kaufman).
2. Changing jobs is a significant cause of stress, creating on average about a third as much stress as the death of a spouse, half as much as divorce, about the same amount as the death of a close friend, and 50 percent more than quitting smoking. (source).
3. Young people’s emotional and psychological distress is more pronounced in wealthy, industrialized nations. GDP per capita is inversely correlated with this sense of meaning: The wealthier a country gets, the more bereft of meaning its citizens feel. (source). I discussed a related finding here.
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
The Revolt of the Rich kids theme seems to have very striking resemblances to the characters of this video on the French Revolution- the Robespierre types and “Guillotine” strongly resembling “Cancellation” as part of the culture…
https://youtu.be/8qRZcXIODNU?si=jJSGAt-gXaqsXlNd
When I was involved in the startup space ~ 30 years ago I certainly met a number of children of the wealthy who throught that they were God's gift to the universe. I was not impressed by the bulk of them. Some were very very good, most rather less so. We were at the low end of the income range in our community, which had very good schools (which is why we were there).
We made sure that our kids knew that they were going to have to make it on their own ability - and that they better plan on going to the state university as commuting students. We saved 3 years of tuition only for each kid with the expectation that they would get at least one year of transfer credit via Running Start. Anything else they were going to have to borrow - and I was not going to co-sign. By the time the youngest graduated I would be over 70 - and might have already retired.
My daughter was a MIT/Cal Tech level student. She did civil engineering at the University of Washington, commuting over an hour by bus one way, and started taking civil engineering internships. My son did Running Start and then studied Management Information systems with a focus upon Security. They both knew that they were launching on their own. There would be no do-overs, at leasst not on my dime.
Both got jobs as working engineers / program managers.
Many of their peers from high school from higher income families were not so practical and a lot of them have significant struggles.