America’s Great Divergence
CONNERSVILLE, Indiana—Ashley Gabbert and Dan Dark are both white Indiana residents in their early 30s, but their lives look nothing alike.
Gabbert, 32, lives in this town in one of the poorest counties in Indiana, where she works the night shift—10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.—for an automotive parts manufacturer. Her life now is a step up from the decade she spent working in fast food, which wasn’t “much of a career,” she told me at the local Walmart, where she was shopping for groceries. Working in fast food, she’d frequently encounter drug users as they pulled up to the drive-in window, needles alongside babies in the backseat of their cars. Like 80 percent of people in rural America, Gabbert doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Dark, 33, lives in the increasingly metropolitan city of Indianapolis, where he runs a creative consultancy doing videos and marketing work for a variety of clients. Dark, who is a college graduate, works when he chooses, often from his downtown home or from the coffee shops and bars springing up around downtown Indianapolis. He loves to travel—he recently returned from Iceland—and goes out to meet friends almost every night of the week. The same night Ashley Gabbert was prepping for her night shift by dropping her 11-year-old daughter off with her mother, Dark was cooking a venison stew for a meat-and-bourbon potluck dinner thrown by a friend. “I’ve built my life around flexibility,” he told me.
In some ways, the lives of Gabbert and Dark represent the diverging fates of two parts of America in the past two decades. Half a century ago, economic opportunity and upward mobility were available to many white Americans, regardless of where they lived and what kind of education they had. They could graduate from high school and find a job at a local factory and make a good wage, or graduate from college and sit behind a desk and make a slightly better wage. About 90 percent of kids born in the 1940s earned more than their parents did, according to work by Stanford economist . But beginning in the 1980s, the returns on a college education started growing, and more of the benefits of economic growth started accruing to
