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1970s—not just in the United States, but in most rich nations. It’s just happened faster since the crash. In 2009 and 2010,more than 18 percent of men in their prime working years were idle, the highest proportion since 1948, when the federal government began tracking that statistic.
    Just as the housing bubble papered over the troubles of the middle class, it also hid, for a time, the declining prospects of many men. According to the Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, since the mid-1980s, the labor market has been placing a higher premium on creative, analytic, and interpersonal skills, and the wages of men without a college degree have been under particular pressure. And for whatever reason, in the lower tiers of the economy, men have had trouble finding and keeping work in the service sector. “And I think this downturn exacerbates” these problems, Katz told me. For a time, construction provided an outlet for the young men who would have gone into manufacturing a generation ago. By the middle of the aughts, manufacturing was hiring “very few” people in their twenties. Yet men without higher education “didn’t do as badly as you might have expected, on long-run trends, because of the housing bubble and construction boom.” It’s hard to imagine that happening again. “We’re not going to have the same sort of housing boom. It’s just not going to be like 2002 through 2006.… There are long-run issues.”
    Women’s growing success in the classroom and workforce is of course a cause for celebration. But the failure of many men to adapt to a postindustrial economy is worrying. The economy appears to be evolving in a way that is ill-suited to many men—at least outside the economy’s upper echelons. Men’s struggles are hardly evident in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. But they’re hard to miss in foundering blue-collar and low-end service communities across the country. In these less affluent places, gender roles, family dynamics, and community character are changing rapidly in the wake of the crash. And almost no one seems happy about it.
    A S TRADE AND technology have re-sorted Americans economically, a geographic self-sorting has followed—and it is this sorting, along with its consequences, that the Great Recession has illuminated most starkly. In 2006,the urban theorist Richard Florida wrote that Americans were in the midst of a great migration—one perhaps as important economically and culturally as the westward march of pioneers in the early nineteenth century or the surge of immigrants and farmers into growing industrial cities toward that century’s end. Society’s meritocratic winners—including its billionaires and multimillionaires, but also much of the professional class—were physically separating themselves from the rest of the country. A “mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions” was under way, and with it “a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places. Such geographic sorting of people by economic potential, on this scale,” Florida wrote, was “unprecedented.”
    In 1970, college graduates were dispersed relatively evenly throughout the United States. Eleven percent of the national population over the age of twenty-five held a bachelor’s degree, and that figure stood at between 9 and 13 percent in half of the country’s 318 metropolitan regions. Vastly more people hold a college degree now,but a relatively small number of places have captured a disproportionate amount of the growth. In San Francisco and Washington, DC, for instance, about half of all residents had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2004; in Cleveland and Detroit, just 14 and 11 percent did, respectively. That same year, more than 20 percent of Seattle’s residents had an advanced degree, versus 2 percent in Newark, New Jersey.A 2010 Brookings Institution report, “The