Decreased Family Size & Social Class Concentration

From a purely statistical point of view, smaller family sizes decrease the likelihood of having close relatives who fall into more economically disadvantaged status. For instance, in a middle-class family of 6 siblings, it is not hard to imagine that 1 or 2 might, for various reasons, wind up experiencing substantially lower standards of living. This might tend to create empathy in more well-off layers of society, since they have close experience of those in a less-advantaged economic class.

In a family of 2 siblings, the statistics are greatly reduced. Then on top of that, there is the generational wealth factor. A comfortable family will be able to deploy more resources to help prevent or assist a child who might be in danger of slipping economically.

Dream Hoarders

I've been following Richard Reeves, author of Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It lately, as well as some other writers on the same topic.

In this latest newsletter, he highlights pundits who disagree, including Robert J. Samuelson, Samuelson says Reeves has it almost backward, the upper-middle class are setting a good model for society to aspire to:

Reeves has the story almost backward. As a society, we should try not to restrict the upper middle class, but to expand it. In general, it’s doing what we ought to want the rest of society to do. Its marriage rates are higher, its out-of-wedlock births are lower, its education levels are higher. As for parents, why make them feel guilty for wanting to help their children? What are parents for, after all?

I think there is a straightforward reconciliation to their two positions, and it is already embedded, I think, in Reeves model. The problem being that the UMC may disproportionately enjoy these traits in their own orbits, but exclusionary housing policies, and the leveraging of networks, prevent them from migrating to less privileged groups.