This was fine, but it needed to be fleshed out a bit more. Williams made broad generalizations and didn't offer quite enough research to back them up.

The below 4-star review was posted to Hillbilly Highways on 8/8/18 and to Amazon and Goodreads on 8/12/18:

I learned two things when I opened White Working Class. One, I am a class migrant (“someone who has moved from one class to another”). Two, apparently I’m not working class at all, and never was. Williams curiously defines “working class” to mean middle class.

She defines working class as: “Americans . . . with household incomes above the bottom third but below the top 20%.” She adds in as well “families with higher incomes but no college graduates,” highlighting the increasing relevance of education to class in America. This results in a range of family incomes from $41,005 to $131,962. Williams has a point when she says that almost all Americans consider themselves middle class. But calling couples who make $130,000 a year “working class” is silly. Williams contrasts the working class with “elites,” i.e., “Americans with household incomes in the top 20% and at least one member who is a college graduate.” This elite is largely a professional and managerial elite (PME).

By this measure I was only working class for a brief few years between grad school and law school. Otherwise I have been poor or elite my entire life.

(I don’t like Williams’ definition, but for the purposes of this review, when I say “working class,” I mean working class as she defines it.)

Williams was motivated to write this book by attempts to answer “the kinds of questions people tend to ask me in blunt private moments. Questions like, ‘Why doesn’t the working class get with it and go to college?’ and ‘Why don’t they just move to where the jobs are?’” I will focus on those two questions first.

College and the Working Class
One reason members of the working class don’t go to college is that it doesn’t make sense for everyone to go to college, because a college degree isn’t a sufficiently useful credential for every job. Our public policies, and especially the public discourse in the news, is almost obsessively focused on college. This reflects the biases of policymakers—college graduates almost to a man and woman—and of the elites who have an outsized influence public policy, rather than the economic reality. Even today, only around a third of adult Americans have a college degree.

A college degree is less valuable for members of the working class. They lack the social capital to maximize their investment: “Working-class kids worry they might end up with a first-class degree and still fail to get a job because they don’t know the unwritten social codes of professional life.” And we have evidence that class bias matters. For example, Williams writes about a study showing that top law firms responded to subtle clues as to social class in resumes (it was probably a mistake to list “old time music” as an interest when I was applying to law firm jobs).

College is a risk. Williams points out that “an increasing number of male college grads end up in low- or medium- skilled jobs” and that between 15 and 20% of “college graduates earn less than does the average high-school graduate.” (I would have liked to learn who these people are and whether they are more likely to come from the PME or the working class.) This after college tuition has risen at well above the rate of inflation for decades.

The working class values devalues a college education because so many of the jobs it opens up are “pencil pusher” jobs that the working class doesn’t value. The working class does value, on the other hand, the farmers who feed the country and the oil workers who keep the economy moving. They have a point.

And working class high school students are sometimes steered away from top-tier schools. My guidance counselor did even though she knew my grades were good enough for a top-tier school.

But, still, the “rigid, highly supervised jobs” of the working class “often are boring, repetitive, or both, which makes the work psychologically challenging.” This is nothing new, although there are fewer of them. There are, of course, more interesting and remunerative jobs available. But we have increasingly walled off jobs with occupational licensure. And we culturally denigrated the skilled trades (now facing a labor shortage). We killed vocational training because it made elites uncomfortable. Up-credentialing—requiring an expensive college or master’s degree where unnecessary—created an unnecessary bias toward families with money and the cognitive elite.

Economic Mobility
Why don’t members of the working class move to where the jobs are? They have in the past, but when they moved, they largely moved as family units.

The PME and the working class build networks in fundamentally different ways. The large “entrepreneurial networks” elites work assiduously to build, largely for the professional benefits, are seen as insincere by the working class (the working class values sincerity; “[t]he professional elite values irony and polish”). I take naturally to building those networks, but I have a bad habit of mistaking them for something other than the transactional relationships they are.

The working class, on the other hand, rely on “clique networks,” “where everybody knows everyone else and ties run deep.” My mom moved to my hometown as a pre-teen; she was married to my dad a couple years before she became “one of them.” But almost twenty years after my dad died one of us she remains. These “clique networks” (there is a certain class bias baked right into the names, by the way) provide “material help with child car and home improvements—things wealthier families buy.” This makes working class families less mobile, because clique networks are valuable, local, and cannot easily be recreated.

“Moving for a job doesn’t strike the professional elite as odd, because the professional elite relies heavily on work to shape identity.” The working class sees it very differently. People from back home care little about my job. There seemed to be a general sense (before we had our daughter), that any professional success was at least canceled out by a failure to stay at home or start a family. There is, after all, “the question of what moving away might imply: that you care more about your job than your community.” Family is a priority to the working class in a way that it is not to the elite. You might see that as necessary to the functioning of the “clique networks”; I would also argue that it is morally superior.

Institutions, or “Little Platoons”
Blue collar families embrace institutions that promote the traits they value, like stability and self-discipline. Especially religion. (This is an area is which Williams’ odd definition of working class can be a bit misleading. According to Pew, the annual household income tranche most likely to attend religious services at least once a week is $50,000 to $99,999. And Williams may make too much of the difference. The range from the lowest tranche ($100,000+) to the highest tranche is only from 30% to 37%.)

Another institution promoting stability and self-discipline is the military, which “provides a reset button—a proxy for being brought up in a stable and ordered environment.” Another way to look at it is as the literal military platoon being a Burkean platoon—one that recruits and pays.

(Williams frequently cites J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, by the way.)

Williams sees the working class as having a “communitarian streak” that “manifests itself in other, clearly laudable ways. Households earning $50,000 to $75,000 give away far more of their discretionary income (7.6%) than do households earning $100,000 or more (4.2%).” Presumably this undercounts, because it doesn’t include informal charity (including non-monetary charity) through clique networks.

Along with the extended family, these institutions provide the backbone of civil society. Williams’ “working class” should be lauded for keeping them going, especially since civic engagement has dropped sharply.

Class Cluelessness
“Class consciousness” has been replaced by “class cluelessness” and “class callousness.” Elites went from honoring the working class to scorning it.

This leads to an intense bias in public discourse (which is dominated by elites) toward elite values as opposed to working class values. Williams tends to share at least some of that. She carefully documents the working class but talks about them like a bug through glass. There is a lot to be said for working class values, and not just on family. “[W]hen asked what traits they admire, both black and white working-class Americans mention moral traits, in contrast to elites, who derive self-worth more from merit than morality.”

Part of overcoming the growing class divide in America is elites recognizing that elite folkways are just that, not “good taste.”

The 2016 Election, Sex, and Race
Some of the strongest parts of the book deal with the 2016 election.

Hillary’s campaign was class-clueless because it focused on shattering the glass ceiling and “[s]hattering the glass ceiling means giving privileged women access to the high-level jobs now held almost exclusively by privileged men.” (It also wouldn’t exactly be a great step forward for the working man or woman for political power to pass between spouses.) Married working class women instead responded to the weakness in the blue collar job market on which their husbands relied.

Elites and the working class see sex and race in different ways. “For working-class women, becoming a homemaker signals a rise in status, not only for herself but for her entire family. But for PME women, becoming a stay-at-home mother entails a fall in status, from investment banker to ‘just a homemaker.’” The treatment of sexism is also class-coded. “When it comes to gender equality, elite men tend to talk the talk but don’t walk the walk; working-class men walk the walk but don’t talk the talk. For example, the average working-class man is less likely to espouse egalitarian [rhetoric] than his professional-class counterpart; but he spends more time caring for his children than does his elite counterpart.” But public discourse focuses on the former over the latter.

Williams also points out, quite correctly, that PME and working class whites express racism in different ways, ways that reflect their own relative values: the PME construe people of color as lacking in merit and the working class construe people of color as lacking in morality. The anti-racism norms of the PME, though, focus on the sort of racism more common among the working class.

Working class views on success also partially (very partially) explain why Trump is (and has been, going back well before his political career) popular with the working class. They distrust the PME but admire business owners. “For many in the working class, becoming a member of the professional class is an ambiguous achievement—you have more money, yes, but you also have to adopt new folkways, like two-facedness.” This is something I have struggled with, and in many ways it is as constraining as “boring” and “repetitive” working class jobs. Owning a business, on the other hand, represents a freedom from that. And real estate is seen (incorrectly) as more real and valuable than wealth made up of shares in the residual earnings of a corporation.

Williams’ Prescriptions
Less worthwhile is the prescriptive section. Williams certainly has her political and ideological bias, and your view of this section will probably depend in large part on your own priors.

I don’t share Williams’ priors, but it is silly to act as if there is a level of anti-government propaganda that is insurmountable by a media, public education system, higher education system, and the bureaucracy itself that are largely dominated by the Left. More likely? The working class are unimpressed by their interactions with government, they see public resources siphoned off for the benefit of the elite, and they have just enough money to pay taxes and for those taxes to hurt.

Williams says some very sensible stuff. “Rather than turning the climate change debate into a fight over the authority of science, why not enlist the support of farmers who see the changes on the ground as desertification sets in?” But doesn’t that also mean talking to the people affected by onerous regulations directed at combatting climate change? Working class Americans would tend to respect the traditionalism and work ethic they share with immigrants. But “working-class whites, themselves disciplined by rules, tend to disapprove of those who don’t follow them.” And the national discourse focuses on illegal immigration, which saps support for legal immigration.

“Means-tested programs inadvertently set the ‘have-a-littles’ against the ‘have-nots.’” True welfare stand in contrast with programs tied to work, which working class people see as “an income that a person deserves and has basically worked for.” Given how those programs have been sold, that makes sense. Williams is wrong, then, to echo the oft-repeated mockery of Tea Party members demanding that government take its “hands off our Medicare!” Medicare is billed as being something we pay for through our payroll taxes.

I won’t belabor my various policy disagreements with Williams. In part because it is a bit of a moot point. “The working class—of all races—has been asked to swallow a lot of economic pain while elites have focused on noneconomic issues: this is the first generation in American history to experience lifetime downward mobility compared with people their age a decade before.”

The Economic Divide and Conclusion
There was a big economic shift over the past several decades. “The typical white working-class household income doubled” between 1945 and 1975 but has been stagnant since. During that period, “professional-elite wages . . . increased dramatically, while the wages of high school educated men fell 47%.” The malaise looks much worse when you get beyond wages. “The percentage of men so discouraged they are not looking for work has tripled.” The number of white children living in poor neighborhoods has increased sharply. And “[w]hite working-class men now are dying younger than they did a generation ago.”

Williams describes disability as the “most valuable” program for the working class, but it is impossible to ascribe the drastic increase in disabled—e.g., 1 in 4 working-age adults are on disability in Hale County, Alabama—as reasonably related to actual disability rates given changes in work and in medical care. Disability instead operates as a crude form of welfare with extremely negative cultural effects.

It is one thing to criticize working class men for failing to adapt to a changing market, but PME men are doing so from the perch of high-status, high-paying jobs in healthy professions.

Williams notes that the working class have shifted from elite folkways to those of the poor when it comes to having children before marriage. Williams sees “the decline in marriage as a symptom of the working class’s economic decline—not, as some argue, its cause. I disagree. People can be poor as heck and happily married—ask my mom. There is a deeper issue here.

Williams’ political prescriptions are off. On the other hand, her calls for elites to better understand and appreciate the working class and their values are more than welcome. But while the populist rebellion against elites is very real and is rooted in valid complaints (and of which Trump is merely an opportunist), the issues with the working class are largely cultural issues. Issues that cannot be fixed politically, because government cannot fix culture (though it can break it), and issues that cannot be fixed by elites, because people from outside a culture cannot fix that culture (although the informational role of outside observers is vital).

There is also great value here in focusing on white Americans. Public discourse in American tends to ineluctably be shaped by race, and not without reason. But it can obscure real issues. The problems of the black working class, or the Hispanic working class, are not that different than the problems of the white working class. But, as Williams shows, in the US the Left tends to talk about the white working class the same way that the Right talks about the non-white working class, and neither are helpful.

The biggest takeaway is that education is increasingly driving both the definition and importance of class in America. This is a big deal. We don’t sufficiently understand what it means, and we aren’t worrying enough about it.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of White Working Class via NetGalley.

This book gives me somehow some basic understanding of why the 2016 US presidential election turned out to be that way. Now I understand that there is a large social class in US whose needs are not given some attention that they deserve.

The book and the ideas are good but I feel it lacks depth. I wanted to see more views of those white working class, their stories, and how they feel towards the current socio-political situation. This book did its best in presenting those ideas but I keep on looking for more.

White Working Class by Joan C. Williams had merit, but also had many flaws. I would recommend reading it with the caveat that although sources and statistics are cited, they are not definitive ( They do not come from diverse sources or lengthy research.). If the book is read knowing it is mainly the author's personal perspective on the topic of class divides and socioeconomic groups in America, it has some very interesting portions in the first few chapters. After that, the book comes across as a condescending political agenda of what the author obviously thinks/believes and a formula for how the Democratic Party can win back white working class voters. Joan Williams--a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law--was born into a class she calls the Professional-Managerial Elite--a family with money and education. She married someone from what she defines the white working class--non college educated people who make up what others would call the middle class who socioeconomically work hard at blue collar jobs. Her spouse attended an Ivy League school as the first in his family and then became part of the PME class. Her observations about all of this are quite interesting. The white working class is different from the poor. In this book she attempts to explain what this large group of Americans want from life and why they voted for Trump. Of course, when you lump people into groups and attribute them with qualities, one can never be totally accurate. For example, there is a portion of America who is very educated ( many times for generations)--educators and ministers come to mind-- who espouse many of the attributes her "white working class" hold important like morality or religion and who do not make enormous amounts of money. As an educator of 38 years, I attended many trainings and read books about how to facilitate young people learning. I also worked with thousands of students from all socioeconomic groups and their parents. Some of the points about what these groups value and want from life are valid. Others are very elitist in my view. The author does make a quite valid point however, that during recent times society seems to have made strides about stepping into others shoes and become less racist or sexist, but has not in terms of judging someone based on their jobs or socioeconomic status. The media and other groups seem to think speaking about others in a derogatory way based on these factors is acceptable. It is not. All Americans should have a right to earn an honest living and should be valued for the jobs they do. They should also have a right to their own opinions about our government and other topics such as the environment. The author implies that it is ignorant on the part of the white working class to not welcome more governmental controls in their lives in terms of health care, etc., which is rather elitist also. So, to reiterate, although this book has some merit, it also has flaws. Thank you Harvard Business Review for providing a copy of this book in return for a review.

Over the last few weeks, I have embarked on a road of discovery that features three books that all take unique frames on the growing divide in our country. Having finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance (which I recommend), I wanted to dive into Joan C. Williams' text after her Harvard Business Review article created so much interest.

This book did not disappoint. Frankly, it was a breath of fresh air to see the unique insights that Williams' presents helping illustrate how we have created a world in which the only people that we can get away with stereotyping are those that are incorrectly classified as the "rednecks, racist, and homophobes." Rather than play a blame game, Williams' brings the reader along a process to better understand the cultural realities that have shaped the white, working class throughout the past few generations.

I highly recommend this book alongside other works like Robert Putnam's Our Kids and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, to contextualize the divisions occurring in communities across the country!

I wasn't impressed with this book on the whole. I'm sorry that I couldn't like it more, especially given the time that it's come out.

Our Sophomore English students currently read The Other Wes Moore and use that non-fiction narrative as a springboard to research projects. Several teachers have asked for ideas of more recent titles dealing with diversity which could eventually replace or perhaps supplement that text. We developed a list with a few dozen names falling into rough categories dealing with economics (and social class), race, gender, immigration, disability, and military experience. Here are two very new titles which, while not narratives or memoirs, would definitely inform the current discussions about class divisions and inequality.

WHITE WORKING CLASS by Joan C. Williams expands upon her essay in The Harvard Business Review which appeared shortly after last November’s election. Williams, an award-winning author and Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair at University of California, describes what she calls "class cluelessness." She argues that "among Americans progressives, there has been a very, very insistent focus on the poor, on gender, on race, but there has not been a focus on the white working class." In addition to incorporating results from formal research studies, I especially like how she draws on personal examples - although those do make for uncomfortable reading at times. WHITE WORKING CLASS is very accessible for our students and seemingly offers a conversation amongst scholars, referring multiple time to J. D. Vance's comments in Hillbilly Elegy (another text in the curriculum). The first half of this book is particularly insightful; both content and Williams' writing style deserve exploration and class discussion. I would further supplement readings with selections from Robert Putnam's OUR KIDS and links in that post, including Pew Research Center findings and Anand Giridharadas' 2015 Ted Talk.

Links in the post:
https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/11/why-the-white-working-class-voted-for-trump
http://treviansbookit.blogspot.com/2016/09/hillbilly-elegy-by-jd-vance.html
http://newtrierlibrary.blogspot.com/2015/03/our-kids-american-dream-in-crisis-by.html
http://fortune.com/2015/03/20/anand-giridharadas-ted-inequality/
Then a review and comments on THE BROKEN LADDER by Keith Payne appears.

This book came at the perfect time. Several political friends have urged that it's time to make nice with the white working class, but as someone who left my rural Midwestern home, I'm still having trouble why people would vote so definitively against their interests. This book attempts to explain why, and I get the phenomenon better than I used to. I don't always agree with Williams' conclusions, and I'm still more angry than she seems to be, but I''m glad she went to the trouble to write this. It's more like a long essay than an actual book, so it's a quick read, and much will sound familiar even without referring all the hnotes. (I know a lawyer wrote it because of the copious amount of footnotes.

I know Joan Williams as a professional colleague and she teaches at my law school alma mater; however, that relationship did not affect my review. Nor did receiving the book for free in advance by NetGalley. This review will be posted at Goodreads when publication info for this book is ready.

agree with the author that social class divide is a major issue. Since the Great Recession many white families are hurting but the so-called liberal establishment ignores them. One of the origins of this country were white Europeans fleeing the class-prejudices of the other white Europeans.

This book is written in an academic style but quite readable(sometimes I find books written by academics less readable than other writers). I found both repelling and interesting the author's own elitism and her descriptions of the elite. It validated something that I have long suspected, that many "elite" don't value morality but put a premium on getting ahead which sometimes, in my opinion, leads to them being unethical.

(I think it is the sign of our times that the author herself openly and anthropologically called herself an elite. I remember in the nineteen sixties and seventies most people-even wealthy ones identified with the "common" man. It was fashionable to say you were from an oppressed group. Furthermore, the elites weren't academics but rich business people.)

However, the author does a good job of describing the problems of the working class. She also not afraid to take on elites who criticize the "working class" for having certain attitudes/prejudices but really having many of the same beliefs themselves but know how to hide it. I agree with the author that we all deserve the respect for the work we do and we need people who can do all kinds of labor(one joke from the Occupy movement that I like goes "How many CEOs does it take to change a light bulb? the answer is none-it takes workers”).

My one criticism of the book is that it divides people into two class-The Professional Managerial Elite(PMEs) and the working class which is mostly manual labor. There is a large group of people who fall neither groups and I consider myself an example of one. I am a college graduate(from a seven sisters school no less) and come from a family of academics and doctors. I like learning and have worked for most of my life but I am proud not to be a PME. By the definition of this book, I would fit in more closely with the working class.

Despite these problems, the book provides much insight into the problems that divide white America and is a good read.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I enjoy following politics, and goodness knows the "white working class" is on the tips of everyone's tongues. But for me, the book felt like an anthropological study of a tribe. I think it would have been a much better book if an actual "white working class" person had written it.

This is a really important book. As many people, it took me a while to cope with the results of the 2016 election. To help, I am getting more involving in my local party and supporting candidates I believe in at a municipal level this year. This book explains a lot about why the election broke for Trump. It made me examine my own privileged place in the world and how I am out of touch with my blue collar roots.

Williams does a great job of explaining why things between classes are complicated. Being a stay at home mom is a status upgrade for a working class mom because it allows he more quality time with her children and spouse. A professional elite may look down about this choice because they don't understand it.

Basically, there is a lot about the white working class that professional elites don't understand or don't try to understand but this book helps a lot. I recommend this book for any Democrats out there that want to plan for a future where they start winning again.

My only disappointment with this book is that while we hear plenty about Trump, I don't recall reading anything about the other candidate that connected with the white working class, Bernie Sanders. The book made me wonder what would have happened if Sanders would have been the nominee.

Author Joan C Williams in White Working Class answers myths of class. With her arguments and references, she steers the 'class clueless' to know more about others. I appreciate her forthrightness in using examples of people she knows, when it comes to myth busting of who uses government money in ways not very apparent to the general public.
A good discussion point and something to be cognizant of - for example Medicare being a federal benefit.
I look forward to more such information in 'Bite size Advice' format by Paul J Thomas.

Our differences are chasms

There are of course, no classes in the USA, officially. But dice the stats and you will find strata that become gaping divisions the deeper you dive. Joan Williams has taken that dive, and has described the classes as succinctly as I have ever seen. It verges on the ethnographic.

She looks at the world through white working class eyes, and it is a different view and way of life. Without disposable income, family, church and neighbors take on new importance. The immobility of workers stems from the absolute need to maintain and benefit from those links. Moving to another state for a new low paying job makes no sense.

They are also suspicious of, if not totally against college education. “Know-it-alls” don’t fit the network. Government is anathema too. Handouts, entitlements and other Republican characterizations of government services have taken solid hold in the white working class. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare“ and condemning Obamacare while treasuring the Affordable Care Act are two manifestations of this self-defeating stance. Nearly 92% of Americans have benefited from some federal program, but more than 50% insist they’ve never touched a dollar from the government. The white working class resents the poor who qualify for aid, while the elites, looking down on both of them, don’t even know there are two other classes. (And they can be split further, into black and Hispanic, very different from the white.) Williams calls this Class Cluelessness and applies it directly to the elites running the political parties.

White Working Class is jammed with facts and stats, reinforcing Williams’ points. But there are two rather important facts that she misses. People with no rights come to believe that is a just and natural way, and that they cannot do better. That’s how the feudal system survived. It explains why the working class supports tax cuts for the rich and nothing for themselves. (Williams thinks they approve out of hatred of the poor.) The other fact is that 48% of jobs in the USA pay minimum wage or less, so college education and job mobility have no appeal. Unless someone is willing and able to address the inequality issue, things will only get worse. It is allowing the West to drift to “authoritarian nationalism.”

David Wineberg