Name: 【TED】J.D. Vance: America's forgotten working class (America's forgotten working class | J.D. Vance)
Uploaded: 2017-03-22T05:57:04.000Z
Duration: 14 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

I remember the very first time I went to a nice restaurant,

It was for a law firm recruitment dinner,

and I remember beforehand the waitress walked around

so I said, "Sure, I'll take some white wine."

"Would you like sauvignon blanc or chardonnay?"

"Come on, lady, stop with the fancy French words

and recognized that chardonnay and sauvignon blanc

and so I told her that I would take the chardonnay,

because frankly that was the easiest one to pronounce for me.

during my first couple of years as a law student at Yale,

because, despite all outward appearances, I'm a cultural outsider.

I didn't come from the Northeast or from San Francisco.

and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways,

ways that are indicative of the broader struggles

Family violence, domestic violence, and divorce have torn apart families.

And there's a very unique sense of pessimism that's moved in.

Think about rising mortality rates in these communities

and recognize that for a lot of these folks,

are actually causing rising death rates in their own communities,

so there's a very real sense of struggle.

I had a very front-row seat to that struggle.

My family has been part of that struggle for a very long time.

I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money.

also plagued my family, and even, sadly, my own mom.

There were a lot of problems that I saw in my own family,

problems caused sometimes by a lack of money,

problems caused sometimes by a lack of access to resources and social capital

If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old

and said, "Well, what's going to happen to this kid?"

you would have concluded that I would have struggled

with what academics call upward mobility.

but it strikes at something that's very core

who grow up in poor communities are going to live a better life,

whether they're going to have a chance to live a materially better existence,

or whether they're going to stay in the circumstances where they came from.

And one of the things we've learned, unfortunately,

is that upward mobility isn't as high as we'd like it to be in this country,

and interestingly, it's very geographically distributed.

very likely to live their share and their part in the American Dream.

in the South, in Appalachia, in southern Ohio,

it's very unlikely that kids like that will rise.

The American Dream in those parts of the country

So one reason is obviously economic or structural.

They're beset by these terrible economic trends,

built around industries like coal and steel

that make it harder for folks to get ahead.

There's also the problem of brain drain, where the really talented people,

because they can't find high-skilled work at home,

so they don't build a business or non-profit where they're from,

they end up going elsewhere and taking their talents with them.

There are failing schools in a lot of these communities,

failing to give kids the educational leg up

that really makes it possible for kids to have opportunities later in life.

I don't mean to discount these structural barriers.

But when I look back at my life and my community,

something else was going on, something else mattered.

It's difficult to quantify, but it was no less real.

So for starters, there was a very real sense of hopelessness

There was a sense that kids had that their choices didn't matter.

No matter what happened, no matter how hard they worked,

no matter how hard they tried to get ahead,

So that's a tough feeling to grow up around.

and it leads sometimes to very conspiratorial places.

So let's just take one political issue that's pretty hot,

So depending on your politics, you might think that affirmative action

is either a wise or an unwise way to promote diversity in the workplace

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】J.D. Vance: America's forgotten working class (America's forgotten working class | J.D. Vance)

struggle

tough

recognize

significant