AMERICAN SOCIETYfederal budget deficits, and increased problems of
international competitiveness. Coming after a long
period of sustained growth, the changes of the
1980s resulted in an economy of low savings, high
consumption, and low investment—a situation of
‘‘living beyond one’s means.’’ In the 1990s, a sus-
tained period of low inflation and rising stock
markets marked a somewhat uneasy sense of pros-
perity, seen as insecure as the decade ended.
MAJOR INSTITUTIONS‘‘Institution’’ here means a definite set of interre-
lated norms, beliefs, and values centered on im-
portant and recurrent social needs and activities
(cf. Williams 1970, chap. 3). Examples are family
and kinship, social stratification, economic sys-
tem, the polity, education, and religion.
Kinship and Family. American kinship pat-
terns are essentially adaptations of earlier Europe-
an forms of monogamous marriage, bilateral de-
scent, neolocal residence, and diffuse extended
kinship ties. All these characteristics encourage
emphasis on the marriage bond and the nuclear
family. In an urbanized society of great geographi-
cal and social mobility and of extensive commer-
cialization and occupational instability, kinship
units tend to become small and themselves unsta-
ble. Since the 1950s, the American family system
has continued its long-term changes in the direc-
tion of greater instability, smaller family units,
lessened kinship ties, greater sexual (gender) equali-
ty, lower birth rates, and higher rates of female-
headed households. The percentage of married
women in the labor force rose from 32 in 1960 to
61 in the 1990s. The so-called ‘‘traditional’’ family
of husband, wife, and children under eighteen
that comprised 40 percent of families in 1970 had
declined to 25 percent in 1995. Over one-fifth of
households are persons living alone. Marriage rates
have decreased, age at marriage has increased, and
rates of divorce and separation continue to be
high. The percentage of children under eighteen
years of age living in mother-only families in-
creased in the years between 1960 and 1985, from
6 to 16 among white, and from 20 to 51 among
black Americans (Jaynes and Williams 1989, p.
522). As individuals, Americans typically retain
commitment to family life, but external social and
cultural forces are producing severe family stresses.
Social Stratification. Stratification refers to
structural inequalities in the distribution of such
scarce values as income, wealth, power, authority,
and prestige. To the extent that such inequalities
result in the clustering of similarly situated indi-
viduals and families, ‘‘strata’’ emerge, marked by
social boundaries and shared styles of life. When
succeeding generations inherit positions similar to
previous generations, social classes can result.The American system is basically one of open
classes, with relatively high mobility, both within
individual lifetimes and across generations. A con-
spicuous exception has been a caste-like system of
racial distinctions, although this has eroded sub-
stantially since the civil rights movement of the
1960s (Jaynes and Williams 1989). The 1980s and
1990s were marked by growing income inequality,
as the rich became richer and the poor did not.
Large increases in earnings inequality accrued
during the 1980s; meanwhile labor unions had
large membership losses and labor markets were
deregulated (unions lost over 3 million members
between 1980 and 1989—see Western 1998, pp.
230–232). Union membership declined from 20.1
percent of workers in 1983 to 14.5 percent in 1996
(Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, p. 441).In the early 1990s, the United States had the
highest income inequality of any of twenty-one
industrialized countries (the income of individuals
of the highest decile was over six times the income
of the lowest decile). The United States differs
from other industrialized countries in the especial-
ly great disadvantage of its poorest people. This
result arises from very low wages at the bottom of
the distribution and low levels of income support
from public programs (Smeeding and Gottschalk
1998, pp. 15–19).The end-of-the-century levels of inequality are
less than in the early decades of the 1900s, but
represent large increases since the lower levels at
the end of the 1960s (Plotnick, Smolensky, Even-
house, and Reilly 1998, p. 8). By 1996, the richest
20 percent of Americans received about 47 per-
cent of total income, while the poorest got 4.2
percent.The dominant ideology remains individualis-
tic, with an emphasis on equality of opportunity
and on individual achievement and success. Al-
though extremes of income, power, and privilege