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Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America. In almost every way, our society is less equal than it was in 1962. Across domains that don't seem like they should be related:
Fitness Hobbyist athletes of today would largely stomp on the professionals of 1962 in fitness metrics. Nobody in 1962 ran marathons as a hobby, now it is common, no PMC office lacks a marathon guy. Lifting weights was weird, and maybe kinda gay. Now it is common. The lifts and PR times of your average Crossfit box would be jaw-dropping at any of the few existing gyms in 1962. The fitness obsessed are stronger, faster, better than their 1962 equivalents. And yet in 1962 the average person was in better shape than the average person in 2024. They weren't overweight or obese, they could walk ten miles if asked to do so. A randomly selected man of 1962 could join a touch football game or help you move furniture in a way that your randomly selected man of 2024 often cannot.
Sex 1962 society was more monogamous, and because of the drive to achieve pair bonding, most people could get one long term partner and marry them and stay together. More men had sex with one woman in the past year compared to today, but more men had sex with anyone. In 2024, it is vastly easier for some men to get laid, your top percentage of men can get vastly more sex with vastly more partners. But there are also vast numbers of men who never have sex, have no long term partners, and few prospects of getting them.
Cooking Imagine I took 100 mothers from my local high school today, and 100 mothers from my local high school in 1962, and Iron-Chef'd them with scratch ingredients and told them to bake me a cake. I posit that the 1962 mothers would all make more or less the same mediocre American cakes, with some ethnic-white flourishes or particular talents, but mostly pretty similar stuff. But virtually all would know how to make a cake given flour, butter, eggs, sugar. The 2024 mothers, a large percentage would simply have no idea how to make a cake from scratch without premade ingredients, only a vague concept of what to do with the ingredients, and we'd get some truly sad attempts. But among the 2024 mothers, there are also some percentage of hobbyists, Great British Baking Show and youtube obsessives, who will make a ridiculously good cake, vastly better than anything that the 1962 mothers would even know how to attempt. All one has to do to figure this out is look at old cookbooks and new cookbooks.
Physical appearance Paul Newman vs Chris Evans. Or just compare Superman to Superman, or even Hugh Jackman in different Wolverine roles. The earlier physiques are easy for a man with good genetics if they don't screw it up or attainable for most men with a bit of effort, the current physiques are impossible without at least two of good genetics, extreme effort, and pharmaceuticals.
Education More Americans than ever have completed college degrees, the value and difficulty of which we can debate but there is no question that completing years of education highly correlates with intelligence. Fewer books are read every year in America. Authors lack the popular celebrity impact they once had. Literary prizes lack the credibility and punch they once did. PhD Theses of 1962 and earlier are often pretty readable, covering a basic or normal topic. PhD theses of 2024 are often whacko, out there, unreadable to anyone without a master's in the topic already, citing obscure theories unknown to anyone outside deep academia.
Gun Ownership Gun ownership has declined from a narrow majority of households in the 70s to a third as of 2014. At the same time, many gun owners today have an absolute arsenal compared to the men of the 60s and 70s. A lot of Old Timer Fudds at my small town gun club think it's insane that the young guys want to own anything other than a shotgun, a deer rifle, a .22, and a revolver. A small percentage of gun owners in America own a vast number of firearms. This simply wasn't a normal middle-class pursuit in the 1960s.
There are other places it feels like there's something there, but I don't know how to parse them with any rigor. Religiosity, racial tolerance, "handyman" skills, foreign travel, military service, automobile driving. It feels intuitive that in the past, a base level of each was expected in every middle class man and variation was rare; and today extremes at both ends are more common while the middle is shrinking.
We live in the age of the Barbell Shaped distribution. There's something deeper there.
All of your examples have this pattern: $[skill] used to be not only desirable but also broadly necessary; as $[skill] became generally unnecessary, a large portion of the population has mostly abandoned it, while those who remained devoted to maintaining $[skill] became much more proficient.
E.g.: back in 1962 every home-maker was expected to bake, and a large proportion of women were home-makers. Now, fewer women are home-makers, social norms about desirability of cakes and cookies have largely changed, and there are lots of options for buying baked goods. Thus, most women have mostly abandoned baking (or never developed the skill), while the few that do have vastly improved that skill.
E.g.: back in 1962, the alternatives to books (for entertainment or information) were either expensive (movies or plays in the theater), or inferior in quality or quantity (newspapers), or were on a schedule (TV and radio). Now, the alternatives to books are superior, cheap, and instantly available. So most people mostly abandoned reading books, while a smaller proportion still reads for pleasure. (Though for this example, I don't know of any metrics by which those that read books have become more proficient, except maybe a brief increase in popularity of speed-reading a decade ago in my circle.)
Let's call these the coming-apart pattern examples, and let's consider whether there are any examples with a flipped coming-together pattern: $[skill] used to be desirable but broadly unnecessary; as $[skill] became generally necessary, a large portion of the population has developed at least some competency in it. As a result, if we compare the $[skill]-ed populations now and back-in-the-day, the back-in-the-day group was much more $[skill]-ed.
E.g.: typing. Back in 1962, most professionals didn't type much themselves because they could hire a typist for a fairly low wage (mostly because that was one of the careers for young women that was generally acceptable for decades by then). That is, a professional could, instead of learning the skill himself, use some reasonable portion of his income to outsource the typing tasks. Now, every white-collar worker and many blue-collar workers are expected to do their own typing, and the typing tasks have only increased. As a result, at least 2/3rd of the population has some typing skill, and if we compare the group whose job included typing in 1962 to similar group now, the average 1962 typist would be much faster and make fewer spelling errors.
(The skill of spelling is another coming-apart pattern example, mostly courtesy of ubiquitous spell-checkers.)
Another coming-together pattern example: figuring out how to make a new electronic device work. Back in 1962, besides the small number of professionals who needed to work with bespoke electronic devices--and hobbyists who chose to do so--most people would only need to figure out how to make their TV and their radio work, and those were fairly straightforward. Now, most people regularly get electronic gadgets that either didn't exist a decade ago or whose user interface changed substantially, and they keep having to figure out how they work. (The joke among us olds is that the instructions are so complicated that only a child can do it.) So a broader proportion of the population has acquired the skill of figuring out how to make new electronic device work, but the professionals and hobbyists of yore were much better on average, because they had to understand quite a bit about the underlying electronics. (My husband salvaged many a cheap Chinese-import doo-dad with a multimeter and a soldering iron.)
To summarize:
When a desirable skill becomes more broadly necessary, more people acquire some level of proficiency in it, and the average level of the skill (among those that have some proficiency in the skill) drops.
When a desirable skill becomes less broadly necessary, fewer people acquire some level of proficiency in it, and the average level of the skill (among those that have some proficiency in the skill) rises.
That explains cooking and perhaps fitness but I think it obviously falls short on physical appearance, sex, and gun ownership. Education I think it also falls short on, education is much more generally necessary today now that you almost need a bachelor's degree to stock shelves at Walmart.
For Guns: To own a gun in modern America, you also have to defend your reasoning for having one to friends. You have to go to FFLs, which are staffed exclusively by assholes instead of by mail. Only people who are really into it will deal with the trouble.
Let me second @FiveHourMarathon's "WTF" here. It might just be the local culture, but I've never known anyone* who had to "defend their reasoning for having a gun," to a friend, or anyone else. And I know plenty of gun owners. My dad and middle brother pretty much have an arsenal between them. Until about a year ago, the bulk of said brother's job was selling guns (as the manager of the hunting department at the local outlet of a "big box" sporting goods store chain) — I suppose that makes him an "asshole" in your view?
Though, again, I live in Alaska. We've got grizzlies, we've got moose, and we've got a rather more gun-friendly culture than the more urban, populous states. Anyone who would make a friend justify their reasoning for gun ownership almost certainly doesn't have any Alaskan friends, and would probably be quite unhappy living here.
In New Jersey, one must obtain a voucher of one's worthiness to own a gun from 2 unrelated adult citizens before obtaining a permit to purchase a firearm, and again for each handgun one might wish to buy. And 3 such persons for a carry permit, though a carry permit barely allows you to carry (if you try you're almost certain to trip over a forbidden zone and become a felon). I'm not sure if any other states have this onerous requirement which would be unconstitutional if the Supreme Court took the 2nd Amendment seriously instead of just a debating point, but New Jersey does.
Ok, can you seriously think that any functional adult doesn't have three friends? When I got my ccw permit in PA, I had too many friends who wanted to be the reference. And I have trouble thinking of a person who doesn't have three friends who should have a gun.
This is the typical communitarian answer. But even people who aren't socially adept are supposed to have constitutional rights.
But we aren't talking about socially adept. We're talking about three unrelated people vouching for you. Coworkers. Landlord. The waitress at your favorite diner. Your pastor.
It's not that hard.
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