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Time for a good look at Charles Murray’s latest effort. First a review in the Wall Street Journal.
So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.
Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.
He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four “founding virtues”—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.
Consider what has happened with marriage. …
Here’s a review from Real Clear Books.
Americans, the saying goes, don’t like to talk about class — but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.
One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its “Living Room Scale,” which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader’s Digest, framed diplomas, or “any work of art depicting cowboys” (sorry, pardners) is not.
Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects — he’s best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet’s nest in the mid-1990s — and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, “is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.
Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.
America’s working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty — and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up. …
WSJ Live Chat featured Mr. Murray.
Question from reader Alan: I read and reviewed your book on Amazon. Most reviewers believe your book is important because it accurately portrays the shrinking middle class. However, many disagree with your perception of the CAUSE. You seem to believe that the middle class is shrinking because of a decline in MORALITY — of middle class people being less willing to marry, go to church, and find work today than before. Most of the reviewers believe the middle class is shrinking because of ECONOMICS, because it is less easy to obtain work that pays an income that allows one to support a family. In other words, many believe that lack of MONEY, not lack of MORALITY, is what is shrinking the middle class.
Charles Murray: Actually, I don’t say the middle class is shrinking. But the economics question is the big one. Short story: working class wages didn’t rise over the last 50 years, but neither did they fall. And the bad things regarding labor force participation increased during the boom. When you talk to people in working class communities about men, the women aren’t telling you that their guys are looking desperately for work but can’t find it. An amazing number of them aren’t interested in working.
Question from reader Florida Bob: Stimulus only works if it encourages Americans to purchase-American made goods. We seem to be creating more jobs in China than America. Most of the jobs being created here are service jobs, jobs that create nothing that is trade-able for the imported manufactured goods and energy that they consume.
Charles Murray: This book isn’t about life in the Great Recession. It’s about what happened to work in the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s, and part of the 2000s when jobs were plentiful, including low-skill jobs paying good wages.
Reader Doug81: Can Mr. Murray comment on how there is a cultural divide between “classes” on how we treat money? In my opinion, the people of “Belmont” take advantage of excellent mortgage offers and credit card rebates while the people of “Fishtown” pay high interest on bad loans or loan-like transactions.
Clarification from Ryan Sager: Fishtown – for those who haven’t read the excerpt – is a real neighborhood in Philadelphia that Mr. Murray uses as a stand-in for the white working class.
Charles Murray: We’re talking about IQ more than culture. It helps to be living in a neighborhood where smart actions about money are common, but the main breakdown is IQ. Lots of smart people in Fishtown do the right thing, but (politically incorrect warning) there are more smart people in Belmont than in Fishtown.
Reader Oscar Looez-Guerra: Are we encouraging a divided society by delaying the assimilation of immigrants?
Charles Murray: Absolutely. But I have to say that all the immigrants I run across, and there are lots in my region, seem to act more like real Americans than a lot of the people already here.
Reader Randall Ward: What do you believe has been the root cause of the degeneration of the people on the bottom?
Charles Murray: The 60s have a heavy load of blame to bear, both in the political reforms of that era and the films/television cultural shifts. But that doesn’t tell us much about where we go from here. …
Just before we get to the humor section, we have a story from the Sun-Times where the joke of a Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, gets dishonorable mention. You see, over the past five years Chicago Public Schools has passed out a quarter of a billion dollars of unused vacation and sick pay to retirees. Duncan got $50,000.
The cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools system spends tens of millions of dollars annually on a perk that few other employers offer: cash to departing employees for unused time off.
Since 2006, the district paid a total $265 million to employees for unused sick and vacation days, according to an analysis of payroll and benefit data obtained by the Better Government Association under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
By far the largest share — $227 million — went to longtime employees for sick days accumulated over two or three decades.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently ordered a halt on paying unused sick time to non-union employees at City Colleges of Chicago after the BGA found at least $3 million in such payouts to former employees over the last decade. Among the biggest beneficiaries was former Chancellor Wayne Watson, who has received $300,000 of a promised $500,000 payout for 500 unused sick days.
“This policy is unacceptable to the mayor and not consistent with the city’s sick day policies for its own employees,” said Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for Emanuel. The mayor also directed other city agencies, including CPS, to halt such payments, review their policies and devise plans to end the practice permanently.
At CPS, the top payouts went to top brass, including more than 300 longtime principals and administrators, who received more than $100,000 during the six-year period from 2006 to 2011, the BGA found. The highest payment topped $250,000.
Beneficiaries included former schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. Secretary of Education, who received $50,297 for unused vacation time when he left in January 2009, according to the data. Duncan now believes the policy should be re-evaluated. …
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.
Fallon: Starbucks closes its very first East Coast store after 19 years. It just couldn’t keep up with its main competition, a Starbucks across the street.
Conan: Now word that the government may be required to release the Osama bin Laden killing video. Obama says this is, “Unhelpful, inflammatory and please release it two days before the election?”
Leno: President Obama is working on a new tourism plan to make it easier for foreigners to get into the U.S. We have that already. It’s called Mexico.
Letterman: Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the Moon. OK, you say, but why? Well, he wants to be the first American to get divorced on the Moon.
Letterman: Wow, Super Bowl. Let’s break it down: $184 million for potato chips, $250 million for pretzels, $500 million for beer, $4 for celery.