Charles Murray is a self-described libertarian who is best known for one extremely controversial and dubious book, The Bell Curve, which he co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein. Not long ago I looked at some of Murray's most recent book, Facing Reality, after listening to a long a provocative discussion he had with Coleman Hughes about it. Last week, for reasons that I shall eventually explain--it's a very long story--I decided I should read another Murray book, Coming Apart, which appeared in 2012. According to Wikipedia it was a best-seller, but I don't think it has had much influence since with either political party. That's because it falls outside both of the ideological frameworks of our two political parties. It is about changes in the lower third of our population--but unlike most such books, it focuses entirely on white people. And it is most definitely not a book about how wonderful our nation would be if everyone could be like them.
Murray begins the book with a fascinating comparison of American on November 21, 1963 and America in 2012, with particular attention to prices and incomes. The American upper class in those days, he shows with the help of constant 2009 dollars, was much less rich than today's. Its life differed much less from the bulk of the population then than now, and more importantly, it did not have a separate culture, or a completely separate educational system, or a separate consumer economy catering to its particular tastes. It grew much larger in the next 46 years, and more distant. Belmont, Massachusetts--whose border is less than a mile from my house--serves both as an example of it and as a metaphor for what has happened. Nationwide, Belmont represents the top 20% of our income distribution. Fishtown, Pennsylvania--a blue-collar, nearly all white Philadelphia suburb--represents the bottom 30%. It too has changed, but while Belmont has gotten richer, it has gotten poorer, in many ways. This leads us to Murray's interesting framework for analyzing our society--a cultural one.
Traditionally, Murray argues, four virtues defined the United States. They were a commitment to the institution of marriage; "industriousness," by which he means mainly a willingness, sometimes obsessive, to work and work hard; honesty, referring mainly to obeying the law; and religiosity, which is self-explanatory. Using census data, Murray devised simple measurements to discover what had happened to those virtues both in Belmont (again, now the top 20% of white people) and Fishtown (now the bottom 30%) since 1960. The results are striking. Looking only at adults aged 30-49, Murray found that in Belmont (again, used metaphorically to refer to a particular class nationwide), 96% of them were married in 1960. That figure fell to about 88% by 1990 but it has been stable at that figure ever since. In Fishtown the 1960 figure was 86% in 1960, 70% in the early 1980s, 60% in 1990, and 50% in 2010. On the other side of the coin, divorced people in Belmont rose from about 2% in 1960 to 7% in 1980 and has stayed there ever since, while in Fishtown it rose from 5% to 33%. And children living with a never-married, separated or divorced parent increased from less than 1% in 1960 to about 2.5% in 2010 in Belmont, and from 2% to 22% in Fishtown. The unmarried proportion of new mothers among white women, Murray notes, rose from about 2% in 1960--where it had been since 1920 at least--to about 30% in 2010. That, by the way, is higher than the nonwhite proportion of out-of-wedlock births in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan set off a firestorm with The Moynihan Report, a study of black unmarried birth rates and their consequences. And the vast majority of that increase is among white women who have never been to college or never finished high school.
Turning to "industriousness," Murray found that in Belmont (all uses of these names will be metaphorical from here on), 98% of prime-age (30-49) males were in the labor force in 1960 and about 88% in 2010. In Fishtown the same figures were 5% in 1960 (and 3% in 1970) and 12% in 2010. Meanwhile, unemployment among all Fishtown males was about 40% higher than the national average by 2010, while in Belmont it was about 70% lower. 20% of Fishtown males with jobs worked less than 40 hours in 2010, nearly double the number in 1960. (Belmont males, interestingly enough, are working longer hours than they did in 1960). Meanwhile, female labor force participation has essentially doubled among married women in both groups, with Belmont women working at only a slightly higher rate.
Crime shows the most dramatic differences of all. Arrests for violent crimes rose from about 100 per 100,000 population to 700 in Fishtown from 1960 to about 1995, falling to about 600 in 2010. Property crimes, which are about four times more common, followed a similar path. All this time the crime rate in Belmont was negligible. And as for religion, the General Social Survey began counting non-believers in 1970, when Murray finds that they comprised about 8% of the Belmont population and just 3% of the Fishtown population. By 2010 they composed about 20% of both.
What all this means is that the United States has for quite a while now had a white underclass--the bottom 20% of its population--which is similar in almost all respects to its nonwhite underclass, and which is larger, since the white underclass is about the same size as the entire black population. Murray blamed this on changing values and the welfare state; I am much more inclined to blame it on changes in our economy which have robbed the uneducated of good job opportunities, and a grave decline in our educational system at all levels. Yet in either case, the fact remains: there is no problem that blacks and other minorities have in the United States that a greater number of white people do not have as well. The one exception is the number of people in prison, where whites trail blacks by a small number of inmates, with Hispanics (many of whom identify as white) in third place. Murray found that when he added data on black Americans in the bottom 30% of our income distribution to his figures, the percentages for his key variables--marriage, labor force participation, etc,--hardly changed at all.
Now it is true, of course, that higher percentages of blacks and Hispanics are in that bottom 30% than the percentage of white people--even though the total number of white people is higher. Yet that obviously cannot mean that blacks and Hispanics find themselves there because of racism while white people find themselves there because of character flaws--nor does it mean that the white predicament is less serious. The Republican Party has been essentially ignoring the growth of inequality for 40 years now, while the Democratic Party increasingly views it as a racial problem. Neither of those views in my opinion offers any hope of a solution. If we want to fix inequality we have to change the shape of our economy, its wage system, and its tax structure, just as we did from 1933 until about 1970, when the entire lower half of the population benefited a very great deal. (I shall present figures on that at another time.) Emphasis on the problems of any particular group only divides us more politically without bringing us any nearer to a real solution.
3 comments:
Professor
Fascinating and challenging post.
Thanks for doing it.
Terms search my site, Bell Curve, for some tidbits, including this interesting passage from yours:
"...What makes the issue of mobility, and the related issue of ability, so fraught, in my opinion, is this. History shows that in any complex field of endeavor, a small minority of people are much better than anyone else. I have written an entire book showing how true this is in baseball, and I have seen it in my own profession and as a spectator in many other fields. These people are different not because of their race or gender--much less their sexual orientation--but because of almost unique personal characteristics that are scattered more or less at random throughout the population..." DK.
All the best
The stand-in example of Belmont which Charles Murray uses is meaningful to me for three reasons. First, I have family connections to Belmont, MA. Second, throughout my life to this point (I'm 36), I've moved through a lot of environments with the social and cultural trappings of Murray's Belmont. Third, thanks to circumstances I could never have predicted, I've been able to see what an airtight seal the Belmont's have developed to sequester themselves apart from the rest of America, to the country's detriment.
The longer I've applied The Fourth Turning as the basis from which to assess the past and events taking place today, the more I become convinced that the social and cultural revolutions associated with the 1960s provide as great a lens as any for why things are the way they are, now. And in my estimation, on the whole, the legacy of the social and cultural revolutions associated with that time is a profoundly negative one. With respect to Coming Apart: there is no question that there has been a great change to Murray's "four virtues" within the Fishtown segment of America over the decades. But I agree with Murray that the fundamental basis for Fishtown's decline cannot be pinned solely to economic factors that can be remedied by social policies.
(To illustrate: the Sexual Revolution - Boomers came of age with it, and this is so important it's worth phrasing another way: Boomers came of age when the Sexual Revolution was NEW. I can't put myself in the shoes of people my own parents' age who were young around 50 years ago, but I think I can say on pretty good authority that they would NOT recognize what the dating and sexual "marketplaces" have become for the generations that came after them. Speaking for myself as a Millennial man, I have always known that women my age had effectively zero regard for men who weren't (A) high status, (B) college-educated, (C) professionally credentialed, and (D) affluent. The downward pressures upon young men to attain these status markers to even stand a chance at having a family have only grown over time, and they TRANSCEND ECONOMICS. Men who lack the upward mobility associated with the professional, credentialed class have seen their status and much of their dignity completely taken away by a change that was new when Boomers were young, and that has been a fact of life for everyone who came after. No social policy can account for the fact that the fundamental basis for the family and social breakdown in Fishtown isn't money; it's HYPERGAMY.)
Not long after Coming Apart was published (but before I'd read it), I lived and worked for seven months in a small town in the Western US, for an organization that was run by an ex-Democrat politician. Most of the staff were under age 30, as I was. I learned many things from that experience, but most starkly, I learned that high-mindedness and constantly talking up lofty ideals, don't measure up to the value of competence, common sense, and a certain adherence to traditional virtues. None of those three things was in evidence among the people I moved amongst in that environment. So more recently, when I've read people like Bob Putnam, I immediately intuit that the solutions they propose, although eloquently articulated, can't possibly work.
Being a good citizen has not always been linked with expectations of economic security; believing in "democracy" doesn't require supporting one party and entrenching ever more rights and special dispensations for people deemed "disadvantaged" for one reason or another. What Coming Apart was advocating for, most fundamentally, was a revitalization of the virtues of citizenship...not only in the white working class, but among ALL races and classes, independently of politics. And based on how this fourth turning is going today, a decade later, I think that ship has sailed.
Professor:
Why not go ahead, re your last paragraph, and throw in the towel, admit, with Salvian, a Marseillaise Christian priest 440 AD, who asks, re the fall of Rome all around him, "Why has God allowed us to become weaker and more miserable than all the tribal peoples?"
Salvian's answer, and that of the NYT, is clear, and it was not the advent of Christianity over Roman pagan religion, which had been the obvious answer (and Gibbon's):
His contemporaries were sinful, and the barbarians (all people of color in NYT speak) were virtuous and blameless.
All the best
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