By Roger Lowenstein in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, January 23, 2012
Charles Murray, the conservative sociologist, has written an incisive, alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American society. No sense withholding the punchline: He thinks we’re in decline. The American rich are living cloistered and isolated lives, depriving the mainstream of their fraternity, their wisdom, and their skills. A growing number at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum are dropping out in another respect—abandoning work, family, and community. At risk is what Murray affectionately terms the “American project.”
Murray simply means that America, as a nation, grew up freer and also more industrious, neighborly, and tolerant than most. The combination of freedom with responsibility produced, until mid-20th century, a more virtuous and happy society.
Coming Apart in effect consists of three books, and during the first two—on the well-educated and the underclass—only occasionally does Murray’s moralism and finger-wagging offend. As the subtitle attests, what he actually examines is white America. Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, restricted his focus as a way of “stripping away distractions” of race to focus on class, a more salient dividing line. His troubling news is that the sociological underclass—once widely assumed to be a subset of black America—is increasingly evident in all ethnicities.
The separation occurs in two ways. Through the 1960s, America’s rich were culturally similar to other Americans. Now, the cultural habits and preferences of America’s elite would be unrecognizable to mainstream U.S.A.
As Murray documents, the well-off used to live in the same or in contiguous neighborhoods as others. Bigger homes were not much bigger; they cost twice as much—not 10 times as much.
Physically isolated from middlebrow Americans, the elite are less likely to be part of the same associations, PTAs, Kiwanis clubs. Money does not define their culture as much as education. But education enables wealth, and vice versa. Given the increasing rewards that our economy returns for brainpower, differences in wealth tend to be self-perpetuating.
Murray’s second part details the declining hold of the “founders’ values” among lower-class white Americans. Murray identifies these values as industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity.
The politically correct will find his language obnoxious, or so Murray dearly hopes. Regardless, he builds a strong statistical case that among the lower socioeconomic rung, the bonds of community, work, family, and faith are fraying.
Murray says we are becoming a European-style welfare state. That conclusion is debatable, but it is a debate that we should all follow and engage in. Hereby a modest proposition is offered: Vastly diverging wages had something to do with it.
Charles Murray: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010