Posted on 01/26/2012 8:21:22 PM PST by neverdem
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Charles Murray (Crown Forum, 416 pp., $27)
Charles Murray is back, and the debate about wealth and inequality will never be the same. Readers of the political scientist’s earlier work, especially The Bell Curve and Losing Ground, might assume that with his new book he is returning to the vexed subject of race. He is, but with a twist: Murray’s area of intensive focus (and data mining) is “the state of white America”—and it’s not what you might think.
According to Murray, the last 50 years have seen the emergence of a “new upper class.” By this he means something quite different from the 1 percent that makes the Occupy Wall Streeters shake their pitchforks. He refers, rather, to the cognitive elite that he and his coauthor Richard Herrnstein warned about in The Bell Curve. This elite is blessed with diplomas from top colleges and with jobs that allow them to afford homes in Nassau County, New York and Fairfax County, Virginia. They’ve earned these things not through trust funds, Murray explains, but because of the high IQs that the postindustrial economy so richly rewards.
Murray creates a fictional town, Belmont, to illustrate the demographics and culture of the new upper class. Belmont looks nothing like the well-heeled but corrupt, godless enclave of the populist imagination. On the contrary: the top 20 percent of citizens in income and education exemplify the core founding virtues Murray defines as industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religious observance. Yes, the elites rebelled against bourgeois America in the late 1960s and 1970s, but it wasn’t long before they put away their counterculture garb. Today, they work long hours and raise their doted-upon offspring in stable homes. One of the most ignored facts about American social life is that the divorce rate among the college-educated has been declining since the early 1980s, while their illegitimate children (as they used to be called) remain as rare as pickup trucks in their garages. Murray deems some of the Belmontians’ financial excesses “unseemly,” but for the most part, he finds them law-abiding and civically engaged—taking their children to church or synagogue, organizing petitions for new stoplights or parks, running Little League teams and PTA fundraisers.
The American virtues are not doing so well in Fishtown, Murray’s fictional working-class counterpart to Belmont. In fact, Fishtown is home to a “new lower class” whose lifestyle resembles The Wire more than Roseanne. Murray uncovers a five-fold increase in the percentage of white male workers on disability insurance since 1960, a tripling of prime-age men out of the labor force—almost all with a high school degree or less—and a doubling in the percentage of Fishtown men working less than full-time. Time-use studies show that these men are not using their newly found leisure to fix the dishwasher or take care of the kids. Mostly, they’re watching more television, getting more sleep—and finding trouble. The percentage of Fishtown men in prison quadrupled after 1974, and though crime rates declined there in the mid-1990s, mirroring national trends, they’re still markedly higher than they were in 1970. (Belmont, on the other hand, never experienced significant changes in crime or incarceration rates.) Fishtown folks cannot be said to be clinging to their religion: Murray finds a rise in the percentage of nonbelievers there. In fact, he found the same in Belmont. The difference is that Belmonters continue to join religious institutions and enjoy the benefits of their social capital. About 59 percent of Fishtowners now have no religious affiliation, compared with 41 percent of Belmonters.
Most disastrous for Fishtown residents has been the collapse of the family, which Murray believes is now “approaching a point of no return.” For a while after the 1960s, the working class hung on to its traditional ways. That changed dramatically by the 1990s. Today, under 50 percent of Fishtown 30- to 49-year-olds are married; in Belmont, the number is 84 percent. About a third of Fishtowners of that age are divorced, compared with 10 percent of Belmonters. Murray estimates that 45 percent of Fishtown babies are born to unmarried mothers, versus 6 to 8 percent of those in Belmont.
And so it follows: Fishtown kids are far less likely to be living with their two biological parents. One survey of mothers who turned 40 in the late nineties and early 2000s suggests the number to be only about 30 percent in Fishtown. In Belmont? Ninety percent—yes, ninety—were living with both mother and father. Many experts would define the cause as a dearth of “marriageable” men (see above). The causation goes the other way as well. Men who don’t marry don’t work—or at least, they work less hard. Severed from family life, they don’t attach themselves to community organizations, including churches, and in greatly disproportionate numbers they engage in antisocial, even criminal, behavior.
For all their degrees, the upper class in Belmont is pretty ignorant about what’s happening in places like Fishtown. In the past, though the well-to-do had bigger houses and servants, they lived in towns and neighborhoods close to the working class and shared many of their habits and values. Most had never gone to college, and even if they had, they probably married someone who hadn’t. Today’s upper class, on the other hand, has segregated itself into tony ghettos where they can go to Pilates classes with their own kind. They marry each other and pool their incomes so that they can move to “Superzips”—the highest percentiles in income and education, where their children will grow up knowing only kids like themselves and go to college with kids who grew up the same way.
In short, America has become a segregated, caste society, with a born elite and an equally hereditary underclass. A libertarian, Murray believes these facts add up to an argument for limited government. The welfare state has sapped America’s civic energy in places like Fishtown, leaving a population of disengaged, untrusting slackers. It has also diminished upper-class confidence: the well-to-do dare not suggest they have a recipe for the good life. “The underpinning of the welfare state,” Murray writes, “is that, at bottom, human beings are not really responsible for the things they do.”
But might Murray lay the groundwork for fatalism of a different sort? “The reason that upper-middle-class children dominate the population of elite schools,” he writes, “is that the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.” Murray doesn’t pursue this logic to its next step, and no wonder. If rich, smart people marry other smart people and produce smart children, then it follows that the poor marry—or rather, reproduce with—the less intelligent and produce less intelligent children. Once you accept Murray’s view of genetic destiny, a loss of confidence in the American project on both sides seems entirely justified.
Those of us who reject Murray’s fatalism will still find in Coming Apart a richly detailed corrective to the bumper-sticker arithmetic popularized by the Occupy movement. Raising taxes on the rich, camping out in front of Jamie Dimon’s mansion, overturning Citizens United: such actions don’t have a chance of changing the fortunes of Belmont and Fishtown. If only it were that easy.
Peleliu. One of the war's grand screwups, of the "Is this operation really necessary?" variety. Another one was Wewak, in New Guinea.
The Sopranos depicted modern American suburbia like no other show I’ve ever seen! Breathtaking in its portrayal of Jersey culture and life. I think I’ll check it out again rather than order this book, LOL.
Later on, about 45 years after DNA was discovered someone came up with the phenomenon known as epigenetics.
Here's an article that takes you to the second issue of the Journal of Epigenetics in 2006. http://www.epigeneticsnews.com/the-history-of-epigenetics-explored/
We no longer descend into Lysenkoism ~ we advance our knowledge of epigenetics.
BTW, the divorced Catholics are over at the Baptist church ~ it's still working.
Uh, no. That’s not my experience with working class Catholic churches in either Belmont or Fishtown. There are good and bad people in all churches and there are some excellent Catholic churches and foolish ones. Happily, I know nothing about the Baptists.
Reverting to Social Darwinism to explain the inevitable fallout of trade policy and pernicious liberal social policy might impress someone who fancies himself to be a beneficiary of such. Everybody else sees the seeds of destruction being sown in our country. Everyone can’t be above average. There are all sorts, and gainful employment is a necessity for them all. That, we no longer have. Surprise! Those on the lower rungs are sliding into despondency.
Duh.
I’m glad I grew up in Belmont.
In the NYC areas the Fishtown areas’ white populations are disappearing through relocation, to the Carolinas, Florida, and other sun belt states. Murray explains the population decline, lack of stable families, lack of marriage, lack of offspring, lack of home ownership due to financial difficulties. Add in the 1960’s immigration policy changes and there hasn’t been much new European immigration to bulk up the Fishtown populations for 50 years. New Jersey didn’t create a single net net job from 2000 to 2010, New York only added jobs net net by increasing government workers, now NY is slashing the gov payrolls. Connecticut now has the highest property taxes in the country, after having nearly the lowest in 1990.
After 2 or 3 generations of declining living standards in NYC metro Fishtowns, you’ll find freepers from the South constantly complaining about liberal Northeasterners moving down South and then voting like liberal Northeasterners.
The collapse of the US Dollar and US Treasury Notes is about the only way we’ll encounter the scenario possibility for some sort of awakening in this country.
Many are moving south, moving to Pennsylvania, or just not reproducing.
Actually, most of the working class Catholic Churches in Jersey or the outer boroughs are closing/consolidated or filled with value hairs. The white proletariat/lumpen proletariat just isn’t reproducing in the northeast.
Actually, most of the working class Catholic Churches in Jersey or the outer boroughs are closing/consolidated or filled with blue hairs. The white proletariat/lumpen proletariat just isn’t reproducing in the northeast.
Great graphic.
Or, it could be that, as with muscle, regular use and exercise hones abilities.
Actually the “Fishtown” Churches have been consolidating/closing for some time, and are disproportionately dominated by the elderly as downscale whites up here either don’t reproduce or relocate to cheaper parts of the country with a greater need of unskilled/semiskilled labor.
Not true in my neighborhood.
This is why unFree Trade and off-shoring are killing us. THERE HAS TO BE MANUFACTURING WORK FOR THE < 100 IQ crowd to do. EIther pay them to manufacture or pay them welfare or have a class war spurred on by the Demagogic Party. You pick. Tariffs or socialism that is the choice, I don’t like but that’s where we are.
Statistically true nationwide and in most of the NY metro area. The old blue collar white townie culture has been disappearing for some time, and anecdotal observations from your neighborhood mean nothing in the face of statistics and a mere drive through the former strongholds of lower class white-dom.
Clemenza, although you and I live in the same area, we do seem to always live on different planets. Let’s just drop it.
Why not just pay them NOT to have children.
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