Coming Apart

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This latest book from Charles Murray showed up at the library of the University Near Here without me even having to ask for it. Somebody up there likes me.

Murray's topic is the increasing split in the US between (1) a (relatively) well-educated, high-skilled, well-paid elite; and (2) just about everyone else. This is something he alluded to a few years back in The Bell Curve, a study discussing (among other things) how differences in IQ were fragmenting society. Perhaps predictably, everyone focused on the racial angle presented in that previous work. Here, Murray concentrates his statistics on white people only, probably a wise move.

"Oh," I hear you saying. "Yet another book about inequality." Yeah, but Murray shows (in my opinion) the right way to look at "inequality". It makes other treatments look shallow and somewhat silly. For one thing, he doesn't concentrate on income inequality; that's a relatively small part of the problem, and (in any case) not amenable to easy solutions.

What's the problem? Murray is deeply troubled by the trends that point to a rapid degradation of the vision of what makes America exceptional. (Murray, like me, is a fan of American exceptionalism.) Our shared civic culture is "unraveling".

The classes are dividing themselves along multiple dimensions. There's a physical separation, as the well-to-do can increasingly migrate to communities with a high concentration of People Like Us; others find themselves left behind or priced out of their upwardly-mobile communities. Murray statistically exemplifies these trends by creating a semi-fictional upperclass community called "Belmont", and a lowerclass community called "Fishtown."

Trends in Fishtown have been getting worse, year by year. (Things aren't as peachy as they could be in Belmont either.) Especially troubling are declines in what Murray considers to be the uniquely American ("founding") virtues: industriousness, honesty, marriage, religiousity. Page after page, chapter after chapter, Murray measures, to the extent that such things can be measured, the decline in each since the early 1960s.

Murray's tone, as usual, is informal and reasonable. I've been reading pessimistic we're-all-doomed works since the mid-sixties (yes, I'm old), so had started to dismiss them. Murray's somewhat more convincing. He goes out of his way to discuss possible objections to his methodology, and, while upfront about his own libertarian viewpoint, is conservative enough to talk persuasively about civic morality.

Is there hope? Who knows? In Murray's view, the only possible scenario that might reverse this decades-long dismal trend is an at-least-quasi religious revival, a rededication to the things that made America great, and (possibly) a return to smaller decentralized government. I would like to think that's possible, let alone likely. For my kids' sake, if not my own.


Last Modified 2024-01-28 8:54 AM EDT