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What to Do About ‘Coming Apart’

By THOMAS B. EDSALL
February 12, 2012, 11:23 pm

Charles Murray has an unparalleled talent for persistently forcing [ http://www.aei.org/files/2009/01/30/Murray%20AEI%20CV%20Feb%2017%202009.pdf ] the most explosive issues of American politics into the center of the political debate.

Not only does he stoke controversy, he does so with perfect timing for the conservative movement. For a generation now [ http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/20080708_1982691thetwowarsagainstpovertyeconomicgrowthandthegreatsocietycharlesamurray.pdf ], Murray has provided intellectual justification [ http://www.sullivan-county.com/racism/murrey.htm ] for an assault on defenders of public welfare benefits.

With the publication of “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Murray has produced a book-length argument placing responsibility [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/08/charles-murray-book-review-part-5.html ] for rising inequality and declining mobility on widespread decay in the moral fiber of white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans, putting relatively less emphasis on a similar social breakdown among low-status, less-educated Americans of all races

Murray’s strength lies in his ability to raise issues that center-left policy makers and academics prefer, for the most part, to shy away from. His research methods, his statistical analyses and the conclusions he draws are subject to passionate debate [ http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/1997/01/the_bell_curve_flattened.single.html ]. But by forcing taboo issues into the public arena, Murray has opened up for discussion politically salient issues that lurk at a subterranean level in the back-brains of many voters, issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy.

Despised by the left, Murray has arguably done liberals a service by requiring them to deal with those whose values may seem alien, to examine the unintended consequences of their policies and to grapple with the political impact of assertions made by the right. He has also amassed substantial evidence to bolster his claims and at the same time elicited a formidable academic counter-attack [ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=93683 ].

Murray first appeared on the political scene in 1984 with the publication of “Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.” The book made the case that liberal government programs had worsened the lives of the poor – a crucial claim if you want to justify the decimation of domestic social spending programs.

His argument immediately provoked intense arguments – one notable exchange [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/oct/24/losing-ground-an-exchange/?pagination=false ] took place in the New York Review of Books between Murray and Christopher Jencks of the sociology department at Harvard. There is no question that “Losing Ground” was influential, playing a key role in the enactment of welfare reform — with radically slashed benefits — 12 years later.

The National Review and the Conservative Monitor [ http://www.conservativemonitor.com/top-ten/losing-ground.shtml ] cited “Losing Ground” as one of the ten books that most changed America. Murray’s book

seemed like a bolt of lightning in the middle of the night revealing what should have been plain as the light of day. The welfare state so carefully built up in the 1960s and 1970s created a system of disincentives for people to better their own lives. By paying welfare mothers to have children out of wedlock into a poor home, more of these births were encouraged. By doling out dollars at a rate that could not be matched by the economy, the system encouraged the poor to stay home.

Jencks was highly critical of Murray’s use of data and the conclusions he drew from his data, but Jencks paid tribute to the political savvy [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/may/09/how-poor-are-the-poor/ ] behind Murray’s argument. “Conservative politicians and writers are now trying to shift the prevailing view again, by arguing that federal programs are not just ineffective but positively harmful,” Jencks wrote. “Losing Ground,” Jencks pointed out [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/may/09/how-poor-are-the-poor/?pagination=false ], is “the most persuasive statement so far of this new variation on Social Darwinism” and “ most important of all, his argument provides moral legitimacy for budget cuts that many politicians want to make in order to reduce the federal deficit.”

“Losing Ground” was controversial, but the disputes it provoked were modest in comparison to the outcry following the arrival in 1994 of “The Bell Curve,” which Murray wrote with Richard Herrnstein, a psychology professor at Harvard who died the year the book was published.

At the time of publication, the Chicago Tribune summarized [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-10-13/news/9410130055_1_herrnstein-and-murray-intelligence-cognitive-elite ] some of that book’s key findings:

Herrnstein and Murray say intelligence will be the decisive dividing force of the 21st century, as smart people get the best educations and best jobs, earn the most money, marry each other, produce bright children and cluster together into a cognitive elite.

Those with markedly below-average intelligence will be left in a growing underclass, likely to drop out of school and hold routine jobs or none at all. Their children will be born into inadequate, high-risk homes, often with single parents, and destined by their low IQ to remain stuck in poverty.

Much of the nation’s well-intended efforts to help the underclass have failed, the book contends, because we have refused to recognize the basic problem: low IQ. “Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster,” they say.

The forces pushing us apart cannot be stopped, assert Herrnstein and Murray. Efforts to improve health, education and childhood interventions must fight a “demographic head wind” that results when the poor have a disproportionately high number of children and the mean IQ of immigrants in the 1980s is slightly below average.

Most controversially, Murray and Herrnstein wrote, “we stipulate that one standard deviation – fifteen IQ points – separates whites and blacks.” [note -- this paragraph is included in a copy of the article text, but, at least on my box, does not show in the article as it appears at the source]

Fast forward to 2005, when Murray previewed, in an article appearing in the September 2005 issue of Commentary, what would come to be the central preoccupation [ http://www.bible-researcher.com/murray1.html ] of “Coming Apart.”

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published “The Bell Curve” eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of “The Bell Curve” — the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure — a chance to surface.

Murray made one substantial and consequential concession [ http://www.bible-researcher.com/murray1.html ] in discussing his former emphasis on the heritability of IQ:

I shift from “innate” to “intractable” to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. “Intractable” means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.

In “Coming Apart,” Murray returns to his core theme [ http://www.aei.org/article/society-and-culture/the-new-american-divide/ ], which is the “intractable” factors that have reshaped America’s class structure: specifically, the stratification of social class in the United States by IQ. He argues that the “central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity” have eroded among those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, and that this population (his focus here is on whites) finds itself at or near the bottom of this ladder because its vulnerable members, on average, have less cognitive ability – and thus less ability to evaluate the likely outcomes of behavioral choice — than those on the upper rungs.

Murray’s concern about the “white underclass” was evident as long ago as 1986, when he published “White Welfare, White Families, ‘White Trash’ ” in the National Review. William Raspberry of the Washington Post summarized Murray’s concerns [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-18/news/8601200552_1_black-families-white-trash-illegitimacy ] that year:

Just when we are starting to come to grips with the special problems of the black underclass; just when middle-class blacks especially are groping for explanations and remedies for the special problems, along comes Charles Murray to tell us that the problems are neither all that special nor all that black. The problem, he says, is not race but class. And though it affects blacks disproportionately, it is affecting whites at a growing rate. For instance, the illegitimacy rate among American whites today is roughly what it was among blacks 20 years ago when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his unsettling report on the disintegration of black families.

Murray’s analysis retains the same focus today that it did in 1986. He contends in “Coming Apart” that there was far greater social cohesion across class lines 50 years ago because “the powerful norms of social and economic behavior in 1960 swept virtually everyone into their embrace,” adding in a Jan. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

According to Murray, higher education has now become a proxy for higher IQ, as elite colleges become sorting mechanisms for finding, training and introducing to each other the most intellectually gifted young people. Fifty years into the education revolution, members of this elite are likely to be themselves the offspring of cognitively gifted parents, and to ultimately bear cognitively gifted children.

Cognitive ability, which arms elites against socio-moral unraveling – and which allows them to create optimal high-investment environments [ http://www.bible-researcher.com/murray1.html ] for their offspring — was far less important to socioeconomic status 50 years ago, Murray believes. Certainly there is persuasive data, recently gathered [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?_r=1&ref=sabrinatavernise ] by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University and the Russell Sage Foundation, that demonstrates that “while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.”

Murray makes the case that cognitive ability is worth ever more in modern advanced, technologically complex hypercompetitive market economies. As an example, Murray quotes Bill Gates: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war or we won’t have a future.”

Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able – in Murray’s view – and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murray’s framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap [ http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/acsbr09-2.pdf ].

Take industriousness. Murray writes: “Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere [ http://www.uts.edu/read-more-trends-marriage-and-family/366-the-new-american-divide.html ].”

To Murray, the overarching problem is that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy [ http://books.google.com/books?id=H0YKqqTogSMC&pg=PR21&dq=bourgeois+virtues+daniel+bell&hl=en&sa=X&ei=w-c2T9mvIOff0QH6xLTkBg&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=bourgeois%20virtues%20daniel%20bell&f=false ] of the counter-cultural 1960s.

On the basis of his extensive publications [ http://www.aei.org/files/2009/01/30/Murray%20AEI%20CV%20Feb%2017%202009.pdf ] over the past 30 years, Murray can stand on equal footing with such pillars of contemporary conservatism as Richard Viguerie, the father of direct mail; Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner, founders of key right-of-center think tanks; Grover Norquist, enforcer of Republican anti-tax policy; and Newt Gingrich, architect of the 1994 Republican revolution and current presidential candidate.

“Coming Apart,” with its emphasis on the “demoralization” of white working-class America, has received [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181750916067234.html ] exuberant praise [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinion/brooks-the-great-divorce.html?pagewanted=all ] and brutal [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles-murray-book-review.html ] criticism [ http://mobile.businessweek.com/magazine/book-review-coming-apart-by-charles-murray-01192012.html ]. Despite his emphasis on morale, Murray demonstrates an insensitivity to the psychologically debilitating effects of the disappearance of decent-paying manufacturing and production jobs for those who are not college-educated, and the painful sense of status dislocation that haunts those who are cast off. He makes almost no reference to the past 40 years of deindustrialization or globalization. He does write that “insofar as men need to work to survive — an important proviso — falling hourly income does not discourage work.”

Murray seems unaware of the anger and resentment that is part of the lives of men (and women) stuck in menial jobs, laid off with caprice on the part of management, and offhandedly described in the media as “living on savings.”

Toward the end of “Coming Apart,” Murray expresses his hope for a “Great Civic Awakening” among the new upper class – an awakening that will lead to the kind of “moral rearmament” and paternalism characteristic of anti-poverty drives in the 19th century. To achieve this, Murray believes, the “new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”

This seems to me a weak reed to lean on. The cognitive elites Murray cites are deeply committed to liberal norms of cultural tolerance and permissiveness. The antipathy to the moralism of the religious right has, in fact, been a major force driving these upscale, secular voters into the Democratic party.

A different assessment of what Murray sees as an irredeemable “coming apart” of American society is, however, possible. Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for United States foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written a three part series (one [ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/01/29/beyond-blue-part-one-the-crisis-of-the-american-dream/ ], two [ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/01/beyond-blue-part-two-recasting-the-dream/ ], three [ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/05/beyond-blue-part-three-the-power-of-infostructure/ ]) for the American Interest that takes a fresh approach to the same problems.

Mead, who is no knee-jerk leftie, argues that the

changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves. The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation. The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended.

Mead continues:

Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.

The 21st century, Mead adds,

must reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.

Mead’s predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it his thinking, more than Murray’s, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target.

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published in January.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/what-to-do-about-coming-apart/ [with comments]

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