Part I: Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?

Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book’s flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book’s appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put.

To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy:

A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report:

The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.

When he publishes his report, somebody points out: “You know, there was a hurricane here last week.” The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, “I’m writing about housing, not weather.”

Coming Apart details the social problems that have overtaken the poorer half of the white American population over the past generation. This population is less committed to the workforce than its parents and grandparents were. It has more trouble with the law. It has more children outside marriage.

None of this information comes as news to anybody. Social observers have been making these points for years. The novelty of Coming Apart is Charles Murray’s remarkable—and telltale—incuriosity as to why any of this might be happening.

I should probably pause to note here that Charles Murray and I have had our personal innings. When I was sacked from the American Enterprise Institute in 2010, Murray posted a blog insisting that I had been fired—not for writing this blogpost—but for laziness. (To which the answer could only be, borrowing from the Duke of Wellington, if you can believe that, you will believe anything.)

However, this unpleasantness has never prevented me from recognizing the merit of Murray’s early scholarly work. In this interview, conducted two months after Murray’s comments, I cited his first book, Losing Ground, as one of the outstanding works of the pioneering era of conservative thought. It would sincerely give me pleasure to be able to say the same of Coming Apart.

I cannot, and I doubt that anybody other than people strongly pre-committed to endorse Murray’s work will say so either.

Here is the book’s one discussion of the idea that the social troubles of lower-class America might be related to the (rather notorious) economic troubles of lower-class America. It’s such a revealing and fascinating statement that I will quote at length, both on the passage’s own merits and to ensure that the argument is given its full context.

A natural explanation for the numbers I have presented is that the labor market got worse for low-skill workers from 1960 to 2008. More [working-class white] men worked short hours because they couldn’t get work for as many hours as they wanted; more of them were unemployed because it was harder for them to get jobs; more them left the labor market because discouraged by the difficulty of finding jobs.

In one respect, the labor market did indeed get worse for [working-class white] men: pay. Recall figure 2.1 at the beginning of the book, showing stagnant incomes for people below the 50th income percentile. High-paying unionized jobs have become scarce and real wages for all kinds of blue-collar jobs have been stagnant or falling since the 1970s. But these trends don’t explain why [working-class white] men in the 2000s worked fewer jobs, found it harder to get jobs than other Americans did, and more often dropped out of the labor market than they had in the 1960s. On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive—an important proviso—falling hourly income does not discourage work.

Put yourself in the place of a [working-class white] man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you’ve been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter’s helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it? As of 2009, a very bad year economically, the median hourly wage for drivers of delivery trucks was $13.84; for carpenter’s helpers, $12.63; for building cleaners, $13.37. That means $505 to $554 for a forty-hour week, or $25,260 to $27,680 for a fifty-week year. Those are not great incomes, but they are enough to be able to live a decent existence—almost twice the poverty level even if you are married and your wife doesn’t work. So why would you not work if a job opening landed in your lap? Why would you not work a full forty hours if the hours were available? Why not work more than forty hours?

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce’s commitment to the labor market.

His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees.

In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:

The ‘60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

The ‘60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today’s money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He’s working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you’ll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That’s not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren’t married, and you don’t go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

How you can tell a story about the moral decay of the working class with the “work” part left out is hard to fathom.

But that’s not the limit of Murray’s incuriosity. There are two other limits, both striking, and both contained in the book’s subtitle. The first is the word “America.”

Coming Apart contains not a single reference to the world outside the United States. Yet the decline in the life prospects of the less-skilled is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

Across the developed world, we see the wages of the bottom half (and in some cases more than half) have stagnated, even as gains have accrued to the top 20%, bigger gains to the top 5%, and the biggest gains to the top 1%.

This trend toward inequality varies from country to country—more extreme in the United Kingdom, less extreme in Germany. The subsequent destabilization of working-class social life likewise varies from country to country. But if the trend is global, the cause must be global too. Yet that thought does not trouble Murray.

The second limit to Murray’s curiosity is revealed by his time limit: “1960 to 2010.” Suppose instead Murray had looked at the whole past century, rather than just half of it: 1910-2010. He’d have found a different and even more suggestive trend: a white working class that became more law-abiding, more temperate, more familial and more civic-minded between 1910 and 1960 and then ever less after about 1970.

Which would raise the question: So if “the 1960s” are responsible for the post-1970 deterioration, what was responsible for the pre-1960 improvement?

Murray does not want to face this question, because it might require him to reconsider elements of his ideology—something he declares himself unwilling to consider.

Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.

So it has been with the evidence I have presented. A social democrat may see in parts 1 and 2 a compelling case for the redistribution of wealth. A social conservative may see a compelling case for government policies that support marriage, religion, and traditional values. I am a libertarian, and see a compelling case for returning to the founders’ conception of limited government.

Three answers:

1) It’s historically wrong to describe the “founders’ conception of limited government” as if there existed some group called “the founders” who broadly agreed a vision of government that more or less corresponded to contemporary libertarianism.

2) As a matter of fact, if you announce that there can exist no possible information that might change your mind about abortion, the death penalty, marijuana, same-sex marriage, and the inheritance tax, then yes you are an unreasonable person—or anyway, an unreasoning one. I’ve changed my mind about same-sex marriage as experience has dispelled my fears of the harms from same-sex marriage. If somebody could prove to me that marijuana was harmless or that legalization would not lead to an increase in marijuana use, I’d change my mind about marijuana legalization. And so on through the list.

3) But here’s the most important point of all. I tramped through a lot of the same research that Charles Murray presents here when I wrote my history of the 1970s, How We Got Here.

As I looked backward and forward in time, however, I had to face this awkward fact: America became more culturally stable between 1910 and 1960 as it became less economically and socially libertarian. As it became more economically and socially libertarian after 1970, America became culturally less stable. I wrote:

The greatest generation was also the statist generation. Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country been more economically equal, never had it been more ethnically homogeneous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering.

Murray nostalgically regrets the lost America of his 1950s Midwestern boyhood. But to describe in any true way how that America was lost would require a reckoning of how that America was made. Unwilling, as he acknowledges, to submit his politics to the check of uncongenial evidence, Murray prefers to avoid encountering the evidence that might shake his politics.

Let me instance another example of the unwillingness. In the first long quoted passage from Coming Apart, I asterisked one of Murray’s statistical claims, a claim stating that wages have stagnated for the bottom 50% of the white work force. That claim is true if you draw your line, as Murray does, beginning in 1960. But put your thumb on the left side of the chart, and start drawing the line beginning in 1970. Then you notice that median wages have stagnated for the whole bottom 75%—and that the median wage only begins to show significant improvement over time when you look at the top 5%.

That number points in a very different direction from the one in which Murray would like to lead his audience. And this kind of polemical use of data is one—but only one—of the things that discredits Coming Apart as an explanation of the social trouble of our times.

As for the other things…they must await a second post, dealing with Murray’s treatment of what he calls the new upper class.

Part II: Social Science Minus the Science

So what is to be done?

Despite all its perverse omissions and careless generalizations, Coming Apart deserves credit at least for this: It takes seriously the challenge of reconstituting America as a middle-class republic. At a time when many conservatives refuse to acknowledge the simple statistical fact of intensifying inequality, Murray has at least joined the discussion. Congratulations for that.

Yet Murray plainly wishes to contribute more than the repetition of familiar observations about widening class divides in America. As he ominously states at the very beginning of Coming Apart:

I will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America.

The stakes can hardly be higher than that. If America is to survive as America, the trends Murray deplores must somehow be arrested or reversed. What does he recommend?

Strangely, the answer to that question is…virtually nothing.

Murray’s program for social reform has two main components.

The first component is a lot more scolding of the poor by the rich:

A large part of the problem consists of nothing more complicated than our unwillingness to say out loud what we believe. A great many people, especially in the new upper class, just need to start preaching what they practice….

And so I am hoping for a civic Great Awakening among the new upper class.

Etc.

This extraordinary passage raises a number of baffling questions. Earlier in the book, Murray waxed indignant about the “condescension toward the rabble” he detected in the new upper class.

In those earlier pages, Murray bitterly condemned the new upper class for non-verbally communicating any “whiff” of disapproval of junk food, smoking, and non-recycling. Yet now at the end of the book he calls for explicit “preaching” of…what? He doesn’t quite say. Nor does he say why he imagines that this “preaching” will be more effective than the non-verbal disapprobation of junk food that so offends him.

Most strangely of all, Murray seems utterly uninterested in investigating whether this chosen remedy will actually work. The new American upper class may be crippled by non-judgmentalism, but there have been other periods in US history where the upper class did not shrink from lecturing: the temperance movement for one outstanding example. Was that successful? Historians have studied the question, and the answer is there for Murray to discover, if he wished.

The second component of Murray’s program for saving the American republic from class divisions is a drastic reduction in the American welfare state.

Murray does not state this point as lucidly as one might wish, so the quotations will have to skip around a bit. But I’ll quote at enough length that I hope I’ll reassure all readers that I do not distort Murray’s meaning:

When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America’s more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcomes, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives…. Through November 21, 1963, the American project demonstrated that a society can provide great personal freedom while generating strong and vital human networks that helped its citizens cope. America on the eve of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, while flawed, was still headed in the right direction.

In some ways, the United States continued in the right direction, bringing us closer to the ideals that animated the nation’s creation. The leading examples are the revolutions in the status of African Americans and women. The barriers facing them in 1963 represented a continuing failure of America to make good on its ideals. In every realm of American life, those barriers had been reduced drastically by 2010.

In other ways, it has been downhill ever since…. Family, vocation, community, and faith have all been enfeebled, in predictable ways….

These costs—enfeebling family, vocation, community, and faith—are not exacted on the [new upper class]. The things the government does to take the trouble out of things seldom intersect with the lives of a successful attorney or executive. Rather, they intersect with life in [the lower class]. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. If that same man lives under a system that says the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing a theoretical outcome, but American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t. Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, ‘I made a difference.’

First the good news. Lower class people in the United States still have lots and lots of satisfying trouble in their lives. Charles Murray worries that we’ve made it too easy to be a menial worker. I think we can set his mind at ease on that point.

Now alas the bad news.

If you’re going to claim the mantle of social science for your claim that reducing government will ameliorate class disparities, then at some previous point in your work, you should make at least some minimal effort to demonstrate that government activity has caused those class disparities. Yet that effort is absent from Murray’s book. Indeed, at the outset of his book, Murray emphatically disclaims any interest in the causes of widening inequality:

I focus on what happened, not why.

Yet at the end of the book, without ever suggesting any reason to believe that government is the problem, he insists that the reduction of government is the solution.

I found myself flipping from beginning to end of the book, punching searches into my Kindle, questioning whether I’d perhaps carelessly missed some crucial piece of evidence. But no. There is no evidence, not even an argument, just an after-the-fact assertion, pulled out of the hat.

It’s puzzling, truly. The prescription comes without an etiology, the recommendation without any discussion of causation, verdict without proof or trial. Social science’s claims to be science are troubled enough without this wholesale jettisoning of—not only scientific method—but even the scientific outlook.

The odd thing is: I’m exactly the right market for Murray’s rhetoric. I’m predisposed to accept everything he says about the importance of individual achievement and the negative consequences of government that provides too much. All I ask is some skein of connection, no matter how thin and fragile, between the “whereas” and “therefore” clauses of the Murray argument. Murray doesn’t draw any at all, and doesn’t seem even to be aware that any such skein is required. The conclusions of Coming Apart are pure dogma, not only unsupported but even unrelated to anything that went before.

Part III: What the Founders Would Tell Charles Murray

Murray is especially eager to chastise the top 5% because he is convinced that this class “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.”

In fact, most ways of answering the question produce the answer “no,” as Andrew Gelman has exhaustively and I think conclusively demonstrated.

Murray does not heed that answer for a reason that reflects both the best and the worst in his method as a writer and thinker. Murray has become one of America’s most influential social scientists because at bottom he is not really a social scientist at all. He is a literary intellectual, who thinks in images, not numbers. At its best—in, say, Charles Murray’s under-appreciated book on political theory, In Pursuit—Murray’s artistic imagination can perceive ancient and familiar conundrums in fresh and interesting ways. However, the same artistic cast of mind leads him to be satisfied very quickly with impressions and assumptions that “feel true”—and which he then attempts to “corroborate” not with facts and figures, but with thought experiments and rhetorical questions.

Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. It includes the retired general now enriching his pension with directorships and consultancies. It includes for that matter the call screener at the Rush Limbaugh program.

(Murray holds the strange idea that listening to talk radio proves you belong to the American mainstream. But of course listening to talk radio doesn’t prove you are mainstream. It proves you are old.)

Charles Murray’s back-handed treatment of the new American upper class is all the more dismaying because the topic is so very desperately important.

Some of what Murray wishes to say is surely true. It’s surely true that the affluent and influential people who make up the top 5% of the American population know less and care less about their countrymen than the equivalent segment of the population in, say, 1970. Such separation has significant real-world consequences.

Back in 1971, an unemployment rate of 6% seemed a national calamity, demanding the most urgent action from Republicans and Democrats alike. Here’s an extract from President Nixon’s State of the Union address that year:

We should take no comfort from the fact that the level of unemployment in this transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy is lower than in any peacetime year of the sixties.

This is not good enough for the man who is unemployed in the seventies. We must do better for workers in peacetime and we will do better.

To achieve this, I will submit an expansionary budget this year—one that will help stimulate the economy and thereby open up new job opportunities for millions of Americans.

It will be a full employment budget, a budget designed to be in balance if the economy were operating at its peak potential. By spending as if we were at full employment, we will help to bring about full employment.

I ask the Congress to accept these expansionary policies—to accept the concept of a full employment budget.…

With the stimulus and the discipline of a full employment budget, with the commitment of the independent Federal Reserve System to provide fully for the monetary needs of a growing economy, and with a much greater effort on the part of labor and management to make their wage and price decisions in the light of the national interest and their own self-interest—then for the worker, the farmer, the consumer, for Americans everywhere we shall gain the goal of a new prosperity: more jobs, more income, more profits, without inflation and without war.

Imagine the reaction—and not only from Republicans—if President Obama talked that way! The difference between then and now is not only driven by partisanship and ideology. Back then, the people who made opinion in this country carried childhood or even teenage memories of the misery of prolonged unemployment. If they felt secure themselves, they had friends and relatives who did not. Murray is right to worry about that separation—even if his only use of his correct perception is to scold.

Yet here is the great problem with Murray’s substitution of imagery for numbers in his social thought. By focusing so intently on those detested hybrid-driving NPR-listening bottle-recycling cheeseburger-avoiding professors and screenwriters, Murray has blinded himself to the most important changes that have occurred since 1960 in America’s distribution of wealth and power.

It is certainly much nicer to be a white member of the top 5% in 2012 than it was in 1962, especially if you are a woman. (Remember, Murray discusses only white people through most of his book—and I will follow his example until my own final post.)

Back in 1962, exceedingly few members of the top 5% had ever taken an African safari.

Back in 1962, exceedingly few members of the top 5% ate grapes in winter.

Back in 1962, exceedingly few members of the top 5% employed maids or laundry services—that work was almost entirely done by the female half of the top 5%, Wellesley degree or no Wellesley degree.

Nobody in 1962 had access to the information and entertainment resources available to everybody with broadband cable today, the top 5% leading the way with the fastest connections and the coolest devices.

As interesting as these changes in lifestyle may be, however, American society has changed in other ways that leave almost all of the top 5% as far behind as they leave the bottom 95%.

Back in 1962, no individual American controlled a national television network, as Rupert Murdoch does today. (The legendary William Paley owned only about 10% of the stock of CBS.)

Back in 1962, it was considered shocking, and even frightening, for an extremely rich man like Nelson Rockefeller to use his fortune to gain political office.

Back in 1962, most political donations were kept secret. But when it came to light after Watergate that insurance magnate W. Clement Stone had donated $2 million to Richard Nixon’s two presidential campaigns, Americans were scandalized. In 2004, by contrast, the John Kerry campaign and related organizations collected $75 million from only four donors.

Charles Murray deplores our present state as a betrayal of the founders’ vision of the country. I am not certain of what the founders as a group would have thought about affluent people taking safaris to Africa. My guess is that Benjamin Rush would have disliked it, while Benjamin Franklin would have been untroubled—but who knows?

But here’s what we do know: almost unanimously, the Americans of the 1790s agreed that vast inequality of fortunes—at least as between white men—were inimical to Republican government. Here for example is Noah Webster, writing in 1790 (I’ve corrected his idiosyncratic spelling):

The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes….

The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government is a fundamental law favoring an equal or rather a general distribution of property. It is not necessary nor possible that every citizen should have exactly an equal portion of land and goods, but the laws of such a state should require an equal distribution of intestate estates, and bar all perpetuities.

It’s worth noting that Noah Webster was a Federalist, not a radical Republican. What he wrote there would have received nods from almost every member of the founding generation, John Adams most emphatically, but also the aristocratic Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson went so far as to endorse a progressive income tax in a 1785 letter to James Madison.

(And here you thought the idea came from Karl Marx, or possibly Saul Alinsky.)

Republican government rested on a broad equality of fortunes: that was conventional wisdom in the founding generations.

Concentration of fortunes threatened republics: that was conventional wisdom too.

And Charles Murray’s suggestion that an emphasis on “seemliness” would mitigate the political consequences of extreme inequality would have seemed to them laughably naive. They would have answered Murray with a quotation from their teacher Montesquieu:

The spirit of moderation is what we call virtue in an aristocracy; it supplies the place of the spirit of equality in a popular state.

When we find ourselves urging “seemliness” on our leaders, we have moved beyond popular government—or so the founding generation would have likely thought. If a writer represents himself as carrying forward the founders’ principles, he ought to pay heed to their most fundamental stated concern: not the purchase of this lifestyle or that, but the use of vast concentrated wealth to sway political power.

Yet it is precisely this concern, so urgent to the founders, to which Charles Murray pays no heed at all.

Part IV: Charles Murray’s Imaginary Elite

While it is the white working class that receives the brunt of Charles Murray’s criticism in his new book, Coming Apart, it is the affluent who are the targets of Murray’s most tartly expressed hostility.

Coming Apart opens with a study of what Murray calls the “new upper class.”

In Murray’s telling, this new upper class is not defined solely—or even primarily—by income. Murray amuses himself with a mocking evocation of the “eminent Columbia faculty member [who] goes home after giving his speech at the Plaza Hotel to admiring Wall Street executives. While his audience is dispersing in their limos to their duplex cooperatives on the Upper East Side, he catches a cab home to his cramped apartment near the Columbia campus, his standing ovation still ringing in his ears, only to be told by his wife that the shower drain is clogged and he must take care of it before the children get up for school the next morning.”

Murray has many harsh things to say about the selfishness and insularity of the new upper class. Yet almost without exception, whenever he shifts from abstractions to particulars, the upper-class behavior that most offends him is the behavior of people like his imagined Columbia professor—and not the behavior of the people in the limos and duplexes.

In all the span of Coming Apart, here is the most stringent indictment Murray has to offer on the behavior of business elites.

Again, apologies for length, but this is a case where only seeing is believing:

The collapse of a sturdy code (ecumenical niceness is not sturdy) also means that certain concepts lose their power to constrain behavior. One of those concepts is unseemliness.

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines unseemly as “not in keeping with established standards of taste or form; unbecoming or indecorous in appearance; improper in speech, conduct, etc.; inappropriate the time or place.” The ultimate source, The Oxford English Dictionary, requires just three words: ‘Unbecoming, unfitting; indecent.”

Some examples? Unseemliness is television producer Aaron Spelling building a house of 56,500 square feet and 123 rooms. Unseemliness is Henry McKinnell, the CEO of Pfizer, getting a $99 million golden parachute and an $82 million pension after a tenure that saw Pfizer’s share price plunge. They did nothing illegal. Spelling had the money to build his dream house, just as millions of others would like to do, and got zoning approval for his plans. McKinnell’s separation package was paid according to the contract he had signed with Pfizer when he became CEO. But the outcomes were inappropriate for time or place, not suited to the circumstances. They were unbecoming and unfitting. They were unseemly.

So they were. But Murray’s tone of genteel reproof sharpens into passionate indignation when he confronts the real malefactors in upper-class America: people who disdain junk food.

The culture of the new upper class carries with it an unmistakable whiff of a “we’re better than the rabble” mentality. The daily yoga and jogging that keep them whippet-thin are not just healthy things for them to do; people who are overweight are less admirable as people. Deciding not to recycle does not reflect just an alternative opinion about whether recycling makes sense; it is inherently irresponsible. Smokers are not to be worried about, but to held in contempt.

The people who suffer from this syndrome have been labeled by many other Americans as overeducated elitist snobs [OES]. The OES syndrome does not manifest itself like Margaret Dumont playing society lady to Groucho Marx. Overeducated elitist snobs may even be self-deprecating about their cultural preferences. They just quietly believe that they and their peers are superior to the rest of the population, intellectually and in their nuanced moral sensibility.

No external marker lets us define exactly who in the new upper class does and does not fit this indictment. Those who suffer from the OES syndrome tend to have high IQs, but lots of people with high IQs happily munch on double quarter-pounders with cheese and think that recycling is a farce.

After the Spelling example, Murray turns to a short, wan discussion of CEO pay. He speculates that executive pay—though generally amply deserved—may have possibly gotten slightly out of hand:

At the individual level, accepting a big compensation package is seldom unseemly. You’re the CEO; you’ve worked hard to get where you are; you think that your contribution is valuable to the company; you know that your compensation package is in line with what CEOs of comparable companies are getting. It is hard to see any ethical obligation to negotiate a smaller deal for yourself than the board of directors is willing to give you.

Then follows a series of hypothetical questions raising the possibility that not all of these negotiations are quite so hands-off as one might wish. Murray concludes: “It looks suspiciously as if there’s a lot of unseemliness going on, but I can’t prove it.”

On the other hand, good news! Even if these activities are unseemly, at least they do not hurt anybody, or so Murray insists—on the basis (as he cheerfully acknowledges) of no evidence whatsoever:

To clarify that question, it may help if I stipulate for purposes of argument that these increases [in CEO pay] were economically rational. I will further stipulate that the dynamics producing these increases promoted economic growth and, ultimately, a better life for people all the way down the line. Now return to the question: Is there anything unseemly about [CEO pay]?

These remarks occur about two-thirds of the way through a book that has extensively argued that we are not seeing a better life for people all the way down the line. As for claims for the economic rationality of surging CEO pay, they don’t look so good now that we know that the CEOs of companies like Merrill Lynch were earning their bonuses by running risks they did not understand—and which were ultimately offloaded onto the taxpayer.

But what is really peculiar is the contrast between these delicate musings about CEO pay and the fierce indignation Murray expresses when it comes time to discuss the real malefactors, Hollywood liberals:

Some parents of the new upper class are responsible for producing and distributing the content that represents the worst of contemporary culture, while others are going to great lengths to protect their children from what they see as a violent and decadent culture. Sometimes those parents are one and the same people.

What most deeply irks Murray about this new American upper class—all those Columbia professors cleaning the showers, all those screenwriters checking their children’s homework—is their fundamental vice, non-judgmentalism:

If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself.… Nonjudgmentalism ceases to be baffling if you think of it as a symptom of…loss of self-confidence among the dominant minority. The new upper class doesn’t want to push its way of living onto the less fortunate, for who are they to say that their way of living is really better?

Yet, Murray notes, the new upper class of professors and screenwriters does permit itself some judgments. After spending one-third of his book denouncing the shiftlessness and sexual irresponsibility of the white working class, Charles Murray then launches this angry accusation at the American elite:

When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites.

This is Palinism with a bar chart.

Part V: Now All Americans Are Losing Ground

At the beginning of this review of Coming Apart, I said I’d finish with a consideration of Charles Murray’s seemingly odd decision to write a history not of America, but only of white America.

Murray himself explains this decision as a prophylactic measure, a means to avoid hot-button issues of race and ethnicity.

For decades now, trends in American life have been presented in terms of race and ethnicity, with non-Latino whites (hereafter, just whites) serving as the reference point—the black poverty rate compared to the white poverty rate, the percentage of Latinos who go to college compared to the percentage of whites who go to college, and so on…. But this strategy has distracted our attention from the way that the reference point itself is changing….

My message: Don’t kid yourselves that we are looking at stresses that can be remedied by attacking the legacy of racism or by restricting immigration. The trends I describe exist independently of ethnic heritage.

Murray here makes a fair point, I think. The deteriorating life prospects of America’s white working class is not only a grimly important fact in itself, it also casts powerful new light on the troubles of Black and Latino America.

Intuitively, it would seem that adding in the rest of America must make the situation even bleaker for [the statistical working class], and the separation with [affluent America] even sharper….

It was a surprise to me and perhaps it will be a surprise to you: Expanding the data to include all Americans makes hardly any difference at all.

Murray then presents a sequence of charts showing that marriage numbers for prime-age adults in the white working class have deteriorated to the point of indistinguishability from the numbers for all working class Americans regardless of race and ethnicity. Ditto for the numbers for children living at home with both parents, ditto for labor force participation by prime-age men, ditto for full-time work by prime-age adults. While the white working class remains somewhat less likely to be arrested for violent crimes than the working class generally, that gap is closing fast.

Saddest of all is the last chart in the sequence: Back in 1970, more than 45% of affluent Americans described themselves as “very happy.” More than 35% of affluent Americans still do so, regardless of race. In 1970, more than 35% of working-class whites—and nearly 35% of all working-class people—likewise described themselves as very happy. Today, only a little more than 15% of working-class people describe themselves as happy, and working-class whites are actually slightly less likely to do so than working-class people generally.

These are important observations, and they constitute (to my mind) the most valuable portion of Coming Apart. Working-class America is an increasingly troubled and dysfunctional place. More than 20 years ago, the sociologist William Julius Wilson predicted “the declining significance of race,” and Charles Murray’s work corroborates Wilson’s foresight. More bluntly, the broadcaster Tony Brown used to warn white listeners that black America was functioning as the “canary in the coal mine” for the whole country. I hosted Brown at a lunch at the Wall Street Journal editorial board in or about 1990, and I still remember his fierce insistence what is happening to us will happen to you. He was right.

Murray writes:

We are one nation, indivisible, in terms of whites and peoples of color. Differences in the fortunes of different ethnic groups persist, but white America is not headed in one direction and nonwhite America in another. We are divisible in terms of class. The coming apart at the seams has not been confined to whites, nor will its evil effects be confined to whites. Coming Apart may have told the story of white America, but its message is about all of America.

Stirring words, and true.

But the more true Murray’s vision, the more depressing and inadequate is his program. Scoldings and program cuts? Is that really all that the flourishing American elite owes to the sinking American mainstream? Even Charles Murray himself, in his second most recent book In Our Hands, advocated some form of mandated and subsidized universal health coverage for all. Intellectual fashions have changed among conservatives since In Our Hands was published in 2006. Yet if he could see the merit of some such proposal then, is it really impossible to imagine that there is anything now that upper America might do to avoid an outcome for lower America that Murray himself regards as catastrophic for all?

Murray writes:

The problems that poor suffer because of poverty disappear when the community is no longer poor. The first two-thirds of the twentieth century saw spectacular progress on that front. But when families become dysfunctional, or cease to form altogether, growing numbers of children suffer in ways that have little to do with lack of money.

But what if the progress against poverty goes into reverse? Working-class America is genuinely a poorer place today than it was in 1970, not only in relative terms—it’s very, very much poorer in relative terms—but simply in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars. Working-class America would be poorer still but for programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which enhance working people’s pay above the level that the labor market alone would provide.

Murray laments the collapse of the “sturdy elite code” that (in his telling) prevailed in the America of the first half of the 20th century. Yet when it comes time to describe that code, Murray emphasizes gender relations to the exclusion of almost everything else:

To be a man means that you are brave, loyal, and true. When you are in the wrong, you own up and take your punishment. You don’t take advantage of women. As a husband, you support and protect your wife and children. You are gracious in victory and a good sport in defeat. Your word is your bond. Your handshake is as good as your word. It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. When the ship goes down, you put the women and children into the lifeboats and wave good-bye with a smile.

As far as it goes, that statement probably does encapsulate many of the conventional beliefs of a typical upper-class American of the first half of the 20th century. But it seems to me wholly wrong to contend, as Murray does, that such beliefs are rejected by upper-class Americans today. I am a member in good standing of the top 5%, and so are virtually all of the people I know—as are indeed, virtually all of the people Charles Murray knows. It is plainly absurd to write, as Murray writes, “If you hear or see any of those clichés used today among the new upper class, it is probably sarcastically. The code of the American gentleman has collapsed, just as the parallel code of the American lady has collapsed.”

What has declined among the top 5% is not our sportsmanship, not our familial commitment, not even our truthfulness in our personal dealings.

What has declined is our spirit of civic responsibility, our acceptance that privilege carries obligations, our willingness to shoulder the economic costs of social leadership.

Let me propose an alternative list of clichés that truly would command less assent today from upper-class Americans than they would have done in 1962:

To be an employer means that you pay a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. If your firm goes broke, you go broke too. You don’t take advantage of clients or customers. As a voter and citizen, you try to think about what is best for everyone, not just you. You eschew ostentation when times are good, and you pay your fair share of the cost when times are bad. Your good name matters more than money. Your contributions to your community define your good name. Whenever you are inclined to criticize anyone, just remember that not everybody was born with the advantages you had.

Here is where it seems to me that Charles Murray is most deeply wrong.

He insists Americans are facing an unprecedented situation. That is not true. We have been here before. In the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, we also saw increasing concentrations of great wealth—at the same time as many working Americans, moving from farm to city, suffered the pain of moral dislocation and social breakdown. Crime, prostitution, and drunkenness ran then at least as rampant as the analogous ills run today.

And in those days too, there existed writers and thinkers who insisted that these trends represented the necessary consequences of ineluctable social consequences. Murray’s claim that the “reality that has driven the formation of the new upper class [is that] brains have become much more valuable in the marketplace” has its almost exactly precise analogues in the writings of Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner.

There was however at least one hugely important difference between those days and our own. Back then, the lower class, rather than sink meekly into its immiseration, periodically erupted in violent strikes and riots. American labor relations in the period from 1880 through 1920 were the most violent on earth. In 1901, an anarchist murdered President McKinley; in 1919-20, a bloody wave of bombings culminated in an explosion on Wall Street that killed that killed 38 people and wounded 400 more.

Many elite Americans decided something had to be done. Yes, they engaged in a great deal of the lecturing and scolding recommended by Charles Murray. But they also worked to find ways to ameliorate conditions for working Americans. Violent strike-breaking went of style, to be replaced by gentler managerial practices. State governments enacted wage and hour laws. Even the federal government acted to enforce national food safety standards in 1906. This was the famous Progressive era. Although there was much about Progressivism that we’d rightly reject today, there was much that could stand rediscovery and renewal.

These attempts at social redress made a real difference. Labor violence dwindled in the 1920s. And from Depression and war emerged a middle-class society—the society that Charles Murray remembers so fondly from his youth in Newton, Iowa. That society did not spontaneously materialize. People who wanted to live in a world that offered more chances to more people consciously built institutions that extended opportunity and provided security to more Americans than ever before. Obviously what they did then cannot be repeated now. Conditions are different. But we can be inspired by their example.

Murray himself pays lips service to the ideal that upper class Americans should exert more leadership on behalf of their fellow-citizens:

The members of the new upper class are active politically, but when it comes to using their positions to help sustain the republic in day-to-day life, they are AWOL.

Unfortunately, because Murray is so signally uninterested in discerning the causes of the social deterioration he has described, he has little content to insert into his vague good wish.

Because he takes for granted that the concentration of wealth is the inevitable (and to a great degree appropriate) consequence of the superior intelligence of the new upper class, he can imagine no changes in the organization of work that might even very slightly redress the balance of reward between the top 5% and the bottom 80%.

Because he regards new social programs (now apparently including the health care mandate he once endorsed) as tantamount to the death of the American project, he can imagine nothing that might be done outside the marketplace in favor of the bottom 80%.

And anyway, really, when you get right down to it, Murray does not really want to do anything for that bottom 80%, because his most bedrock condition is that the bottom 80% deserve their nasty and deteriorating fate.

[A]n intellectual underpinning of the welfare state is that, at bottom, human beings are not really responsible for the things they do. People who do well do not deserve what they have gotten—they got it because they were born into the right social stratum. Or if they did well despite being born poor and disadvantaged, it was because the luck of the draw gave them personal qualities that enabled them to succeed. People who do badly do not deserve it either. They were born into the wrong social stratum, or were handicapped by personal weaknesses that were not their fault. Thus it is morally appropriate to require the economically successful to hand over most of what they have earned to the state, and it is inappropriate to say of anyone who drifts in and out of work that he is lazy or irresponsible.

Science, he predicts, will shortly discredit these absurd ideas.

Pending that day, the great challenge ahead is to repeat and insist that “people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with one another.”

And for those of us for whom life is sweet and getting sweeter? Who discover that we are becoming ever richer than 95% or 99% or 99.9% of our fellow citizens? Who can ever more easily afford to buy more of the good things of life even as the great majority of Americans are discovering that the global marketplace will pay less and less for their work? (I began this fifth post in a restaurant in London’s Mayfair district where the cheapest appetizer cost more than the average hourly wage in the United States.)

For us, Murray recommends that we “take a close look at [our] lives, and ask whether those lives are impoverished in some of the ways [described in a passage a few paragraphs back about the spiritual deprivation of the materially rich], and then think about ways to change. I am not suggesting that people in the new upper class should sacrifice their self-interest. I just want to accelerate a rediscovery of what that self-interest is.”

It’s tempting to sign off here with a joke or jibe that the new upper class seems to have a very good idea of where their self-interest lies, and it is “the good old rule, the simple plan, let them keep who have the power, and let them take who can.”

But no. Give the author the final word, and let him explain what he means. What then is our self-interest in a country where it is no longer just an underclass few who are “losing ground” but now the overwhelming majority?

Here are the words that immediately follow the above quoted words about the rediscovery of self-interest:

Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us. A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding—and more fun—to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.

What it comes down to is that America’s new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different. The drift away from those qualities can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation or victories on specific Supreme Court cases, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are talking again about why American is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it has been: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.

That’s the end of the answer and the end of the book. I leave it to each reader to assess for himself or herself what to think of such an answer to what Charles Murray himself identifies as the supreme social problem of our times.