2012 ComingApartTheStateofWhiteAmeri

• (Murray, 2012) ⇒ Charles Murray. (2012). “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010." Crown Publishing Group. ISBN:030745343X

Subject Headings: Social Class, Elite Social Class, SuperZip, Income Inequality, Marriage.

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  • Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 is a 2012 book by political scientist and W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray. The book describes what the author sees as the economic divide and moral decline of white Americans that has occurred since 1960. The author focuses on white Americans in order to make it clear that the decline he describes was not being experienced solely by minorities, whom he brings into his argument in the last few chapters of the book.

    Murray describes several differences he sees forming between and causing two emerging classes — the New Upper Class and the New Lower class — among which are differences in or lack thereof in regards to religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc. Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, and family etc. have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. Much of his argument is centered around a notion of self-selective sorting that began in the 1960s and 1970s, when he argues that cognitive ability became the essential predictor of professional and financial success, and people overwhelmingly began marrying others in the same cognitive stratum and living in areas surrounded largely by others in that same stratum, leading to not only an exacerbation of existing economic divides, but an unprecedented sociocultural divide that had not existed before in America.

Quotes

Book Overview

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship — divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

5. The Bright Side of the New Upper Class

p.125

Those are theoretical observations. Realistically, rolling back the disposable income of the new upper class in a major way is not an option. The American political culture doesn’t work that way. The same Congress that passes higher marginal tax rates in this session will quietly pass a host of ways in which income can be sheltered and companies can substitute benefits for cash income in the next session. The new upper class will remain wealthy, and probably continue to get wealthier, no matter what.

If the most talented remain wealthy, they will congregate in the nicest places to live, with nicest defined as places where they can be around other talented, wealthy people like them, living in the most desirable parts of town, isolated from everyone else. It is human nature that they should do so. How is one to fight that with public policy? Restrict people’s right to live where they choose?

Congregations of talented people will create a culture that differs in important ways from the mainstream culture and that consequently leaves them ignorant about how much of the rest of the population lives. How shall we prevent that?

Changing the new upper class by force majeure won’t work and isn’t a good idea in any case. The new upper class will change only if its members decide that it is in the interest of themselves and of their families to change. And possibly also because they decide it is in the interest of the county they love.

References

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2012 ComingApartTheStateofWhiteAmeri	Charles Murray			Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010						2012