White Blight

[Valin]

City Journal:

Charles Murray depicts an increasingly two-tiered white America.

Kay S. Hymowitz

1/25/12

 

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.

 

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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.

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[Pepper]

@Valin. Thanks for article.

[Valin]

@Valin. Thanks for article.

 

Charles Murray is always guaranteed to make you think.

[Rokke]

Wow. I'm putting that book on my list.