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    Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
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    Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
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    Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
    Ebook511 pages7 hours

    Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

    By Charles Murray

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating explanation for why white America has become fractured and divided in education and class, from the acclaimed author of Human Diversity.

    “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.”—David Brooks, New York Times

    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.

    The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJan 31, 2012
    ISBN9780307453440
    Unavailable
    Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
    Author

    Charles Murray

    Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. He is also well known for his 1994 New York Times bestseller The Bell Curve, coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, which sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America's class structure.

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    Reviews for Coming Apart

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Easily one of the most interesting books I've read in ages. I didn't agree with all of his conclusions, but the questions raised are certainly thought provoking.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book reviewing the state of white America, comparing the difference between 1962 and 2007. By examining the economic and social differences between two towns, one the lowest percentile, the other the highest, the reasons for the economic divergence between the highest and lowest economic strata are exposed. According to Murray, the founding virtues of white society are: Marriage; Honesty; Industriousness and Religiosity. The decline of these virtues in "Fishtown" doccument the fall of lower class white society in America. By adhering to these virtues, the residents and their children of "Belmont" prospered. Sticking completely within the white communities, Murray demonstrates that as marriage and vocation within the society decline, community virtues of participation and religion also falter, causing a cascade of problems that limit opportunities and ambition.An excellent book with short comments, this is not a good book to sit and read in one swoop, but to savor and think about as he develops his thesis and presents his documentation. There is some math and tables shown to demonstrate his points, but they are fairly easy to understand, especially when they are alarming and unexpected. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Wow - I just couldn't do it - too many statistics for me.
    • 4/5
      There is great wisdom in the thesis of this book. If you can get through all the quantitative data and graphs of the first 75% of the book, everything will come together towards the end. The final chapter, "Alternative Futures", is masterful!
    • 3/5
      This was an interesting book for the point of view, which I do not wholly agree with. Then again, that is one reason I picked it up.

      Murray has a steep hill to climb, and I do not think he is successful: he puts all his faith in culture/society being able to solve problems, taking a dim view on the effect of economics or the beneficial effect of government. This, together with his apparent view that if we were all just 'better' people then things would be better, makes this hard to believe.

      To be sure, he points out some things that I think are worthy of looking at: many, many people are increasingly isolated, we are all strangers, and this fraying of social structure makes life more uncertain, higher risk, and increases unfairness and inequality because social bonds between what would be (or are) different classes are broken.

      He makes some uncomfortable assertions that one has to at least consider: if wealth and privileged is (socially) heritable, then so must be poverty and disadvantage; and that -at least in part- is self-perpetuating. A central theme for him is that poor, uneducated people make more poor, uneducated people, without any 'help' from e.g. oppression. Uncomfortable... but reasonable... to an extent. (He *repeatedly* waves off economic causes for just about everything, while once and a while giving it a little nod as something that might have some effect sometimes.)

      And then he just skips over things. He discusses falling real earnings, increasing part-time work, decreasing full-time work, dissatisfaction, etc. all within, for the most part, a few tens of pages. But he steadfastly refuses to consider any link between these other than a decay of culture.

      I still give it three stars because I do feel like, without being the first, he points out many issues. I read this, to a certain extent, as an antidote to always seeing economics, income disparity, etc. pointed to as the root of all evils. While Murray has not convinced me in the least that society (or a lack of a certain kind of society) is the root of all evil, he does remind me that complex problems have complex causes.
    • 2/5
      I found this book to be full of stereotypes and thinly supported over generalizations. I lost interest by the third chapter but continued to skim through it. I finally gave up and did not finish the last 4 chapters.
    • 4/5
      I have friends who remind me, regularly, that wealth is becoming more and more concentrated among the wealthy. Further, the "not rich" are making less than they used to, relative to the wealthy. In other words, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

      There is a divide growing in America, argues Charles Murray in his book "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010" but it isn't necessarily just over money. In fact, the divide may be greater because it is cultural, not just economic.

      Displaying a dizzying array of statistics, studies, and research, Murray shows an America that is watching the rise of what seems, to me, to be a new ruling class, a group of elites that are well educated ("overeducated elitist snobs"), well connected, and with a set of values and interests different from much of modern America. The self-segregation is not malicious, but, largely a result of people being attracted to others like them. As a result, their children grow up with a different set of values, more educated, and in turn marry people like them, further segregating themselves.

      It works both ways, though, and Murray sets up as a comparison a hypothetical city on the upper ("Belmont") and on the lower ("Fishtown") ends of the spectrum to compare them. In his analysis, people in Belmont are better educated, less likely to get divorced (if at all), more involved in their community, work longer hours, are more honest, and are more religious. On the other hand, vital statistics in all of these areas for Fishmont show a gradual falling off over the last fifty years.

      Why is this problematic? One reason is that it has resulted in a culture for the upper class that is completely out of touch with most of America. They watch different movies, participate in different social activities, drink different beers, and read different books. Their interests are not the same, and yet they are a select group that sets policy and opinion, controls wealth and power, for America.

      Another problem is that the degradation of values in lower class America over the last fifty years is leading to a collapse of "American civic life," something exceptional about America. At this juncture in the book, Murray, a confessed libertarian, recaps the roots and history of American civic culture and its uniqueness in the world. Neighborliness, vibrant civic engagement in solving local problems, voluntary associations, and so on. All hallmarks of America up to as recently as the 1960s, the members of lower and upper classes shared through these civic association a culture together that connected them and their values.

      Further, although the elite retain some values, they have failed to lead. The elite class is as "dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way. Personally and as families, its members are successful. But they have abdictated their responsibility to set and promulgate standards." Instead, its most successful members take advantage of the perks of position without regards to the "unseemliness" of that behavior, showing something of a new "gilded age."

      Prognosis? "If the case I have just made for a hollow elite is completely correct, all is lost," says Murray on page 294. The lower class is only barely able to care for itself by 2020, while the upper classes enter yet another generation separate from main stream America and further out of touch with the "real world." Insightfully, then, Murray says that "new laws and regulations steadily accrete, and America's governing regime is soon indistinguishable from that of an advanced European welfare state. The American project is dead."

      Is all lost? Murray says that for things to turn around, America must see four predictions borne out: America must watch what happens in Europe (and if the turmoil of the last few months is any indication, this prediction is bearing out), science must undermine the moral underpinnings of the welfare state, it will become increasingly obvious that there is a simple, affordable way to replace the entire apparatus of the welfare state, and Americans' allegiance to the American project must be far greater that Murray's argument has acknowledged.

      Could these be born out? Time will tell. In the meantime, it's a powerful argument for a retrospection of the great problems of our times and our country.
    • 4/5
      This book analyses class in the US from 1960s onwards. It consists of three parts: one dealing with the new elite classe, one with the new lower class, and the third part drawing some kind of conclusion.
      In a nutshell, the core thesis is that a new elite class which is isolated from "mainstream" America, while at the same time a new lower class has emerged in which the core values of industriousness, centrality of marraige, religiousity and honesty have been ditched. According to Murray, the problem is that:
      The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead.
      ...
      Personally and as families, its members are successful. But they have abdicated their responsibility to set and promulgate standards.
      It is the first book by Murray that I read, and I think it is a very good read. The style is engaging, and it is packed with factual information.

      I think readers of any political persuasion can safely sail through the first two parts - the last one is the more political, but in fairness to the author he makes his position clear at the outset:
      Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded in 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.
      In the concluding chapter, I try to explain why I see the facts in this light.
      Although the exposition appears to at least try to be objective, it does not always manage to: for instance, as a European I feel his description of what he calls "the Europe Syndrome" are exaggerated. Also, many people (me included) will disagree with large parts of his analysis, and a feeling of nostalgia for the good old days pervades the exposition - still, a very stimulating book even for people whose position in the political spectrum is quite far from that of the author.
    • 1/5
      This was an incredibly frustrating book.

      It starts off with a statistical analysis on income disparity and social segregation. The basic topics are well-established in American discourse. However, he ascribes an unusual cause - the rise of liberal technical classes, and the lack of the 'moral character' of the poor. The elites are sorted out due to technical skill and intelligence, so he says, and place themselves in nice little ritzy neighborhoods and thus refuse to enact meaningful social help for the proles.

      To be fair, it is possible for those with technical education to move away from their rural hometowns and live in nicer areas. That's social mobility, especially possible for those with technological or knowledge-based occupations. His later discussion of community-based thinking is a position that is treasured by both left and right. Communities bring people together. But as he turns to the discussion of the poor, the analogy starts to fall apart.

      The leftist policies which the 'liberal elite' espouses at least attempt to address some of the worst effects of income discrepancies. Welfare reform, health care reform, education reform, etc. If he wanted to get into the idea of elites, it would only be fair to bring up Super-PACs and how single plutocrat individuals are able to keep political campaigns afloat far more than the average prole.

      It is a myopic view of history, claiming that the social policies of the Great Society in the 1960s were responsible for the moral decay of the American public. Why didn't the New Deal and the subsequent 'Moral Decay' afterwards, of World War 2 and the 1950s? Or is that contradiction too inconvenient for this hypothesis?

      And what of western Europe and Scandinavia, with its social democracy? Granted, they have their own share of economic problems, but the larger industrial powers aren't as bad off as we are. Why aren't these heathen nations suffering, with their laziness and atheism?

      And why are the lower classes down on their luck? Is it because of outsourced jobs, a judiciary which defines corporations as people and allows the free reign of lobbyists to spread plutocratic interests? A truly indolent legislature? The collapse of the union system? The dismantling of the welfare system, heralded by libertarians and social conservatives, with pseudo-racist rhetoric on mythical welfare queens? A minimum wage which has fallen behind a living wage standard?

      Of course not! Instead, the poor are such because they are Lazy and Indolent and Immoral and will Never Amount to Anything Unless They Do As I Say. They will 'pull themselves up by their own bootstraps', but the bootstraps are gone, and only 'I told you so' rhetoric will save them. An idealized Libertarian version of the Founding Fathers is described (to say nothing of the fact that 1) they were not a homogenous political group to begin with, and 2) some advocated a form of proto-social security for the common good), as well as conservative legislation which will claim to be in support of Families, while directly hindering them (women's reproductive rights, gay marriage rights, etc.)

      Even worse than The Bell Curve.
    • 5/5
      Coming Apart shines an uncomfortable spotlight on the deep-rooted and often controversial problem of social class in 21st century America. Two distinct lifestyles are contrasted, the super-affluent and the impoverished under-class. And note that the author specifically focuses on white Caucasians because the sample size in both groups is large enough for accurate statistical comparison. (In other words, minorities don't yet make up a large enough portion of the upper class.) His findings, illustrated through a series of charts and graphs, are disheartening, but should not be too surprising.This is a lot more complicated than the widening income inequality gap. Murray shows us two distinct groups of Americans who not only have vastly different lifestyles, but are also physically separated more than ever before.
    • 1/5
      Poor people are unsuccessful because they're lazy, immoral, and stupid. Upper and upper middle class people are successful because they are smart, morally upright and industrious. However, they are elitist snobs who are too far removed from poor people. Hence, poor people are suffering. They don't have a good example of how to be industrious and moral. As for being smart, well poor people can just forget it. With the exception of a few lucky members, they're just destined to keep passing on those dumb genes. However, if the upper and upper middle classes decide to watch American Idol, drink domestic beer, buy a pickup truck and maybe hang out with the poor every once in a while, then everything will be better in America again.No need to create jobs, provide healthcare, provide better education or anything else that involves the government spending money on programs intended to help the poor and the rest of American society.I hope this review will spare you the pain of reading this book.
    • 3/5
      Charles Murray could have spared writing this book simply by reading Elizabeth Warren's Two-income Trap, as it answers all the questions Murray should have asked if he had an open mind. His previous explanation that all of America's ills were caused by its supposedly less intelligent but pigment-rich co-citizens having obviously failed, he explores two new ideas, this time simply among white people (in its extended inclusion of formerly non-white whites). Murray's first explanation is eugenics: In Brave New World terms, it is about those damn Alphas unwilling to breed with Gammas and Deltas. Thank God for John Edwards impregnating his campaign worker. His action truly helps keeping up the non-Alpha gene pool.Murray's second explanation is the loss of 1960s morals. Murray has found a mostly white trash neighborhood in Philadelphia, the Dickensian Fishtown with terrible social statistics. Out of touch, Murray fails to connect Fishtown to the hit comedy series "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" with its loutish characters (while otherwise judging America by its TV representations). The poor whites in Fishtown have started acting like Murray's despised black folks. The baby-daddy no longer marrying the mother. The true cause of this change is not, as Murray claims, a morale decline but the economic devastation endured by blue collar workers in the US. Their real incomes have declined since the 1970s. Marrying a working class male has become a losing proposition in the US. The public's decisions are relatively rational under those odious socio-economic constraints.America's filthy rich, concentrated and segregated in a few Super-ZIPs, have looted the country's future, transferring more and more risk to the individual while socializing the losses of the rich. Murray, who lives among them, at least acknowledges the problematic nature of those Super-ZIPs but fails to discuss the obvious and simple solution: Tax the rich. Instead, he launches an unhelpful culture war petard.An honest assessment was not to be expected of a paid pied piper of the 1%. Hopefully, this will be his last tune. The US desperately needs a new melody. Instead of this book, read Warren's Two-income Trap. She is a true conservative with a vision for the US.
    • 3/5
      Written by the controversial author of The Bell Curve, Murray's latest book looks at the divergence in classes in white America in the last five decades. He looks solely at White society to avoid dealing with racial problems in this country and backs up his findings with reams and reams of statistics which he exhaustively explains in seven separate appendices.His book can be divided into three parts: the rise of an upper class (the top 5% of the population economically), the fall of the lower-middle/lower class and his conclusions about what this means for the country.Murray's thesis is that American exceptionalism is based on four pillars:--Industriousness--Honesty/Respect for law --Marriage--Religiosity (as defined as Christian tenets of humility, self-denial, brotherly kindness & the Golden Rule)Surprisingly, unlike what the media likes to portray, Murray states that it's the new upper class (Represented by Murray's statistical construct of "Belmont") as opposed to the lower classes (Represented by "Fishtown") who embody these values today. He also points out that the two segments of society live isolated from one another - the upper classes concentrated in what he calls "super zip codes" where they rarely come in contact with those who are less educated o less wealthy than themselves. They tend to marry one another, thus perpetuating the class structure that has evolved.The lower classes on the other hand are distinguished by low education, chronic unemployment, single women with children and isolation from community life.These findings will not be too surprising to anyone who regularly reads a newspaper or a journal of opinion. However, where Murray comes off the rails is in his libertarian analysis of both the problem and his rather lukewarm suggestion of a solution. In keeping his analysis solely to the last 50 years, he ignores the social forces that were in effect from the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus he falls into the common trap of blaming all the problems he describes on the social upheavals of the 1960's and the growth of the welfare state (such as it is in this country). He lays no blame on the disappearance of well-paid factory jobs or in the systematic defunding of the public education system. He blames the upper classes for being out of touch with the majority of the nation and being elitist in their attitudes even though by his own admission they embody the pillars of American behavior that he so admires.At the end of the book, he literally runs out of steam. What passes for a solution o the problems he's described is fo the upper classes to have a "Great Awakening" of civic responsibility. That accompanied by the government presumably withering away, he feels, will miraculously solve all of this county's problems.While Mr. Murray has done an admirable job of detailing the ever-widening income and class gap in this country. His solutions really don't make a lot of sense. I'll give him an A for starting a discussion, but an F for offering any kind of plausible solutions.