Charles Murray on Economic and Moral Life in America

[Music] welcome back to conversations on Bill Kristol I'm very pleased to have as our guest today charles murray I consider to be America's leading living social scientist welcome Charles thank you Bill I don't know if that is that phrase oh it's not I'm dazzled of coming from you especially maybe damning with faint phrase given what some of your social science colleagues do but no it is genuine phrase Mensa's genuine phrase for me so I think they will be just didn't know how did you become a social scientist you know it's one of those funny things that you can remember about when you were a kid I can remember reading the Reader's Digest when maybe that was 12 or 13 years old and seeing an article about the RAND Corporation and I swear I read that and I said that's the kind of place I'd like to work I'd never heard of a place like that that sort of indicates to me that there was some deep proclivity toward this kind of work the the more direct answer to that question is I was over in Thailand with the Peace Corps this was 1965 to 67 right after college and my wife at that time had been a Fulbright Scholar she was Thai she had to stay in the country to work off her teaching obligation and so I had to stay in the country and find some work and I ended up getting work in a study of northeastern villages and it was part of the hearts and minds kind of effort that the US military was having at that time and I did that work and I wrote that report and in the course of that I started to learn about regression analysis and I said this is really cool I was I was hooked from then on I never thought of doing anything else and you went out to get a PhD and I went back to MIT for a PhD and my explicit purpose was I wanted to learn every quantitative method known to man so I could augment my toolkit but somehow I think I've read most of your books and there's plenty of data in them but I wouldn't say you're a big user of super fancy quantitative methods regression analyses etc yeah you need to know what they're good for I'm not good for and well here's my my take on them if you have an important relationship that you have observed in life about the effects of marriage or the effects of unemployment or whatever and you want to see if that insight is correct quantitative methods are really helpful to check out whether you're just making it up or whether the evidence is really there what you should not do is run regression equations see a statistically significant coefficient and then from that try to infer that something important is going on as far as I'm concerned quantitative analysis primarily validates or fails to validate insights that are more obvious than quantitative statistical tidbits and you've written I think about your experience in Thailand on the insights the non quant not quantitative insights you got from that which I think changed your point of view on things now essentially most of what you read in my books I learned in Thai villages about elaborating that it was it because it was it's it's fascinating to me anyway I'm up there in these time villages and I'm trying to analyze of whether government assistance has improved the life of the villagers and whether they like that stuff or not and initially when we're talking to mrs. van through logical quasi participant research a lot of times they can't even remember that there was a well project or a double cropping project or a fish farm project and then when you finally remind them of it said oh yeah well the crops failed you know so we did we didn't do that anymore or they put the well in a place where we told them that it was gonna be bad water if they put it there but they put it there anyway instead when you've got them talking around the fire at night it turned out that there are two things they really wanted from the Thai government first they wanted the Thai government to catch water buffalo thieves because that's a big deal to lose a water buffalo and secondly they wanted the Thai government to allow them to make moonshine for personal consumption they were very reasonable about this they said you know not to sell just they ought to let us make enough to drink and I suddenly was struck first by the enormous discrepancy between what Bangkok thought was important to the villagers and what the villagers wanted out of government and the second thing I got out of it was that when the government changing agents showed up the village went to hell in terms of its of its internal governance and when you saw villages where you did not have the change agents you had some very sophisticated self governmental mechanisms that they had developed naturally all of those things when I came back to look at social programs in the United States kept me rotten reminding me that gee this inner city Detroit attempt to help delinquents is running into the same problems that they ran into and they tried to introduce double cropping the time village so what you were skeptic about sort of do-gooding big government efforts that was probably close to the beginning is that that was that was part of it in another part I was really impressed by the degree to which human beings left alone to organize themselves did a pretty good job of it well let's those are two good themes to follow up on yeah I mean your first I guess famous book maybe your first book I don't know was losing ground that was the first famous one the first famous one yeah in 1984 and that I'd say people at least took to be more on the first side of the the first of your two hypotheses they sort of damaged government can do he had to do and this is I was on welfare primarily they're not not only it's actually much broader than just welfare and that's one of the things people talk about losing ground as being a book about welfare that's partly because you helped inspire the welfare reform efforts later and some people think you know but yeah actually it deals also with crime and with education and with job training and a variety of other things but the common underlying theme was that during the 1960's we changed the rules of the game and we changed them specifically for poor people and even more specifically for young poor people and most specifically evolved for black poor young people and what a lot of these things did which were well meant was they made it profitable for people to behave in destructive ways in the short term excuse me they did profitable for the new things that were destructive in the long term but look good in the short term and what led you to that I mean you obviously have a ton of data in the book out of ton of different issues but was there one thinker who influenced you the most one experience one study I'm just curious or had just accumulation of work by doing during the 70s I mean I had been evaluating social programs on contract to the US government throughout the 70s for an organization called the American institutes for research so we got a contract we go out and we evaluate such-and-such program write up the evaluation report one of those involved chronic delinquents in South Side Chicago which are really chronic delinquents and it was a program to provide non-custodial alternatives don't lock him up give them residential facilities that are less restrictive and so forth and in the course of that I remember specifically one 16 17 year-old who was really irritated that he had been finally thrown into reform school and he was irritated because he said they picked me up for lots worse things than that before and they never sent me here why did they send me here now and as I listened to him he was looking at a system which from his perspective was completely irrational they'd let they let him get away with all sorts of things for arrest after arrest and he was finally being punished and the whole thing made no sense and yeah that example stuck in my mind and the same thing happened with all kinds of other programs where from the point of view of the recipient it made a lot of sense to do things that were gonna kill your future so people were behaving rationally in the short term in the short term and I'm just curious I remember reading advanced fields book you you knew it oh yeah in heavenly City which was one 1970 at 75 74 which goes on at something you know which is stresses the difference in short-term and long-term but I don't read Banfield's book was a brilliant exposition of a lot of the same kinds of things I was saying and losing ground he was prematurely right in 1974 of people weren't wanting to pay that much attention to it then in 1975 James Wilson James Q Wilson comes along with thinking about crime and that does sort of break the log jam you think that's interesting I'd have really thought about what what was the moment when it became respectable to say these politic the incentives and all these great many of these great society programs were skew well and self-defeating really I mean I think Jim Wilson's book who was a major event there the end and actually wasn't just the book's publication he had a an excerpt from it in the New York Times Magazine and the title of the article was lock him up and that was such a stunning thing to read in 1975 and it occurred at a time when so many people living in urban areas understood just how bad the private crime problem was that that that got a response and all at once I think a lot of the things that were going on in the liberal reform efforts came under a new kind of scrutiny and I guess written by a Harvard professor silly yeah but written by a latest crafters of social science pros who's ever lived yeah wrote beautifully how important was that you mentioned it I was gonna come back to ask you about losing ground and the reception to that which was not uncontroversial even though you're pretending that the ground urban laid for nine years before you did that book what about frozen that's not your you're a very good writer and a compelling writer I believe I don't know how important it is huge it's hugely important well though another of the finest social science writers who ever lived was named Irving Kristol and and the it's so important because look the kinds of issues you're talking about with public policy are ones in which you have to use persuasion combined with evidence that people will actually read so a James Q Wilson in thinking about crime conducted absolutely no original analyses of his own he took the entire literature this technical literature that was very abstruse and he made it accessible through his brilliant prose to a large audience and it had an impact where has all those separate articles had not and I think that if you go to all the books that have had as they say changed the conversation they have had that in common that seems to be the Jim Wilson and you actually both didn't the people's heads in with your conclusions I mean you sort of let yeah I think you're good at this you lead people to you often say upfront I have a certain set of views that yeah you may might not agree with but I'm gonna leave you know but you sort of lead people to think through themselves I think that's very I this has been something that I started with losing ground and I think I pretty much repeated it with every book where I structure the book saying look I'm going to give you a lot of data and at the end I'm also going to give you my interpretation of what those data mean but I have a particular set of predilections and philosophical leanings that you ought to know about I think that that ought to be standard operating procedure for all social scientists so that when Christopher Jenks writes a book he starts out by saying I'm a social democrat I'm going to give you a really fair reading of the data on inequality or whatever I'm writing about and then I'm going to give you my policy and analysis of that but you should understand where I'm coming from I will say even though it sounds self-serving that where as I do that I know of virtually no social scientists on the left who starts out by saying by the way I'm a social democrat yeah well everyone they know is they don't feel the house okay I guess but it was despite you good froze and a certain NASA and a genuine I think willingness to let people draw what conclusions they wished the book was met in 84 with a certain amount and it generated a certain amount of controversy I remember oh it felt to me like a red-hot controversy until I found out what red-hot controversy was really like with the bell curve but yeah in 1994 it got a lot of people it was a two-stage process bill yeah tell me first at first the book came out you've got a couple of people like Robert Samuelson wrote a column on time to a few other visible people where were you but you were a scholar at the minute so it was viewed as center-right I guess and libertarian libertarian right yeah and weird that well-known I was completely obscure I mean you were nobody else that or I saw I was a nobody how does the booklet people be curious and looking back how did it take him cuz there's some moment that caused it to take off or was it just general or you published it and I think it was the review by Nick Lemmon in the New Republic because Nick lemon I think I'm quoting a fairly directly said there is a horrible authenticity about my description of the problem and for the New Republic audience this was a very important thing to say to get the interest of a people and then as soon as it became understood that the book was being taken seriously by people like Nick lemon It was as if we've got a discredit this guy and that was my first experience with the lengths to which the opposition will go to say the man is a racist or he is a sexist or he makes up data fudges the data he's writing at the behest of sinister contributors it's not enough to by the way what I'm saying is is true I think of the attacks on people writing on the left is is a lot of people are writing on them right but it is not enough to take on the arguments that are in the book you've got to demonize the writer and I think that's one of the most pernicious aspects of current the current political debate I wonder whether I guess it's always happened I suppose it wasn't when I really began but it seemed like the mid 80s was a particular time of that I mean that was 84 your book I came to Washington 85 and Bob Bork was an 87 and it was just a moment there where somehow I don't know if it's the the laughter the mainstream culture was sort of losing control and they sensed it and they just had to discredit anyone who challenged certain premises or I'll tell you what really struck a nerve with losing ground this I think became very very soon if you read losing ground I care about poor people right and and my argument was not that we were spending too much money it wasn't that we had welfare queens that were fraudulent getting the money I say it I think explicitly in the introduction to the book the the worst thing about policy is that it's hurt the people we've tried to help and that's the province of the left I mean we had our assigned roles people on the right are supposed to worry about welfare queens and and we're spending too much money and people on the left yes the programs may not work as well as they should but at least they care and here is this guy on the right pretending that he actually cares about these people and that struck a nerve and also I think maybe correct me if I'm wrong you respect prospective respected the poor people enough to think they behave rationally response to incentives you weren't patronizing them and saying these people have just brought up in a certain way and you can't expect better you were making an argument that actually the system was in a sense was driving them on a driving of a leading man towards these decisions yeah it's ironic they said they hadn't said offices the the the left started out by saying the system is to blame so it's not their fault that they're poor and that they're out of work and in a funny kind of way I was yeah the system instant blame the system is to blame for systematically luring them down the primrose path and flicking back what is it now it was about 40 years this year right 30 30 30 years medicine system 30 years this year so what areas has there been the most progress in welfare crime education and in which the least is there any lesson are there lessons to be learned from that crime crime and we go back to Jim Wilson who had you can't calibrate exactly how much his influence was but it's substantial I mean think about the huge change in imprisonment policy I think we probably went too far the other direction but but we did need to start putting a whole lot of people behind bars where they can no longer victimize people the whole broken ideas of broken windows I philosophy of law enforcement which took hold because of Jim Wilson's article on on broken windows and we've had falling crime rates for a long time I understand that there continues to be a very sophisticated debate about how much you can attribute to various causal factors on the reductions in crime my way of responding to that is to say okay yeah it's hard to know for sure but if we were still imprisoning at the rates we were imprisoning in 1980 we'd have a million fewer people in prison if tomorrow we released a million people from a prison what do you think would happen to the crime rate to me the changes in law enforcement and criminal justice policy were crucial in creating the reduction in crime I suppose maybe it was easier to get political support for that because an awful lot of middle-class people and voters were affected any crime including liberals living on the Upper East Side of New York yep if you look at which kinds of public policies get reformed in an oddly high proportion of cases there are reforms that benefit the upper middle-class sort of sad the ones would be the least help right yeah welfare I mean you are considered somehow the father or Godfather or stepfather or something of the 1996 welfare reform legislation is that how significant is that sir not to be in your opinion or well it was hugely instructive it showed that you don't actually have to do something to get a behavioral response you just have to announce that you're going to do something one of the the welfare rules declined precipitously which is good I think the Welfare Reform Act was a good thing even though it wasn't a panacea but what was fascinating is those rules started to drop as soon as the law was passed before there have been any kind of sanctions or anything else the left have done such a good job of saying if this is passed you know we'll have Calcutta on the Hudson a line from our friend Pat Moynihan and and you're going to have these draconian consequences that a lot of people just left the rolls because there are a whole lot of people that were on the rolls because it was convenient but not because they really needed it that bad so you've got a huge behavioral response because of a specific policy reform and it would be nice if if folks had noticed that and said maybe we could extend that to other areas but they didn't really do that yeah and education would seem to me looking from the outside the toughest to get any changing right oh we had a big change called No Child Left Behind you know I feel guilty as as far as my career is concerned because when No Child Left Behind was being proposed this is early Bush Foundation wasn't around it I was deep into a book that would eventually be called human accomplishment I was just totally locked in on it barely noticed this when I finally looked up and saw they've been passed I said this is the most idiotic bill I've ever heard of and I'd never said that during the debate in education what you have is a series of I think terrible reforms with No Child Left Behind being one of the worst because of what I consider to be the educational romanticism which infects and right alike which says all the children can be nuclear physicists if they get the right opportunity well they don't literally say that but they do literally say in some cases every child can go to college or handle college-level material only they've got the right opportunities I think that this kind of thinking about education has slowed what could be real progress I think it has punished kids who do not have that peculiar set of intellectual gifts that make you thrive in college but do have other gifts that they could education policy I think has been one of the most poorly handled any one or two things if someone some presidential candidate called you up and said what should I make the core of my education reform agenda what would be the changeover from sort of from the college degree is the standard of educational success to certifications so give a young person something that he can take to an employer that says what this person knows and what he can do as opposed to how you know how long it took him to learn it and worry and where he did it the CPA the certified public accountant exam is a really good example if you can pass the CPA that is credible evidence to an employer you actually know a lot about accounting and the fact that you got that score because you went to an online university that cost you a few hundred bucks as opposed to University of Virginia or something doesn't make that much difference we could extend that to all kinds of things which would enable young people to get training that they could take to the marketplace doesn't take them four years to do it doesn't take $100,000 in student wellness to do it there are reforms that could be done I think some of that's beginning to happen just because of the technological possibility that you think of online education and the pressure of the yeah what's been causing this is one case where market forces are going to revolutionize education I think in the next 15 years for the better and the educational establishment will not be able to withstand it in large part because college education has gotten so bad except in the hard sciences I mean people will still be lining up to send their kids to Harvard and Yale and Princeton no matter what right but to spend a lot of money to send your kid to the second-tier State University or a private college now people don't put up with that much longer and the ability online to take a class take a competency test and have a discussion with some teaching assistant if you want to do that and even physically go sometimes but not all the time I think all of that really is a game I'm not normally a believer that technology by itself changes things fundamentally but I think in this case it really could we break it open I bet we both had the same experience that we have taught a seminar via a TV hookup or something it feels very much like being in that seminar room and your interaction for those students are the same kinds of interactions you have if you were physically there and I the way I think of it as you know state level you measured UVA I live in Virginia if there's a great economics class at the University of Virginia are you doing these students at the other I think 12 other state campuses in Virginia a favor by not allowing them to watch that class which is probably electric class anyway so it's not as if there there's no Q&A that's right so why are you not letting them watch the excellent class that started UVA if they're enrolled at a southern Virginia Community College rather than making them take a class by someone who may not be nearly as good a professor who's physically there or at least give them the choice I just think at some point some governor is gonna realize he can save a lot of money yeah there will be huge resistance to this of course I suppose there will be resistance but it's gonna be resistance by the universities themselves which are under enormous financial pressure and of course now you can have these massive online courses MOOC s I think they're called where you could listen to Sandell at Harvard lecturing on ethical theory or something right if you if you stop to think about it the idea of going to a university and sitting in a lecture course is really one of the worst worse uses most inefficient uses of a university so assets and even in the K through 12 environment again an excellent T where it is probably more important to have a teacher therefore you know students aren't sort of sitting taking notes but still you know excellent well I think we've seen this with some of Khan Academy and some of these other things the ability to do stuff online and partly online and to break up the monopoly also the really 19th century notion that everyone if it is even 19th century notion that everyone should go at the same pace and that all seems gonna look right yeah if education education is going to be a happy story in the past it has been a miserable story that's good that's good to hear I'm sure it up that you're considered such a pessimist sometimes or you know the if you think education is going to be a happy story and cheers me up but I actually agree with that I think there are some changes that would help I think accelerate the process and also make sure it's not just taken advantage of by a few people who are able to do so you know we're most well situated to do so but a lot of the reforms in education cannot be blocked by the teachers unions they cannot be blocked by the federal Department of Education they are going to happen for reasons beyond their control it's funny I came to Washington to work at the Education Department we got to know each other I couldn't met you before but really then when I worked for Bill about it and I've often thought that we fought hard for school choice and all kinds of other things sensible reforms on the whole I think it got nowhere basically and I've often thought the most important thing we did at that at the Education Department which was done really on the side and I was not quite inadvertently but very much a sort of afterthought was we defended the home schoolers who were beginning to crop up all over the country and people forget this now but they were really the states were trying to shut them down in many cases and we had one person two people in this General Counsel's office who helped some of these local groups defend themselves against efforts to shut them down with parents rejected accomplishment yeah in retrospect we didn't do it we just helped a little bit it was like I think doing that was probably more important that all the other stuff we did to try to perform the big bureaucracies which is sort of a lesson to I think that often the way you change policies is to go around the existing institutions they're awfully hard to change directly exactly yeah Fred Smith once said this about Federal Express and the post office you know conservatives when he was a kid when I was a kid it spent a lot of time complaining about the post office this massive government bureaucracy unionized I think and therefore you know varying inefficient expensive and everyone kept having post office for forum proposals I think Republicans in Congress of course they went nowhere and then Fred Smith invented FedEx you know and then fax machines and email and who really worries about you don't really anymore and you know a lot of that's going to happen I think with with lots of domains of life in some cases the bureaucracy can fight back and they can simply maintain a government monopoly which prevents these kinds of workarounds but technology is a big help in this regard good I'm glad to hear that so you wrote losing ground you survive the attacks on you and all that and I think it really had a big effect on policies many policies by obviously especially welfare policy contributed in crime then why then you sort of took a different tack I think for your next book it was sued in pursuit not a very good title but I'm stuck with it in pursuit of was the book I really wanted to write when I left my employment and from the 1970s yet at a Social Science Research Institute I had gotten fascinated by the idea that well it's this sounds like such a pedestrian idea the complete disconnect between your material condition in life and the degree to which you are experiencing experiencing lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole which is my working definition of happiness and how does public policy feed into this and and I had the idea of using as the dependent variable if I can introduce some charger the thing that that you're exploring as the phenomenon you want to explain why not uses the dependent variable the degree to which people are enabled to pursue happiness and that's how you judge whether food stamps are a good idea or whether an education reform is a good idea of the rest of it that's ultimately the template that was very abstract and as I started to work on it it's almost as if I had to get push aside a whole lot of underbrush to get to that core topic and that underbrush was losing ground and after losing ground had been written I was able to focus in on on this this almost a philosophical disposition on the relationship of public policy to the ability of people to pursue happiness and I will say that the result of it was a book that got very little attention when it came out but that first remains my own baby I mean that's my favorite of all the books I've written but secondly if you look at everything I've written subsequently it goes back to that well a lot of the themes and in pursuit are to be found in the bell curve what it means to be a libertarian human accomplishment in our hands all of them so for me in pursuit is at the center of everything I've written and how does put any things in that in that context of the pursuit of happiness lasting satisfaction or enjoyment as opposed to the normal federal way economic honest might think about or social scientists might think about what public ought what goal public policy should pursue I mean what difference does it make well suppose you're thinking about something like poverty and we have a measure of poverty and so we say X the percentage of people are below the poverty line or above the poverty line you know what does that really mean yes it has some relevance to to your level of material existence and so forth but we've all known poor people low income people who have lived very happy lives they've had families that have been sources of great joy to them they hadn't been rich but they've never gone hungry they've they've they've done work that they enjoy doing they had self-respect about what they did they could legitimately take pride in themselves and we also know other people who've had exactly the same level of income who've lived absolutely miserable lives a variety of reasons well it's important let me back off and say I'm not saying that level of material resources is unimportant I am saying that we ought to be focusing on the difference between those two examples I just gave and said why is it that life has been so successful and that life has been so unsuccessful for reasons unrelated to economics and so that leads you to ask a whole new series of questions that you wouldn't ask if that weren't your your dependent variable and those questions I can imagine someone say well those are interesting questions and if one were writing a grand psychology of human beings that'd be certainly fascinating to explore but how do they affect public policy well the the framework that I I chose to analyze it as Abraham Maslow's needs hierarchy Abraham Maslow being a psychologist from 1940's and his needs hierarchy became quite well-known and he started out by saying man does not live does live by bread alone if there is no bread so first you've got to have physical survival you've got to deal with that and as soon as you've dealt with that then things like safety come into play you know you've got to be safe from the leopard jumping out of the tree at night and after you have have dealt with that then you can successively move up to other needs being filled such as dignity and self-respect and ending with the thing which we talk about all the time now self-fulfillment so you talk about those as the enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness it can't pursue happiness of your starving you can't pursue happiness if you are totally under threat all the time etc but what you then say is well how do they interact so that if self-respect is also a deep human need how does that interact with the way you acquire the food and shelter in the rest of them if there is an interaction it has public policy implications as to how you enable people to satisfy their material needs but also maintain their self-respect and you're starting to get into some fairly obvious implications that you know what just handing out the food and shelter is impeding the self-respect big-time and that's an important public policy implication so I'm just giving you one example of things that I've worked through now that's interesting by me because I'm not actually a libertarian I don't think that you are more or less yeah say you are but actually I would say that's contrary isn't it to a lot of libertarians who don't like this notion in a way of focusing on happiness does it they might say what you what you just said would imply the government should start to getting in the business of well if we can kind of Judge this hierarchy of knees and judge people's happiness let's by all means adjust public policies to make people happier and you're sort of on a very slippery slope away from arguably a kind of limited government to you know nudging people in certain directions and nudging is a very big word these days yes all right yeah and and I spend a lot of the book pointing out how that tent that tends to backfire the government is not in a position because the government the way I've put it in the book is whenever the government says well here's this problem such as poverty or not enough housing or this that or the other thing that we've got to solve and we will take care of that in some sense they are taking some of the trouble out of life as they look at it but from another perspective they're also draining some of the life from life because the stuff of life consists of coping with the problems around us they can't be in superable in manageable problems where we get miserable but we have to cope so I go to a you know preserving my libertarian credentials I think I I work very hard saying actually the government is inherently problematic when it tries to get into that the kind of thing however let me point out that at the end of in pursuit I say look Adam Smith could admire and be a friend with Edmund Burke and vice versa and that's the way I look at it I am a Smith e'en but I'm not only a Smith e'en who loves wealth of nations I even I love Theory of Moral Sentiments even more and you put those two together and for me I will use the modern term libertarian to describe what that produces but I'm not hung up on the word to me Adam Smith had a profoundly correct view of how human society should work I think that's important I don't really thought about it this way before but you know you're able to both make the case for a limited government without signing on to what some modern libertarians and certainly economists in a way sign on to which is a kind of we don't have a foggiest idea what's right and wrong and what makes people happy or not therefore we just should stay out of the way and let people do whatever they whatever it sounds like you well I mean like Smith you sort of have a practical argument for the market and for a limiting government without necessarily a fully relativistic or sort of account of when they say we ought to leave them alone you've got to really leave them alone so that for example you you you could legalize drugs in my view in a libertarian world where people were responsible for the consequences of their action and if they were drugged up and unable to hold a job that was really pretty much make taking drugs really painful you can't have legalization of drugs if you have a welfare state the steps in and so forth I sometimes make the case that in a libertarian world people are absolutely free in their intimate relations to cohabit with each other or marry each other or have serial girlfriends and boyfriends they can do whatever they want but guess what in a libertarian world the nuclear family is going to be incredibly strong because in a libertarian world women and men have huge incentives to want to form family units just because they're economically viable especially from the woman's point of view she's going to have children in a way that a variety of other alternatives aren't so to me there is an underlying paradox that the United States in the 19th century was pretty much as close to a libertarian state as we're going to see and the family was incredibly strong social pressures were incredibly strong there were all sorts of ways in which the civic culture was incredibly vital those weren't abnormalities those were the results to me freedom yeah I suppose you could argue and maybe you could talk about your most recent book in this context coming apart that now you in some parts of the country at least you have the worst of both worlds which is a paternalistic state that protects people from the consequences of their decisions in a way but also a kind of libertarian F us in terms of the family and yeah so forth that allows people to be foolish and impulsive whatever you want to say in the short term and one ends up with yes and and a lot of the blame for that goes to I think the elites I think the elites have fallen down on the job you aren't nearly as old as I am but even you can perhaps remember back to a time of when for example it was considered unseemly to build a 25,000 square foot house even though you could afford it that that was getting too big for your britches that was sort of you know putting a in your face toward people who did not have as much and the whole sense of and seamless has has died a lot of the ways in which the elites formally set the standard and also we're supposed to live up to that standard those have been lost I'm just basically saying you're right we now have an ethos which refuses to say here are virtuous ways of living that that ought to be applauded and celebrated and instead we're all saying oh poor non-judgemental we're abdicating a very important responsibility but what's interesting one of the interesting things about coming apart which was published what a year and half to two years ago yeah 2012 yeah is that somehow the elites having said all this to have managed to save themselves or from the consequences of what they what they profess isn't it interesting the baby boomers have managed to make the world work for them in every conceivable way while neglecting their obligations to the rest of them yeah in terms of marriage and working hard and for that matter oftentimes being deeply engaged in communities and even religion the the elites are behaving pretty well within their own communities but they are inclusive so increasingly segregated from the rest of America that it's almost I'm doing okay jack and and so you guys can take care of yourselves yeah it's a nice time to be a member of the American elites if you don't worry too hard about the rest of the country and the argument of the book was that the increasing gap between especially with the top 20% in the bottom 30 is that well you have you have two different kinds of of contrasts the upper middle class is a pretty big group that's about 20% and if you compare them with the working class which is about the bottom 25-30 percent the big cap has opened up there but the real problem I think allies and the people around the country which is a much smaller percentage of the population people who have national influence on the culture or the economy or the politics they tend to well we are talking in Washington DC and if you move west and north from where we are sitting you have one of the most intense concentrations of great affluence and great power and education at elite universities that you will find anywhere in the country which means anywhere in the world and the the this this this area that I'm talking about is big enough that kids can be raised in it and live their lives in it with very seldom moving out of it into any other world and then they go on to their elite colleges and then they go on to their nice professions and the country is increasingly being run by people who if you sat them down and pika Kansas would feel like they were in a foreign country and your account of at least the bottom half third orator - pika Kansas and almost everywhere else was pretty grim I mean that that's really got a lot of attention when the book was published just gave me a family decomposition and a social decomposition and one of the reasons was that I limited the data to White's non-latino White's because a lot of times you can take a look at these social problems and say well they're very bad of course they're concentrated in the african-american community or Latinos or something and by looking just at whites it concentrated our attention and also there are just too many people who now know what small-town America is like I grew up in Iowa town of 15,000 we didn't have a meth crisis and in small towns then you now have you now have the problems of the inner city which have in many ways spread into much broader range of American communities and since the book has come out and there's been a ton of literature about it friendly unfriendly for just some of it in between yes yeah have you learned anything are you more convinced that things are dire or you do you think you overdid the and that's what struck me the most reading the book and teaching the book actually it's a hertog program for a very interesting three-hour discussion I would say the students willing to believe the elite side aid that they're doing well weirdly somewhat contrary to their own doctrines they're living much more responsible socially integrated traditional wise and be that they're totally out of touch with the rest of America you have that quiz where you ask people if they know anyone in certain the walks of life or watch certain scene certain movies etc it is pretty startling the Gulf but they really balked I would say these over so most they are off in middle class kids at what they took to be your excessively dark picture of what's going on not just in the bottom five or 10% but really in a pretty good chunk of them now as you say of white America you know has any of the day I didn't challenged interestingly I live in that America I live in the western part of Maryland in a small town it's a blue-collar and and agricultural community there's a working-class community that my kids went to school in and there are you know that's a good news bad news thing the good news is those communities are still filled with really good people and people that are resourceful and deal with their problems but we also see in that same community we see parents whose daughters much to their chagrin have had a child without getting married we have seen increases in drug use parents are having lots of problems with their kids that were unheard of thirty years ago in such communities or twenty years ago and so are they still good places to live the particular towns were a town where I live and the adjacent towns the answer is yes are they're also just looking at it do we know that there are problems that are growing and that are going to threaten those community's ability to function in the future yes we also know that so if you say was I too dire I might have been too dire in some cases about how much deterioration has occurred already I wasn't being too dire about the degree to which we are on a trajectory where we know what the consequences will be I suppose your most controversial book was the bell curve published in where was that 19 1994 before how did you come to write it what was maybe should say a word about what it argued and then what the reaction was well how I came to write at first in 1986 I got an invitation to be on a panel commenting on two papers that were to be presented at the American Psychological Association and one of them purported to explain differences in crime by using IQ and the other one purported to differences in unemployment using IQ and my first reaction was but don't we know that IQ tests are biased and they don't really measure anything and then I read the biblio saw the bibliographies and I realized there was a literature out there it was extremely sophisticated rigorous and that nobody was talking about and I got interested in IQ its relationship to social problems and by 1989 I had decided I was going to write a book about it but then dick Herrnstein the professor at Harvard who had written on IQ in the past had an article in The Atlantic Monthly which led me to think ah Bernstein's already doing this so I called him up I had met him before we did we'd been friendly and I said gee if you're doing a book on this I'm not gonna try to compete with you and Dick said to me no I'm not and he paused and he said why don't we do it together alright and I paused and I said let me think about that and I called him back later that afternoon and said let's do it that was the entities idea yeah it was it was it was that was the extent of our negotiation and it was I will say parenthetically he just became a dear dear friend it was a wonderful collaboration so anyway we did this book and what's with isn't about very simple and said in the subtitle intelligence and class structure in American life and we were saying iq interacts with all these important phenomena whether it's crime or poverty or single parenthood or a variety of other things and this has effects on the social structure because we live in a world which is increasingly hospitable to people with high IQs and increasingly difficult for people with low IQs it turns out that in order to write such a book you have to confront the issue of race because in the bell curve as in coming apart we had some chapters that were exclusively using white data samples to say look the relationship has nothing to do with race issues there but if you want it with this the argument of the whole country you've got to say well can you interpret IQ scores for people of different ethnicities so we had chapter 13 was ethnic differences in IQ that's what created the firestorm so the book comes out and there's actually a rather nice review of it the New York Times there was a very clear panel we had at the American Enterprise Institute with scholars from the left and right treating as a serious work and then it hit the fan it's it's hard to recreate now the degree to which that book was just at the center of conversation I remember he was two or three months after the book came out I had given up reading the newspaper Catherine my wife was in charge of reading everything and telling me if I had to respond to something and she reported that the three months after the book came out that that morning's Washington Post had two op-eds and two news stories that all referenced the bell curve in one way or another and it was like that all the time and the accusations leveled against us were hideous I mean they the reaction to a losing ground was nothing as compared to the bell curve I was in shell I was shell-shocked for months and then watch I mean basically does anyone challenge the basic date they the argument of the book I take it it was I recall was you couldn't make sensible public policy for a country for the country without understanding that the objects or what the right Verma term is the people who upon whom these policies would be having an effect are very different in IQ among other differences that's right and that therefore you can't just assume everyone is the same and has a hundred and ten or a hundred or hundred and twenty I you probably the case of the policy makers I I cube is that's what they think you know they think it was like well you know a lot of in a lot of ways we were making arguments that prefigured what I said in coming apart yeah in fact the bell curve was very wide they talked about little red so I was able to recycle a lot of material from the bell curve and coming apart and nobody ever noticed we there was relatively little argument about the thesis of the book yet I don't want to say all that 95% was about race and 95% of the argue about the argument rather little about the okay yeah I was it was about race and what really struck me standing back from it now is that if you ask people of our generation your generation my generation what was the bell curve about what they will say is oh it wasn't that the book that tried to prove the blocks were genetically inferior to whites and if you go to the discussion of race you will see in italics sometimes statements about we don't know what the what the reasons for ethnic differences in IQ are we are agnostic about the sources of those that people get way too excited about the idea of genetic differences I would go back during the height of the storm and reread the race chapter say you know how could we have written it better and I continue to think to that day it's beautifully written people I decided it was like a Rorschach test people were projecting onto that text of their own anxieties and so they would say this is an angry book it is the most uh Nagre book you've ever read it is a polemical book it's it was we made it almost deliberately boring in some cases weak weak you know here is here is for me the most telling fact i'd about the criticism of the bell curve you will never ever find a direct quote from the book because we actually wrote it saying we want this each sentence to be such that you can't just lift it out of context they never quote the book there's really something quite an experience I do not recommend it I'll try to avoid it that was a good book and I do think it had real policy implications no in terms of the education system and other oh yeah which we're not being serious about we're not doing things that would benefit especially I think the book as you said about to come about losing ground in a way your main object maybe this is why people hate it also your concern was not for the high aq people who you thought I think we're doing okay in America it was more that policies were not thinking about the fact that a certain number of the people affected were not very high exactly that we were having a society which was is designed to be an affirmative action employment program for attorneys we we are in all sorts of ways creating a very complex society that and with complex ethical rules and standards which is just fine for those of us over educated people who love all complexity and subtlety and all that and makes it much harder to live a life if you were a person who doesn't have that peculiar skill set a friend of mine actually ed crane who was formerly president of the Cato Institute he said what you're really saying in terms of people living moral lives is that that everyone has a moral compass but some are more susceptible to magnetic storms and others and that was actually a nice notion it's really easy to make that moral compass was around if you create the kind of society we are so yeah that was the focus of our concern in the book it became what I think of as a stealth book because after four or five years you saw increasing references to the kind of cognitive stratification that we were talking about they never called it that it was always linked to education as opposed to IQ but a whole lot of the propositions of the book entered the public dialog they never referenced the bell curve never mentioned IQ and now you fight liberals whirring I'm not without reason it's only about you know very high status people might marry other high status people and low status people very low status people and it's gonna increase social difference between classes and TVs mobility among classes but she did say that a while ago didn't I guess as long as you say the word status or educational achievement yeah or something like that and don't actually suggest that it could partly be IQ you're okay okay yeah you're so you're okay sort of and especially if you manage to frame it so that race does not enter into the gun discussion whatsoever I've I did develop a real contempt for a lot of academia I know too many people who are quite famous in academia who said to me privately it's a wonderful book and whenever they were asked to comment at public on publicly they would trash it without a second thought it happened in earnest really interesting number of cases is that with some names that would be very interesting to you if I reveal them but I won't okay that's very gentlemanly view though it's unfortunate of course was so often being a gentleman con trade actually you know I don't I don't want to reopen those fights yeah I guess not and so that Jack you've had you for a little while I suppose but you move right on actually and didn't didn't dwell on that I dwelled on it for a while did you the currency and on the currency just a few weeks before the first bound copies came out he was he was diagnosed with terminal cancer on the same day we sent him the very final bit of draft for copy editing and he died just a few months later and so partly I was grieving at the loss of dear friend and part of me was saying you know if Nick were still alive we could call each other on the phone and so do you see what this idiot said and we would have had that kind of mutual support so I think it's probably true that I was clinically depressed for some time after the bell curve came out and okay I will I will admit it the piece of writing I think I'm proudest of is the afterward I wrote to the bell curve for the paperback edition because I I think if you read it cool sound extremely cool extremely detached slightly amused that was a complete misrepresentation of my state of mind but that I managed to pull off that's good that that voice is a source of real sadness and that was within yeah that came out in June and or I was done writing it in June and the book had come out in October so it was pretty soon after the oil yeah ads of people I've just I don't know if you follow it even but I mean to people in campus today or in social science environments today they just don't talk about it I mean they don't just they can't sustain the assault because what's the basis of it at this point there's no no one's done anything to disprove I mean there was a by remember weren't books published of oh it was a cottage industry in such books but no one disproved anything right no and and in fact the the the si si dick and I deliberately did not push the envelope on any of our claims we really pulled our punches with some things which we could have stated more strongly so it's not that we were present about what the state of the knowledge was we were very cautious and so essentially the substance of bell curve is part of the conventional wisdom now it's just not a certified a yeah it's always put in terms of educational attainment and from a policy point of view assuming it's not a good thing for a society to be increasingly diverging if it is and increasingly lacking contact and I between these two roughly you have to do parts and mobility from one to the other assuming that's the case is there much to be done about it I guess maybe is there fatalism implied in the bell curve or is that not fair well when I revisited that and coming apart because a lot of the material overlaps I try to say to people who are in the privileged elites to what extent are you living in an environment which is not nearly as rich as it could be in terms of your human life and and to what extent are you systematically depriving your children of some of the experiences that made you who you are and the good news is I get when I say that to an audience of older people I see a lot of heads nodding a very affluent people who done everything they possibly can for their children is sort of saying my children have have missed out on a lot that I had I also try to point out you know what you can live in a small town like I do 60 miles out of Washington and you really aren't losing anything the Internet and the rest of it means you have access to to all sorts of stuff that you formerly had to come to the big city for what I do want to come to the big city it's an hour and a half away big deal you you you don't have to live in McClane you don't have to live in these enclaves of the cognitive elite and your life will be the better for it I also this will sound facetious but it's not I regularly played poker casino in Charlestown West Virginia which is a microcosm of the real America and I'll be sitting there at a table with all kinds of people every ethnicity every socio-economic group every kind of profession or non profession and that kind of experience just constantly reinforces to me that not all the interesting people in this country have gone to Harvard and they don't all live in the claim there are really interesting funny engaging people out there and you shouldn't pull away from them they're Americans are marvelous set of people for a policy point of view part of encouraging people to live in Burkittsville not McClane is there any anything to be done you know what we need job owning one of the critical comments of the book by a libertarian writer actually was that Murray offers little more than plenty of moralizing because I don't offer policy solutions well plenty moralizing has a lot to be said for it and a lot of the ways in which America has changed its ways had its origins in just saying to people this is this is not the best way to do things the civil rights movement is a classic example the Great Awakenings religions awakenings we've had our examples and if if I'm correct that life is truly richer if you're more deeply engaged with a variety of people around you if you're more deeply engaged in your community and so forth if I'm correct in that it ought to be an idea that has residents and if it has residents it could very easily be picked up so so I consider my role in life now much more jawboning than saying here's here's a plan with six points that will solve the problem if I do things after you think that thing is like I mean take the public school system and the fact that it's which I'm not against that it's locally controlled or regionally controlled and but there for the kids in Fairfax County you go to very good public schools pretty good public schools and the kids and somewhere else unless Evette plus less well-off place go to worst public schools there are certain ways in which is just basic public policies probably reinforce the stratification where other policies might not I don't know well education is one of those things which is drives this the segregation because parents want to send their kids to goods labels and here is where the empirical record made me feel comfortable about sending my kids to a mediocre public school but then it was a safe public school there's a nurturing public school but it wasn't terrific the fact is that so much of the kids intellectual and academic achievement occurs because of things in the home that that you are not your kids are not I'm not going to lose 10 IQ points because they went to a mediocre public school and on the contrary my daughter who went to Middlebury from this mediocre public school and I who went to Harvard from a mediocre public school in Iowa both had the same experience we were in when he went this freshman we were around a lot of other people who have been in Exeter or Andover or very fancy schools and you know they were sort of blase about all this and my daughter and I when we were freshmen were on a huge high and we were so excited to be out in the real world did we know a little bit less because of our indifferent education yeah and we also caught up you know in a year at college so so I'm saying to the penny parents we're listening go ahead and send your kids to a school as long as it's safe and nurturing and don't worry too much about whether it's you know the best public school you've ever seen it's okay safe is of course something it's not the case and nurturing and some of the inner city really I would never I would never have sent my children to a lot of the DC Public Schools it's terrible that we consign these parents in DC to send them to these so I'm a big school choice advocate so the bell curve is respected without being acknowledged I guess these days I would like to think it's respected I'm not even sure that Valerie's lessons worked its way to other books anything else you've done this somehow is having a comeback or something surprising to you yeah I may uh I may have a book whose time has come it was called in our hands came out about ten years ago it argues for a basic guaranteed income for everybody age 21 and older that replaces the entire welfare state replaces all transfer payments actually including Social Security and Medicare and I like to think it's a it's a well argued book or I anticipate the problems and talk about how they can be avoided and I'm beginning to see references to a basic guaranteed income and reference specifically to the book as a way out of this whole we're digging ourselves into fiscally then we will not be able to avoid forever so that's one bit of good news about a book that's making a comeback however bill I'll have to tell you that the book that I have been associated with that will still be read 500 or a thousand years from now is a book about the Apollo program that my wife and I did together back in the late 1980s it's a story of how we got to the moon focusing and the people in the and it essentially is a unique source book and so my prediction has a thousand years from now world war two will be a very you know obscure thing nothing that happened in the 20th century will still be talked about much except that was when we first left earth and there will still be people who will consult our book Apollo 4 original source material that's the one who last that's good to know now are you depressed since I hadn't expected to talk about space but I'm actually personally somewhat interested in this are you depressed by the fact we seem to have managed to literally have regressed in our space efforts since we waged a lot I mean is there ever been a case in human history where you would have sometimes there's something stall out but actually we could not do if I'm not mistaken right oh what we did in 1972 were I think oh we were able to put into Earth orbit at that time tonnage that would be way beyond it did stop so fast that we had to fully built Saturn 5 vehicles with her spacecraft you know ready to go except for putting the gas in them that we never used it is it is very very sad the the good news here is I think eventually it's going to be private money it resuscitates that and one of the one of the good things about the huge private wealth is that when it's somebody like Jeff Bezos or the head of Amazon who has it who is a big space nut that a lot of that money is going to be spent I think probably getting us back into space again and and in a way in which it can be sustained because there are economic benefits to it so strategically I'm optimistic about looking at the way we threw away the legacy of Apollo is very depressing ya know it strikes me it's so unusual for a country that has no external crisis not as if we were going bankrupt or we're invaded by someone we were wealthier today than we were when we did Apollo and and we just shut it to out and then I think the Space Shuttle I assume was a terrible mistake and diverting the whole program to a you know going back and forth to a Space Station I mean it's it it was emblematic of the times right that was when we were getting out of Vietnam it was it was a time in American history when there was very little vision and there was also frankly very little nerve right it would be interesting if the private sector could save us I suppose that's happened in history though a lot of the exploration the discoveries were somewhere government financed but a lot were private or seized partly private certainly if you asked me what is one of the great underestimated forces for what's going to happen to American life in the future it is the size of the private wealth that can do things now that are mammoth in size so Bill Gates Foundation can say we're going to get rid of polio worldwide we are going to do such-and-such everything and I talked to people who were in the field to see how that Foundation's money is spent and they say this is not your run-of-the-mill NGO or government program this one actually works so you know this great public wealth the private wealth may be able to solve problems the government scandal and that hopeful note we should we should stop and thank you very much for taking the time this is a great fun thanks so much thank you for joining us in conversations

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

Views: 32,166

Rating: 4.7802196 out of 5

Keywords: Charles A. Murray (Author)

Id: kpdM-Q4b4Hs

Length: 72min 35sec (4355 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 13 2014