Charles Murray: Reflections on a Distinguished Career in Ideas

[Music] hi I'm Bill Kristol welcome to conversations I'm very pleased to be joined again by my good friend charles murray America's pre-eminent social scientist well I think it's true but I think that heareth you can do mirror if you wish in a fake to mural are you good or not I'm just gonna reserve it recently it became a scholar emeritus I think at the American Enterprise Institute where you've been for quite a while and you'll still still active obviously in your scholarship but maybe fewer and so in institutional responsibilities congratulations on that thank you and you gave a talk so we're speaking in early February she gave a talk exactly a month ago at AEI that is up on their website the video and I imagine it'll be published somewhere but people can look at it if they want but it's so provocative and interesting that I thought it was worth having a follow-up conversation with you it he disgusts your own intellectual trajectory what you've learned you it's provocatively called right questions and wrong answers you're much more modest the 75th birthday it was it was it was actually my birthday that day yeah happy birthday relatedly so let's talk I mean I first met you I think when you published losing ground in 1984 which was such a path-breaking work in social science and did I think stimulate the welfare reform movement and the welfare reform legislation 1012 years later I remember reading the book when I was in I guess the assistant professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard being very shaped by it I hear you have some second thoughts about it so talk a little bit about that and then we'll go forward and now to your other works well losing ground was the apogee of my optimism which is to say the only for you a book called losing ground maybe you've heard of a low bar okay it was optimistic in this sense I still thought at that time there were policy solutions that were not politically feasible but if you did them they would have a huge effect I'll give you one example of in the last chapter where I have some thought experiments I had a thought experiment about a very thorough going about your system which would leave the public school system in place but would provide everybody with enough money to go to a private school with a voucher and I was convinced that would not only be a good thing in the way I still think it would be a good thing giving parents more control over their kids education I think there's a line in there saying oh if you want the test score discrepancies between disadvantaged groups and the rest to close within a generation this is the way to do it and and so I was optimistic not that the voucher system could be enacted but it could be done and as years went on after losing ground I became a lot more aware of the way in which something can be a cause of a problem at one point in time but reversing it isn't necessarily going to be the solution to the problem ten years later and here I think the good example is my thought experiment about getting rid of the welfare system because in the last chapter of losing ground for I said I don't have any practical solutions I said suppose that the entire welfare system went away and I talked about the ways in which conversations between boyfriends and girlfriends would start to differ conversations the way I put it then was suppose that it were announced that nine months and one day from now that the entire welfare system is going to disappear what kinds of conversations would parents have with their their daughters tonight you know well yeah I think that I will still defend the proposition that the social reforms of the 1960s were a major contributor to the acceleration of out of wedlock births but once the economic realities of having a baby without a husband changed the stigma started to erode as you had more and more births and the social rewards for getting married and doing the right thing they decayed and so I had to come to the in terms of the fact that I don't think getting rid of the welfare system would in any way fully restore the same kind of milieu in which teenage boys and teenage girls made decisions about this sort of thing it seems to be there are two things I think you say and you suggesting the talk but very briefly so maybe you can elaborate that you know you've been more struck by since we're losing crab one is this I should I say that you once something happens it has its own it then becomes a cause not simply in effect to put it in live in those terms and it's not so easy to unwind I guess that's the point you're making there for you it seems family breakup is a very key family breakup is a very key thing and it families only form in the first place because there are very powerful social and economic pressures when kids are twenty years old to do that thing and that fabric is just frayed enormous lee for low-income people i want to come back to that person that hasn't changed right I mean the impaired the numbers of in terms of a deployed lock verse and so forth or oh it's now among you know the the statistics on blacks have been notorious for years let's just talk about working-class White's best estimate depending on what your definition of working-class is that about half of all children born to working-class mothers white working-class mothers are out of wedlock well it's just is so interesting with families from it it was so important and the data show that that remains a huge disadvantage yeah we could have less stigma and we could have programs that now now here you are verging on to another thing in which my okay so a jump to that you and I want to be very careful how I put this do I still think that it's really important for child to grow up with two parents yes I do I think it's very important for the for all the reasons I used to think it was to go back to something I've been saying for years a little boy doesn't learn how to be job ready and get up and go to work every day even if he doesn't feel like it because somebody teaches him that he that he grows up because he's watched dad do that and if you don't have a dad that you watched do that watching mom do that is the same thing we know that an awful lot of kids who are in those situations don't make the connection that gee moms working hard I a male when I grew up should work hard to take care of a wife and children so anyway there are all sorts of ways in which I think that two-parent family is still really important on the breakdown has caused huge problems in the Civic culture here's the tricky part that we also know as we did not know in 1984 when I published losing ground of that it turns out that what we think of as the environment that shapes children which are things like socioeconomic status the local schools of two-parent family and that they actually play much less role than we thought they did this is referencing a very complex large literature that I won't try to go into except I will say is settled science a word that I can use with a straight face after the way it's been misused it is settled science that this shared environment the siblings have explains far less about how they turn out than we thought it did that the environmental effects that are important are much more likely to be peer groups or a variety of idiosyncratic circumstances so the family so important is playing that person so it's still important but not as important and sharing environment means in effect the home the parents the socioeconomic status reading to the little kids when they're 18 months old all right that's our middle class parent that one thinks one is doing well by one's kids by providing them this I guess shared environment to use the term is lastly less important than one thanks yeah basically this is based on extensive literature of twin studies because and twins raised together because the nice thing about twins raised together is they're born at the same point in a marriage whereas two siblings that aren't twins going to be born in two completely different environments if the marriage is broke for something they're born at the same time into the same circumstances they share half of their genes just like siblings - approximately half whereas identical twins have the same characteristics except they share virtually 100% of their genes and with that as leverage with large samples and comparing outcomes for identical twins and and fraternal twins you can disentangle what's causing what and so the environment is so important it's not the kind of things that lead parents to spend 60 grand a year on private schools yeah it's kind of things over which they have very little control if people who think that's counterintuitive I just say to them look do you have a sibling and if you have a sibling think of all the ways you and your sibling are really different and different for reasons that you can't put down - socioeconomic status or parent or anything else that's interesting I think yet well the upper middle class conventional answer that would be well of course we're different but we still both benefited so much from the shared environment of yeah well you share genes yes yeah and then so these studies must show one way I guess they studied this then it's compare the main ways was the identical twins to the yeah paternal Jen's and I guess what you're saying is identical twins are much much much much more in common with each other than fraternal twins whatever whatever difference you have if you have very large representative samples if you if you specify that the difference in outcomes between the fraternal twins and the identical twins and a large sample has to be explained by genes that's the only that that's the distinguishing feature of their each growing up and yeah it's gives up to control for it's it's an album it's an algebraic thing right whereby if you share 50% in one sample and you share a hundred percent of genes with the other sample you can work it out and everyone is otherwise growing up similarly so to speak now as you say they're bored at the same time they're in this you can make you can correct for everything else but by the way people who are watching this they're gonna be some people watching this you know this literature well and they'll say oh Marie is really you know not giving a clear picture what's going on other people who have never heard of this literature save what is this man saying how can be so confident this jeans I recommend to everybody that this is really interesting stuff and they should look into it any one or two books that for semi laymen or semi yeah there was a best-selling one of Judith Harris yeah it's all 15 years ago I think yeah it's its nature nurture nature nurture and I can't some of the precise title of the book the nurture assumption the nurture assumption it was a best-seller in the late 1990s it's still scientifically valid that's interesting yeah so that points one towards I read it to you I suppose mm-hmm and so that's points what also to your famous book the bell curve you wrote with Richard Hornstein a little bit about that well heredity is yeah I did change my mind on that as well I wasn't as conscious of the rule of heredity in the 1980s as I became when I was working on the bell curve it is not that genes are everything they're not the environment is quite important but I'll tell you what really did sink in with me you can say of any one characteristic let's say it's IQ which what the bell curve was about and so there I along with dick Hearn stun my co-author we put in italics all sorts of times that IQ is just one of many features that go into determining success etc etc but then I was saying to myself and I've been saying this as early as in pursuit a book I published in 1988 I'm saying yeah but what about the person who gets the short end of the stick on a whole bunch of things so he's not only got an IQ of 90 which is a little below average he's not really very handsome he's not really very charming he's not super diligent and none of these ways is he a bad person but he really got the short end of the stick and a whole bunch of dimension and so he's not going to be famous and rich and get satisfactions from that kind of success the question that then became really central to me is okay how can how does this guy live a satisfying life a deeply satisfying life and that's what pushed me toward the emphasis that I have had and things I've written ever since 1988 on family vocation community and faith as being the four domains Arthur Brooks calls than the institutions of meaning which is a nice phrase within which people of a very wide range of abilities can get to be my age and they can be proud of themselves and genuinely satisfied with who they've been and what they've done but the trick is and this also characterizes my work since 1988 those four institutions have to be rich and vital communities have to be rich and vital families do vocation does and ends faith traditions do too and that seems to be the tended to argue I'm gonna come back to in pursuit your book from 1988 that is less well known I would say then it's and once before or after is my own favorite your own favorite so let's explain why but but well what are what you've made since then is that our society is peculiarly badly set up to help less advantaged people find this kind of meaningful satisfaction that you're talking let me amend that that the way the society was originally set up you know whenever you say that you have to have the caveat slavery was a bad thing okay so but the the ideals of the of the of the Constitution and the Declaration they really did create vital communities and vital families it's the 19th century which is the most libertarian period of American history in which you go to communities including urban communities and they are just seething with voluntary associations and religiously oriented groups and just simply neighbors doing things with neighbors to solve problems and so I look at that I look at how much they accomplished in an era of vastly less wealth than we have now and I say don't tell me about free societies a libertarian society is being atomistic we were the opposite of atomistic and what really bothers me about American civil society now is that the energy of those institutions particularly community and family have been vitiated 'add and why I mean or well if you have a turbo modernity or big government or if you think about about it for a minute you can conceive of the entire social welfare state project as saying to people we're here to take some of the trouble out of life you know we're going to surprise that provide these supports which will take some of the trouble out of being unemployed which will take some of the trouble out of having a baby without a husband some of the trouble out of and you just go through a whole list of things and so there are a variety of functions which if the family didn't do them or the community didn't do them they wouldn't get done which will now in a kind of half-assed fashion get done because of a nanny state a welfare state and it's hardly any one political constituency stands up and says no don't do this for us it's not good for us so it has accreted over time extensively in Europe increasingly in United States and what we've done is we've shipped the functions of community and family downtown we've we've given them some of them over to other places so guess what marriage isn't as important as you see as it used to be the neighborhood isn't as important as it used to be but that's a function of policy why is this particularly bad though for those on the bottom half of the spectrum in terms of background or because because people like you and me can fool ourselves if necessary well we've got one of the four institutions of meaning namely a vocation in which we've been successful and were filming car conversations and and we've done well in our vocations and so in a way suppose we have rotten family and community and faith we can still sort of cling to that now actually actually been lucky in the yeah I have to say that as you get older this kind of thing gets less important as you and I both know but we have that going for us if you are sort of gotten the short end of the stick that I talked about have being a good parent and spouse is still a role that's open to you it's still a source of deep satisfaction but that's one that you better take because some of your other options have been foreclosed similarly you can be a good neighbor and be in a community you can be it couldn't you know devoted to your faith tradition but those are the only games in town and so we're at sort of the opposite of where we should be we we talk all the time about celebrity and money and you know these kinds of trappings that's what is defined as success by an awful lot of kids and the idea that you're supposed to take satisfaction in getting married and slogging away at a job and supporting kids the culture doesn't back that up very much the culture says if you aren't rich or famous you're nobody so there's the cultural lack of backing up of being a family man and a volunteer and the marriage and so forth and then I suppose you also make the point I think the way in which the modern welfare state works the laws and the regulations and the ability to navigate Oh disproportionately helps the were clever and among us and sort of it somehow in the old and an older time you could it was simpler to be there was there were simpler paths to relative success look it's just an example that I happen to encounter but there are thousands of them along Route 340 between where I live in Harpers Ferry on the weekends you can during the summer buy barbecue from people who pull up in a truck and they settled out of the back of the truck and so forth and I got in a conversation with the months and they sort of went through the hoops they had to jump through in order to be allowed to sell people passing by in cars barbecue and did they did they surmount those yeah do we make it as tough as possible for people to do things like that yeah we do that too we make it as tough as possible to put an addition onto your house we make it as tough as possible to do all sorts of simple things and if you have enough money you can hire lawyers to take care of that or you have assistants who do the paperwork or the rest of it or because we have cognitive skills we can decipher the paperwork and and all that we have crafted a world in which complexity seems to rule in terms of the regulations and and a variety of other things because complexity is what the lucky people in terms of IQ were good at so we're really happy with and by the way it gives us all sorts of jobs for attorneys or other things because we've had this complex world that we run we have screwed to use a technical term people who are just trying to do ordinary things won't don't hurt anybody trying to improve their own lives made it tough for them and you don't think that this is simply a necessary or inevitable consequence of modernity automation technology I don't know you know people needing more educated skills to work with the modern economy I mean it's obviously there might be some truth to it but not I guess yeah it's a tougher sort of the excuse I think maybe people might say might use and saying no no it's not that we've sort of done this had much of a choice I guess well okay first I will say there is no need to have made a lot of this stuff as complicated as we have and so if you are going to be for example on the Left I would like to see people on the left saying that this is is damaging the lives of people we care deeply about because we're social justice warriors but having said that there are aspects of modernity that also make this a lot tougher and they have a lot to do with the technology and here's where I have new reasons to be depressed that I did not have in 1984 there's a guy named Robert Nozick famous philosopher wrote book called Anarchy state and utopia that I still think is one of the most brilliant books I've ever written he's a libertarian philosopher anyway he had a thing called an experience machine in there and the experience machine was one that you could hook yourself up to and be virtual reality whereby you had no way of knowing you were not actually engaged in that alternative reality and should you just plug yourself into that for the rest of your life as opposed to living this dull drab life you really live and in in pursuit 1988 I used that and say no no no a human life has a dignity and a weight etc and he tried virtual reality recent osek I think also wasn't that the point about yeah in no Zechs book - that was the point yeah yeah yeah I can't remember how Nosek used it I use yeah whatever but we were in the same ballpark here's the thing I don't know if you have put on any reality classes I haven't either I've been told by people who've used virtual reality as it exists now it is spookily good that was in a few minutes it's very hard for you to realize that what you're doing is not operating in a real environment well let's do a trendline here let's think in terms of Donkey Kong and mrs. pacman and so forth in the 1980s and do a line up to where we are in terms of the video games now extend that out ten years extend that out twenty years that experience machine is not that far away so I'm a 22 year old kid I don't want to go to work as a greeter at Mall Walmart I don't want to take the trouble to learn how to be a welder and make a really good salary and and have a craft that I'm proud of but for a couple hundred bucks I can immerse myself in these alternate realities or I can take opioids or other things well that is it's understandable that people make that choice you know the dystopian novel that is increasingly persuasive is brave new world yeah it's not 1984 it's brave new world and that age is very well yes so that's of that rapidly I mean what would you said before I my reaction is is it necessary for us to have this in during modernity no it's not necessary are there are all sorts of ways that make that the line of least resistance yeah and our policies don't push back against it they policies and our culture and this is where I get very exercised I guess I'm didn't exercise in the last few minutes in talking about that those of us who have been lucky enough as we have to have had wonderful families both when we are growing up but also the women we married and the children we've had been a deeply satisfying and I've lived in communities that have been great sources of satisfaction to me my wife has been deeply engaged in a faith tradition and sort of convinced me better get more engaged in so all of these things in our own lives we ought to be as people who are the lucky ones in society we ought to be sponsoring a culture which says to people this is better than a reality game it's better than a virtual reality it's better than then dope it's better than drugs these are the things that that are worth having we don't do that we we enjoy these and by we I mean sort of the new upper class we we still enjoy these deep sources of satisfaction we don't create a culture which makes them accessible to other people your emphasis on culture I think is you boys obviously I mean understood and in fact losing ground was about the culture that was created by the incentives I guess for the welfare state but as you said earlier in a way these the the conclusions will maybe if we reverse the incentives the culture will reverse so you generally think that incentives per se are just less a little less important than you thought I mean libertarians what you sort of consider yourself one do tend to put an awful lot of weight on economic incentives which I think a lot of times is of course quite reasonable honey but are you a little less of an economist and a little more of a more of a a group person in the sense that suppose you have a situation in which well the one that I've often used suppose that you had a guaranteed income and that which I've had still I do advocate with it and and I'm saying that replaces social security but the guaranteed income is enough that that people can put money by or that there are ways in which they can you know invest and and do a lot better in their retirement than they do with Social Security and people say to me oh but you can't expect ordinary people to make they'll just fritter away their money and they won't invest in a balanced portfolio all that it's not that I believe that each individual will do that but I do think if you had a situation in which everybody had to take care of their own retirement that the conversation at the local coffee shop would not be about oh I've got this great stock tip that'll quadruple my money and in six months it would be that all at once balanced portfolios and diversification and things in the coffee shop it would become the people who thought about this would be saying the right incentives are to go with this kind of strategy everybody wouldn't think it through but they would generally follow the lead in a case of vouchers for schools you aren't going to have every single parent that's going to go out and evaluate the teachers the schools but schools will get reputations and they'll get reputations based on on solids criteria so I I have I do have faith that a free society can create a situation in which they make it easier for people to make decisions that will be good for them in the long term and part of that is by following the example of people who have thought these things through yeah that's very interesting I that's very much speaks to me when I was at the Education Department we sort of on the side and without thinking about it much help support the very early homeschooling movement just out of a kind of Reaganite view that they should have the right to do what they want but I've got to say I thought and it was under much more attack than people not realized from state authorities who just tried to prevent it it wasn't even they tried to friend it partly by highly regulating it in some cases just prevented and we sort of were on the legal side of the parents when I worked for Bill Bennett there but I always thought you know homeschooling I mean every individual is gonna figure out the curriculum it's a little crate you know I mean I mean I'm not sure I could do it I fairly well-educated and it's asking off a lot of people and they have jobs is it it kind of fanciful but I of course didn't think this is why they cuz it's such an important point I I did think to add a mystically and not in terms of groups of course once they especially with the internet but once things got going there was going to be you know some good homeschool in curriculum that would word-of-mouth or the internet would quickly can vait to a lot of other people and they didn't have to individually research every math curriculum they just had to be told that the Khan Academy works you know and then they could just go teach their kid through the Khan okay we're not even teach their own chemist and they would go also find some tutor who's offering his services or her services if necessary for part-time amplification of the homeschooling I mean the extent to which this sort of the libertarian argument like circus gets to your book and pursued which is I think your favorite of your books the accessories of libertarian argument is not an individualistic argument is wildly these little platoons it's it's deeply embedded in the opportunist and actually the internet for all the ways in which it is problematic look at the way in which it has liberated information yeah and so all you know I guess actually as a social scientist I would like to see good studies I don't buy anything anymore without looking up some of the reviews right uh and and and I'm a big enthusiast of uber and Airbnb and all these others in which the purveyors of the service rate the customers and the customers rate the service and you have these this information flows to what extent are all of these good things that make it easier for us to get that wonderful curriculum because we've gone online right and we've seen the DD Hirsch's curriculum is the best and so we download that one when we open school our kids what what are the facts about whether people are using the Internet across the range of society I don't know yeah there's that been studied it that much I think I'm sure it has fed I even look at this yeah there's got to be answers out there but I don't know what they are but there is a way which the Internet can be can help for the formation of communities not just oh yeah heard it's too simple I think to say it atomizes everything though it certainly has that tendency to I think well how about if you want to be and then there are such people handyman you're you're really good at fixing things and it's a good way to make a good hourly salary and if you can put together enough hours a good living and it's hard to find people like that well it's a lot easier to find them with Angie's List and other kinds of websites than it used to be before it's a much more reasonable alternative for somebody who's really these hands to say I'm gonna do that for a living so there are lots of ways in which we are being empowered a word that I don't use any more than I have to but we are being empowered including people who have disadvantages of various kinds I'm I guess I would take one back to the policy questions of do we have all kinds of barriers occupational license oh yeah and stuff that make it unnecessarily hard for people to empower themselves so the handyman the if the county or supervisors or if the state legislature hears about it you can be sure they'll say oh well we got a we got a license the Handy a handyman I know yeah instead I thought the internet also makes it easier to find the guy and pay him off the books well if you want to think about that not that we're recommending that yeah well say we're in right and pursue persimmon that's so it's not your best-known book and it is your favorite book and I imagine many fewer people have read it than than losing ground that's kind of a cool fall yes there's a car following away which is good yeah well it was it was the how'd you come to write it next he wrote laws with losing ground and you become free well no and this sort of expert on well that is I'll write about IQ I mean in your sport before absolute oh in pursuit was the book that I was that I quit my tea my day job to write you know I irritated isn't the right word but so I was nobody until losing ground came up well I was the chief scientist of the large Washington office of a well respected researchers I actually was doing pretty good and I quit that job because I was tired of writing government reports that nobody ever read and also because of in my own personal life I was acutely aware of how unhappy I was in a bad marriage at that time and and so I decided I wanted to explore the relationship between public policy and happiness there's a kind of a weird way to respond to the unhappiness of your personal life but that's the way I did respond and so I had it in my mind from the late 1970s on that I wanted to explore this intersection of public policy and happiness and it turned out that I had to kind of clear away the underbrush first by writing losing ground because what I was really an expert on as of the early 1980s was the way government programs worked on the ground as opposed to the way the rhetoric says it but I finally did get around to writing that book and that's where I've zeroed in on happiness as lasting and justified satisfaction is life with the life as a whole which is very Aristotelian way of looking at it that's where I used Abraham Maslow's needs hierarchy to sort of talk about the things that human beings need in order to pursue happiness and came up with the institutions of meaning that are the vehicles through which we do it so that arose way before I had come on to a public scene with losing ground and that book I looked at it before this it to people it seems to stand up very well you know it's it's it's not as time-sensitive so to speak it's losing no it's not at all time sensitive and it actually has served as the kind of the seedbed for a lot of things I've done since you you will find echoes of in pursuit in just about every book I wrote subsequently with the exception actually the most recent one by the people and right after in pursuit you wrote a book that it I actually liked very much and is has a cult following as more than a cult following maybe the book on the space program ah which you and Katherine Road right yes my wife and I that you present that in this talk is sort of a diversion but I don't think that's quite fair there's some serious lessons in that so oh yeah there are serious lessons I guess I should elaborate a little bit yeah please because after all if I can't indulge myself by telling war stories now one can I something at the time that a losing ground was about to be published was unemployed I'd gotten an effect in advance against royalties from the Manhattan Institute - right losing ground I didn't expect it to do much of anything Catherine didn't my wife and I did not have a fellowship there so we need her to do something to make a living and and for various reasons we got really interested in the story of the Apollo program of in terms of the people on the ground the flight controllers the people who designed the Saturn 5 and the rest of that and so we had written a book proposal and sent it out and actually I remember going to meet our new agent Amanda urban for the first time she'd agreed to handle the book on the basis of our proposal for Apollo and I had my first bound copy of losing ground that I got in the very day I met her the first time and I remember sort of carrying my baby in there sitting down with her and sort of saying something about this is my book I've just done them and and binky her nickname is binky sort of weight that aside you know that's not going to do anything but the Apollo book might and and so we were doing Apollo a journalistic account to write a best-seller now that was our intention and we wrote a book that we really loved and we loved doing the research it does have serious stories to tell about about an entrepreneurial government enterprise which took enormous risks which was done by kids Apollo 13 which is a movie that allowed a lot of people watching a scene yeah very popular movie has these flight directors who are the heroes of it those guys were in their mid-30s and the other people in the Mission Control were often in their mid-20s and they were given this huge responsibility and look what they accomplished so yeah Apollo had to it's it's a serious book in the sense of it's a story that's worth that knowing but mainly it was just lots of fun are you an enthusiast for the space program sort of going forward I mean do you believe Oh NASA became a bureaucracy by the time they landed in the moon I mean NASA until we got to the moon was like this start up you had people jumping over lines of authority doing what needed to be done forgetting about bureaucracy NASA became a bureaucracy the inspiriting story just happened yesterday yeah well let's talk about the UH which is yesterday as we as we're taping this early February yeah you had the Falcon Heavy of the Elon Musk his space thing which is the largest thrust I believe since the saturn v capable of listening and lifting very large payloads completely privately done and you have NASA which is sort of keeps mumbling about going to Mars or going back to the moon and never you know just being you know marching in place and you have a private organization that is going to take us back to space again big time that's and if you look at the video of the launch with all the people in that organization cheering madly for five minutes continuously as the launch proceeds through all its phases and then you look at when they show shots of that room jam-packed with 20-somethings screaming their lungs out as they're so pleased with what they've accomplished and that makes me optimistic again and you're getting me just say if either you be Pro NASA but you're pro or you think it would be good to oh yeah to explore space I mean that's an important part of being somehow human it's a human spirit the the yeah yeah I'm I'm very enthusiastic about it is an amazing story if you've written that up enough I mean that NASA spends extra zillion dollars I'm sure this is a little unfair for million reasons but and Elon Musk spends you know 1/100 of X million dollars and that he's a lot lesser than that yeah I don't know isn't there I mean yeah the the well we interviewed the Apollo people in the nineteen mid 1980s when they or in the in the Space Shuttle phase and I'll take time to tell a little story because it's very implementing the hero and Apollo 13 the movie was guy named Gene Kranz and I was interviewing Gene Kranz and I was talking to him about their decision to continue the flight to the moon of Apollo 12 after the Saturn 5 had been hit by lightning while it was in the launch phase hit twice by lightning and they all of the systems have been knocked off line three hours later these 20-somethings and young 30-somethings make the decision no we're gonna go ahead to the moon to check things out we're good to go and when you think about it that is a very gutsy decision and Gene Kranz is trying to say to me no no you know we checked would check things out we knew the vehicle was good and this was after the Challenger accident that I was interviewing him and I said gene given the same situation now would NASA ever make the same decision gene was very loyal of NASA he glared at me and when Gene Kranz glared at you you quailed Anthony broke into laughter because there was no chance in hell that bastard would ever make that same kind of decision again and Elon Musk and his people would make that kind of decision again yeah it's be curious to see how this progresses and where the government tries to step on or Carl sort of the private islands program I don't I haven't really followed that it would you know I suppose they will and I suppose they already have a lot of regulations that have been holding them back but I've got to say after what happened yesterday there surely has to be a groundswell of people saying leave them alone let them do this stuff I'm struck just has there ever been a society I guess a husband but I mean it is pretty striking for society to get to the moon and 69 go back several times in the next five to three years and then stop and then just stop and regress really if I'm not mistaken I was in government we could do less oh yeah 15 years later but we I mean literally that we couldn't we didn't have the thrust it couldn't do that we couldn't even replicate it it wasn't that we just were stable you know if you go down to the Houston Space Center there is a Saturn Saturn 5 on exhibit they're lying on its side that is not a model it is not a it's it's a fully operational Saturn 5 all they needed to do was put gas in it which was never used mm-hmm because sex was no longer sexy in the 1970s we we kept talking about here's how many poor people we can feed if we 4:1 saturn v launch I don't say that to be denigrating and poor people I say that just to talk about the poverty of the human imagination that makes that kind of judgement about here's what's worth doing and here's what's not and not to draw on this too long with the space shuttle which struck me as a bizarre kind of thing to land on as the heart of the space program for the next 20 or 30 years it's like like let's have the most I'm sure there's some scientific utility to it I don't reach a minimum you know nothing here but I mean really that's the best thing we can do is kind of go back and forth to the space station I don't know it seems yeah well don't get me started he certainly lost the public imagination yeah there's an argument to be made that by going to the moon we sort of exhausted people's interest in the space program and if we'd done if we'd done a space station first and if we had a longer-term program we might have kept up momentum but going to the moon was such a big deal yeah once it was like well I guess our knowledge it was sex I was going to make probably be an apropos anyway a lot of the a lot of the energy disappeared very quickly after the first moon land is a striking study I guess they're historical analogies of countries huge discoveries and then just sort of deciding well that was interesting to discover the new world but we're not actually gonna go back there for X number of decades we're busy doing local you know wars in Europe or something I don't know I mean it was sort of emblematic of the 70s that we yeah said oh well never mind yeah I think I'm just I'm struck by that let's jump forward to your most recent book if that's okay well that was the really depressing one well no so your second most recent book okay well we can do your most recent book - you want to know what first and that no I can do this that we can do a sequin coming apart so I'm coming apart caused a huge ruckus at Splash I don't know if you expected it too much or not not really yeah in 2012 and then sort of after the fact people have decided it was I think correctly maybe ahead of the curve it sort of explains Trump in some kind of complicated way it's the same word about the book we discussed it on a previous conversation but all specially now six years later whether you know we're things have changed Rizzoli this new data that you've had a chance to rethink some things doesn't stand out maybe just summarize the thesis first and then well the the thesis is that we developed new kinds of classes that we have a new upper class that's different because it it doesn't only have more money than the former upper class it also has a completely different culture it is not made up of people who have high school diplomas but have become great successes and building businesses it's made of people who went to elite schools have graduate degrees and so forth and so on and you have a new lower class which is not the urban underclass as we used to think of it it is much broader it is certainly multi-ethnic and in I focused specifically on whites that working-class whites have fallen away from the industriousness the religiosity the the honesty and from marriage the these kinds of institutions upon which the American project depends and they are becoming disconnected from the rest of society and the third part of it which actually I think is in some ways the most important is the degree to which these two new classes despise each other and the it's the not just the working class but up through the middle class that is quite conscious that you have this new upper class of which I hate to tell you Bill you and I are members of which condescends and looks down on ordinary Americans consider this them to be stupid in a lot of cases deplorable the coin of word if people understand that and that the the antagonism which I did identify in coming apart and talked about and chat i chat sized the new upper class for for isolating themselves from it but in 2012 I had no idea how deep that ran how deep the resentment ran and the from the bottom up and how deep the condescension was from the top down we all found out didn't we in 9th 2015 and 16 and 17 and how big the gulf was i guess right they did that famous test that people the bubble quiz yeah yeah yeah so what's change the new lower class found a leader no I should I shouldn't have said it that way it wasn't just the new lower class it's a it's a much broader group of irritated Americans who were tired of being talked down to who were tired of being told that they shouldn't worry about immigration that immigration The Economist all said it's a net plus plus of in that wind by the way I'm not arguing with those economic arguments I'm saying if you're a carpenter who used to make $18 an hour and now you're making 13 because you're competing against illegal aliens who are not getting Social Security been is that guy right to be angry yeah he's right to be angry and and the same goes for all sorts of other things whereby we can debate on an intellectual plane the pros and cons of various policies but we ought to be a lot more aware of how they're affecting people on the ground has the date had changed though I mean is the actual situation over six years appreciably changed much one where the other that's been something of an economic recovery but no the the numbers on marriage have remained fairly stable they were pretty bad so that with people who have college degrees and graduate degrees and things they're still getting married they're staying married they're doing well at the time I did coming apart you were down to about half of all working-class White's ages 30 to 49 who were married and it's about at the same place now you had a little very slow recovery from the recession in terms of people going back to work that has gotten better by the way in the last several months I am told in terms of the continued collapse of of religiosity it's it hasn't gotten better it's it's an odd kind of thing I can't document this chapter in verse my sense is that religion is getting much more respectable in the upper reaches of society I mean the fact that you have the New York Times editorial page has Ross Douthat who is a observant Catholic and writes often about spiritual issues and and David Brooks who I won't try to characterize his his faith tradition but he's certainly writing about deeply religious and spiritual issues a lot of times in a column there if Arthur Brooks is writing about the same kinds of things again in the New York Times but you also have that kind of thing in the Washington Post more than you had so in some sense there's an argument to be made that who knows religiosity may be making a comeback in some sections of society I have seen no data or indications that the same thing is happening in the working-class so that analysis of the huge gut and I think one aspect of the Gulf is the declining rate correct me if I'm wrong of social mobility or upward mobility from one class to the other is that clear in the data yeah Americans do not get up and go where the jobs are in the same way we used to nor do nor are people encouraged to do so again the culture used to celebrate Oh Americans are always packing up stakes and going off to where the grass is greener and that was part of what being an American was all about and that's not celebrated anymore either it's it's not that we have discontinuities between the way people are behaving and the cultural signals are being sent that they're very much reinforcing each other and how much of that is due to kind of sorting where people are funneling because of IQ sorting themselves out into classes and so the kids of the upper-middle class just herb higher aptitude than the average job yeah yeah I mean talking about groups not about individuals of the working class and therefore it's just harder I mean there used to be more people who were by accident so to speak in the working class because they were just come over on a boat you know well you had two things going on one was that a lot of the the talent was among people with high school diplomas you know when when 10% of the population goes to college guess what most of the really really smart people are coming out of high school education and so you had a huge reservoirs of talent and and one of the paradoxes of a meritocracy a word that I use with irony rather than approbation is that you've got a lot of churning in the beginning so in Al Murray got a high school diploma couldn't go to college no money had to for his family but he becomes successful and he sends his kids to colleges including me to Harvard and and so you could that's that social mobility yeah I don't in generations but my kids all have been in that world your kids have all been in the world that we entered when we went off to college and as more as more and more people with talent get a chance to fulfill that talent the more they tend to migrate into a class a cohesive class and the stickier it is because they are passing along to their kids not just the money they managed to accumulate they're passing along the talents that got them where they are so you've got a much stickier social structure than they used to that's one aspect of it but another aspect is this kind of segregation you're talking about where all sorts of opportunities that are actually out there don't get communicated example from my own life we we live out in a little town in rural Maryland and we went to a very pedestrian high school local high school there are some really smart kids in my daughters and sons high school classes I mean we're talking they they could do really well at Harvard and Yale and Princeton they never considered that it's not that Harvard would necessarily turn them down although as white working-class kids they get they're sort of last to get preferential treatment at Harvard Yale but but they were punished smart enough to but and they could have gone to other selective schools but didn't cross their minds that that there were not other people except for my daughter who were heading off to one of these selective schools but when she went to Middlebury of all places given my recent history with Middlebury and she loved the school and we love the school but when she told her friends that she was going off to Vermont to Middlebury a common reaction she got was Oh are your parents moving to Vermont mm-hmm because why else would you go to Vermont school instead of going to Frostburg State or whatever now what does the data suggest about assuming though the other there's another girl who's smarter shoe daughter and has the same basic he's a good character itself Morton your daughter goes to Middlebury she goes to University of Maryland or maybe Frostburg State do they end up as the society his Society is open to this graduate of the University of Maryland or Frostburg State doing as well as the graduate of Middlebury or Harvard or the kind of connections you make there terribly helpful or does that just fade away for you quickly and everyone's I I personally have never thought the connections thing is as big a deal as people make sense but the what happens when you've gone to Middlebury or to Stanford or whatever is you are aware of well if I really want to go to into such and such a career if I want to go work for Goldman Sachs or whatever this is the next step and if you've gone to Frostburg State you were not nearly as much exposed to those kinds of things and the other thing that doesn't happen is cultural if you had lots more kids at Middlebury who have gone to ordinary little working-class high schools it would be really healthy for Middlebury student body to have a lot more of those kids mixed in with with the ones who are coming out of the private schools in New York City and Washington DC and so forth the the culture within colleges I mean the problem with the segregation that we've been talking about so far is the ways in which it disadvantages ordinary Americans the problems that associated with the way it disadvantages as it were the it the new upper class are are also real when I would I looked out and watched those kids at Middlebury screaming at me last March I was saying to myself you know these kids have no idea of what the real world is like I mean they were there they were they were talking in the run-up to my speech there and and the the issues that are live in Middlebury involving whether it's transgender rights or whether it's their idea of social justice and so forth it is so disconnected from the problems facing somebody trying to make a living now and the problems face not by the most oppressed people in the society but just by ordinary folks that's what they're ignorant of that's what the bubble quiz was all about trying to get them to understand if you were dropped off a bus in some little town in Kansas you wouldn't have a clue you wouldn't have you wouldn't know it would be like you've gone to some exotic foreign country that was touring what I was trying to get across to them and that's on American that should not be true I suppose it was always true of a certain very rarefied yeah who put Boston aristocrats and whatever rather the fact there's quite a lot of fiction and so forth about moving some very small out of this but it was a tiny group and now it's a big group I guess yeah well there's a reason it was called the New York 400 yeah and it was 400 and the same with Beacon Hill and the funny thing is of course about Harvard at the time Harvard was dominated by those kinds of people it also had a very large body of commuting students who were working-class oftentimes Jewish Boston kids and they were there in the same classrooms and in many ways providing more interaction across socio-economic classes than you have in Harvard today yeah well that is a good point you make that I mean there's that window when a lot of very bright kids from working-class or modest backgrounds make it make it and huge social mobility and interaction but in a way that that's the Harvard I attended 1961 to maybe that's the exact guess the counter-argument to you this has been made in terms of your book and by putting ups and stuff as you guys are romantic not remain romanticizing or using us the benchmark a very unique twenty thirty forty year period when as you just said there was an escape mobility and one country in post-world War two and maybe this is back to the back to the pasture it's always been more this way but I think that's not your argument I mean no but I'm sensitive to the vulnerability of people like me to romanticizing that kind of thing there is a my wife has who comes also from Newton Iowa as I do the former home of the Maytag company she observes that my whole view of American capitalism has been deformed by the fact that I grew up in a small town with one of the companies which in the 1950s was very rare that was trying to make products that never broke down that was unusual it was a company town which meant that any kid who had the goods to go to college would get a free ride from the Maytag Company there was the lovely Maytag park that everybody had access to you know it was this company yeah but it was it was extremely good for the town so I sort of thought well there's American capitalism an American community and it works really well might be a little romanticism there you most recent book of the people by the people by the people it's not a good title of people can't remember it that's the problem close if I googled it it would still show up probably right so say worried about that that I think you characterize it here is even more pessimistic I'm not sure that's quite true but would say it was more systematically pessimistic I'll give you an example of well let me first state the thesis and that is that of the United States the American project is essentially already dead in in its original form and I document that in the initial chapters through several observations that I had I had known about but I hadn't taken seriously enough for example I had always known we departed from the original Constitution in terms of limited government but I thought it was kind of a slippery slope and and maybe if you got the right five or six people in Supreme Court you could slowly rebuild some of these limits on government and so when I actually looked into constitutional law I came face-to-face with the degree to which in the 1930s in a handful of decisions the court said now we are going to interpret interpret the Constitution this way and there's no going home and it lifted all the bars basically on what the government could do similarly I've was aware back in 1988 that the law was getting so complex that in many ways it was lawless from the point of view of an ordinary person who can't figure out why they're being prosecuted for this crime instead of that crime or why they're having to pay a fine for something than their workplace that wasn't causing anybody any harm I didn't know the half of it I didn't understand the extent to which the regulatory state is self-contained it can make the regulations it can enforce the regulations it can then adjudicate whether people have been guilty of violating them all without oversight of Congress except to the most general sort and the degree to which these regulations are impacting the use of impact is a verb maybe the first time I've ever done that on TV who which have a large impact on ordinary Americans going about their daily lives and also I had not realized the institutional sclerosis to borrow the phrase from men's roles and an economist we both I think probably have been instructed by the degree of institutional sclerosis which explains why we're never going to get a clean tax reform we're never going to get clean health reform that does a lot of rational things that could be done to solve these problems and the reason we're not going to get it is because the institutions are too tied up in in the regulatory and lobbying not that men's rules and identified so in all of these ways I was saying forget it folks the the American project of people living their lives as they see fit as long as they don't bother anybody else that's gone and then I tried to offer ways in which we can rebuild it that's the optimistic side of the book I think probably people correctly understood that my case for the pessimism was much stronger than my case for the optimism saying I wish not to understand that so I thought it slightly went after a stick but I won't I will quarrel with that final couple of questions which answer one or both or neither as you wish um your own work I mean what comes next or what are you working on and secondly more broadly what do you expect to see in terms of social science which we'd be looking for that we will learn in the next two five ten years either social science or more broadly since you're interested in the natural science side of social science so I can put it that way I know you've given that quite a bit of thought well both questions go to the same thing because when the book is actually where social science is headed I guess I can go ahead and talk about the title of the book that would be great this may be its public debut this is huge the working title working title of the book is human differences : race gender class and genes you know at least it's not going to be controversial so that's that's good yeah I should say it's not going to be the substance is not going to be nearly as exciting as the as the title seems to indicate here is the thesis of the book real quickly that the Social Sciences in in the United States and the humanities have become the run by an orthodoxy in academia which says race is a social construct gender is a social construct class is decisively causal it's called intersectionality now I think but social class you know that determines everything and my modest message in the book is first race is partly a social construct it's partly a biological construct gender is partly a social construct sex is also biological construct that has meaning and that class is not nearly as determinative as people usually think it is that's one message of it a second message is the differences that we are talking about whether they involve gender or ethnic groups or whatever are not scary they we're not going to rank groups of people from superior to inferior whether it's by sex or whether it's by ethnicity there were complicated bundles of different strengths and weaknesses and and they're usually small differences so that's that's the second message but the third message is that the social sciences if they don't get on board with all the new knowledge that is being accumulated in the Natural Sciences they're going to be irrelevant and I will give you you know a concrete example is you go to social science journals now and you will have all sorts of analyses of the causes of crime well and we know a lot more about the genetics of criminality than we have known before not at the level of genes for criminality but but but in terms of the genetic the heritability of it and so forth if you try to write something about causes of crime in the environment without bringing to bear what we also know about the causes of crime in heritability your analysis just isn't worth reading and right now you can get away with that because the orthodoxy is so scared of biology that can only go on for so long because the rate at which we are learning about the genome and learning about how the brain works and so it's so out of whack with what people assume so at some point the level of knowledge that's out there that's being ignored by the social scientists will no longer be ignored and there is gonna have to be a major revolution within the social sciences or there's going to be irrelevant it doesn't necessarily lead to a brave new world situation where there are a few scientists who understand how to program all the rest of us I mean it isn't incompatible well that's a long way down the pike this level of knowledge of the genome one of the human brain whatever is consistent with sort of the Declaration but it's consistent with a belief in the moral he now indignities know they'll never know rest easy on that score I'm talking about something much more pedestrian the social scientists if we are doing our job right our understanding how the world works better than we were before if we replied social scientists we are thinking in terms of policies that are likely to work what we have ignored for so long is the role that human nature plays in all of that and in part we have wanted to treat human nature as being a blank slate Steve Pinker wrote a very good book fifteen years ago saying why that was stupid to think of us as blank slates but we have in fact not wanted to think in those terms for social scientists to be able to understand how the world works we are going to have to take our proper place in the hierarchy the sciences which goes like this at the top is mathematics physics is built on the basis of mathematics chemistry is built on the basis of physics biology is built on the basis of chemistry and the social sciences should be built taking into account this complicated thing called the human being understanding the realities about how human beings work that won't mean that the social scientists insights are no longer important we have things to say the science is not going to be able to inform but we've got to integrate what's going on in the night Sciences especially biology with our work it's not happening there are a few brave people up there who are starting and and I don't think this revolution is going to take forever I think things are happening so rapidly that by even 2025 and certainly by 2030 I can't imagine that the race is a social construct gender is a social construct orthodoxy is still going to be running things there's one thing about academics which you can count on these same people who say that IQ doesn't mean anything are absolutely obsessed with their own IQs relative to their colleagues they really don't want to be seen as stupid above all else they don't want to be seen as stupid they do want to be seen as smart we are not very far from the time in which people who continue to say some of the silly things that social scientists say now are going to be seen by their colleagues as stupid and that's them you want to talk about incentives that's an insight a that still works that's great that's an optimistic note to end on who says that you're becoming more pessimistic at chose Mary thanks so much for joining me it's always a day and thank you for joining us on conversations

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

Views: 18,701

Keywords: Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, Losing Ground, Coming Apart, Apollo Program, Social Science, Conservatism, American Enterprise Institute, Bill Kristol

Id: Z1x5asXF6x4

Length: 74min 4sec (4444 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2018