Charles Murray: Why America is Coming Apart Along Class Lines

free societies tend to do a very good job in responding to human needs libertarian intellectual charles murray is perhaps america's most influential social policy thinker born in 1943 in the small town of newton iowa murray spent six years in the peace corps stationed in thailand and went on to earn a doctorate in political science from mit in 1974. murray started out as a liberal democrat but he underwent a political transformation while researching his landmark 1984 book losing ground the book marshaled overwhelming evidence that american welfare programs were harming the very people they were supposed to be lifting out of poverty when you try to do things for other people that they are not prepared to do for themselves it's very difficult to achieve anything losing ground was fiercely denounced by the political left but soon won wide acceptance that the war on poverty was at least partially a failure the simple fact is there wouldn't have been welfare reform without losing ground far more controversial was the bell curve murray's 1994 collaboration with harvard psychologist richard hernstein we were convinced that iq is an important phenomenon and trying to understand what's going on in society that book maintained that differences in genes contribute to differences in iq those differences in turn play a significant role in the life outcomes of individuals most controversially the book argued that various ethnic groups have distinct albeit marginal differences in inherited intelligence the commentary on this book shows the bankruptcy of the american media in dealing with difficult topics murray is the author of more than 20 books including what it means to be a libertarian a personal interpretation in his new book coming apart the state of white america 1960-2010 murray argues that americans are becoming divided into two distinct classes and that this growing divide could end american life as we've known it murray's analysis focuses on white americans as a way of highlighting that the negative social trends he identifies do not break along racial or ethnic lines murray is currently the w.h brady scholar at the american enterprise institute i sat down with him in march for a wide-ranging discussion of how his prior work has led to coming apart well first of all thank you very much for coming in to talk to us every reason it's good to see you ron it's been a while yeah as you know you're here talking with reason magazine reason tv you call yourself a libertarian what does that mean for you what do you mean by that so i'm a lower case libertarian essentially i think what madison thought and what jefferson thought in terms of the original structure of government and its proper limits uh so i'm i'm libertarian on all but the purest to pure things for example i'm in favor of drug legalization uh i'm not real upset about laws against child pornography and things like that to just give an example of where i park company with real purists in your new book coming apart the state of white america 1960 to 2010 is is a valedictory about a victory of your long discourse on the intersection between happiness and public policy public policy public policy's purpose is to better enable people to pursue happiness how does it do it and with that in mind let's start with your first big book losing ground it seems to me in that book you made the following sort of argument that poverty is like anything else the more you pay for it the more you can have of it yeah the the statement i made in the forward or the introduction of that book was that in the 1960s we changed the rules of the game for for low-income people and especially for low-income young people and that we changed the rules in the game in the ways that made short-term incentives such that they did really stupid things in in the long term so basically it was about incentives people were being killed it was about incentives and uh and and i've i tried to make the point that a lot of times you don't have to appeal to exotic cultural explanations for why people do things just assume that whatever they're doing makes sense to them at least at the moment they're doing it in a recent interview about losing ground you said you argued that you still believed that the reforms of the 60s jump-started a lot of the trends that you currently deplore and that toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube just by reversing a few welfare state policies yet in losing ground you apparently thought you could put some of the toothpaste back in the tube i was writing in 1980 and in 1980 you still had in the white population for example you were still looking i was writing in the early 1980s you still had out of wedlock births in the low teens i believe in terms of percentage of births you still had a culture in which of getting married was a strong cultural norm we're looking at 2012 now and in 2012 if you take all births in the united states of all races and so forth you're looking at about 40 percent of them are out of wedlock you have seen a change in a cultural norm which has enormous power in the early 1980s there was still some stigma certainly in the white community associated with having a baby without a husband that's gone effectively it's gone a variety of other changes have occurred in sexual behavior in expectations of women in the workforce a whole bunch of things have happened which means that before you can make policy changes that are going to have much effect you've got to have some cultural changes but in losing ground you had hoped at least may i quote here you called for scrapping the entire federal welfare income support structure medicaid food stamps unemployment workers compensation subsidized housing the whole thing the whole thing and such a step would leave working-age person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market family members friends and public and private locally funded services can we get rid of a lot of welfare programs okay no you know i'm in an odd situation when it comes to the welfare reform act of 1996 because a lot of people say well losing ground was the intellectual impetus that led to that which of course i i want to believe and i want to take credit for it but i also say the welfare reform act of 1996 borne no relationship to what i was proposing it was a single program the afdc cash program to which there were changes and changes that led to a lot of people getting off the welfare roles uh something we could talk about at length as to why that happened but there remained a big support structure in place didn't touch the food stamps program didn't touch medicaid didn't touch public housing didn't touch a whole bunch of other things here's the irony the left got so excited about the welfare reform act saying it was going to lead to uh calcutta on the hudson or which i think was pat moynihan's phrase or something like that they propagandized welfare recipients saying you know the sky is falling the sky is falling if this thing passed and when it did pass they believed him you had lots of people who left the roles just after it passed and before anything else had happened also you had lots of people who were working off the books so they were getting their afdc and they were holding jobs and all at once they couldn't continue working off the books as easily because the they were supposed to be putting in uh efforts to get jobs and it got kind of awkward when you actually were already holding on to a job so what you had was i should have been a lesson for us for lots of other reforms as well just make it more of a hassle you know if getting if getting assistance were as difficult as getting a driver's license is in some department's motor vehicles for example like the dc department the last time i was there it's amazing how much we could cut back on recipients of welfare benefits so incentives did matter in that sense sure oh and i still believe incentives matter uh what i'm saying in the current book is you we don't have anything in the political landscape that would permit changes that affect incentives enough to produce much of an effect socialist intellectual michael harrington critiqued your work in losing ground as rather crudely as he said the equivalent of a vulgar marxist a social theorist who believes in a one-to-one relationship between economic and the political or the psychological weren't you actually in some sense advocating a kind of economic determinism in that book um there gee there's a chapter in that book entitled the destruction of status rewards and the destruction of status rewards said you know what a lot of these changes and behavior come from a lot of them come in the from the fact that it used to be that if you were a low-income guy who was holding down a job and supporting a wife and children you got status in your community as one of the good guys and if you didn't do those things you got stigmatized as one of the bad ones well those are incentives all right they're not economic incentives they're cultural incentives uh to say that i am an economic determinist is to have a very selective reading of losing ground on the other hand the the core of what caused the falling apart if you will as i understood from the book was the rise of the welfare state which was all about economic incentives for the most part but they affected the state as rewards you know when you have a change and this is especially true of the welfare chain it has cascading secondary effects and the reason i now say you know policy changes aren't going to make that much difference is it set in motion all of these other cultural outcomes including the destruction of status rewards uh including i would say the infantilization of males uh but that's incred in concert with uh the feminist revolution and some other things as well feminist revolution to a certain extent has been a great good for women absolutely exactly so that part of it isn't inevitable i i think that that the status between males and females would have changed well actually it is suppose you have no changes in the welfare rules at all i'm sorry welfare incentives suppose none of the mistakes of the 1960s were made but you did have the same entry of women into the labor force okay so you have the feminist revolution without any of the policy mistakes what you would have then in low-income communities are more and more women who are making money on their own and in a lot of cases making enough money that it's significant and they could support the child on their own so in that sense you've already got a weakening of the incentive to marry because economically it's not as crucial as it was before but this but another thing happens suppose at that point the woman says well i still want to get married because my father needs a child my father a child needs a father okay so they get married the guy's position is different now he's still holding down a job let's say but she's making just as much money because she's continuing her job so yeah he's helping to put food in the table that's different from being the man he's now a partner in this marriage and i think partnership in marriage is a good idea so i'm i'm saying as a father of three daughters i'm glad the feminist revolution occurred it inevitably took for low-income men a major prop away from their self-esteem and their dignity it could not have been otherwise and that all by itself was going to make a big difference then you add on that to that the sexual revolution right so the guy the sexual revolution had not occurred you had women going into the labor force but sexual norms were still the same and then the guy would still have a good incentive to marry because if the only way you're going to get regular sexual access to women is to be married you're going to get married in so far as that's no longer necessary a big incentive for guys when they're young to get married diminishes that's just the truth about males what do you suppose the net effect of that is going to be what's the point of getting married so what do you do about that then you can't take either of those back it has nothing to do with the incentives of the welfare estate at all it's a exactly so so now you go back and say well do we have any objective reality on our side i would submit a major source of satisfaction in life is a good marriage in order to have a good marriage you got to get married so when i'm talking about cultural shifts i'm not saying we've got to make up stuff to try to propagandize people into doing what we want what we need to do is to start talking more openly about the objective rightness of these behaviors on the other hand the notion of companion in marriage is what i'm taking that you're thinking about to some extent is a fairly new notion in human history uh if you go back to the 19th century and so forth one description of marriage is a man and a woman standing back to back fighting against the forces trying to destroy their family those forces went away to a large part of modern society and they turned on each other instead and you saw divorce rates increased because people started expecting more for marriage than they used than they were getting is that not a plausible part of what also happened during the 1950s first let's go back to the 19th century and before when indeed love was not the basis for making marriages tocqueville talks about the marriage in 19th century america in some very interesting ways specifically he says in america they don't arrange marriages okay so they raise the daughters to choose husbands wisely and that's the way that americans can get away with marriage which has such very strict obligations because they are making marriages with mature decisions and he has this wonderful passage at the end of the book where he says to what do i attribute all of these wonderful qualities of the united states and he says i attribute it to primarily to the superiority of american women okay so you have a an institution in the united states uh in which women still may not have been choosing for love they were choosing on the basis of people being good providers good fathers to their children so forth love in marriage does not consist of this burning desire to jump into bed with each other that you feel at 20 years old it consists of a shared life and a growing companionship and a depth of human connection that's very difficult to describe to an outsider i think that developed i won't say as frequently because i don't know but i think that was a very common feature of 19th century marriages the next big book the one that caused you a lot of heartburn was the bell curve the way i interpret that move from losing ground you'll correct me if i'm wrong to this is that you went from an incentive explanation for a lot of the things that have gone wrong with american society and growing inequality to one based on more cognitive constraints that basically the society was sorting on the basis of ability would that be a fair sort of that's that's that's a good description and it was the same sort of social problems were being identified with those causes well if you go to the last chapter of the bell curve uh you see us address that question directly we said that what we are doing now is we are creating a world which is congenial to people with high iqs people with high iqs love complexity they think complexity is fun that's why you have kohlberg at harvard coming up with his stages of moral reasoning which has seven stages uh you know at the primitive level people just think certain things are right and wrong but at a sophisticated level you understand that sometimes it's okay to steal in service of a higher good okay that is theoretically true i even believe it that that it can be okay to steal in service of a higher good but a kind of moral world governed by that kind of complexity is real hard to deal with if you aren't very smart it's much simpler if you are you know not an intellectual to have a criminal justice system which is based on very clear simple straightforward statements of if you do this which is really bad uh objectively you will get a penalty and what that means is you want a state in which the things that are against the law are things that everybody agrees or bad robbery murder rape so forth uh have you changed any of those laws though as i understand it those all those are all still bad and we have a thousand other things that are also against the law in which it's not really that so that obvious that it's so bad because very few low iq people i suspect are following a foul of those new laws of those complex new tax laws those complex new laws laws against smoking a joint and things like that you don't think they're falling afoul of that that's true uh okay uh in terms of all kinds of laws though including the laws against robbery rape murder and so forth i evaluated a program in south side chicago in the 1970s for chronic juvenile delinquents and i would talk to kids who were outraged that they'd finally been sent to the can because they would say to me i'd done things lots worse than that and been caught for them they didn't do anything to me why they do anything now they were looking at a system which behaved utterly irrationally from their point of view they didn't see it as one which was being forgiving hoping that they would do better and finally saying i guess now we'll have to sanction you they saw a system that made no sense whatsoever the same thing has happened with all kinds of aspects of life the phrase we used in the bell curve actually was stolen from ed crane and he said what you're saying is that everybody has a moral compass but some of them are more susceptible to magnetic storms than others i think that's a brilliant avocation of what i'm saying and what you want to construct is a society in which it is easy for people of a broad range of ability to be morally autonomous and guess what that's a libertarian society now of course a lot of critics at the time pressed you very hard on the question of racial and ethnic differences in iq uh nearly 20 years later you still see those differences as significant would you tell me anything in the data that has changed in those 20 years i mean i've done more research into it uh since then and it looks to me like this uh the the diff black white difference in iq measurements of which go back to the early 20th century narrowed substantially for for uh black and blacks and whites born in the 30s 40s 50s and 60s in the 1930s it was real big it was not one standard deviation to use the technical term it was closer to two and it narrowed to about one uh standard deviation maybe a little less even among kids born through the 1960s among kids born since the early 1970s there has been no change in the black white difference in any data set that that i have yet seen and that does not look good to me it is consistent with what we said in the bell curve there remains a difference in means that does not imply that all blacks are less smart than all whites the significance of group differences is trivial as long as you treat people as individuals which of course is the key james heckman who reviewed your book for the reason for reason magazine many years ago said that you hadn't really looked at all the data you might have that one of the things that you could do is an intervention that might be successful and he said he had good data for this and in fact very recently had further update on this is you could have early childhood programs five and earlier where perhaps it might have to have huge effects on cognitive development later but had huge effects on qualities like industriousness sharing abilities that you could inculcate other qualities through education and children that ended up with huge benefits later down the line yeah and he's using programs like perry preschool with a sample size of 50 in the control group and 40 in the experimental or something like that look there heckman's a serious scholar and and i don't dispute his conclusion that these programs have an effect greater than zero i would not even go to the mat and say the effects are trivial i think he is seeing a glass half full that i see half empty but if you want to spend money on things early childhood education is going to buy you more than trying to jack up k-12 education that's for sure and children who are born into severely disadvantaged circumstances for my money you don't have to prove long-term outcomes to say that putting a child from a punishing environment into a nurturing warm environment is a good thing to do i hope they have more impact i think he's more optimistic than the data strictly warned so one of the other things that that seemed to be the conclusion of the bell curve is that you were afraid that in some sense rather the cognitive elite that you identified was going to merge with the fluent already effluent and create a new upper class and i believe that you're arguing that that's actually happened yeah yeah people ask me about whether i think the bell curve is still valid i say look around they'd degree to which we now have a coincidence of the very affluent with the very smart is palpably obvious to everyone but you can also talk about it more systematically as i try to do in the new book what would you say the thesis of the new book is oh that's very easy we have developed classes that are different in kind from anything we have known before take the case of marriage cultural norm for rich and poor alike back in 1960 about every almost everybody was married when they were full-grown adults in their 30s and 40s 94 in the upper middle class 84 percent in the working class you go to 2010 marriage is still alive and well in the upper middle class about 84 percent of adults are married in the whites upper middle class it's down to 48 in the white working class i mean that's a stunning number uh that's a divergence unlike anything we've ever had before in that sense second example we had neighborhoods in 1960 which were the cliche neighborhoods for where rich people lived north shore chicago beverly hills scarsdale and the rest of westchester county upper east upper west side upper east side excuse me northwest washington you know what the mean income in 14 of those classic rich neighborhoods in 1960 was it was expressed in current dollars today's dollars eighty four thousand eighty three thousand dollars something like that in other words half of the people made less than eighty three eighty four thousand dollars in today's purchasing power which means even in these richest neighborhoods you had lots of people who didn't have that much money more importantly you only had about 26 percent of them with college degrees so even the ones who were rich oftentimes were high school graduates so you know they were fully socialized in mainstream america go back and go to 2010 same 14 neighborhoods 163 thousand dollars median income that's two i'm sorry that's the 2000 census it's going to be a lot higher now when we get to the 2010 census 67 percent with college degrees a lot of those disproportionately high numbers from the elite colleges it's very far from mainstream america and the isolation is not so bad for people who have grown up in working class families or middle class families it's really problematic when you have people rising to positions of power who have never known anything about that world why is it problematic because they have so much influence on the culture and the politics and the economy of the country and when you have that kind of influence and you have no real understanding of what the lives of most americans are like you tend to do things that screw over the lives of other americans intentionally or unintentionally most obviously in the case of politics and when the tea party says we got this bunch of intellectual elitist snobs who think they know best how we should live they got a point those people do exist and that's a kind of separation of americans into class we've never seen before funny you say that they think they know best how people should live because part of what your argument is as i understand it is that those people are in fact living the sorts of lives that the lower class should be living are you not saying that they're staying married they're working hard yeah a lot of things are doing so they do know how the other half should live is that correct yeah but they shouldn't be able to make laws now by the way they are not making laws saying people have to work and people have to get married they are talking about making laws about um how what they should eat so they aren't as fat as they are they they have all sorts of things with smoking of course being the obvious example of going way beyond protecting people from second-hand smoke and instead sort of trying to enforce that dictum about how people ought to live their lives there are all sorts of ways in which they are regulating the the life out of all kinds of occupations which prevents people from living their lives as they see fit um now the people at the top are not doing a bad job of living their own lives what i don't want is to give them the power to decide how everybody else should i would like them to say more openly that we think that the way we're behaving is a good way to live say it as a cultural statement of what's what they consider to be right and wrong don't use the power of the state to try to enforce what your opinions are i don't know how that would work i mean uh that's why i say this i go and visit my relatives in southwest virginia i grew up on a uh relatively poor on a dairy farm and so forth and i'm i'm regularly informed that i got above my raisin that i'm uh being a snob and i'm not sure they want to hear what i have to say about these well you know i get this question by the way i'm not that i i'm not part of your i'm not a member of the if you're ecumenical nice people i do tell people what i think yeah but people tell me you know i use the phrase in the book that that people should preach what they practice right and the image is that i want them to go down to low-income communities with bull horns you know and stand in the corner look go back to 1960 when there was an extremely powerful stigma against having a baby without a husband incredibly powerful if you got pregnant and you were in most parts of american society you went away to visit your relatives for for several months and the baby was put up for adoption you know it's an incredible statement how did that come about i mean because if you aren't old enough to remember those years but i am it was not that people preached on street corners it was that i was raised so that i knew that if i got my girlfriend pregnant i'd have to marry her and i can't even remember the specific times my parents told me that it was in the air and it was in the air because it was a cultural consensus so when i say that a cultural consensus has enormous effects on behavior across the socioeconomic spectrum i am referring to conditions which have existed in the past and can exist again then they will exist when you get conversations started that start with thousands of conversations and eventually go to millions of conversations and result in a change in the temper of the times what can you do to foster that you write books on the on the other hand that cultural consensus also existed in a world where it was very hard for a woman to support her child on her own and there was no contraception so expectations were different so even if you do now go back and preach you're preaching to a completely different world in many ways okay now can we get back to the reason that it's premature to talk about solutions with policy what do you suppose is going to happen to policy if once again there is a cultural consensus that it's terrible for kids and it's terrible for the society to have single births lo and behold all sorts of policy changes in the direction of shifting the concrete incentives will become possible but until that cultural shift occurs you can't do a thing you'll be demonizing single women if you do well for example the republican party right now seems to be in the process and the elite media tend to interpret as such of a war on women for example for example about rick santorum i know rick santorum has said that contraception was a bad idea and he's getting crushed for it deservedly so no he's got i'm just making an observation of fact that to raise that these days is not only going to get you crushed by the left you are not going to have people on the right standing up for you either um politicians across the ideological spectrum are scared stiff of alienating a very large voter bloc namely women and more specifically women with children and no guy but so women without basically think that the deal they've got now is better than the deal that the cultural conservatives like you perhaps might want them to go back to in the 1960s well i'm saying that the issue has not been raised in the way it needs to be raised that you don't do it by saying let's have a law about contraception you do it by talking about what happens to children in different family structures you do it by talking about the objective realities i discussed a while ago uh and you don't put it in terms of changing laws you put it in terms of what's right and wrong starting this in 1960 this is when you were a younger man we'll just say at that point and to a certain extent it could sound like it does sound like in many cases that you're valorizing your childhood is there a kind of confirmation biased by nostalgia that's going into your analysis well there's part of the book which says if a time machine could appear that could transform me back to 1960 i would have to be dragged into a kicking and screaming and i described the reasons why because life in many ways now is better than it was then especially for people like me and people like you we're doing just fine then you can go to a hard-headed empirical examination of the lives of this new lower class i'm talking about all right if you say that satisfactions in life deep satisfactions in life come from one of four domains something i've been arguing for years they they come from family community vocation and faith you don't have to tap into all four there are happy atheists there are happy single people but if you don't tap into those domains you better have a really satisfying vocation for example or you better have a really satisfying community life okay what i'm describing in the new lower class are increasing numbers of people who aren't married they aren't working they uh fallen away from religion and they are isolated they're they're living in their communities isolated from any interaction with other people those people are living lives that have been stripped of a great deal of the stuff of life all right i don't consider that argument to be nostalgic i say that is grounded in a great deal of our understanding both in terms of classic aristotelian discussions of what it means to be a human being and also modern empirical psychology and sociology i'm making the statement this is a human tragedy and yet i get the impression that if you gave them the offer you could go back to 1960 they would also be like you not want to go they go kicking and screaming yeah yeah the reason that they aren't going to go back to 1960 part of them are exactly the same reasons i'm not going to okay all right the terms of the creature comforts and the rest of it the other part of it is that the most impoverished part of all is they don't know there is anything better out there we have kept that information carefully to ourselves that if people are watching take away anything i wish they would take away this it is non-judgmentalism run amok to say that the person i just described unmarried not working no religion no community to say well these are his choices and perhaps in his own way he's just as happy as i am that doesn't apply to you is a form of cruelty and public policy cannot address this form of cruelty we have to address it by a deep introspection into what we most deeply believe about the sources of satisfaction in a human life and how do we transmit that relive it we live it openly and we don't make it easy for people to live miserable lives thank you very much glad you could come in and talk about it thanks ron i enjoyed it

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 339,124

Rating: 4.7492824 out of 5

Keywords: reason, reason.tv, reason.org, reason.com, reason magazine, reason foundation, liberarian, charles murray, nick gillespie, the bell curve, coming apart, the state of white america, welfare, losing ground, war on povery, richard herrnstein, american enterprise institute, aei, ronald bailey, ron bailey

Id: oXIsEHFCBns

Length: 34min 45sec (2085 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/indianawalsh]

Miss me with that IQ-determinism / lowkey race realism shit