Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 [ハードカバー]

The last chapter, entitled "Alternative Futures," sounds a note of optimism. All that we need is for America's elites to recognize the problem, come to their senses, and set things straight. Right. As if Murray has not been futilely expounding this message for the past 40 years. He cites Robert Fogel's "The Fourth Great Awakening" as an inspiration for his optimism. America has overcome crises of the spirit in the past, after we lost first the Puritan spirituality, then the secular sense of mission which fueled our independence, then the crisis of the depression which was answered by the New Deal and the welfare state. Fogel argues that today's crisis is a want of meaning in our lives. Murray believes we can reestablish it.

Murray says that there are only about four fundamental personal characteristics undergirding a happy life. The ones he names are two character traits: honesty and industry, and two societal connections: meaningful relationships with one's fellow man, and a satisfying marriage. He provides another, overlapping list of four elements that have historically defined American society which he calls the four founding virtues: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity. He goes into some length presenting sociological surveys that demonstrate the importance and the interconnectedness of these characteristics to personal happiness, and their importance to the well-being of society. If only we could recover them, all would be well.

The backbone of his book is a comparison between two hypothetically constructed communities, Fishtown and Belmont. They are based on real places, predominantly white neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Boston respectively, with incomes at the 8th and 97th national percentiles. They exemplify the directions taken by subsets of white America as we are, in the words of his title, "Coming Apart." In constructing his abstract communities he excludes minorities and people outside the age range of 30-49. He goes on to describe how these communities have evolved over the past half-century.

Fortune has put me in a good position to judge the accuracy of his characterization. I am a few months older than Murray and spent my 25 year marriage in Bethesda, one of the Belmont like suburbs of Washington DC, not far from Murray himself, with a wife who was born in the actual Fishtown and some of whose family remained spiritually anchored there. That gave me time on both sides of the tracks. Moreover, I started out that way - in a blue-collar neighborhood close to Berkeley, where my classmates and intellectual peers were definitely Belmont types.

One of the things I enjoyed about the book was Murray's 20 questions to help an Overeducated Elitist Snob (OES) such as almost everybody who's going to be reading this book determine how well, if at all, they know the "real America" where 80 percent of white people live. By virtue of my blue-collar neighborhood and my Army service, experience is that younger men simply don't have, I scored a respectable 41 on his test, placing me well in the category of those with the most experience with the real America. The shock was how low you can go on his scale... how totally out of touch my Bethesda ex-neighbors could be with the country their governing. I knew this intellectually, but Murray brings it home.

Back to the story, in 1960 Fishtown was a very Catholic neighborhood in which the men worked, the women stayed home, and the kids went to Catholic school. My ex-wife was one of them. What they considered to be social problems were excess drinking, quite a bit of it, fistfights and a bit of philandering. Young people, however, knew what was expected of them. They got married, before or after becoming pregnant, and provided families for kids. It was a moral expectation that was generally observed. People had responsibilities and took them seriously. They did not accept welfare, they answered the call when they were drafted, and they participated in church and civic organizations.

Fishtown in 2010 is a very different place. People simply don't feel an obligation to either work or get married. There are many never married people, and many out of wedlock children. A lot of the guys are just bums - don't work, don't want to work, don't want to get married, and waste their time watching television. An inordinately large number have figured how to game the system by qualifying for Social Security disability. Their attitude is that work is for chumps. Quite a few of them have drinking and drug problems, but Murray does not consider these disabilities to be nearly as important as the lack of any of the four foundations in their lives. No more religion, no social connections with the community, either no marriage or an unsatisfactory marriage, and no vocation.

Murray, a longtime libertarian, claims that intrusive, European-style government has taken away the need for these four virtues and undermined the people who attempt to practice them. Kids don't need a father if the government provides money and social workers. Men don't need work if the government gives them handouts. Social connections aren't important if there's nothing really to be done improving the place.

Murray claims that the state of affairs in Belmont is much better. People work hard, get married, stay married, are resolutely and obsessively concerned with their children, and are involved in community. More than that, counterintuitively, they are more involved in church than are the people remaining in Fishtown. They may not believe the dogmas, but they understand the social value of belonging.

What has changed in Belmont is the conviction that the set of virtues they practice really ought to be preached. Belmont now believes totally in moral relativism. If somebody else doesn't want to remain married to his kids' mother, doesn't want to work, or spends all of his money on drink and drugs and all of his time watching TV, they're not going to be judgmental. That's somebody else's life.

Another thing that has changed in Belmont is their acceptance of lower-class culture. A Belmont mother will not prevent her daughter from dressing like a hooker, using gutter language picked up from rap music, or swearing like a sailor. There is not a sense that "Belmont girls don't do that." Also out the door are old-fashioned morality, the idea that you shouldn't seduce girls when they're drunk, cheat on tests, or tell the clerk at McDonald's if he gives you too much change. People just don't have a sense of seemliness anymore. Kids can wear the most outrageous clothes, and their parents can take the most outrageous bonuses from their companies, and rich people can take inappropriate and undeserved handouts from the government without blushing in the slightest.

Murray makes a few huge oversights. Race is one. White people are everybody's least favorite ethnicity. We get called anti-Semites and racists, and are constantly backpedaling in the face of accusations from Hispanics and overwhelmed by the sheer intellect and industry of the Asians. Even in the unlikely event we were to resist in the ways he advocates, society would still sweep us along its unfortunate path. Another oversight is education. All sectors of society are being worse educated year-by-year, Belmont, Fishtown, and most especially the black and Hispanic groups he doesn't mention. The educational system seems dedicated, whether by design or sheer ineptitude, to destroying religion, fostering dependence on government, and stultifying personal industry and ambition. Oh, and it goes out of its way to denigrate anything in American history of which white people might be proud.

My Puritan forefathers hoped to establish a country in which the four founding virtues - industry, honesty, religion and marriage - might flourish. It worked for a few centuries, but now appears to be hopelessly broken. I do not think it is possible within any country. Murray himself relates Toynbee's description of the way in which every great empire contains the seeds of its own destruction. I would advocate that each individual leave countries out of the equation as they seek the best future their family. Find a community - Mormons would be a good place to look - where civic virtues are still in evidence. Find a way to educate your family - homeschooling looks good - to shield them from the propaganda and the mediocrity of the public system. Find a religious community of like-minded people. And do not be afraid to look the world over to find these things - America may no longer be the place.

Slog through this book - it's a must read.

Keep in mind, however, that this is an infuriating book in many ways, because it's got a deep pro-libertarian political agenda that is awkwardly melded with evidence that shows how libertarian policies and politics can tear apart the very society the author describes as "ideal" - the honorable but poor nuclear family living in a community of racial, social and religious uniformity.

While it was at times disturbing to see how accurately he was able to describe the "bubble" that I increasingly live in (his 25 question "test" of the thickness of your middle class bubble was very interesting), what surprised me was how myopic his views on the influence of globalization on society's lowest-paid workers are. Like most libertarians, the role of externalities is often downplayed, leaving the fault of economic failure and the praise for economic success exclusively with the individual, and all other factors are nearly irrelevant.

Much of the statistical evidence he cites in the book is based on a few surveys, and where there's no data, he just invents information that supports his thesis, and then backs in the "evidence" to fit his views. That can be frustrating at times, because it leads to "trending" a data item even where there is no valid data longitudinally over the periods of time in which he's citing a trend.

In many ways, those are nitpicks, because the real core of the book is an interesting, and by my own experience, accurate view of the United States today. This is despite his juvenile certainty that the individual's motivation is all that matters to success or being able to survive economically (basically a classic position of Libertarian politics, which are roughly identical to those of a 15 year old boy).

He correctly identifies the huge differences between the people from "Belmont" (a fictional place where white people have jobs, a stable home life, go to good schools, stay married, don't watch much TV and never smoke) and "Fishtown" (another fictional place where they smoke, watch lots of TV, know who's who in NASCAR and are likely to wear a jacket with a Budweiser logo on it when they go to a smoky bar with friends). Living, as I do, in a place where Belmont and Fishtown overlap, it was extremely revealing to me to see just how different my "Baby Belmont" lifestyle is from my Fishtown neighbors. He's absolutely right when he suggests that the people in Belmont are capturing all of the good jobs, and maintaining a lifestyle of privilege and stability that is gone from the Fishtown world. I see it every day, like when at work we "can't find the right people" for open jobs, while I know of plenty of underemployed people who wish they could get a job paying 1/4 of what my company pays for almost any position. We'd never be able to hire from Fishtown.

But this is where, from my perspective, the book goes way wide of the mark. He actually refers to the white males of Fishtown who don't have enough or any work as "goofing off" - those are the actual words he uses.

He makes arguments that any work is better than no work - and while at some level, that's true, what he completely ignores is that the "Atlas Shrugged" crowd running American business these days has actually stripped hope of improvement of your situation from low-wage work. The "worked your way up from the mailroom" stories that abound in libertarian mythology are based on a world where the bottom of the workforce in America was competing with itself to rise up within the American Experiment.

[11 April 2012 NOTE: I've edited the part below to clarify my statements about the "Atlas Shrugged crowd" above in response to several of the comments below.]

The author is an avowed libertarian. There's no model in the Libertarian worldview for dealing with the idea that the guy living in Fishtown in a trailer alongside the highway and making $8.25 an hour needs only to "work smarter" to enjoy the benefit of the American Dream when company he's working for is about to hire someone who was living in a dirt floor hut near Xinghuy last year.

In a global economy, companies have little motivation to think nationally, they just look at median wages paid by geography and move labor to where it's cheapest and automate whatever's left behind, resorting only to paying a living wage to human beings where there's no other option. Fishtown is learning what the "Global Citizen" has for a standard of living. To the worker in China or Mexico who didn't have running water in their home, being offered a job with a bed and a shared bathroom in a dormitory next to a factory and earning $220 a month for a 60 hour workweek is a massive improvement in living standards. To the guy in the trailer in Fishtown, it will be a massive downgrade of living standards.

But it's not just the fact that Fishtowns are the result of a huge pull downward for America's working class that results when the median wage is evaluated on a global scale. If you're an Ayn Rand acolyte, you don't really care about national borders or the people downstream of your decisions, you care about your own self-interest. You then build companies aligned with your own economic interests accordingly and that's supposed to either "lift all boats" or "trickle down" or whatever you want to say about it. While I am not anti-capitalist by any means, I think that the author unfairly places the blame for economic failure to thrive among Fishtown residents on the members of the Fishtown community itself who have been "coddled" by the government and social policies that don't force people to take whatever work they can, regardless of what it is.

In the author's view, the residents of Fishtown are "lazy" (to use just one of the pejorative terms he uses throughout the book). In reality, I think that the residents of Fishtown realize that if they work hard, and do the right thing, they are still playing in a game they can't really win. This is because the companies led by people acting in their own self-interest have become incredibly adept at reducing current costs to themselves while ignoring, to the greatest extent possible, the external effects of their decisions.

For Fishtown residents who do work hard, their rewards seems to be a 29 hour work week, carefully managed to avoid payment of any overtime, with no ability to buy health insurance because their pay is too low, and no ability to enter the "ownership economy" because they are priced out of the market. In short, it's a sucker's bet to bother to try. Now in the author's defense, he does suggest that a broad and deep social safety net does not do much to encourage the white males of Fishtown to get off the couch and get out to work at some menial job because that's the honorable thing to do. The emotional side of me disagrees with the author on this point, but the pragmatic side of me (and the memories of taking on menial work when my own career derailed for a while) does give his argument some validity.

I do wonder if we're experiencing the results of people who spent years of being told in school that "you can be anything you want" and getting prizes for participation, not victory. Has this has left us with a culture that's simply unable to accept that sometimes you just have to work hard and lower your standards, and not every door is open to everyone? For the Fishtown residents, I don't accept his conclusion that they are just "goofing off" - I think that a complex confluence of globalization and the effects on wages and a society that seems to be breeding out competitiveness in Americans have resulted in the Fishtown culture. The issues he describes are the symptoms of hopelessness and anger that comes when reality doesn't match the stories we were told growing up.

His view of the Belmont residents is more charitable, but he decries their willingness to tax themselves at what he feels is an excessive rate in order to placate and calm the residents of Fishtown with deep and broad social safety nets.

His view is that the second and third generation Belmont residents don't understand the Fishtown world at all (I'll concede that) but they also feel a need to "do something" to help them - so they willingly decide to accept what are (in the authors view) excessive tax burdens, just to keep the folks in Fishtown from becoming a social problem in the Belmont neighborhoods.

In other words, he has a distain for economic empathy, and I think he's concerned that real empathy and a connection between these cultures is lost. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that his argument for dismantling the social safety nets and convincing the Belmont folks to stop paying for it is actually based on some form of empathy for the Fishtown residents - I think that while the author is horrified by what he sees in Fishtown, he thinks that Belmont is making Fishtown possible by funding a system that discourages the kinds of "good behaviors" that the author sees as mandatory for the American Experiment to continue.

Regardless of what you think about your own situation, this is a good read, and slog through it to the end. It's not always well written, but there are many little gems of insight that are really good in it, and if you're making your living as a "knowledge worker" it is a good way to get a look at a world you may be ignoring.

(Edit: Fixed some typos and added a word or two for clarity, updated last section heavily on April 12th)

"Coming Apart" offers a very effective analysis of the diverging economic prospects and social values of American society since 1963. I should say first off that many people seem biased against this book because of the controversy surrounding Murray's prior book, "The Bell Curve." Murray has taken great pains in this new book to avoid the issue of race, focusing specifically on white Americans. I could find nothing offensive or even politically incorrect regarding race in this book.

The author's main premise is that over the past 4+ decades, America has divided strongly into two classes, that he illustrates with fictional town names. "Belmont" refers to the cognitive elite: The top 20% with college or graduate degrees, who hold jobs in knowledge-based occupations. And "Fishtown" refers to the working class: The bottom 30% with at most a high school diploma and (if employed) working in blue collar or low wage service jobs. Murray demonstrates quite effectively (using statistics) that the people who make up "Belmont" have become more industrious and more traditional in their attitudes toward marriage, family and community, while the people in "Fishtown" are living in communities that are basically falling apart and where traditional nuclear families are becoming harder and harder to find.

While the book bases its arguments on solid statistics, I have two primary complaints. First, it does not always do a good job of distinguishing cause and effect. For example, the author points out the working class men now choose to engage in much more "leisure" and less work. He then conjures up a vision of a typical male, who all bent out of shape because he doesn't have the opportunity has grandfather had at the GM factory, turns down a $12 per hour job driving a delivery truck. I find it VERY hard to believe that $12/hr delivery jobs are going begging. If, in fact, a lot of working class men are not actively pounding the pavement looking for these jobs, there could be reasons: Maybe competition is so intense it is hopeless. Or maybe the jobs get given out based on networking or cronyism, so someone out of the loop has little chance. But I fail to see how "laziness" is the primary cause here.

The second thing is that the book does not anticipate the future very well. Just about everyone will agree that technology and globalization have hit "Fishtown" hard. What fewer people seem to see is that BELMONT IS NEXT. If you doubt this, consider how IBM's Watson computer won at Jeopardy. Or consider the number of information technology and software engineering jobs getting offshored. Or look at what the internet is doing to journalism. These are all jobs that Murray puts in the "Belmont" category. But in the future, a lot of these people are not going to be able to afford to stay in Belmont. Of course, Belmont will still be around; it will just be occupied by fewer and fewer people.

To get an idea of how technology and globalization are likely to change the workforce (and society) of the future, read The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. Don't assume that today's status quo will continue indefinitely!