Charles Murray gained notoriety for his
book "The Bell Curve", written with Richard Herrnstein in
1994. Its claims included that intelligence is partly heritable. To a
scientist, this is what you would expect, but to many leftists it
must be condemned as incorrect because it could be misused.
In "Coming Apart", Murray's
main factual thesis is that America is seeing a class divide as never
before. Compared to his baseline year of 1960, the elites of his
"now" year of 2010 live in luxurious enclaves, separated
from the rest of society to the point of being unaware of how they
live. On the other hand, cohesive neighborhoods where poorer people
live have unraveled.
Murray specifically limits his book to
white people, which I think is actually a good idea. While "The
Bell Curve" had possible implications for racial policy, here he
is showing that poor white neighborhoods have all the bad things that
a racist mindset would attribute to poor black neighborhoods.
Demonstrating such things in white neighborhoods is an anti-racist
step. To his credit, he also says in passing that racism and sexism
were serious problems in 1960, and we have made a lot of progress on
those issues since then, and he does not want to turn back the clock.
He measures the unraveling since 1960
with low marriage rates, many fewer children being raised by two
biological parents, low civic involvement, low industriousness, and
low religious commitment. The bulk of the book is statistical
evidence supporting those points. I had thought that these changes
have occurred was not particularly controversial but a mainstream
consensus.
In his final chapter, Murray gets to
what is to me the most interesting part: What should we do about it?
He does a reasonable job of describing the leftist approach of the
social safety net, then describing its weaknesses as he sees them.
Then he gives his prescription, in line
with his libertarian inclinations. Rarely have I read a position that
I could so easily dismiss.
He claims that the elite is still going
strong on the 1960 values of industriousness, marriage, two-parent
families, civic engagement (though its form has evolved since 1960)
and even religious involvement. But he laments that the elite does
not "preach what it practices". Instead, it is
nonjudgmental and loathe to criticize other cultures. He would like
it to preach the values of 1960. One mystery is that he goes to
considerable lengths in the first part to show that the new elite is
isolated from the underclass in a way it was not in 1960. But he
gives no indication of how things would be different if the elite did
understand how the rest lives. Would they be more inclined to preach
and condemn? Or more inclined to support the social safety net? The
latter seems more likely to me than the former, but he himself is
adamantly opposed to even the social safety net we have.
He describes a European mentality that
is in contrast to the US. At one point he claims that the European
welfare states are going bankrupt -- which is highly questionable.
The efficiencies of modern capitalism have created enormous wealth to
support a safety net.
But otherwise his problem with the
social safety net is a moral one -- one of values. He says if the
idea is to live life as pleasantly as possible, the European plan is
a good one. Europeans are more inclined to work just to make a living
rather than striving to get ahead as Americans traditionally did. For
Murray, this striving to get ahead is the traditional American value
that he believes is a big part of what makes a good life. I'm happy
to support people who choose that value for themselves, but I see it
as only a personal choice.
The first part of the book describes
the elite, and at the end of that section was where I saw the first
major factual flaw. He says the elite is here to stay, and surely we
couldn't reduce income disparity significantly by taxation. The elite
has power, he says, and even if they can be convinced to raise tax
rates, they will quietly introduce loopholes so rich people don't
actually have to pay those rates. I find it ridiculous that it is
politically impossible to reinvent the progressive tax structures
that prevailed from 1935 through 1980. Sure, it's not politically
easy, but poorer people do have votes and vastly outnumber the rich.
His alternatives are nowhere near sufficient to address modern
problems. Or they are quixotic -- one of his solutions is getting the
elite to exhort the poor to find again the community values of 1960,
and expecting that poor communities will transform themselves on this
basis.
Along with exhortations, he proposes
cutting the money off. He notes that a social safety net means that a
man knows that children he fathers will survive whether he supports
them or not. Well-intentioned policies in the 1960s did have the
unfortunate effect of discouraging marriage by giving benefits to
single mothers but not married mothers. But his idea of reversing
this by cutting the social safety net is alarming. A great many
children would starve before this incentive kicked in to change male
behavior -- if it ever did.
Other thinkers have noted that one big
problem is that working class jobs pay a lot less than they did in
1960. Murray recognizes this but dismisses its relevance, saying that
even a minimum wage job could support a family. Highly unlikely. It
would be a very precarious living standard indeed. His poor
neighborhood example is the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia,
and a quick look now suggests small apartments renting for $1,100 a
month. At $12.50 an hour, a person makes $25,000 in a year, which
after taxes is roughly $21,000. Subtracting $13,200 for rent leaves
$7,800 for everything else. Rents are less in East St. Louis. I
suppose these enterprising poor should all move to East St. Louis,
assuming there are jobs there.
I do share one conviction with Murray
-- that people feel good about life when they know that their actions
make a difference. It's good to empower people in that way. My
solution is to allocate quite a bit of our social safety net to "wage
magnification". There is an existing earned income credit, but I
would like this to be vastly expanded. If you do a job for $12 an
hour, the government would turn it into $18 an hour. If you earn $18,
the government would turn it into $21. Today's minimum wage jobs are
real work that really needs to be done, and if they paid better,
people would take more pride in doing them. Legislating a higher
minimum wage is a much blunter instrument. For one thing, it
encourages employers to hire fewer people, while wage magnification
would not have that effect. For another, a minimum wage only affects
the very bottom of the wage scale. Of course wage magnification would
be expensive, and would be paid for by taxing the rich. But people
who work for low wages spend their money, so it should stimulate the
economy. It would also lift some people out of poverty enough to make
some eligible for less support from other programs.
Of course making jobs pay better is not
the whole story. Some people just can't work. Subsidized child care
is a great thing and would help some mothers to work more. We still
need the other kind of safety net. Universal health insurance is an
obvious improvement that I favor.
Some valuable things have been lost
since 1960, but they can't easily be reinstated. If you've decided
(correctly...) that God doesn't exist, how are you supposed to become
religious again? We don't want to encourage marriage by making people
get into ones that are unhappy or abusive.
People can spend their leisure sleeping
or watching television, which is apparently what many of the
underclass do -- and plenty of the rich too. But people are always
free to seize the initiative. You can throw away your TV. You can
volunteer to work in neighborhood programs. You can join political
movements. If you don't have children of your own, you can make a
point of being a support to your nieces and nephews. You can work
out, play an instrument, paint, or write fiction. I like the idea of
going beyond sleep and watching television, but people should choose
it for themselves. Murray wants to force the poor to work to stay
alive. If work paid a decent wage, most people would choose to work,
and we can afford to keep the others alive.
Murray is against the "unseemliness"
of great wealth. Combatting this with a few voluntary measures is all
he offers in the way of defusing income inequality. He finds high CEO
salaries to be obscene, and suggested boards of directors limit them.
But any such effort is voluntary and going to be uneven, and is going
to have a free-rider problem. Why should our CEO make less than the
others?
Progressive taxation is what works if
you are serious about income and wealth inequality. With loopholes
closed, there are no free riders, and it solves the problem
uniformly. If you make $20 million, you might pay 70% of that in
taxes. Similarly, if you inherit stock that earns you $20 million in
dividends, you will pay 70% of that too. I don't see that high CEO
compensation is any more obscene than income from stocks. The CEO is
at least typically working very hard, while stockholders do nothing
at all.
I don't think income inequality is in
itself a bad thing. The only reason I want to take money from the
rich is because there are pressing needs, and no one else has the
money. We are a vastly richer society than we were in 1960, and we
can take some of that money in taxes to spend it on vital social
needs, including the social safety net.
The libertarian (and more generally
right wing) view of economic justice is roughly, "It's our
money, damn it, and the government should keep its hands off it!"
This conveniently ignores many things. It ignores how little of
success is due to choices people make, and how much is due to innate
endowment, privileged upbringing, and plain old luck. It ignores the
fact that while the modern economy has created great wealth, market
forces allocate most of it to the rich. Free markets create that
wealth, so it's good to not interfere with them very much. But there
is no inherent justice in that arrangement, and the government can
effect a partial redistribution by taking a part of that wealth,
regardless of where it comes from. Only the government can do that.
Another argument libertarians bring out
is that the founding fathers never had a social safety net in mind.
That is true, but we are far, far richer than they were. They didn't
have the money to provide a safety net, and we do -- and did, as of
1933 if not before.
I think the European model is great.
Let's make life as pleasant as possible. People should be encouraged
to set their own goals and work hard to achieve them. Those who do
will be happier. But forcing them to do so to avoid starving to death
is wrong.
