Review of "Coming Apart", by Charles Murray

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.