Perhaps our social distancing has gone way too far

An understandable first reaction to the news of this virus is denial -- there isn't really any problem. Most people got over this quickly, and even Donald Trump seems to have finally moved past it.

The minimum sensible response to the COVID-19 outbreak is a "mitigation strategy", described as "combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease." I can't think of any reason we shouldn't be taking at least those measures.

The US quickly moved to a more radical social distancing strategy. One notable early example was shutting down US professional sports when one basketball player tested positive. Restrictions on travel and the banning of large gatherings have followed. Denial is gone, and there is a consensus that our temporary inconvenience is worth it if we can prevent a public health disaster.

And yet, here is a radical possibility: The world will be much better off in the long run if we do no more than mitigation. There were powerful forces against society taking this as an initial response. It seems callous regarding the immediate, visible problem of people dying from the virus. There is also a strong psychological tendency to say, "This is a serious problem. I want to do my part to help solve it. I'm willing to undergo major inconvenience to do my part." The answer, "Actually, it's best if you keep up your normal routine with a few small changes" doesn't sit so well. Yet this "back to life as usual" line of thinking might come into play as we consider how long we can keep this up.

The model where radical social distancing makes sense is one where we suffer now for a few months at most, we flatten the curve of infections so as not to overwhelm the public health system, and then we can resume our normal ways and pat ourselves on the back for doing what needed to be done. But a few months will not do it. <This report> out of the UK influenced recent US policy decisions and had a key conclusion: "The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed."

They determined that the basic mitigation strategies "might reduce peak healthcare demand by 2/3 and deaths by half. However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over." That sounds bad, and considered by itself it is very bad, but it might be preferable when we consider the consequences to social distancing as we are now practicing it.

A huge problem with social distancing is the economic fallout. In normal times of economic slowdown, economists lament that a lack of consumer confidence is to blame for things not picking up again -- people's sense that tough times might lie ahead leads to spending less. And since one person's spending is another person's income, the economy stays weak. Consider how mild "reduced consumer confidence" is in comparison to what people see right now. A stock market having lost 30% of its value is one sort of wake-up call. But even if you figure that the stock market is a rich person's problem, one trip to your supermarket will tell you that this is a big deal -- the empty shelves are a result of your fellow citizens hoarding in expectation of hard times ahead. It takes no appreciation of fine points of economics to understand that air travel, tourism, hospitality, sports, and the restaurant business are immediately and drastically reduced. Those industries employ a lot of people who will be out of work, who will spend less, leading to other people out of work. From zero concern to deep concern in a mere two weeks, everyone knows that things are very bad for large segments of the economy. Talk about loss of consumer confidence! As always, hard economic times will hurt most the working poor and not-so-poor.

Those sectors are just the beginning. A remarkable amount of what we spend our time and money on is not strictly necessary. There's no real need to work out at the gym -- you can get back in shape later. Focusing just on how we present ourselves, who needs to get a nice haircut or their nails done? You can now restrict your clothing purchases to the practical and necessary and make them online. We do some of those things to "keep up with the Joneses", but quite likely the Joneses will be giving them up too. And if you stay home, no one can see how you look anyway. Reductions in those sectors and ones that are similarly optional will hurt the economy even more.

This sounds to me like a situation likely to be fully as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s. At that time, the public rallied behind Roosevelt's radical government intervention, and it still wasn't enough. If any such intervention is to happen today, it will first require the entire Republican ideology to be repudiated enough to relegate the party to long-term minority status. (We'll see if Republican words in the past couple days about shelling out large sums for ordinary people actually translate to sustained action). One useful step might be a guaranteed minimum income.

In fairness, it is hard to get an economy going again once it has stalled. Given that we've opted for radical distancing right now, abandoning the policy will likely not lead to a return to what we have come to think of as "normal" soon.

But there are other problems beyond economics. What does it do to children to tell them they can't go to school or play with friends for 18 months or more? The impressions children get of their world will influence them for the rest of their lives. And what does it do to us -- adults as well as children -- to feel that our fellow human beings, including our friends and extended family, are physically dangerous?

I am a member (though not a very active one) of the First Unitarian-Universalist Society in Newton (FUUSN), which took the creative step of holding a virtual service this past Sunday using Zoom. Over 90 households participated. You could see the live feed of families in a grid, a dozen or more per page. I wondered what might be going on beneath the laudable sense of coming together. Considering the real social contact that this service replaced, each family must wonder whether they are dangerous to the others or whether those others are dangerous to them. The epidemiologist's correct explanation would be that the chance of either being a danger to the other is actually very, very small, but the cumulative danger to society from the occasional transmission is high enough that we should avoid such interactions, however small the danger. But that cannot be easily fit into our human psychology -- what the human brain can absorb is that the other people who have been our social world are now dangerous. The longer our isolation goes on, the stronger this sense will become.

There's also the distinct possibility that the sacrifice of those of us who scrupulously follow this path of social distancing will be undercut by the behavior of a minority who go right on partying. The only solution to that might be police state powers that we have been very reluctant to use in this country.

"Exit strategy" is a concept that arose with regard to war planning, but it's a good thing to think about for any endeavor in life. If you start in on a course of action that is costly, how are you going to stop it later? In particular, we should consider it for radical social distancing. Suppose our efforts flatten the curve, and we declare victory in August and say it's time to go back to life as usual. It won't feel like victory. We will be reading about hundreds of deaths every day from the virus, and the idea that it could have been worse will be hypothetical. Your fellow humans are still as dangerous as they were before. Will you want to go out again? Consider the entirely likely possibility of a vaccine not being widely administered for two years. Patterns will become more and more ingrained. And if you consider going out in March of 2022, society will have changed a lot. The places you used to go out to will be out of business.

There are pandemics for which such measures would be justified. Imagine one that has a 25% mortality for the young and healthy. That would justify radical distancing. Perhaps we will learn from this one the skills we would need to deal with that one.

I could be wrong about all this. I welcome feedback. There may be facts I'm not aware of, and new facts may come to light that no one is aware of now. But I think we should consider seriously the dangers we incur by opting for radical social distancing.

Super Tuesday Muddle and Decision

Today I voted in the Massachusetts primary. I wasn't entirely sure who I would vote for until the last few minutes, which is unusual for me. I found all the considerations going through my mind interesting to me, so perhaps to others too.

I would do anything to <defeatDonaldTrump>. But how to get the best odds of doing that?

If I were personally appointing a President for the next four years, my clear choice would be Elizabeth Warren. Her values line up with mine almost perfectly, and she is very smart and thorough on the details. If she was the radical Democrat in a strong position nationally (replacing Bernie in that position) it would be very tempting to vote for her. But she's not. But the latest polls show her as the only candidate in Massachusetts with any chance to put a dent in Bernie's support and perhaps win a few delegates for use at a convention, so I considered voting for her on a tactical basis, but decided against it.

There's Bernie Sanders again, and I divide my consideration of him into two pieces.

What would he be like as President? I'm in agreement with most of his positions -- I do not believe he actually wants to nationalize the means of product along the lines of the Soviet Union. The columnist Paul Krugman says he might if he had his way ideally turn our society into one resembling Denmark. That would be fine with me. I'm more skeptical of his anti-free-trade positions, but that's not a big deal.

The biggest problem is that he seems uninterested in compromise and conciliation. He's not going to get what he proposes. Even if he rode into office on a wave that gave the Democrats a 5-vote majority in the Senate, it's not enough. No Republican would vote for anything he proposed, meaning he would need the support of almost every Democrat. And there are plenty of moderate Democrats who would not support his more radical positions. None of his big ideas is going to happen in the next four years. Can he work with moderates to enact small but real improvements? I suppose he would have his bully (that is, "terrific") pulpit as a means of expounding moderate socialist ideas as reasonable -- a long-term goal. But would he do that artfully? Or would his strident way of making his points alienate people from considering them fairly? Of course he would be vastly preferable to Trump, as he would restore and respect the institutions of US democracy. But would the people after four years think, "He's like all the other politicians, full of hot air and not getting anything done"?

How about getting elected? He's an old white guy, a comforting demographic unlikely to alienate moderate voters. When people actually think about them, many of his positions are politically popular. Yet there will be heavy use of the "socialist" cudgel against him. His unwillingness to compromise means he might have a hard time pulling in all the moderate Democrats and getting them to the polls -- let alone the independent swing voters. He does have hordes of ardent supporters who are likely to turn out for him. But where are those supporters? It matters little if solid blue states like California and New York pile up extra millions of votes for the Democrat. What matters is swing states -- and how many ardent Sanders supporters are there in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, etc.? The consideration that competes with "energizing the base" is "winning the swing voters" What about them? It might be true that with tribalism so strong today, 90% of Trump voters would never desert him -- but even half of that remaining 10% could be enough to swing those states.

And then there's Joe Biden. Another old white guy, comforting to moderates. A long track record of moderation and compromise. Not likely to enact any major changes (relative to the Obama years) -- and yet infinitely preferable to Trump in restoring the basic decency of democracy. And yet he is such an imperfect candidate. A bumbling speaker, a bit handsy with the women. He'll do everything in his power to reach out to the Bernie supporters, but it's not clear if that will be enough.

Bloomberg was appealing as a sort of "minimal pair" candidate compared to Trump. Also a New Yorker, but a genuine billionaire instead of a pretend one. Also an old white guy, associated with moderate liberal positions. But he doesn't seem to be appealing to lots of people, and using money to try to get votes (I've gotten 3 mailings from him and none from any other candidate) is a bit distasteful.

So what has been decisive? Within the past 24 hours, Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out of the race and endorsed Joe Biden. Dropping out is a selfless thing to do, and endorsing Biden is a strong statement -- one that most candidates do not take when they drop out. I figure they are smart people who know far more about politics than I do, especially Klobuchar. They know everything I wrote above and far more. I ultimately went with their choice and voted for Joe Biden.

Among my proud past votes was that for Bill Clinton in the primary of 1992, a year when virtually no one thought any Democrat had a chance against George Bush senior. He was actually a fairly conservative Democrat, but he was a Democrat and much preferable to any Republican.

And whether the nominee is Biden or Sanders, I will very much want to convince the supporters of the other one to come out in November.

If I adopt the perspective of a cynical bystander who wants to see a good show, Bernie Sanders will make for the more colorful campaign and election. But I don't.

When the waiter doesn't give exact change

I tend to write about weighty things. Life also has little details.

I still pay for some restaurant meals with cash, especially if it's a lunch where the total bill is under $20. Waiters have been making occasional mistakes for as long as there have been waiters, yet today I write about something else.

It may have been ten years ago that I first ran into the idea of waiters deliberately not giving you exact change. The first problem is psychological. When people my age were young, a quarter was a valuable coin -- because of inflation but also because children are much poorer than adults. It is no longer of much importance to you if you're being a rational economic actor, but it still has that trace in my feelings. So if their change is off by even a quarter, it is already changing the rules of the game. They're forcing you into the realm of approximations where you're supposed to think that maybe a quarter doesn't matter. I've never known a waiter at a Chinese restaurant to do this, and it's one nice feature of Chinese restaurants (a tiny one, to be sure).

Say the bill is $10.25 and you give them a twenty. If they bring you a five and ten ones, I find it mildly annoying for the reasons above but not too bad. I figure they are being generous and offering me a free quarter. I proceed to leave a cash tip. I can verify it's correct because I see two ones there and know it is 20% of my ten-dollar tab.

What I really dislike is when they only bring you a five and four ones. You've been shorted by seventy-five cents. Who has pocketed that seventy-five cents? I assume it is the waiter, not the restaurant, though it's not entirely clear. Next, they are assuming you are going to leave a tip -- which goes against the social form of a tip as a voluntary payment. But what's more, they are making you do extra math. If I want to leave a 20% tip I should now put down one dollar bill and a quarter. Now when I look at the cash on the table as against my ten-dollar tab, it looks like a very poor tip. But if a quarter isn't important, then I could just leave a dollar. Yet I'm also aware that that is a tip under 20%, so there's some temptation to leave an extra dollar to be sure it's enough.

As long as we as a society are still using coins, we should use them right, partly to be in harmony with our past.

I am happy with retail stores that have a dish of pennies, because you can grab one to cover your purchase of $10.01, and it's also a place to put the few pennies you might get in change. Even when I was young, pennies were not very important. But the vital thing is that it is voluntary. I can if I choose fish in my pocket for that extra penny I owe, and I can pocket the pennies I get from change. I think of penny dishes as an arrangement you see in places on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Maybe there's some stigma attached to it, but I don't think there should be.

I am sympathetic to restaurants adding 18% or 20% to the bill for parties of five or more. When it's no one person's job to make sure everything adds up to include a decent tip, I presume the total is often short, which is why they adopt these policies. In that case there is real money at stake.

In fact, when I order a lunch special that costs $10 and ask for water as my beverage (because in fact water is the beverage I want most), I will typically leave a tip of 30% or even 40%. They've done as much work as they would for a more expensive meal. But that is my choice, and that makes all the difference.

Social mobility isn't important, improving the condition of the poor is

The Atlantic in its August 2019 issue had an article about Raj Chetty, a brilliant economist who has achieved a vastly better understanding of social inequality using fine-grained data that was not available to earlier researchers. One result of his work is identifying opportunity zones, noting that when people from poor zones move to those places, then their children will have higher lifetime earnings. If promising initiatives like this were implemented, social mobility would increase.

So the key question he is addressing is social mobility. He notes that someone in the bottom fifth of family income making it to the fifth has a 10% chance in Salt Lake City but only a 5% chance in Milwaukee, a disparity he would like to fix . He is far from alone in focusing on this -- the feeling that a good society is one where more poor people have a chance to make it.

I was following along without complaint, but suddenly I stopped to ask this question: Why is this an important goal? It assumes a zero-sum game, and associated with the upward mobility of someone in the bottom 20% is the downward mobility of some other person or persons.

Perhaps the assumption is that this poor person is deserving of higher income on account of merit -- they are smarter and harder-working than those people whom they will leap over. More on that later.

Or perhaps the idea is that the bottom 20% is a class, and this class deserves to have some of its members move upwards. This strikes me as an illusion. A family of the bottom 20% that makes it to the top will merge into it -- the children will be indistinguishable from the rest of the 20%. I could see the argument if the category was race. Black people and their children are still black in the top 20%, so they are visible and an example to others of what African-Americans can do. But the class of poor people in general is defined by nothing but poverty. It's a fair guess that most people in the top 20% today had ancestors 100 years ago who were poor.

Far more important than social mobility is to restructure society to improve the circumstances of the bottom 20%. One simple way to do this is redistributive taxation. I have suggested wage magnification as one way to do it (the government turning a $12/hour job into an $18/hour job), though a guaranteed minimum income is another way. Strengthening those parts of the social safety net that benefits the poor (such as Medicaid or food stamps) would also help.

There is no doubt that wealth has its privileges and the children of the wealthy have much better chances than the children of the poor. It would be great to dismantle discrimination (which is very real), but I'm not so sure about extraordinary measures to allow a few more poor people to make it to the top.

Suppose we allocated income in a totally random fashion. When each child is assigned a social security number, they also get their lifetime income. A few will enjoy the riches of being in the 1%, most will be in the middle and some will be poor. The child of a rich family would be as likely as the child of a poor family to end up in the bottom 20%. That doesn't sound like any kind of improvement to me. An improvement is improving the lot of the bottom 20%, however they got there.

There are other factors that make social mobility complicated. One is that "merit" is somewhat heritable. If you're a hard worker, the chances are that your children will be too, based on what you teach them and the example you set -- and possibly to some extent on genetic endowment. If over the course of decades many of those with merit in the bottom 20% rise, there will be fewer left who deserve to rise based on merit. I have read that today class is more important than race in determining future earnings. The children of the black middle class do pretty well, and the children of the white lower class do much less well.

I like the idea of a society where hard workers who create useful things earn more money. I don't mind a society where if they create something of enormous value, they can get enormously rich. As long as there is a disparity in wealth, there is the question of what can be done with it. We seem to all agree that they can buy a fancier house and car and consumer goods. In contrast, many people share with me the view that good health care should be available regardless of income. Rich people should not be higher on the waiting list for organ transplants. But another thing people like to do with their money is to spend it on their children or leave it to their children when they die. If we really want a society where children of rich and poor start out on an equal footing, one implication would be an inheritance tax of 100%. To me that's too extreme and doesn't solve the fundamental problem.

The children of the rich are not inherently more deserving of good things than other children. Here's a radical idea (for a leftist): they are not less deserving either. As long as the choice is where to put people on a zero-sum ladder of family income, I see no real benefit to shaking things up. In fact, studies have shown that ordinary people feel that to take from a rich person to make them poor is unjust, though they feel less that way if they only recently became rich.

Some of what I'm suggesting may sound like a conservative argument -- things are fine the way they are, the children of the rich can go right on getting benefits the children of the poor do not have. But I am instead endorsing a more radical left-wing view -- the idea that we should raise the condition of the bottom 20% -- which necessarily requires lowering the condition of the top 1%, as no one else has the money.

The dream of mobility is that "anyone can make it". But even in a society with good mobility where anyone can make it, not EVERYONE can make it. I'm more concerned about the large majority of those born in the bottom 20% who will remain in the bottom 20% even if social mobility is increased.

Where was the power of the rich in the 1930s?

The social safety net is a no-brainer to me. Capitalism has created great wealth and also created great inequality. Starting with Roosevelt in the 1930s, the US built a social safety net, paid for by taxes on the wealthy. The other industrialized nations have all taken the same path. And yet today in the US this concept is under attack. Leading the charge are wealthy Republicans whose personal interest is aligned with lower taxes. But they are also backed by a large number of working people who benefit from the safety net they oppose, acting against their own self-interest. How did this happen? We are told that the wealthy wield great political power, and there is a lot of truth to that.

But how were things different in the 1930s? In Roosevelt's landslide victory in 1936, he won every state except Vermont and Maine. Yet his support was far from unanimous. The popular vote total was 61%, and his Republican opponent got 36%. Over a third of the voters disapproved of him. Presumably the rich were disproportionately represented among that one third, but they had a large minority of ordinary people. Whatever arguments the opponents were making have not made it into the histories I have read. How come the rich lacked power then and yet they have so much of it now?

One of the many things I have been curious about is the US reconstruction of Japan after World War II, carried out in large measure by Douglas MacArthur. The Wikipedia article notes that it was a rare opportunity for one nation to largely remake the society of another nation. Yet while MacArthur was a staunch Republican, the blueprint of society that was imposed on Japan was very much like Roosevelt's New Deal. From Wikipedia, "MacArthur's efforts to encourage trade union membership met with phenomenal success, and by 1947, 48% of the non-agricultural workforce was unionized." Elected Republican legislators might have recognized that the New Deal was so popular with the US electorate that it was unwise to suggest dismantling it. But there was no parallel concern for the views of the Japanese. So perhaps MacArthur was an example of a fair number of Republicans who were convinced that the New Deal was a good idea? Or did they just lack insight, somehow?

In my youth I was earnestly devoted to the goal of a socialist revolution the US. I had enough perspective to look at a wide range of nations where there had been socialist movements, and compare those that succeeded and those that failed. It seemed to me that the key factor in the victory of a socialist revolution was overwhelming incompetence on the part of the existing regime. Where the powers that be had enough political savvy to divide the opposition and buy off parts of it (for instance) the revolutions failed.

So is it possible that the rich in the 1930s just lacked vision and a good PR operation? And that they finally got enough political wisdom to add to their financial advantage to bring about the Reagan revolution of 1980? Or is it possible that through the 1960s they had scruples about just plain lying, and the new generation of right-wing activists lost those scruples?

I would welcome other perspectives on this mystery.

The Biggest Picture

We often speak of backing off from details to look at the big picture. Here I'm going to back up to the biggest picture I can think of. In descending order of importance:

1. The world is an amazingly complicated place. There might have been nothing at all, or a universe with nothing but stars, dust and rock. But here on the surface of this planet we can perceive amazing complexity. The world is interesting!

2. We long for purpose. We want to know what's right and wrong -- what's good and bad. Whether we live up to our standards or not, we want to know those standards exist. They don't. There is no inherent right or wrong and no inherent meaning. In reflective moods people sometimes rage over the unfairness of our mortality -- whatever we create in our minds will be destroyed when we die. Mortality isn't the key obstacle to meaning, however, it's just the first and most obvious one. If we lived for thousands or millions of years, there would still be no objective meaning, or right and wrong.

3. We are animals, and a big part of our human nature is our minds. Our minds have been profoundly shaped by evolution. Like other animals, we seek pleasure and avoiding pain, but we as humans have more complicated desires. In the absence of an objective right and wrong, we still feel that there is right and wrong. The source of this conviction is our human nature as shaped by evolution. We value fairness, loyalty, and love, for instance. We value our human relationships, especially those with partners and children. We seek status and strive to better our condition or keep it from worsening. The most profound reason we fear death is that we are programmed by evolution to fear death. For some people religious belief is central. I'm confident they are mistaken as to matters of fact, but in the absence of any objective purpose, what they have chosen is no worse than any other.

4. Our collective human activity is causing damage to our environment and natural world which cannot be corrected for millions of years. Our future for those millions of years will include far less biological diversity. Climate change may make the planet a much less hospitable place for humans as well. Yet bad consequences that last millions of years seem unable to motivate most people more than bad consequences that last ten years (or even just one year or one month).

5. Our human nature constrains us but also allows us considerable freedom in how we organize our societies. Compared to most of human existence, things are very good today in western nations. We do not fear the arrival of some army within twenty years that will kill, rape, pillage, and destroy everything we have built. It is rare that others take our property or our lives. The vast majority of the time, our fellow citizens will help us achieve our goals if it doesn't inconvenience them much. To take a very simple case, in the grocery store aisles we move our cart to the side when we stop to let others get by. We have also created great prosperity, even for our poorer citizens. Entertainment via electronic devices is virtually limitless. We have eliminated serious infectious diseases, we have effective medicines for medical conditions that have plagued humanity throughout our past. And effective painkillers mean we don't have to die in agony any more.

6. We also can see so many ways that things could be better. People have somewhat different values. Some value greater independence and less government involvement in their lives, even if it means more suffering for those who are less well off. Others (including me) value the common good more, and seek reduced income inequality, a better social safety net, and less political power for the rich. We seek to reduce discrimination based on identities, such as race, sex and nationality. I value the rule of law, democracy, and an open society, the constellation that is perhaps the single most important thing under attack by Trump and his Republican allies.

7. Everything else. Here are the more mundane concerns of our lives that occupy 99% of our attention and effort. Eating, sleeping, working, socializing with others, sex, exercise, and TV shows. Bigger-ticket items here are getting a better-paying job or one with better working conditions, finding a life partner, and maintaining our health as best we are able.

A wise formulation of how to live life is to accept what cannot be changed, to work to change what can be changed, and to be wise enough to tell the difference. Items 1 through 3 above, the most important, are impervious to change.

Some of us take time to celebrate what we've achieved in point 5 and work to not lose what we've achieved. Some work to make things better regarding points 4 and 6. A very few put a lot of effort into them. Mostly we live our lives in category 7. And given our human nature, that is as it should be and how it has to be. But understanding the earlier six points is part of an authentic, grounded life.

I wonder how other people would formulate their big picture differently.

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.