Charles Murray, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” Cox & Murray, Inc.  2012, 306 pps  plus 47 pgs of Appendices & 30 pgs of notes

Murray examines fifty years of data which demonstrates that America has dramatically separated into upper and lower classes that are so unlike one-another that they may as well be from distinctly separate cultures.  The upper class now lives in communities (often gated) surrounded mostly by their own kind while the lower classes are similarly surrounded by only their own kind.     

The book traces the cultural separation occurring from before-1960 to the present.  Before the 1960s, Americans of all classes participated in a traditional common culture of civic and social engagement that valued marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity — known as "American exceptionalism".  No longer; those exceptional virtues are rapidly dissolving among the lower classes where family and community life has largely eroded.

My Notes:

Pg. 8:  Economists have reconstructed poverty rates for 1949 and found that 41 percent of Americans were below the poverty line.  Therefore, by 1963 when poverty rates were at 20 percent, no one was particularly exercised about it as this represented a vast improvement from 1949.   In responses to a Gallup poll taken in 1963, 95 percent of the respondents said they were working class (50 percent) or middle class (45 percent).  A great many poor people were refusing to identify themselves as lower class, and a great many affluent people were refusing to identify themselves as upper class.

Pg. 11:  This book is about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever known.  If this divergence continues, it will end what has made America America. It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship. 

Pg. 13:  This book uses evidence based overwhelmingly on whites in the description of the new upper class and on the lower class.  This is done to forestall conclusions that the stresses described can be remedied by attacking the legacy of racism or by restricting immigration.  The trends described exist independently of ethnic heritage.  However, the trends do affect all ethnic groups mostly the same.

Pg. 19:  The narrow elite, at the top, are those who have risen to jobs that directly affect the nation’s culture, economy, and politics.  These fewer than a hundred thousand people, and perhaps only ten thousand or so mostly run America. These are the top media personalities, legislators, judges, generals, etc.

Pg. 46:  Four developments took us from a set of people who ran the nation but were culturally diverse to a new upper class that increasingly lives in a world of its own.  The culprits are the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy (homogamy is marriage to people with similar characteristics). 

Pg. 50:  Sometime from the late 1980s through the late 1990s there was a phenomenal growth in top incomes.  From 1960 through the early 1990s, the top centile of American families had incomes that began at around $200, 000 (all figures in 2010 dollars).  Then in 1994 the bottom end of this top centile careened up from $233,000 to $433,000.  In March 2010 the 95^th centile for working-aged Americans began at $199,000 and the 99^th centile at $441,000, remembering that $441,000 is the bottom of the top centile.

Pg. 62:  In 1960, just 3 percent of American couples both had a college degree.  By 2010, that proportion stood at 25 percent.  The change was so large that it was a major contributor to the creation of a new class all by itself.

Pg. 80:  The year 2010 probably marked the point at which births to white women were a minority of all births.  Whites will become a minority of the American population by midcentury if not sooner.  The 2010 census data revealed that Latinos now constitute 16 percent of the population and blacks 13 percent.

Pg. 130:  The four founding virtues are: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion.  Of these, two are virtues in themselves—industriousness and honesty—and two of them refer to institutions through which right behavior is nurtured—marriage and religion.

Addenda (taken from other reviews):

To emphasize that the new cultural divide is largely based on class, not race/ethnicity, Murray confines core sections of "Coming Apart" to comparing socio-cultural differences among middle-aged whites (age 30-49) in two communities: upper-middle-class Belmont, Mass., and working-class Fishtown, Pa. (Murray builds somewhat "fictionalized" versions of these communities through statistically adjusted models that control for age, race, income and occupation to heighten the contrasts between them.) Belmont represents perhaps 20% of the total U.S. population; Fishtown, about 30%.

Murray reveals alarming levels of social isolation and disengagement among Fishtown's working-class whites. By the early 2000s, only 48% were married, down from 84% in 1960; children living in households with both biological parents fell from 96% to 37%; the number of disabled quintupled from 2% to 10%; arrest rates for violent crime quadrupled from 125 to 592 per 100,000 people; and the percent attending church only once a year nearly doubled from 35% to 59%. In 2008, almost 12% of prime-age males with a high school diploma were "not in the labor force" — quadruple the percentage from the all-time low of 3% in 1968.

The well-educated, upper-middle-class whites in Murray's Belmont model fare far better: 83% are married; 84% of children reside in two-biological-parent homes; less than 1% are on disability, though nearly 40% attend church only once a year. Nearly all adult males are in the workforce.

For Murray, immigration is evidence that "America had jobs for everyone who wanted to work." He's rightly depressed by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's research findings of an inverse relationship between ethnic diversity and strong civic culture.