Charles Murray, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010,” Cox & Murray, 2012, 357 pp.
Theme: Family, Vocation, Community, and Faith are the essential elements in a civilization through which one attains a satisfying life. (I would add income).
I read this book as it was mentioned many times in other books I have been reading as well as by those I follow on Twitter. Only when I was halfway through did I realize I had previously read and reported on this book in 2013, shortly after it came out. When I reviewed those previous notes, I surmised I had been less than thorough, so I continued and read the entire book again. This book is so full of facts and graphs that a second reading is not a waste of time and its content is still pertinent in 2018, even though the book was written in 2012. The thrust of this book is that our nation is coming apart at the seams—not ethnic seams, but the seams of cognitive ability. The author's case is made first by concentrating only on whites—later the author presents evidence that the same coming apart applies as well to Blacks and Hispanics.
In 1963 we had rich and poor and they were much alike one-to-another, the poor were not all that aware that they were poor, I was brought up in that White environment. Ozzie and Harriet’s world is not an inaccurate portrayal of the community values of 1963 white society—all of it, rich and poor. By 2010 those with at least one BA degree in the family continued to maintain their 1963 values. Not so much for those with only a High School degree or less. Additionally, the rich and poor by 2010 now live in separate neighborhoods and tend to communicate and socialize only with those like themselves—consequently, these rich and poor communities no longer share the same values nor do they belong to the same community institutions nor do they intermarry in any significant amount.
As a literary device, the author has created two fictional communities (based on real ones); the poorer community is represented by Fishtown to represent the poorer community and the richer community by Belmont. Fishtown residents have high school degrees or less, single parenting is prevalent--this is the manual blue-collar community. Belmont residents, on the other hand, have households where at least one of the couples has a BA degree or higher, most are married, and at least one has a professional job. Belmont, containing the cognitive elite, represents perhaps 20% of the total U.S. population; Fishtown, about 30%
The author 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--minus the gates. It is important to note that the data in most of the book is confined to whites, in most instances between the ages of 30 to 49. Murray says he chose to focus on whites so he could conduct his analysis of changes in American society “independently of ethnic heritage.” He omits Asians and Hispanics because most are relatively recent arrivals, just as having African origins brings burdens of its own. This leaves some 200 million people—now 69 percent of the population, down from its 90 percent height of the population in 1950. (I think the author's literary approach may have had something to do with all the flack he received for his previous participation in the 1994 publication of The Bellcurve: a book I feel is so important that I have bought my own copy).
The author 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 Fishtown classes where family and community life has largely eroded.
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. (For the non-religious it is important to not overlook the contribution that religious institutions make to the sense of community, regardless of whether you believe the doctrine).
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. However, nearly 40% attend church only once a year. Almost all adult males are in the workforce. In other words, they remain culturally much the same as in 1963. except for church attendance.
My Notes:
Pg. 4f: In 1963 only 3.5 percent of American households were headed by a divorced person with another 1.6 percent headed by a separated person. Marriage percentages for college grads and high school dropouts were about the same (only 8 percent had college degrees (only 3 percent of couples both had a degree—by 2010 this would change to 25 percent; 1963 neighborhoods were not segregated on the basis of education). The 1963 median family income of people working in managerial occupations and the professions was $62,000 (2010 dollars are used here and in the entire book) and fewer than 1 percent had incomes of $200K or more. The average price of all new homes was $129K. Cost of living from the perspective of 2010 wasn’t cheaper then than now. Notably, in 1963 more than 80 percent of married women with young children were not working outside the home. Rich or poor, it was not socially respectable to be adult, male, and idle. Only 1 percent said they did not have a religious preference and over half had attended church in the past seven days. Illegal drugs were rare but drinking was rampant.
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. 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 author establishes later in the book that the trends do affect all ethnic groups mostly the same when the groups are cognitively the same).
Pg. 19: The narrow elites, 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. 27: Life was not cheaper in 1963 than in 2010: Eggs at $3.92 (2010 dollars), a gallon of milk $3.49, Chicken $2.06 lb., and a sirloin steak $6.80 a pound, etc. [However, Education and medical care were much cheaper, I would point out].
Pg. 46: Four developments took us from a set of people who ran the nation but were culturally diverse to a new (governing) upper class that increasingly lives in a world of its own. The four developments 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 95th centile for working-aged Americans began at $199,000 and the 99th 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. 76: The author identifies 14 ‘Super-Zip code areas in the U.S. These were considered elite neighborhoods in the 1960s as well as in 2000. In 1960 the median percentage of adults in these zip codes was 26 percent and the median household income was $84K; in 2000 this had changed to 67 percent with a college degree and a median household salary of $163K (all in 2010 dollars). These are the neighborhoods where most of the nation’s decision-makers live and they have little contact with those not living in their neighborhood. Only 10 percent of these people are doctrinaire conservatives, 64 % are doctrinaire liberals.
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. See The American FactFinder tool at the Bureau of the Census website.
Pg. 130: In America in the 1770s the four founding virtues were: 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.
Pg. 144f: The real Belmont, zip code 02478, centile 97, is a suburb of Boston and the home of people who are mostly in the upper-middle class. Median family income is $124, 200 in 2000 and 63 percent of the adults had BAs. The real Fishtown, zip code 19125, centile 8, is located in the north-eastern part of Philadelphia. It has been a white working-class neighborhood since the eighteenth century. Most get their HS diplomas and go straight to work—only 8 percent of the adults had college degrees in 2000.
Pg. 149f: The author has chosen to present class divergence in marriage as one of the important markers because over the last half-century marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes. Around 1970 marriage took a nosedive that lasted for nearly twenty years and those not living with spouses doubled. (This book has a great many graphs on this subject).
Pg. 170: The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits rose from 0.7 percent in 1960 to 5.3 percent in 2010 and the trend line continues up, adding evidence of the weakening work ethic and this decay is mostly confined to those in the Fishtown profile.
Pg. 181: America experienced a social and economic revolution from the early 1970s to the early 1990s: the percentage of white women in the labor force rose from 40 percent in 1960 to 74 percent by 1995. In the fifteen years after 1995, little changed, it was 75 percent in 2000. This was true for both Fishtown and Belmont.
Pg. 190: For every 100,000 Fishtowners ages 18-65 in 1974, 213 were imprisoned; by 2004 that number was up to 957. And those numbers are based on just state and federal prisoners. They don’t count people in jails, who amounted to around 100,000 whites in 1974 and 317,000 whites in 2004. In contrast, the parallel numbers for Belmont were 13 in 1974 and 27 in 2004.
Pg. 193: There has been a dramatic reduction in crime that began in the early 1990s and continued into the 2000s. As of 2009, the FBI's overall crime index was 40 percent below its 1991 peak. Fishtown has shared in the reduction in crime, but the levels of arrests in Fishtown, especially for violent crime, remain far above their levels of earlier decades.
Pg. 200: Religion’s role as a source of social capital is huge. Nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. However, there is one characteristic that Fishtown and Belmont share: both have experienced a sharp rise since 1980 who have said they have no religion. There is also a large disengagement of those who claim to be believers but seldom go to church.
Pg. 226: The author defines the threshold of ‘making a living’ as earning an income large enough that it puts a household of two above the poverty line—in 2010, an income of $14,634. As of 2010, a married man without children could have done it if he worked 50.5 weeks at a minimum-wage job.
Pg. 227: Scholars have retrospectively calculated the poverty rate back as far as the 1940 census, showing that poverty then stood at more than 50 percent of the American population.
Pg. 228: For Fishtown men, the percentage who weren’t making a living started to increase in 1974 and continued to increase through good times and bad. In 2007, when unemployment was still low, that percentage had hit 27 percent, more than triple the rate in 1973.
Pg. 234: Many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable. (I disagree here: my opinion on all of these except the inheritance tax has changed).
Pg. 247: The scariest message of this book is that the raw material that makes community even possible has diminished so much in Fishtown that the situation may be beyond retrieval. That raw material is social trust—a generalized expectation that the people around you will do the right thing. The existence of social trust is an explanation of why some cultures create wealth and other cultures are mired in poverty. At the community level, it is hard to think of any form of social capital that would exist without trust.
Pg. 255: The domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfaction in life are—family, vocation, community, and faith, with these provisos: Community can embrace people who are scattered geographically. Vocation can include avocations or causes. The stuff of life occurs within those four domains. (I believe intellectual pursuits are every bit as important).
Pg. 302: Since colonial days, America has periodically been swept by religious movements known as Great Awakenings. Each was characterized by powerful preachers, revivalism, and evangelical enthusiasm. The first began in the mid-1720s and reached its apex in the late 1730s. The second began around 1800 and lasted until 1840. The beginning of the third is dated variously from the 1860s to 1890 and continued into the early 1900s. Each of the three had a political aftermath in which the new ethics precipitated powerful political programs and movements. The First Great Awakening set the stage for the American Revolution. The Second was instrumental in the spread of the temperance movement, compulsory elementary education, abolitionism, and the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement. The Third laid the ethical basis for the reforms of the New Deal and later the civil rights movement.
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