Book of the week: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray

last updated 8 January 2015

“Charles Murray is back, and the debate about wealth and inequality will never be the same,” said Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal. With Coming Apart, the conservative sociologist and co-author of The Bell Curve has delivered “a richly detailed corrective” to the idea, popularized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, that what divides America is simple income inequality. Murray agrees that a fissure exists, but his survey yields evidence of a deeper cultural cleavage, even among white Americans. A “new upper class,” he says, has unwittingly contributed to the creation of a near-permanent caste system by completely isolating itself socially from an undereducated lower class. Murray’s “cognitive elite” aren’t selfish heathens: They work hard, stay married, dote on their children, and attend church or synagogue. It’s across town that traditional values seem to be collapsing.

Engagement from the Right on this problem is long overdue, said Niall Ferguson in Newsweek. Murray’s work now ranks as “by far the best available analysis of modern American inequality,” and it starts with his suggestion that we think of white America as living in distinct communities—“Belmont” for the elite and “Fishtown” for the undereducated. In Belmont, the natives perpetuate their advantages in our knowledge-based economy by sending their children to top-tier schools and seeing that they marry only their own kind. In Fishtown, marriage, industriousness, and religion are meanwhile in steep decline, depriving individuals of the traditional pillars of happy, successful lives. Murray doesn’t ask for a government solution, as a liberal would; he proposes instead that the residents of Belmont choose for themselves to reconnect in meaningful ways with Fishtown.

If only he hadn’t attempted to explain why the breakdown occurred, said Roger Lowenstein in Bloomberg Businessweek. When the topic is civic virtues, “Murray’s description of past American exceptionalism is as inspiring as any I have read,” and “only occasionally” do his “moralism and finger-wagging offend.” But in the last third of the book, he casts aside arguments from evidence and instead heaps blame blindly on “the welfare state”—never explaining why social cohesion is weaker today than in the 1960s, when government assistance to the poor was significantly higher. Perhaps the distorted incentives created by government aid have kept the poor down and the rich idle, but Murray falls far short of proving it. Read him for his “incisive, alarming” portrait of a divided America, not his “hugely frustrating” analysis of the causes.