Coming Apart
A Book Review
In his book Coming Apart, Charles Murray evaluates the separation of the upper and lower classes in America. He compares and illustrates the changes in American life between November 21st 1963 and today’s (2010) America. In this book review I will highlight his main points and relate these things to family processes.
The Upper Class
Narrow Elite: top influential people in the nation: lawyers, judges who shape laws, news, Hollywood, top academics, politicians (a few 100 or 10 thousand people, top 1% of Americans).
Broad Elite: top influential people in cities/regions, top 5% most successful people in America: military, business management, same list as narrow elite. 69% married, age 25+
The elite classes are ISOLATED from and ignorant about mainstream America geographically, economically, educationally, and culturally, politically.
“Good things [are] happening to the cognitive elite that are not open to the rest of America” –Charles Murray Coming Apart page 34
Residential Sorting
“The upper class live in a world far removed from ordinary America”
–Charles Murray Coming Apart page 91
· Super zips- extremely rich neighborhoods
· “Attraction to elite-ness” pg. 85
· Upper class in isolation and ignorance
Q: Why did the upper class become less similar to the middle class?
1. Market Value of Brains – intellectual capital in the marketplace became more valuable. “All the benefits of economic growth from 1970 – 2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution” –Charles Murray Coming Apart page 50
2. College Sorting – 59% of Tier 1 college attendees came from families in the top quartile. The applicant pool is biased, especially toward those from the Northeast private schools. There is NOT FAIR OPPORTNITY for poor smart kids as there is for rich smart kids. (See page 59)
3. Homogamy – Kids are smart because their parents are smart. Rich smart kids marry other rich smart kids.
Positive Changes Since 1963
The upper class is credited with economic growth and improved standard of living. Upgrade of cognitive talent resulted in better products, medicine, innovation, globalization and more.
The upper class is a culture, removed from everyone else; its not just money, its congregations of talented people controlling our country (see page 123).
The New Lower Class
The 1960’s counter youth culture revolution was the beginning of endless change in America. In the 1960’s industriousness, honesty (low crime), marriage, religiosity, and virtue were common across the country (see page 135-136). Now all these variables are up in the air for the lower class. One could cite many social and political problems today, but the mere fact that these problems have arose is a sign that America is changing. “The fact that we are changing the constitution means America is changing” –Charles Murray Coming Apart page 50. On page 143 Murray sites founders who taught that our constitution was made only for moral and religious people.
To better illustrate the differences between the upper and lower classes, Murray creates two representational towns: Belmont for the upper class and Fishtown for the lower class. The trends he presents for each city represents the reality of each class across America. He examines and compares four “Founding Virtues” of America: industriousness, Honesty, Marriage, and Religiosity. I will try to highlight the main trends in each category, but if you’re looking to get a more holistic picture, glance through the graphs in chapters 8-11. Look at the drastic changes in Fishtown! This chart I made is based on my reading of the graphs, so the numbers aren’t exact.
Keep in mind that this chart is not real data- just an “at-a-glance” summary of the charts in the book. To sum up, here are the basic trends:
Lower Class in America: less marriage, more divorce, more non-marital child bearing, more unemployment, less people working full time, more arrests (for violent and property crimes), more in prison, less religiosity, less church attendance, more secular. The size of the white new lower class has doubled since 1960.
Lower class Americans don’t work or don’t have consistent jobs, have children but don’t get married, and live in dangerous communities where everyone is isolated from everyone.
Upper Class in America: slightly less marriage, lots of stable, two parent households, a tiny bit more unemployment, but lots of stable jobs, lots of working hours, practically no crime, and less arrests for property crime, more secularism and less church attendance—but not as drastic as the lower class.
Upper class Americans are still getting married, have good jobs, and associate with other people with families and economic stability.
Bottom line: THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT AMERICAS
“Marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes.” –Charles Murray Coming Apart page 153
Why does it matter?
“The trends signify damage to the heart of American community and the ways in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives. Many of the best and most exceptional qualities of American cultures cannot survive unless the trends are reversed.”
–Charles Murray Coming Apart page 239
Community life, associations and neighborliness, and helping one another were common in urban and rural areas alike. The poor and the rich used to know each other. There has been a decline in social capital by civil disengagement. Voting and social trust are down, and it’s the worst among those in the lower class.
Aristotle said: “Happiness consists of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.” In chapter 15, Murray argues that things that bring true satisfaction must be important to the individual; he must put forth effort; and he must be able to take credit for the success. Responsibility for satisfaction is essential. The “stuff of life” in which one could find satisfaction is family, vocation, community, and faith. These four elements have greatly diminished among American poor. “Everything that makes America exceptional will have disappeared” if things continue in the direction they are going.
“WE ARE DIVISIBLE in terms of class, not race.”
“The alternative to the Europe Syndrome is to say that your life can have transcendent meaning if it is spent doing important things—raising a family, supporting yourself, being a good friend and a good neighbor, learning what you can do well and then doing it as well as you possibly can. Providing the best possible framework for doing those things is what the American project is all about. What I say that the American project is in danger, that’s the nature of the loss I have in mind: the loss of the framework through which people can best pursue happiness” (pg. 288).
“America’s creative minority has turned into a dominant minority” (pg 291). We know this because of the upper class’s stand is “non-judgmentalism” instead of teaching and sharing their values, or “what works” with the lower class.
Murray comments on the Government’s ineffectiveness to help strengthen families and alleviate poverty. “The family has responsibility for doing important things that wont get done unless the family does them. When the government tries to do these things, families and communities disintegrate.” (pg. 286) “Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, ‘I made a difference’” (Murray pg. 287). “They (those who run this country) will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth” (Murray pg. 304). “The United States is one of the richest countries on earth. Most Americans make enough money for themselves and their families that the entire welfare state could be dismantled tomorrow and they would do just fine. And yet, in 2002, as I was writing In Our Hands the federal government alone spent about $1.5 trillion in transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, and all forms of corporate welfare. The states spent another few hundred billion dollars in transfer payments. And yet we still have millions of people in need. That’s what I mean by ridiculous. How, in a country where most people don’t need a penny of income transfers to begin with, can we spend $1.5 trillion dollars on income transfers and still have material want?” (Murray pg. 307) “We have been the product of the cultural capital bequeathed to us by the system the founders laid down: a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with one another. Discard that system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we have loved about Americans will go away” (Murray pg. 309).
“How much do you value what has made America exceptional, and what are you willing to do to preserve it?” (Murray pg. 309)
“What it comes down to is that America’s new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different. The drift away from those qualities...is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional” (Murray pg. 310).
As you can see from these excerpts, Murray raised a powerful argument about class schism in America and calls for everyone, especially the influential people at the top, to reflect on what kind of country we really want to live in and what we need to do to change it.
