Murray’s Proposal for Reducing Cultural Inequality
Charles Murray proposes a remedy to what he calls growing cultural inequality between classes:
When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.
Changing life in the SuperZIPs requires that members of the new upper class rethink their priorities. Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you’re not part of that America, you’ve stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.
So Murray’s solution appears to be telling members of the “new upper class” to change quite a few of the cultural habits that he has just described as part of what distinguishes them from everyone else. If he explained why they should or would do this, I must have missed it. Murray seems to hint at it briefly towards the beginning, and he appears to be interested in reviving the “common civic culture” whose unraveling he details, but he never makes an argument for why the “new upper class” should follow his advice. It’s implied that declining rates of marriage, religious practice, and “industriousness” among the “new lower class” are the real problems that need to be fixed, but the remedy appears to be little more than encouraging the “core of civic virtue” in “Fishtown” by validating “the values and standards they continue to uphold.” That may be encouraging for the people whose habits are being validated, but it doesn’t tell us why the people currently not practicing those habits are going to have much incentive or reason to start.
If I have understood Murray’s argument, the cultural separation between classes became self-reinforcing decades ago, and increasing separation and isolation will keep happening “no matter what.” As he writes elsewhere in the op-ed:
The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class.
The separation that Murray has identified will keep happening and can’t really be slowed, much less reversed, by any policy mechanism, but he thinks that the SuperZIP-dwellers can partly remedy this by rejecting isolation:
Everyone in the new upper class has the monetary resources to make a wide variety of decisions that determine whether they engage themselves and their children in the rest of America or whether they isolate themselves from it. The only question is which they prefer to do.
The trouble here is that Murray has just thoroughly detailed which choice they prefer, and he hasn’t given them much of a reason to choose differently, except to say that the places they live are “sterile,” their way of life is “self-limiting,” and they are “stripping” themselves of much of what makes “being an American special.” What is missing throughout the op-ed is any appeal to republican or democratic principles, civic duty, national unity, or social solidarity. Perhaps he thinks the reasons to do as he advises are obvious and don’t require explanation, but it is a curious omission. Murray clearly believes that the “new upper class” ought to engage “in the rest of America” to reduce cultural inequality, and he wants it to be strictly voluntary, but he gives no clear reason why anyone should volunteer.
P.S. Even though Murray has described the “great divide” in America in terms of culturally separated classes rather than in terms of increased economic inequality, it is likely that someone like Romney doesn’t see this divide and might not find much wrong with it if he did.
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Wow, what a terrible article. Typical Wall Street Journal elitism.
Murray seems to be ignoring the simple fact that class isolation stems from economics – people who make more money tend to buy houses and do things that their money allows them to do, leaving them socializing with people who live similarly. A lot of this is driven by simple zoning. You don’t get big fancy new houses built in lower middle class areas. You don’t get tract homes built in upscale neighborhoods. It takes money to buy ski equipment, boats, golf club memberships, and many of the recreational pursuits that people with money pursue.
So this is all pretty inevitable once you get whole classes of people making a lot more money than other classes of people. The solution is way too obvious: reduce income inequality. Murray doesn’t want to argue that, because no one making more money wants to actually allow his choices to be limited by actually making less money. So he comes up with this false solution, of asking people who make money not to spend it on things they actually want, and spend their time doing what their money allows them to do, or live in the places their money lets them afford. Who is honestly going to do that? A few, perhaps, but only because they happen to have more modest tastes and desires. It’s not as if people make money these days by communitarian pursuits, quite the opposite. But somehow the mindset of those who pursue money is supposed to change after they make it. Not likely.
Agree with IanH above.
Re: from the Murray article: “If you are invited to a dinner party by one of Washington’s power elite, the odds are high that you will be going to a home in Georgetown, the rest of Northwest D.C., Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac or McLean, comprising 13 adjacent ZIP Codes in all. If you rank all the ZIP Codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that 11 of these 13 D.C.-area ZIP Codes are in the 99th percentile and the other two in the 98th. Ten of them are in the top half of the 99th percentile.”
The irony is that while the people in Fishtown may not have jobs at all, the Power Elites in Washington are parasites sucking on the Government teat either directly or indirectly. Lawyers, K Street lobbyists, overpaid Think Tank squatters like Murray – all tethered one way or another to the Leviathan.
Most guests at one of those dinner parties produce nothing more tangible than opinions and political grease. Likewise, the Bankster Class merely moves electrons from the Wall Street offices of Las Vegas on the Hudson.
The dirty little secret is that a huge percentage of SuperZip jobs are by and large as economically irrelevant as the ones the Fishtowners had lost. Only the Power Elites smugly game the system and will fatten their bank accounts until the implosion.
“P.S. Even though Murray has described the “great divide” in America in terms of culturally separated classes rather than in terms of increased economic inequality, it is likely that someone like Romney doesn’t see this divide and might not find much wrong with it if he did.”
Romney, always Romney, Daniel, as opposed to Obama, that great democrat and former community organizer, who takes his family to the down-scale and nonexclusive island of Martha’s Vineyard for his annual vacation (except for that time two years ago when he went to the BP devastated Gulf Coast for a day to placate the hoi polloi before beating a hasty retreat to MV), whose wife takes expensive trips to stay in exensive hotels on the Costa del Sol, and whose two daughters attend that inexpensive, nonexclusive private school in Northwest Washington Sidwell-Friends. Or maybe you meant that great champion of the lower black and sometimes white lower classe, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who would have lived in inner-city Washington near those afflicted persons whose cause he championed but couldn’t find such a place overlooking the Potomac, so he had to settle on McLean, Virginia. But Kennedy did make it a point to vacation in such downscale locations as Martha’s Vineyard and Palm Beach.
Romney is the one babbling about class warfare and “dividing America” the moment that anyone raises questions about things he would prefer not to talk about, including income inequality. Murray’s argument is one attempt to account for the divisions in society that Romney doesn’t think exist.
Murray said:
“It’s not that white working class males can no longer make a “family wage” that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960.”
I like to see where he gets those numbers. This only makes sense to me if he does not factor in the increase in housing prices since 1960. This oped disagrees sharply with Murray on this point and I think is more accurate:
“”But the working class is not a cultural vanguard confidently leading the way toward a postmodern lifestyle. Rather, it is a group making constrained choices. For the most part, these are people who would like to marry before having kids but who don’t think they are economically ready.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703618504575459994284873112.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
So I take it Murray lives in Anacostia?
What’s so bad about distinct subcultures? What would TS Eliot say about Murray’s argument?
“So I take it Murray lives in Anacostia?”
He lives near Brunswick, MD a small town which is 92% white.
It’s Charles Murray. Expecting truth from him is like expecting fidelity from Gingrich.