Well, I'm not going to argue with you either, but I consulted my alternate old friend, the Gray Lady, in addition to my usual old friend, Google. In the end, though, a brief Krugman note sent me to this long review by David Frum, apostate conservative, in , of all places, the Daily Beast, home of that ridiculous Niall Ferguson article that sort of started the week here. Starts at thedailybeast.com , continues at
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I read a bit about Murray's latest when it came out, my conclusion was considerably shallower than Frum's lengthy takedown. Murray knew where he was going - basically the same shtick as the Bell Curve, the wealthy deserve what they have, and the lesser among us deserve what we have too. The lower class deserves squat because they're worth squat. Frum, knowing the territory a lot better, pulls in a much richer context, but ends up in pretty much the same place. I was going to try to pull out key parts of this long piece, cross-reference it with the other stuff I turned up, but who am I kidding? Back from when I first brought up Murray, you wrote:
Murray has performed a valuable service We as a Nation need to have a conversation, and not a shouting match, about whether Murray's thesis and statistics are true enough and if so why, and if not, why?
Murray has performed a valuable service all right, but for whom? Hint: who's paying him for his valuable service? You'll either read Frum and catch on that Murray isn't all that interested in such a conversation, or not. Frum seems much more interested that Murray in such a conversation, which is probably why, unlike Murray, he was cast out of AEI. Anyway, here's the conclusion of that long review, in case you don't feel like plowing through it. You might want to go directly through the link for better formatting, indication of the direct quotes from Murray below didn't come through SI's lame-o editor.
And anyway, really, when you get right down to it, Murray does not really want to do anything for that bottom 80%, because his most bedrock condition is that the bottom 80% deserve their nasty and deteriorating fate.
[A]n intellectual underpinning of the welfare state is that, at bottom, human beings are not really responsible for the things they do. People who do well do not deserve what they have gotten - they got it because they were born into the right social stratum. Or if they did well despite being born poor and disadvantaged, it was because the luck of the draw gave them personal qualities that enabled them to succeed. People who do badly do not deserve it either. They were born into the wrong social stratum, or were handicapped by personal weaknesses that were not their fault. Thus it is morally appropriate to require the economically successful to hand over most of what they have earned to the state, and it is inappropriate to say of anyone who drifts in and out of work that he is lazy or irresponsible.
Science, he predicts, will shortly discredit these absurd ideas.
Pending that day, the great challenge ahead is to repeat and insist that "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."
And for those of us for whom life is sweet and getting sweeter? Who discover that we are becoming ever richer than 95% or 99% or 99.9% of our fellow citizens? Who can ever more easily afford to buy more of the good things of life even as the great majority of Americans are discovering that the global marketplace will pay less and less for their work? (I began this fifth post in a restaurant in London's Mayfair district where the cheapest appetizer cost more than the average hourly wage in the United States.)
For us, Murray recommends that we "take a close look at [our] lives, and ask whether those lives are impoverished in some of the ways [described in a passage a few paragraphs back about the spiritual deprivation of the materially rich], and then think about ways to change. I am not suggesting that people in the new upper class class should sacrifice their self-interest. I just want to accelerate a rediscovery of what that self-interest is."
It's tempting to sign off here with a joke or jibe that the new upper class seems to have a very good idea of where their self-interest lies, and it is "the good old rule, the simple plan, let them keep who have the power, and let them take who can."
But no. Give the author the final word, and let him explain what he means. What then is our self-interest in a country where it is no longer just an underclass few who are "losing ground" but now the overwhelming majority?
Here are the words that immediately follow the above quoted words about the rediscovery of self-interest:
Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us. A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding - and more fun - to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.
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 can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation or victories on specific Supreme Court cases, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are talking again about why American is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it has been: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.
That's the end of the answer and the end of the book. I leave it to each reader to assess for himself or herself what to think of such an answer to what Charles Murray himself identifies as the supreme social problem of our times. |
