I sent around recently the WSJ excerpt from Charles Murray's new book (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2012/01/new-american-divide.html), Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307453421/tilsoncapitalpar), which David Brooks highlights in his op ed in the NYT:

Since then, America has polarized. The word "class" doesn't even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

The upper tribe is now segregated from the lower tribe. In 1963, rich people who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan lived close to members of the middle class. Most adult Manhattanites who lived south of 96th Street back then hadn't even completed high school. Today, almost all of Manhattan south of 96th Street is an upper-tribe enclave.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you're born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you'll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you'll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he's mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don't come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray's story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society's resources. But that's a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

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January 30, 2012

The Great Divorce

By DAVID BROOKS

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinion/brooks-the-great-divorce.html

I'll be shocked if there's another book this year as important as Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." I'll be shocked if there's another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.