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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 Paperback – January 29, 2013

by Charles Murray (Author)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating explanation for why white America has become fractured and divided in education and class, from the acclaimed author of Human Diversity.

“I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.”—David Brooks, New York Times

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.

Print length

432 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Forum Books
Publication date

January 29, 2013
Dimensions

5.19 x 0.9 x 7.96 inches
ISBN-10

030745343X
ISBN-13

978-0307453433
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Mr. Murray's sobering portrait is of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness.”—W. Bradford Wilcox, The Wall Street Journal

“Coming Apart brims with ideas about what ails America."—The Economist

“A timely investigation into a worsening class divide no one can afford to ignore.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Charles Murray] argues for the need to focus on what has made the U.S. exceptional beyond its wealth and military power . . . religion, marriage, industriousness, and morality.”—Booklist (starred review)

“[Charles Murray] has written an incisive, alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American society.”—Roger Lowenstein, Bloomberg Businessweek

About the Author

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention in 1984 with Losing Ground. His subsequent books include In Pursuit, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, In Our Hands, and Real Education. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Our Kind of People

In which is described the emergence of a new and distinctive culture among a highly influential segment of American society.

ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1987, ABC premiered an hour-long dramatic series with the cryptic title thirtysomething. The opening scene is set in a bar. Not a Cheers bar, where Cliff the mailman perches on a bar stool alongside Norm the accountant and Frasier the psychiatrist, but an airy room, perhaps attached to a restaurant, with sunlight streaming in through paned windows onto off-white walls.

The room is crowded with an upscale clientele gathered for drinks after work, nattily uniformed servers moving among them. Two women in their late twenties or early thirties wearing tailored business outfits are seated at a table. A vase with a minimalist arrangement of irises and forsythia is visible in the background. On the table in front of the women are their drinks- both of them wine, served in classic long-stemmed glasses. Nary a peanut or a pretzel is in sight. One of the women is talking about a man she has started dating. He is attractive, funny, good in bed, she says, but there's a problem: He wears polyester shirts. "Am I allowed to have a relationship with someone who wears polyester shirts?" she asks.

She is Hope Murdoch, the female protagonist. She ends up marrying the man who wore the polyester shirts, who is sartorially correct by the time we see him. Hope went to Princeton. She is a writer who put a promising career on hold when she had a baby. He is Michael Steadman, one of two partners in a fledgling advertising agency in Philadelphia. He went to the University of Pennsylvania (the Ivy League one). Hope and Michael live with their seven-month-old daughter in an apartment with high ceilings, old-fashioned woodwork, and etched-glass windows. Grad-school-like bookcases are untidily crammed with books. An Art Deco poster is on the wall. A Native American blanket is draped over the top of the sofa.

In the remaining forty-five minutes, we get dialogue that includes a reference to left brain/right brain differences and an exchange about evolutionary sexual selection that begins, "You've got a bunch of Australopithecines out on the savanna, right?" The Steadmans buy a $278 baby stroller (1987 dollars). Michael shops for new backpacking gear at a high-end outdoors store, probably REI. No one wears suits at the office. Michael's best friend is a professor at Haverford. Hope breast-feeds her baby in a fashionable restaurant. Hope can't find a babysitter. Three of the four candidates she interviews are too stupid to be left with her child and the other is too Teutonic. Hope refuses to spend a night away from the baby ("I have to be available to her all the time"). Michael drives a car so cool that I couldn't identify the make. All this, in just the first episode.

The culture depicted in thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects, and whose sex lives were emotionally complicated and therefore needed to be talked about. The male leads in thirtysomething were on their way up through flair and creativity, not by being organization men. The female leads were conflicted about motherhood and yet obsessively devoted to being state-of-the-art moms. The characters all possessed a sensibility that shuddered equally at Fords and Cadillacs, ranch homes in the suburbs and ponderous mansions, Budweiser and Chivas Regal.

In the years to come, America would get other glimpses of this culture in Mad About You, Ally McBeal, Frasier, and The West Wing, among others, but no show ever focused with the same laser intensity on the culture that thirtysomething depicted-understandably, because the people who live in that culture do not make up much of the audience for network television series, and those who are the core demographic for network television series are not particularly fond of the culture that thirtysomething portrayed. It was the emerging culture of the new upper class.

Let us once again return to November 21, 1963, and try to find its counterpart.

The Baseline

The World of the Upper-Middle Class

Two conditions have to be met before a subculture can spring up within a mainstream culture. First, a sufficient number of people have to possess a distinctive set of tastes and preferences. Second, they have to be able to get together and form a critical mass large enough to shape the local scene. The Amish have managed to do it by achieving local dominance in selected rural areas. In 1963, other kinds of subcultures also existed in parts of the country. Then as now, America's major cities had distinctive urban styles, and so did regions such as Southern California, the Midwest, and the South. But in 1963 there was still no critical mass of the people who would later be called symbolic analysts, the educated class, the creative class, or the cognitive elite.

In the first place, not enough people had college educations to form a critical mass of people with the distinctive tastes and preferences fostered by advanced education. In the American adult population as a whole, just 8 percent had college degrees. Even in neighborhoods filled with managers and professionals, people with college degrees were a minority- just 32 percent of people in those jobs had college degrees in 1963. Only a dozen census tracts in the entire nation had adult populations in which more than 50 percent of the adults had college degrees, and all of them were on or near college campuses.

In the second place, affluence in 1963 meant enough money to afford a somewhat higher standard of living than other people, not a markedly different lifestyle. In 1963, the median family income of people working in managerial occupations and the professions was only $61,500 (2010 dollars, as are all dollar figures from now on). Fewer than 5 percent of American families in 1963 had incomes of $100,000 or more, and fewer than half of 1 percent had incomes of $200,000 or more.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Forum Books; Reprint edition (January 29, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 030745343X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307453433
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 0.9 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #113,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Charles Murray

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Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of "Losing Ground," which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, "The Bell Curve" (Free Press, 1994), coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America's class structure. Murray's other books include "What It Means to Be a Libertarian" (1997), "Human Accomplishment" (2003), "In Our Hands" (2006), and "Real Education" (2008). His 2012 book, "Coming Apart" (Crown Forum, 2012), describes an unprecedented divergence in American classes over the last half century. His most recent book is "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission" (Crown Forum, 2015).

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Richard B. Schwartz

A Very Important Book

Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2012

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As many have argued, this is a very important book, perhaps the most important this year. The argument can be briefly summarized: the founding of our country was premised on the notion of virtuous behavior. Absent such behavior, the exceptional degree of personal freedom accorded by the Constitution would lead to failure rather than success. This virtuous behavior can also be correlated with individual happiness. The nexi for the relevant behaviors are: work, faith, community and family.

Industriousness can lead to wealth. More importantly, it leads to self-esteem based on accomplishment. Our desire to pursue a meaningful vocation bears on our personal happiness. The regular practice of faith has characterized the American project and can be shown as well to contribute to personal happiness. This is true as well for civic participation, neighborliness and philanthropy. Finally, the nuclear family with married biological parents contributes to both financial wellbeing and personal happiness.

In the 1950's there was considerable commonality across American society. Although there were differences in income there was much less cultural differentiation. Far more Americans watched The Beverly Hillbillies than now watch American Idol. Diets were similar; we drove American cars and there was a greater sense that `we all are members of the middle class'.

That commonality has now been lost. We have a society bifurcated by class (not, it should be noted, ethnicity). The successful, the `cognitive elite,' David Brooks's `bobos in paradise' live in a very different way than the poor. They eat radically different foods; they marry later; they watch far less television; they don't smoke; they drive foreign cars, and so on. Most important, they attend church far more regularly; they contribute to their communities; they work very, very hard and they have children within wedlock.

In short, the elites practice the virtues urged by the founders and confirmed by modern social science as having positive results. They do not, however, preach what they practice. They are studiously nonjudgmental. This is usually seen as `tolerance', though it could be viewed, conspiratorially, as their `keeping the secret to themselves' in order to sustain their elite position. I would put it this way: the elites have been enjoined never to discriminate with regard to race, class, gender, and so on, but they have neglected to notice that the word `discriminate' also is defined as `to use good judgment'. The former is important, but the latter is equally important. Elites should not remain silent for fear of offending if their silence contributes materially to human suffering.

Murray describes these two groups in terms of imaginary communities: `Belmont' and `Fishtown' and traces their attitudes and behaviors, their successes and their dysfunctionality. The discussion is confined to whites, but when minorities are brought into the equation the results (behavior > success/dysfunctionality) remain essentially the same.

While fearing the growth of dysfunctionality and the destruction of the American project, Murray holds out hope for other alternatives--first, that the elites will share their `secret' and speak up on behalf of virtuous behavior; second, that modern genetics, neuroscience and social science will demonstrate that the views of human nature that undergird the European welfare states will simply be proved to have been wrong and the ongoing implosion of those states will foster a reinforcement of American exceptionalism.

Needless to say, this is fiery material that will evoke passionate responses. The beauty of the book lies in the clarity of its argument, the use of a breadth of materials, from popular culture to Aristotelian notions of happiness, to modern survey research and the rigor with which it is presented. This is not a screed; it is an elegiac expression of hope that is deserving of wide and serious attention.

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Phil71

Making our way back to Fishtown

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2012

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"People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk." (Kindle Locations 894-895). Sales of Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, would have suffered if he had only written this sentence but the response wouldn't have been nearly as animated. However, Charles Murray and his writings have generated energetic responses for over 20 years. This paper briefly examines the truism of "birds of a feather" and the evidence Murray uses to justify his contention. I will also address my personal response and how it affects my duty toward social justice.

From 2000 until today I have lived approximately 10 years outside of the United States. I never "lived" in the United States during the past 12 years; I visited. When I was home, I was either celebrating holiday or beginning a new transition back overseas. Therefore I didn't invest myself; I didn't make the point to overtly observe nor acutely feel some of the growing divisions. Only in this last year, while transitioning to becoming an American again, have these dividing lines been obvious. This realization provoked me to read several interesting books detailing these apparent ruptures. Coming Apart has been an interesting read, because it challenges some of my more progressive leanings. However, the argument Murray makes is compelling, as it addresses some of the more dangerous topics in 21st century discourse: race, intelligence, and government intervention.

Murray's thesis introduces two hypothetical cities: Fishtown and Belmont. These two hypotheticals are based upon real cities with a few alterations: all the inhabitants are white and the age range is 30-49. Murray, whose previous bestseller The Bell Curve, was roundly criticized for drawing what some considered racist conclusions. When recently interviewed, Murray explained he limited his findings to white America in an attempt to avoid such claims. It is important to remember this caveat when looking at our first city, Fishtown 2010.
Fishtown has seen better days. It has been ravaged by a poor economy, high crime rate, and what some term a systematic moral decay. 40 percent of all children are born outside of marriage. This was once called wedlock, but that word now carries a pejorative connotation. Those who do marry will probably divorce. Fishtown residents are the working class, where 30 percent have at most a high school diploma and work (maybe) in a low paying job. Consequently, their income falls in the 8th percentile nationally. Also, two-thirds of the people who live in Fishtown are overweight and about a third are obese (Kindle Locations 581-582).

Belmont, our other real/fictional city, is the home to what Murray terms the cognitive elite. He defines the cognitive elite as the 20 percent of the American population who have a college degree and who work in occupations requiring a specific type of knowledge. These residents usually work in the fields of finance, IT, government, law, and medicine. These professionals stay married at a far higher rate than the working class in Belmont. They attend a religious service more often than the counterparts in Belmont. They are in the 97th percentile economically. Part of the reason their income is higher is because they work hard and for long hours. Another interesting distinction is Belmont residents are fanatic about monitoring caloric intake, eating whole grains, green vegetable, while avoiding red meat, processed food, and butter (Kindle Locations 605).

The city of ?, in which I grew up, is considered a Superzip. A SuperZip is where residents score between the 95th through the 99th percentile on a combined measure of income and education. Interestingly from Potomac to Ellicott City, Maryland is the largest contagious grouping of SuperZips in the United States. This means you can literally drive from Potomac to Ellicott City without leaving an area where 95 percent of its inhabitants are richer and better educated than all but a mere 5 percent of the overall population (Kindle Locations 1428-1429).

Murray takes us back to the idyllic year of 1963. A charming and good-looking president was gearing up for what everyone thought would be a contentious 1964 election. Three television stations ruled the airwaves. Walter Cronkite was not yet Uncle Walter. The Perry Como Show or Perry Mason were must see television. The white and blue collar often lived, worked, and played together. Certainly there was economic disparity but how pronounced was it? The most expensive homes in Chevy Chase cost $500,000 (adjusted to 2010 dollars). The "rich" drove a $50,000 Cadillac (adjusted), or a Buick if they didn't want to be perceived as ostentatious. "In Washington newspaper advertisements for November 1963, gas was cheaper, at the equivalent of $2.16 per gallon, but a dozen eggs were $3.92, a gallon of milk $3.49, chicken $2.06 a pound, and a sirloin steak $6.80 a pound"(Kindle Locations 449-451). These prices demonstrate that cost of living in 1963 was roughly equivalent to 2010. Another important fact to remember was that people working in high paying white collar professions made about $62,000. A little bit further up the salary food chain reveals fewer than 8 percent of American families made more than $100,000, and about 1 percent made $200,000 (Kindle Locations 424-426). The most obvious difference between the rich of 1963 and everyone else was that they just had more money (Kindle Location 489). This minor difference was soon to be replaced by countless others.

The OWS movement was intensifying soon after my return stateside. I spent several months discussing with friends. Slowly, it became clear how contentious economic theory is for many people. I often remarked, "It is called economic theory for a reason," only to be corrected on this naïve response. I would retort how the machinations of human behavior with the global exchanging of goods and services could be anything other than a theory. It seemed everyone was a politician, giving the party-line answer to their constituency. All I knew was that I wasn't running for office and was genuinely interested in the OWS demands.

"Homogamy refers to the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics. Educational homogamy occurs when individuals with similar educations have children. Cognitive homogamy occurs when individuals with similar cognitive ability have children" (Kindle Locations 1034-1036). A college education in 1960 was rare. Those who had earned a college degree numbered less than 10 percent and almost certainly didn't have parents who also were college graduates. It hadn't been that long when the men of Harvard and the women of Wellesley were not cognitively different than graduates of a state university. Murray writes that the assassination of the temperamentally non-confrontational Kennedy and the subsequent replacement with Lyndon Johnson "the master legislator," a perfect storm for the "Coming Apart" was approaching (Kindle Location 204).

After Dallas, November 1963, something unique began to occur. Large numbers of smart people began to send their children to the same schools. Murray writes, "The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the (Harvard) incoming class by 1960" (Kindle Location 931). Beginning in the 1960's the Ivy League became the meeting place for the cognitive elite. "Increased educational homogamy inevitably means increased cognitive homogamy" (Kindle Location 1052). It is from this sentence Murray's thesis springs. Children of high IQ parents, often successful and with money, began meeting on campuses reserved for biology's finest. Below are two quotes, the first detailing Yale in 1961 and the second detailing the 105 best universities in the United States in 1997.

The stratification became still more extreme during the 1960s. In 1961, 25 percent of Yale's entering class still had SAT verbal scores under 600. Just five years later, that figure had dwindled to 9 percent, while the proportion of incoming students with SAT verbal scores from 700 to 800 had increased from 29 to 52 percent (Kindle Locations 941-944).

Together, just 10 schools took 20 percent of all the students in the United States who scored in the top five centiles on the SAT or ACT. Forty-one schools accounted for half of them. All 105 schools, which accounted for just 19 percent of all freshmen in 1997, accounted for 74 percent of students with SAT or ACT scores in the top five centiles (Kindle Locations 953-956).

I remember Michael Steadman, a Penn graduate, and his wife Hope Murdoch, his Princeton educated wife. The television show thirtysomething was filled with smart, highly educated people talking about literature, child-rearing philosophies, while having Native American blankets in their homes as decoration. I remember watching many of these episodes as a college student. I still remember Michael and Hope having a heated argument whether to raise their daughter in the Jewish or Christian faith. I am not ashamed to say I remember the night Gary--Michael's best friend--died. Michael and Hope's conversation about her miscarriage is easily recalled. Michael consoled her by saying, "It is okay, we will have another baby," to which Hope replied, "But it won't be this baby." Though 18 at the time, I remember thinking how their responses felt familiar and authentic. If Michael and Hope were real, we can safely assume they are rich ($500,000 plus combined income), still married, and that their daughter eventually went to one of the 105 schools mentioned above. "The reason that upper-middle-class children dominate the population of elite schools is that the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children" (Kindle Locations 1021-1023). I will let the implications of that quote linger.

Michael and Hope were industrious, honest, faithful, and spiritual people. Murray would contend they embody the foundational traits upon which this country was built. They are emblematic of our "fictional" city Belmont. Sadly, I guess, the Steadman's long moved out of Fishtown, never to return. The once relatively heterogeneous neighborhoods of the 60's became increasingly homogeneous, both ways. "It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values--classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship" (Kindle Locations 239-240). Is there a way out of this spiral toward irrevocable division? Have we as a society already laid the foundation of our demise? Has the rewarding of the rich been more destructive or the enabling of the poor? Answers to these questions reflect our most deeply held convictions. As an educator, and more importantly a father, I must consider my legacy? Am I optimistic about this grand experiment called The United States of America? Is there anything I can accomplish or should my focus be concentrated on the people and circumstances I have direct contact?

My idea of social justice is that it needs to evolve according to context and to not become overly dogmatic. The debate this book has sparked is healthy. However, the tone of the debate disturbs me. I am often unable to decipher civility when people discuss important matters. Hidden agendas, obvious neurosis, poor inter-personal skills, and shallow understanding inflict the blogospheres and the airwaves. It is in these weak moments I most empathize with the residents of Belmont. Who does not crave tranquility and safety? If these are options, why wouldn't I choose them? However, Murray suggests we do the opposite. He believes Belmont, with its hard-working and faithful residents, needs to re-engage the wider society.

I am not sure if I am optimistic toward this proposal. Though this might be the solution, it is its implementation that proves problematic. Like Murray I tend to be a libertarian when it comes to how we address social ills. Murray believes it was government activism that precipitated many of the current problems. Johnson's The Great Society expanded the role of government in numerous ways. Many "conservatives" contend these policies had the opposite effect of what they originally intended. As Ronald Reagan once remarked, "We fought a war on poverty and poverty won."

This paper is not my treatise on the role of government, but rather my role as a citizen. A few principles to which I adhere are that social constraints are effective deterrents to many types of dangerous behaviors. I believe community involvement builds neighborhood cohesion. I also contend active parents increase educational opportunities (not just for their own children). Lastly, implementation of cooperative educational models makes a difference in assessment scores. The task is daunting and the process long, but changes in society do occur. I take away from this book a renewed sense of just how important an educator's role is in our very real cities.

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Marcelo Costa

Preço muito alto pela qualidade do papel e impressao

Reviewed in Brazil on August 14, 2021

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O papel e impressão do livro são muito ruins

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Fernando Robledo

Highly recommended

Reviewed in Spain on June 23, 2021

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Excellent

CAT

très éclairant

Reviewed in France on January 11, 2020

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décrit et analyse la divergence de culture et de résultats des classes "populaire" et "moyenne supérieure" aux USA. Un livre équivalent reste à écrire sur la France.

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Mick McManus

A DECADE ON AND COMING APART STILL RESONATES

Reviewed in Australia on October 10, 2023

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I have just read ‘Coming Apart” a decade after it was first published. It’s storyline is probably more relevant today than 2012/13. Australia is experiencing the same disintegration of the family, the Church, and society in general. Even our national broadcaster has lost the trust of a broad cross section of society. The primacy of ones personal conscience has supercharge secularism and may be our ultimate demise. Charles Murray makes us think about how 2000 years of Judeo-christian values have delivered us this far, but what will deliver a prosperous future.

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uZone

Beeindruckend

Reviewed in Germany on May 6, 2017

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Obwohl bereits vor 2012 geschrieben liest sich das Buch wie eine Erklärung all der Dinge, die zwingend zur Wahl von Trump führen musste.

Die Sprache ist sehr klar und einfach zu lesen. Er baut ein Argument langsam, aber zielstrebig auf. Fachbegriffe kommen sehr selten vor, und wenn, werden sie gut erklärt. Grafiken werden sparsam gezeigt, und sind aber jedesmal sehr sorgfältig ausgewählt und gestaltet.

Eine immens sorgfältige wissenschaftiche Arbeit, die ebenso sorgfältig vorgetragen wird.

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