Except that you’ve got it backwards. When divorce laws were liberalized, the divorce rate shot up briefly, and then stabilized. Middle and especially upper-middle class marriages end in divorce much less often than marriages between people at the lower end of the economic scale. Indeed, as recent articles have demonstrated, as the decline in work traditionally done by males with no college has accelerated, an increase in unwed motherhood has followed. Marriage and church do not bring prosperity; prosperous people are more liekly to marry and go to church.
Maybe there’s more to this than you’ve shared, but the only one I see who has contempt for someone else is you. It seems like a perfectly reasonable preference to not want to be working in an office. Especially since office work has health effect similar to smoking cigarettes
Do you have a cite that the increase in the divorce rate was only brief? It may have stabilized, but at a higher level,
That is a mix of cause and effect. Divorce is associated with poverty and a drop in living standards, especially for women and children. And unwed motherhood correlates with poverty, especially for unwed teen mothers.
So you don’t have it quite right. Prosperous people are less likely to divorce, and people who go to church (at least in the US) are less likely to divorce. (Cite.)
Do you have a cite that truck drivers live longer, on average, than office workers?
Your cite doesn’t prove your point. Or at least, it doesn’t show that people who go to church are less likely to divorce, rather than that people who are likely to divorce are less likely to go to church. Similarly, I don’t think you’ve established that I don’t have it right. The correlation between poverty and unwed motherhood is just as likely to be causitive in one direction as the other. A man incapable of supporting a family is less marriageable, unless he can find some other way to justify his existence in a household. The rise in unwed motherhood among white women suggested that this is the causitive relationship, since it *followed *the decline in employment prospects for 30 to 50 % of adult males.
I admit I don’t. It was a throwaway line, and it really didn’t belong. It has no bearing on my main point, which was that different people are suited to different things, and hating the life of a cubicle dweller is not a sign of low moral character.
I don’t have the data offhand to really prove it, but here’s my theory.
They may not have contempt for them, but you can’t blame White Southerners for feeling this way towards Democrats. Democrats tend to support policies which benefit minorities at a detriment to Whites, while Republicans oppose said policies. States which tend to vote Democrat also have low minority populations, whereas states which vote Republican have high minority populations. Therefore, Whites in Democratic-leaning states are less likely to be negatively affected by those policies as when compared to Whites in Republican-leaning states. When Whites in Republican-leaning states complain, those in Democratic-leaning states label them as racists or whatever. Ergo, those Whites in Republican-leaning states grow to resent the Democratic party for turning the proverbial blind eye to them in favor of minorities, and writing them off as “racists”.
Anyway, I checked. There’s a list and a map. Unsurprisingly, the South has the lowest percentage of Whites while the northeast has the most. Those states along the Mexican border also have low-percentages of Whites. So I would say that my theory has at least a bit of credence, though I don’t claim it’s absolutely correct.
The fact that a David Brooks article on something Charles Murray wrote is being debated in earnest is pretty funny to me.
David Frum has been reviewing the book and highlighting the critical factor that Murray ignores: falling wages.
As Frum puts it:
If you’re going to ignore the effect of falling wages on the willingness or ability of the white working class to live up to the traditional American middle class values of 60 years ago, then you’ll be constrained in your ability to explain what caused the change. Think of the debate surrounding the decline in violent crime in America beginning in the 1990s. A whole host of factors have been pointed to to try and explain it - the economy, access to abortion, tougher criminal laws - but they’re merely factors. It’s impossible to point to any one factor and say with confidence that it was the compelling reason for the change. And if your politics led you to completely discount one factor out of hand, then you wouldn’t be telling the whole story.
Murray’s solution is to pull some cockamamie theory out of his ass pinning the blame on moral collapse and the 1960s, like an erudite Starving Artist. But if one of the rock-solid conservative planks is that the Job Creators need to earn a wage premium in order to encourage and inspire them, then why wouldn’t that be a factor for the working class?
Again, Frum:
Leave out the effect of stagnant wages and declining employment, and all you have is a plausible-sounding story (depending on your political persuasion).
“Asian” or “Hispanic” should be capitalized, but “black” should not be, nor “negro.” “African-American” should be, of course. (Racial designations are not proper nouns unless they incorporate proper nouns.)
Median household income won’t tell us the whole story. You need to break the income down by percentile to see whether the lower percentiles have seen gains, something like this graph or this. But even those graphs don’t tell us enough, because we also need to know the change in percentage of the workforce that is at each percentile and the effect of education. If Grandpa had no more than a HS diploma and still ended up in the 70th percentile, and Dad had no more than a HS diploma and was in the 50th percentile, where is Son likely to end up if he has no more than a HS diploma?
Bobo’s argument is that the top 20% live in their liberal enclaves in the coastal urban areas, completely apart from the bottom 30%, and that the lack of interaction has made the bottom 30% coarse and unruly. His solution is a national service program where the children of the top 20% will, presumably, scold their lessers into behaving like responsible, middle class Americans. But the “lower tribe” doesn’t need scolding, what they need is better opportunity and investment. Murray himself was the son of a manager at Maytag, and he grew up in Newton, Iowa among the children of Maytag’s assembly line workers, working class people with solid jobs. Yet he seems wholly uninterested in drawing any correlation between their solid employment and their values; he’d rather keep fighting the Culture War.
All they gotta do is trot out the old tried and true. When the middle class is fearful and nervous, tell them that their problems would be solved if only the gummint was giving away all their money to the lazy poor folks. Works every time. Maybe not this time, from my lips to the Ears…
