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bjbjLULU GWEN IFILL: Next, the author of a new bestseller talks with NewsHour economics
correspondent Paul Solman about the economic plight and social values of working-class
Americans. The book is already receiving a heated reception. The discussion is part of
Paul's ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news. CHARLES MURRAY, author, "Coming Apart":
It's not too dramatic to say this. We're losing a lot of what has made America exceptional
as we become increasingly a class society in which a big chunk of the people on the
bottom no longer behave in the ways that are essential for a self-governing, free society.
PAUL SOLMAN: Conservative lightning rod Charles Murray, who wrote "Losing Ground" in 1984,
blasting welfare programs for making poverty worse, co-wrote "The Bell Curve" in 1994,
arguing that economic success comes increasingly from genetic differences in I.Q. Both books
offended blacks in particular. He returns to these themes in his latest bestseller,
"Coming Apart," which restricts its scrutiny to white people to emphasize the issue of
class, not race. CHARLES MURRAY: We have developed classes in this country that are different
in kind from anything we have known before. PAUL SOLMAN: The new super-smart, super-educated
upper class is out of touch, says Murray, tucked away in exclusive zip codes, he calls
the "SuperZips." But Murray reserves his actual anxiety for the 30 percent at the bottom.
CHARLES MURRAY: We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away
from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work. PAUL
SOLMAN: That's because, he argues, they're less honest, less religious, less responsible
than white working-class people were half-a-century ago, violent crime, for example, way up, at
least as measured by arrest rates. CHARLES MURRAY: In 1960, it was still -- no nostalgia
here -- an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods. Even
after the reductions in crime that we ve seen since the 1990s, you're still at about four
to five times the level of violent crime in these neighborhoods that you had before. PAUL
SOLMAN: Regular worship, meanwhile, way down. CHARLES MURRAY: If you define sort of the
core religious population as being people who go to church regularly and say they have
a strong affiliation with their faith, you're down to 12 percent in the white working-class
who have that kind of relationship to religion. PAUL SOLMAN: But perhaps the widest gap over
the past 50 years, says Murray, is in marriage rates. CHARLES MURRAY: Is collapse too strong
a word? I'm not sure, but it's really close to that. 1960, you ve got about 94 percent
of the upper-middle-class whites who are married, compared to 83 percent of the white working
class. It's the norm in both groups. You turn to 2010, you're still at 84 percent for the
upper middle class. PAUL SOLMAN: Eighty-four percent married. CHARLES MURRAY: Right. For
the white working-class, you're down to 48 percent. PAUL SOLMAN: According to Murray,
nearly half of all white working-class kids are now born to single moms, who look at the
dads and say: CHARLES MURRAY: Why should I marry these losers? You know, the guy who
impregnated me was a nice guy, but he can't hold on to a job. PAUL SOLMAN: And that's
because of a final piece of Murray's dreary data. Over the past 50 years, lower-rung white
males have left the labor force. CHARLES MURRAY: You know, 1960, guys are supposed to work.
That is as universal a social norm as there is. You don't work, you're a bum. And just
about everybody either did work or was looking for work. Turn to 2008, before the recession,
you're up to about one out of eight white working-class males ages 30 to 49 is not even
looking for work. PAUL SOLMAN: But, as with Murray's previous books, the coverage has
often been withering, and the main critique is that he's left out the most important factor
in working-class decline: economics. On the left, Salon.com's Joan Walsh mocked Murray's
insistence on culture over economics, claiming her next book will be called "Coming Together:
How the White Working-Class Woke Up and Realized the Right Now Thinks They're Dumb and Lazy
Too." On the right, David Frum asked, "How can you tell a story about the moral decay
of the working-class with the work part left out?" What Murray s saying, "Coming Apart,"
you know, these people are -- they're dissolute. THEA LEE, deputy chief of staff, AFL-CIO:
As opposed to rich people. PAUL SOLMAN: Thea Lee is deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO.
THEA LEE: Go to any private school in Washington, D.C. You know, take the level of drug use,
you know, at private high schools. Or look at Bernie Madoff. I'm just trying to get my
head around this idea of morality being the purview of the wealthy, the elite and the
intellectually accomplished. PAUL SOLMAN: Besides, says Lee. THEA LEE: If you look at
the big economic picture in the United States, it's one of a weak labor market, wage stagnation,
and growing inequality. The U.S. economy is in a dead end right now because there's been
too much focus on cutting costs, cutting labor costs, laying people off, making due with
less. And in the end, what you see is an economy that's shrinking, that's failing, that's not
providing a middle-class lifestyle. PAUL SOLMAN: You really think it has nothing to do with
all the jobs that have been shipped overseas and, more importantly perhaps, the technology
that has made so many jobs obsolete? CHARLES MURRAY: I don't see the relationship between
the changing nature of the distribution of working-class jobs and the increased dropout
from the labor force. It's not as if assembly line jobs were so much fun and the jobs that
are available now are so much less fun that you are discouraged from taking those jobs.
PAUL SOLMAN: No, they paid more. They paid way more. CHARLES MURRAY: You aren't going
to fix it by bringing back unionized assembly line jobs. PAUL SOLMAN: Instead, Murray advocates
cultural changes, encouraging the lower class to emulate the more virtuous behavior of those
above, who might as well living on another planet, so clueless have they become about
what's going on in the rest of the culture. You have got a quiz in the book. CHARLES MURRAY:
"How thick is your bubble?" PAUL SOLMAN: The quiz, which you can take on our Making Sense
website, measures upper-class familiarity with working-class America. CHARLES MURRAY:
Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? Because
my feeling is, if you can't answer yes to that question, you are in big trouble in trying
to understand the country you live in. PAUL SOLMAN: Though Murray, Harvard grad, MIT Ph.D.,
qualifies as what he calls an OES, an overeducated elitist snob, he grew up solidly in the middle
in small-town Iowa, nothing whiter, he's called it. And he stayed close to mainstream America.
Since 1989, he s lived in tiny Burkittsville, M.D., way outside the Washington Beltway,
the nearest town of any size, Brunswick, where Murray and his wife sent their kids to public
school. I told him I had one final line of questioning. He suggested we stop in at Mommer's
Diner to discuss it. To you, so many of the rewards in our society come from talent, which
is, to a large extent, innate, right? CHARLES MURRAY: Right in the second half. Okay? The
first half, which says so many of the rewards in our society come from talent, if you're
talking about money, yeah. But if you're talking about rewards in life, meaning deep satisfactions
in life, vocation, that is having a job that you find satisfying, and marriage and religiosity
and community, which are as accessible to people on the bottom of society as the top,
those are still there as potential rewards. PAUL SOLMAN: Since Murray denies that the
lack of economic rewards are the cause of cultural decline, he s not pushing any government
economic solutions. CHARLES MURRAY: It's a very well-verified social science finding
that government programs don't do a good job at solving the human problems that I'm discussing.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, Murray says the upper crust should try to share their -- or perhaps I
should say our -- superior virtues with those who have lost them. CHARLES MURRAY: We have
right now an upper class that will not say out loud, as elites really need to do in any
society, this is a good way to live. This doesn't mean they're passing laws. It doesn't
mean they're forcing people. They are setting a standard. THEA LEE: And how do we do that
exactly? Do the people just wander into a poor neighborhood and start instructing people
in how to not have sex before marriage or. . . PAUL SOLMAN: Again, the AFL-CIO's Thea
Lee. THEA LEE: I'm trying to imagine the picture of the wealthy elite sharing the benefit of
their knowledge and superior situation with the less fortunate. And that just might not
be that much fun. CHARLES MURRAY: The way that social norms become social norms is not
through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.
And here's the good news, Paul. I think these are ideas whose time has come. PAUL SOLMAN:
With the coming of "Coming Apart," ideas that Charles Murray is doing everything he can
to propagate. GWEN IFILL: You can find out if you're living in a bubble by taking the
quiz on our website's home page. urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags country-region urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags
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place GWEN IFILL: Next, the author of a new bestseller talks with NewsHour economics correspondent
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