David Frum joins the hippie chorus again
by David Atkins
David Frum has an epic, 4-part takedown of Charles Murray’s execrable new book Coming Apart. Murray’s thesis is essentially that 1960s liberals softened the industrious spirits of working-class whites, making them less eager to be economic “producers.” No, that’s not a joke. That’s his actual thesis.
Take this paragraph, for instance:
In one respect, the labor market did indeed get worse for [working-class white] men: pay. Recall figure 2.1 at the beginning of the book, showing stagnant incomes for people below the 50th income percentile.** High-paying unionized jobs have become scarce and real wages for all kinds of blue-collar jobs have been stagnant or falling since the 1970s. But these trends don’t explain why [working-class white] men in the 2000s worked fewer jobs, found it harder to get jobs than other Americans did, and more often dropped out of the labor market than they had in the 1960s. On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive – an important proviso – falling hourly income does not discourage work.
Put yourself in the place of a [working-class white] man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you’ve been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter’s helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it? As of 2009, a very bad year economically, the median hourly wage for drivers of delivery trucks was $13.84; for carpenter’s helpers, $12.63; for building cleaners, $13.37. That means $505 to $554 for a forty-hour week, or $25,260 to $27,680 for a fifty-week year. Those are not great incomes, but they are enough to be able to live a decent existence – almost twice the poverty level even if you are married and your wife doesn’t work. So why would you not work if a job opening landed in your lap? Why would you not work a full forty hours if the hours were available? Why not work more than forty hours?
Anyone with an ounce of intelligence could explain to Mr. Murray the fallacies in his thinking. Perhaps he might want to reconsider his own position on his famous Bell Curve of intelligence. More than that, Murray’s thesis is incredibly insulting.
Frum slices and dices him nicely:
His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees.
In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:
The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.
The ’60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.
Let me try my hand:
You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today’s money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He’s working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.
Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you’ll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That’s not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren’t married, and you don’t go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.
This is but a small sample of Frum’s overall critique, which is devastating in its entirety, and focused in large part on increased income inequality as the cause of social malaise. The only key point I think his analysis overlooks is the central role of the decline or organized labor in reducing wages while piling up said inequality. That admission would likely be one step too far for George W. Bush’s former speechwriter, but it’s an important one.
Even the comments to Frum’s article are delightful, such as this one from Banty:
It’s amazing how a tax rate increase is supposed to destroy the incentives of the wealthy to invest, innovate, and build, while decreasing compensation for labor is supposed to have no effect whatsoever on the work ethic of an individual worker.
I’ll have more on this subject later on today, but for now it’s simply important to note just how far beyond the moon the Republican Party has gone that Charles Murray is celebrated as a Burkeian intellectual; Dubya himself is considered an incompetent liberal; and his former speechwriter is relegated to land of leftist hippies. The GOP is following a parabolic arc of Objectivist crazy.
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