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Books

Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980

– (New York: Basic Books, 1984.)
Summary: This classic book serves as a starting point for any serious discussion of welfare reform. Losing Ground argues that the ambitious social programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually… More

In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

– (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.)
Summary from Publisher: “What a government must do,” Charles Murray says, “is leave people alone.” No one who reads this clear, energetic work will come away with previous… More

Apollo: The Race to the Moon

– (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.) (with Catherine Bly Cox)
Summary from Publisher: Here, for the first time, is the dramatic story of the Apollo space program. Murray and Cox recount how, in fewer than ten years, the men and women behind the scenes… More

Does Prison Work?

– (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997.)
Summary from Publisher: Crime is low when crime doesn’t pay, is the motto of this provocative essay by Charles Murray. He challenges the prevailing view amongst the criminal justice… More

Income Inequality and IQ

– (Washington: AEI Press, 1998.)
Summary from Publisher: What causes income inequality? The usual answers are economic and sociological. Capitalism systematically generates unequal economic rewards. Social class… More

The Underclass Revisited

– (Washington: AEI Press, 1999.)
Excerpt: No one talks much about the underclass anymore, and apparently for good reason. The welfare rolls are plunging. Crime has been falling for several years. The labor market is so… More

In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State

– (Washington: AEI Press, 2006.)
Summary from Publisher: America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for… More

The Happiness of the People

– (Washington: AEI Press, 2009.)
Summary from Publisher: The political culture created by the Constitution has made Americans a people uniquely optimistic, lacking in class envy, and confident that that they are in charge… More

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010

– (New York: Crown Forum, 2012.)
Summary from Publisher: 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… More

American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History

– (Washington: AEI Press, 2013.)
Summary from Publisher: The phrase “American exceptionalism” is used in many ways and for many purposes, but its original meaning involved a statement of fact: for the first century… More

By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission

– (New York: Crown Forum, 2015.)
Summary from the Publisher: American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our… More

Essays

The Two Wars Against Poverty

– The Public Interest, Fall 1982.
Excerpt: Most people, including most scholars, think the War on Poverty began with a formal declaration by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In a sense this is true, for there was in fact no formal… More

The Fairness Delusion

– American Spectator, October 1984.
Excerpt: Democrats have been bludgeoning the Reagan Administration with “the fairness issue” since 1981. The fairness issue covers a variety of sins, generally falling under the… More

The War on Poverty 1965–1980

– Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 1984.
Excerpt: No one disputes that poverty exists in America. But how serious is the problem? Who are the poor? Why are they poor? Are there more poor people than there used to be? On such… More

The Domino that Didn’t Fall

– Atlantic Monthly, November 1984.
Excerpt: This is the story of an insurgency that disappeared. It begins in the mid-1960s, when the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) initiated an active and violent rebellion in… More

Saving the Poor from Welfare

– Reason, December 1984.
Excerpt: There is a lesson to be learned from our national experience with the Great Society programs of the 1960s and their successors in the years since. The lesson is that the kinds of… More

Helping the Poor: A Few Modest Proposals

– Commentary, May 1985.
Excerpt: Last fall I published a book entitled Losing Ground. It called attention to the fact that on several of the dimensions we ordinarily use to measure quality of life—unemployment,… More

Prepared Statement to the Joint Economic Committee

– Prepared Statement, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, June 20, 1985.
Excerpt: I thank the Subcommittee for the opportunity to appear before it today, but the assignment is daunting. The last time I tried to answer the question, “Did we win or lose the… More

Are the Poor ‘Losing Ground’?

– Political Science Quarterly, Fall 1985.
Excerpt: In the year since it was published, Losing Ground has become a political football in the debate about social policy toward the poor, and many of the substantive issues it raises… More

Cruel and Usual: Pretrial Punishment in Jail

– The Washington Monthly, December 1985.
Excerpt: John Irwin’s thesis is that American society uses jails to control and segregate the “rabble,” a subset of the poor and disadvantaged. Besides being destitute, the rabble are… More

The Constraints on Helping

– The Freeman, February 1986.
Excerpt: Let me pose a problem in the form that Einstein used to call a “thought experiment.” Whereas Einstein used the device to imagine such things as the view from the head of a… More

How to Lie with Statistics

– National Review, February 28, 1986.
Excerpt: Charles Murray “has never publicly responded, however, to one of the most widely publicized “refutations” of his thesis, based on a paper by David Elwood and… More

White Welfare, White Families, ‘White Trash’

– National Review, March 28, 1986.
Excerpt: How many dozens of article, Op-Ed columns, cover stories, talk shows, and features on the six o’clock news have by now used Bill Moyer’s documentary on the vanishing… More

Losing Ground Two Years Later

– Cato Journal, Spring/Summer 1986.
Excerpt: Losing Ground appeared in the fall of 1984. It was an election year, and the two presidential candidates held a debate on domestic policy. The word “black” was hardly… More

No, Welfare Isn’t Really the Problem

– The Public Interest, Summer 1986.
Excerpt: Ellwood and Lawrence Summers’s article “Is Welfare Really the Problem?” (Spring 1986) exemplifies a continuing problem that clouds debate about the underclass. On one side… More

In Search of the Working Poor

– The Public Interest, Fall 1987.
Excerpt: The American debate about poverty and public policy has always been grounded in the prevailing answer to the question, “Can any American who is willing to work hard make a… More

To Ourselves and Our Posterity

– Free Minds and Free Markets, May 1988.
Excerpt: A false premise prevails in the latter half of this century, one that will seem as naive to our grandchildren as the Victorians’ confidence in the permanency of empire now… More

Don’t Give Up: Poverty Programs That Work

– The Washington Monthly, June, 1988.
Excerpt: What you have generously offered me is a  chance to say that while I think most of the programs failed, I’m not a fanatic, and to prove it, here are some successes. And I… More

Crime in America

– National Review, June 10, 1988.
Summary: An excerpt from In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government in which Murray reflects on how different “the crime problem” looks when we ask just what constitutes… More

The Coming of Custodial Democracy

– Commentary, September 1988.
Excerpt: It is by now taken for granted that the nation is about to turn to the Left in domestic policy. “Reaganism is finished, bankrupt, used up, over,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger,… More

Underclass

– Sunday Times Magazine (London),  November 26, 1989.

Here’s the Bad News on the Underclass

– Wall Street Journal, March 8, 1990.
Excerpt: The call from my friend was cheery — he’d been reading a spate of newspaper and magazine articles proclaiming that the underclass is getting smaller. Crime in the inner… More

The British Underclass

– The Public Interest, Spring 1990.
Excerpt: IS THE UNDERCLASS an American phenomenon? It often seems so. Reports about Western Europe’s social democracies typically portray societies in which the low-income class is… More

How to Win the War on Drugs

– The New Republic, May 21, 1990.
Excerpt: Drugs should not be legalized, because many other social policy changes would be needed for legalization to be effective. In addition, making law enforcement an effective deterrent… More

Can Neighborhoods Save the City?

– City Journal, Spring 1991.
Excerpt: CHAIRMAN NATHAN GLAZER: Today’s session is part of an effort to figure out how city neighborhoods and communities work and how they fail; what we gain when they work well, and… More

But We’re Ignoring Gifted Kids

– Washington Post, Feb. 2, 1992 (with Richard J. Herrnstein).
Excerpt: MOST OF the hand-wringing over American education has been misdirected. While the special problems of the disadvantaged have still not been adequately addressed, a thorough look at… More

Thomas Jefferson Goes East

– National Review, March 30, 1992.
Excerpt: I first arrived in Thailand in September 1965, a skinny 22-year-old, and stayed for six years. I married there. My first child was born there. In many of the most important ways, i… More

After L.A.—Causes, Root Causes, and Cures

– National Review, June 8, 1992.
Excerpt: The Rodney King verdict seemed as outrageous to me as it did to most Americans. But if it was outrageous, it was also laden with meaning. It opens a new and explosively dangerous… More

The Legacy of the Sixties

– Commentary, July 1992.
Excerpt: “Is President Bush hinting that the Peace Corps destroyed the moral fiber of poor people?” asked Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers,… More

A Question of Intelligence, by Daniel Seligman

– Commentary, December 1, 1992.
Excerpt: In the tight and sometimes nervous world of people who write about IQ, this book has been a topic of conversation for a long time. It was originally commissioned as one of the… More

What’s Really Behind the SAT Score Decline?

– The Public Interest, Winter 1992 (with Richard J. Herrnstein).
Excerpt: AUTUMN 1991 saw renewed controversy about SAT scores and American education. First it was revealed that the national average on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test… More

Bad Lessons

– New York Times, January 8, 1993.
Excerpt: President-elect Bill Clinton is right to make education a top priority. He is wrong in his understanding of what needs fixing. Not one of his main educational policies —… More

Stop Favoring Unwed Mothers

– New York Times, January 16, 1993.
Excerpt: The New Jersey Legislature took the plunge this week and passed a welfare package that, if signed by Gov. Jim Florio, would limit the benefits for women on welfare if they have… More

The Local Angle: Giving Meaning to Freedom

– Reason, October 1993.
Excerpt: Twenty-five years ago, in May of 1968, where were you? Some days, I was in Northeast Thailand, along the banks of the Mekong River, where in the evenings I would sit on the porch… More

The Coming White Underclass

– Wall Street Journal, October 29, 1993.
Excerpt: Every once in a while the sky really is falling, and this seems to be the case with the latest national figures on illegitimacy. The unadorned statistic is that, in 1991, 1.2… More

Upon This Rock: The Miracle of a Black Church

– City Journal, Winter 1993.
Excerpt: Upon This Rock (HarperCollins, $22.50) is a sourcebook for thinking about the black inner city. Not for understanding it, nor for solving its problems—this is more than one may… More

Regaining Lost Ground

– City Journal, Spring 1994.
Excerpt: In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13 percent of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next 12 years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled.… More

Does Welfare Bring More Babies?

– The Public Interest, Spring 1994.
Excerpt: LAST OCTOBER, I published a long piece on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Coming White Underclass.” Its thesis was that white illegitimacy—22 percent… More

The Aristocracy of Intelligence

– Wall Street Journal, October 10, 1994.
Excerpt: A perusal of the Harvard’s Freshman Register for 1952 shows a class looking very much as Harvard freshman classes had always looked. Under the portraits of the well-scrubbed,… More

Genes, Race, and IQ—An Apologia

– The New Republic, October 31, 1994 (with Richard Herrnstein.)
Excerpt: As of 1994, then, we can say nothing for certain about the relative roles that genetics and environment play in the formation of the black-white difference in I.Q. All the evidence… More

The Real ‘Bell Curve’

– Wall Street Journal, December 2, 1994.
Excerpt: In the past few weeks, I have found myself occasionally leafing through “The Bell Curve” to reassure myself. Richard Hernnstein and I didn’t really write the book… More

What to Do about Welfare

– Commentary, December 1994.
Excerpt: In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s television ad promising to “end welfare as we know it” was one of his best vote-getters, so effective that it was the first choice for a… More

The Bell Curve and Its Critics

– Commentary, May 1995.
Excerpt: In November 1989, Richard Herrnstein and I agreed to collaborate on a book that, five years later, became The Bell Curve. It is a book about events at the two ends of the… More

The Partial Restoration of Traditional Society

– The Public Interest, Fall 1995.
Excerpt: DURING work on The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and I were struck by the way in which the 1950s saw portentous developments that no one noticed at the time. We were focusing… More

Welfare Hysteria

– New York Times, November 14, 1995.
Excerpt: Catastrophe looms. A million children pushed into poverty. Children sleeping on grates. Calcutta on the Hudson. All caused by the Republican welfare bill. This is the message of… More

The Next British Revolution

– The Public Interest, Winter 1995.
Excerpt: IN 1989, the London Sunday Times asked me to explore whether England was developing an American-style underclass. I reported then that England seemed to be replaying the American… More

A Stroll Through the Income Spectrum

– American Enterprise, July/August 1996.
Excerpt: The link between income and standard of living used to be simple: People who made more money lived better. They drove a Buick, not a Chevy. They moved from an upstairs flat to a… More

Keeping Priorities Straight on Welfare Reform

– Society, August 1996.
Excerpt: In April 1995 I was asked to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the welfare reform bill then under discussion. As I write (mid-November 1995), the Senate and House… More

Bad News About Illegitimacy

– The Weekly Standard, August 5, 1996.
Excerpt: I’m no newspaperman, but the following sure looks like a front-page, above-the-fold story to me: ILLEGITIMACY RECORDS BIGGEST JUMP EVER WASHINGTON, June 24 — Figures… More

IQ and Economic Success

– The Public Interest, Summer 1997.
Excerpt: IN The Bell Curve, the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I described an emerging class society in which the intellectually blessed become ever more rich and powerful and the… More

Three Broken Compacts

– Wall Street Journal, December 23, 1997.
Excerpt: The received Republican wisdom now proclaims that Americans don’t hate the federal government after all. Most Americans like the federal government. Republicans must let the… More

What Government Must Do

– American Enterprise, January/February 1998.
Excerpt: Years ago I worked for a research company that evaluated social programs for the federal government. One time I was heading a team assessing a program for troubled inner-city… More

The Perils of GOP Activism

– Wall Street Journal, February 20, 1998.
Excerpt: At the beginning of 1964, the country was at peace, the economy was humming, and vast tax revenues were burning a hole in Congress’s pocket. Sound familiar? The rhetoric of… More

And Now for the Bad News

– Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1998.
Excerpt: Good news is everywhere. Crime rates are falling; welfare rolls are plunging; unemployment is at rock bottom; teenage births are down. Name an indicator, economic or social, and… More

Our Dreyfus Case

– The Weekly Standard, February 22, 1999.
Excerpt: In light of the conclusion of the Senate trial of the president, the editors of the Weekly Standard asked 22 writers, thinkers, and political actors the following questions:… More

Deeper into the Brain

– National Review, January 24, 2000.
Excerpt: We, Homo sapiens, are about to learn how to alter human nature at roughly the same time that we finally learn for sure what that nature is. Our ignorance about the underlying truth… More

Prole Models

– Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2001.
Excerpt: That American life has coarsened over the past several decades is not much argued, but the nature of the beast is still in question. Gertrude Himmelfarb sees it as a struggle… More

Family Formation

– In Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins, eds., New World of Welfare Reform. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.

The British Underclass: Ten Years Later

– The Public Interest, Fall 2001.
Excerpt: AS the 1980s came to an end, the Sunday Times asked me to come to England and look at the country’s social problems through the eyes of an American who had been writing about the… More

The Fathers Are Still Missing

– Washington Post, October 30, 2001.
Excerpt: “Honey, I’m Home” was the cheery title of the Urban Institute Study. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities titled its study with the stodgier, “Declining Share of… More

Family Decay Hurts Equality

– American Enterprise, April/May 2002.
Excerpt: Americans hate the idea of social classes. Accordingly, we try to pretend we don’t have any. Up to 80 percent of survey respondents in our country will tell the interview… More

SAT Reform Fails the Needy

– Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2002.
Excerpt: Last week’s reforms of the SAT — a new writing test, elimination of the famous analogy items, and the addition of higher-level math problems — signal an evolution… More

Measuring Achievement: The West and the Rest

– The Public Interest, Summer 2003.
Excerpt: Eurocentrism has in recent years joined racism and sexism as one of the postmodern mortal sins. The Left’s fight against Eurocentrism explains why students in elementary school… More

Accomplishment on High

– American Enterprise, October/November 2003.
Excerpt: At rare times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. They have discovered truths about the way the universe works, written words that illuminate the… More

Well, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

– New York Times, November 30, 2003.
Excerpt: “BUT what are the worst accomplishments?” the interviewer asked. We had been discussing great accomplishments in the arts and sciences, a subject on which I’ve… More

An Opportunity Lost

– The Public Interest, Winter 2003.
Excerpt: IT is customary when making critical remarks to start out by saying nice things about the person one is criticizing, and I want to do that now, but not pro forma. The report of the… More

No Justice

– Sunday Times (London), January 18, 2004.
Excerpt: The story was told by an American student named Valerie Ruppel who had returned from a term’s study in London. Two days after her group reached Britain, a policewoman came to… More

Simple Justice

– Sunday Times (London), January 25, 2004.
Excerpt: I recently interviewed Una Padel, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, a research foundation that advocates alternatives to prison and restorative justice. A… More

You Are What You Tax

– New York Times, April 14, 2004.
Excerpt: Take a break as you fill out your 1040 form, and play this game: suppose you could choose which government entities your tax dollars support — and in what proportion. Since… More

Portrait of Privilege?

– Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2004.
Last Wednesday’s record-breaking price of $104.2 million for Picasso’s “Boy with a Pipe” dramatizes the chasm that separates the art market from the contribution… More

Marriage-Lite

– The Public Interest, Summer 2004.
Excerpt: JONATHAN Rauch persuasively demonstrates, central to everything else, that those of us who are not proponents of gay marriage do not have the option of hoping the issue will go… More

Sex Ed at Harvard

– New York Times, January 23, 2005.
Excerpt: FORTY-SIX years ago, in “The Two Cultures,” C. P. Snow famously warned of the dangers when communication breaks down between the sciences and the humanities. The… More

The Advantages of Social Apartheid

– Sunday Times (London), April 4, 2005.
Excerpt: Underclass is an ugly word, and we live in an age that abhors ugly words, so it is good to hear that the Blair government has devised a cheerier label: Neet, an acronym for “not… More

How to Accuse the Other Guy of Lying with Statistics

– Statistical Science, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2005.
Abstract: We’ve known how to lie with statistics for 50 years now. What we really need are theory and praxis for accusing someone else of lying with statistics. The author’s… More

The Inequality Taboo

– Commentary, September 2005.
Excerpt: When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have… More

The Hallmark of the Underclass

– Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2005.
Excerpt: Watching the courage of ordinary low-income people as they deal with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, it is hard to decide which politicians are more contemptible —… More

Thomas Sowell: Seeing Clearly

– National Review, December 19, 2005.
Excerpt: One mark of a great book is a thesis so powerful that after a few years people take it for granted. Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions (1987) is such a book. Its thesis: The… More

A Plan to Replace the Welfare State

– Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2006.
Excerpt: This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and… More

The $10,000 Solution

– Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2006.
Excerpt: Suppose we assume people on the other side of the political divide are not hateful, not bent on destroying America, but are instead, by and large, decent and sensible humans.… More

Acid Tests

– Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2006.
Excerpt: Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). They have to be, because so little else about the act is attractive. NCLB takes a giant step toward… More

The GOP’s Bad Bet

– New York Times, October 19, 2006.
Excerpt: LAST week President Bush signed a law that will try to impede online gambling by prohibiting American banks from transferring money to gambling sites. Most Americans probably… More

Intelligence in the Classroom

– Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2007.
Excerpt: Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is… More

Aztecs vs. Greeks

– Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2007.
Excerpt: If “intellectually gifted” is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we’re talking about no more than a few people per thousand and… More

Jewish Genius

– Commentary, April 2007.
Excerpt: Since its first issue in 1945, COMMENTARY has published hundreds of articles about Jews and Judaism. As one would expect, they cover just about every important aspect of the topic.… More

Abolish the SAT

– The American, July-August, 2007.
Excerpt: For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks. Waiting for the scores—one for verbal, one for… More

The Age of Educational Romanticism

– The New Criterion, May 2008.
Excerpt: This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools—its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise. Educational… More

Francophilia

– The Weekly Standard, June 2, 2008.
Excerpt: So there I am in Avignon, lost, and I go into a shop and ask, “Où est le bistro La Fourchette, s’il vous plaît?” in my best Iowa accent. The woman behind the… More

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

– Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008.
Excerpt: Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this… More

Leave This Child Behind

– New York Post, August 17, 2008.
Excerpt: When it comes to thinking about our schools, politicians and educators recoil from a truth that the rest of us learned in first grade when we read “Dick and Jane.” That… More

College Daze

– Forbes, September 2008.
Excerpt: College is not all it’s cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky majors and grade inflation have conspired to make the letters B.A. close to meaningless. But another problem… More

Good Teachers in Bad Times

– Washington Times, October 14, 2008.
Excerpt: It is a bad time to be a good public school teacher, as I had occasion to discover at a personal level when I recently wrote a book on education. I was criticizing the anemic… More

Love Has Nothing to Do with It

– South Texas Law Review, Fall 2008.
Excerpt: And now, for something completely different. When I say something completely different, I am afraid that it is perhaps more different than the organizers of this event would really… More

We Can’t All Make the Grade

– Standpoint, October 2008.
Excerpt: It is a gradient that, given fine-grained tests, will be found to apply from Year 1 to university. In Year 1, it is indeed true that almost all children can learn everything that… More

Poverty and Marriage, Inequality and Brains

– Pathways, Winter 2008.
Excerpt: It may be said with only a little exaggeration that policy analysts are happy describing the causes of problems while ignoring their solution, and politicians are happy proposing… More

Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?

– New York Times, December 28, 2008.
Excerpt: BARACK OBAMA has two attractive ideas for improving post-secondary education — expanding the use of community colleges and tuition tax credits — but he needs to hitch them to a… More

Twelve Ideas for the Middle Class

– National Review, February 9, 2009.
Excerpt: Contemporary conservatism has too often lost touch with the concrete concerns of middle-class America. For a long time, conservatism thrived politically on the domestic troika of… More

The Happiness of the People

– Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, March 11, 2009.
Excerpt: My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness… More

Thank God America Isn’t like Europe—Yet

– Washington Post, March 22, 2009.
Excerpt: Do we want the United States to be like Europe? The European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted whenever I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention… More

Tax Withholding Is Bad for Democracy

– Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2009.
Excerpt: America is supposed to be a democracy in which we’re all in it together. Part of that ethos, which has been so essential to the country in times of crisis, is a common… More

Intelligence and College

– National Affairs, Fall 2009.
Excerpt: Imagine a high-school senior who is trying to decide whether to go to college. He walks into the office of his school’s counselor and asks for help in making up his mind. The… More

Why Charter Schools Fail the Test

– New York Times, May 5, 2010.
Excerpt: The latest evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest and most extensive system of vouchers and charter schools in America, came out last month, and most… More

Why Tiger Won’t Catch Jack

– The American, July 22, 2010.
Excerpt: Predicting that Tiger Woods can win five more majors assumes that nothing has significantly degraded the freakish combination required for extreme accomplishment. That assumption… More

Software’s Pull on Hard-to-Reach Teens

– Washington Times, October 10, 2010.
Excerpt: Forget teachers unions, undisciplined classrooms, social promotions or any of the other usual complaints about public secondary education. The real problem is that we are not… More

The Tea Party Warns of a New Elite. They Are Right

– Washington Post, October 24, 2010.
Excerpt: The tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite. “On one side, we have the elites,” Fox News host Glenn Beck explained… More

Belmont and Fishtown

– The New Criterion, January 2012.
Excerpt: American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been seen as different, even peculiar, to people around the… More

Five Myths About White People

– Washington Post, February 10, 2012.
Excerpt: 1. Working-class whites are more religious than upper-class whites. This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by liberals who conflate the religious right with the working… More

Narrowing the Class Divide

– New York Times, March 7, 2012.
Excerpt: THERE’S been a lot of commentary from all sides about my recently published book, “Coming Apart,” which deals with the divergence between the professional and working classes… More

Why Economics Can’t Explain Our Cultural Divide

– Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2012.
Excerpt: Some reviewers of “Coming Apart,” my new book about the growing cultural divide between America’s upper and lower classes, have faulted me for ignoring the role… More

“Coming Apart” and Fishtown

– Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 2012.
Excerpt: Coming Apart, the book I published a few months ago, tracks the cultural divergences in America’s classes from 1960 to 2010, focusing on whites as a way of getting people to… More

Future Tense, IX: Out of the Wilderness

– The New Criterion, May 2012.
Excerpt: Upon reading Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers many years ago, I became fascinated with the ebbs and flows of human achievement, and especially those points in world history that… More

Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem

– Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2012.
Excerpt: Mitt Romney’s résumé at Bain should be a slam dunk. He has been a successful capitalist, and capitalism is the best thing that has ever happened to the material condition… More

The Shaky Science Behind Obama’s Universal Pre-K

– Bloomberg, February 20, 2013.
Excerpt: “Study after study shows that the earlier a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road,” said U.S. President Barack Obama in Feb. 14 speech in Decatur,… More

Poker is America

– New York Times, February 24, 2013.
Excerpt: Let’s start by getting this straight: poker is about money. If you took the money out of it, I wouldn’t play. But even when I lose, I’ve had a good time. I love playing poker… More

Advice for a Happy Life

– Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2014.
Excerpt: The transition from college to adult life is treacherous, and this is nowhere more visible than among new college graduates in their first real jobs. A few years ago, I took it… More

Does America Still Have What It Takes?

– Mosaic, April 2014.
Excerpt: Some years ago, I conducted an ambitious research project to document and explain patterns of human accomplishment across time and cultures. My research took me from 800 BCE, when… More

How To Get Ahead in Suck-up City

– Politico, April 23, 2014.
Excerpt: I just published a book called “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead” for people making the transition from college to the real world. It consists of tips that I… More

The Trouble Isn’t Liberals. It’s Progressives

– Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2014.
Excerpt: Social conservatives. Libertarians. Country-club conservatives. Tea party conservatives. Everybody in politics knows that those sets of people who usually vote Republican cannot be… More

Our Futile Efforts to Boost Children’s IQ

– Bloomberg View, November 14, 2014.
Excerpt: It’s one thing to point out that programs to improve children’s cognitive functioning have had a dismal track record. We can always focus on short-term improvements, blame… More

Why the SAT Isn’t a ‘Student Affluence Test’

– Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2015.
Excerpt: Spring is here, which means it’s time for elite colleges to send out acceptance letters. Some will go to athletes, the children of influential alumni and those who round out the… More

Curing American Sclerosis

– Lecture, Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society, April 29, 2015. Reprinted in The New Criterion, June 2015.
Excerpt: I am a little wary about receiving an award named for Edmund Burke two weeks before the publication of a book in which I advocate massive, systematic civil disobedience. I am not… More

Regulation Run Amok—And How to Fight Back

– Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2015.
Excerpt: America is no longer the land of the free. We are still free in the sense that Norwegians, Germans and Italians are free. But that’s not what Americans used to mean by freedom.… More

The United States of Diversity

– Commentary, June 2015.
Excerpt: The received wisdom about multicultural America goes something like this: “At the time of the Founding, America’s free population was not only white but almost entirely… More

Kids Today

– Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2015.
Excerpt: My takeaway from all this was expressed in the closing chapter of my own work on Putnam’s topic, Coming Apart (2012). Very briefly, I don’t think America’s civic culture will… More

The Regulators’ Yoke

– National Review, November 9, 2015.
Excerpt: Earlier this year, I published a book called “By the People” that laid out a plan for systematic civil disobedience of stupid and pointless regulations. It is a subversive… More

Trump’s America

– Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2016.
Excerpt: If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate… More

An Open Letter to the Virginia Tech Community

– American Enterprise Institute, March 17, 2016.
Excerpt: Last week, the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands, published an “open letter to the Virginia Tech community” defending lectures delivered by deplorable people like me (I’m… More

Reflections on the Revolution at Middlebury

– Murray, Charles. "Reflections on the Revolution at Middlebury." AEIdeas blog. March 5, 2107.
Text: A few months ago, AEI’s student group at Middlebury College invited me to speak on the themes in Coming Apart and how they relate to the recent presidential election. Professor… More

Commentary

Escaping the Poverty Trap

– Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, September 10, 1984.
Excerpt: Political scientist Charles Murray is probably going to be roasted as a reactionary. He’s just written a well-documented polemic arguing that government’s efforts to… More

The Battle Over ‘Losing Ground’

– Michael Barone, Washington Post, April 3, 1985.
Excerpt: The debate rages over Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground.” Has he conclusively proved that Great Society programs hurt rather than helped the poor and therefore… More

Reason Interview

– Reason, May 1985.
Excerpt: REASON: Your book Losing Ground is very hot right now. Why did you go into this analysis of social welfare policy? MURRAY: My professional background consisted of evaluating… More

Charles Murray & His Critics

– Robert Royal, Crisis Magazine, July 1985.
Excerpt: What is it about Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, 1984) that has evoked such violent reactions? After initial shock at its… More

The Rediscovery of Character

– James Q. Wilson, The Public Interest, Fall 1985.
Excerpt: Charles Murray, whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, has done so much to focus attention on the problem of welfare, generally endorses the economic explanation for the decline of… More

Q&A: Charles Murray; Of Babies And Stick

– Robert Pear, New York Times, April 11, 1986.
Excerpt: One of the Reagan Administration’s main sources of inspiration on social welfare policy is a book by Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist. In “Losing Ground:… More

The Origins of the Underclass

– Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic, June 1986.
Excerpt: The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to: they make… More

Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family

– David T. Ellwood, Basic Books, 1988.
Excerpt: Charles Murray’s powerful indictment of the social welfare system implicitly emphasizes these contradictions. According to Murray, the very system that was designed to help… More

Congress Writes a Law: Research and Welfare Reform

– Ron Haskins, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10:4 (Fall 1991).
Abstract: This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on… More

Subsidized Illegitimacy

– Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, November 19, 1993.
Excerpt: In fact, the idea I proposed is not at all original. I was merely echoing Charles Murray, who in his book, “Losing Ground,” offered the cold turkey approach as a… More

Talking Points: Response to Charles Murray

– Welfare Reform Working Group, William Jefferson Clinton Library, May 3, 1994.
Excerpt: “He did the country a great service. I mean, he and I have often disagreed, but I think his analysis is essentially right. Now, whether his prescription is right, I… More

What Is Intelligence, and Who Has It?

– Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times, October 16, 1994.
Excerpt: In “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,” Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray write, “Mounting evidence indicates that… More

IQ: What’s the Fuss?

– Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, October 21, 1994.
Excerpt: “The Bell Curve” is a powerful, scrupulous, landmark study of the relationship between intelligence and social class, which is what the book is mainly about. It is… More

For Whom the Bell Tolls

– Peter Brimelow, Forbes, October 24, 1994.
Excerpt: “MY POLITICAL aspiration,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray tells FORBES, “is the restoration of the Jeffersonian republic.” Murray’s critics… More

‘Bell Curve’ Ballistics

– Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, October 26, 1994.
Excerpt: “The Bell Curve” — the controversial book about the role of intelligence in society — is already a commercial success. Its publisher reports that it has now… More

A Conversation with Charles Murray

– Transcript, Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, October 1994.
Excerpt: MR. WATTENBERG: Hello. I’m Ben Wattenberg. Welcome to a special two-part edition of Think Tank. You know, sometimes an argument within the scholarly community is so fierce… More

Sins of the Cognitive Elite

– Michael Novak, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: Our intellectual landscape has been disrupted by the equivalent of an earthquake and, as the ground settles, intellectuals are looking around nervously and bracing themselves. At… More

Acting Smart

– James Q. Wilson, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: Serious readers will ask four main questions about The Bell Curve. Is it true that intelligence explains so much behavior? How can IQ produce this effect? If it does, is there… More

Common Knowledge

– Michael Barone, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: The Bell Curve is not an argument for racial discrimination. It is an argument against racial discrimination, against the one form of racial discrimination that is sanctioned by… More

Legacy of Racism

– Pat Shipman, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: Human intelligence is an eel-like subject: slippery, difficult to grasp, and almost impossible to get straight. Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein make a heroic attempt… More

Not Hopeless

– Ernest Van den Haag, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: The Bell Curve shows that cognitive ability measured by IQ tests reliably predicts success—professional, academic, pecuniary—and that, on average, African-Americans have an IQ… More

Going Public

– Richard John Neuhaus, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: The statistical data on which the book bases its conclusions about the cognitive differences between whites and blacks are impressive. And, since it would seem to be nearly… More

Living with Inequality

– Eugene D. Genovese, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: The Bell Curve has much to offer. Its excellent analysis of the transformation of the American elite deserves high praise and a many-sided elaboration and critique, as do its… More

Trashing The Bell Curve

– Daniel Seligman, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: It is clear enough what The Bell Curve‘s liberal critics want. They want its ideas suppressed. They want the data to go away. They want the authors depicted as kooks and… More

Paroxysms of Denial

– Arthur R. Jensen, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: Commenting not as an advocate but as an expert witness, I can say that The Bell Curve is correct in all its essential facts. The graphically presented analyses of fresh data (from… More

Is Intelligence Fixed?

– Nathan Glazer, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: Herrnstein and Murray give some surprising data (surprising in the light of their argument that intelligence is fixed early and can’t be changed appreciably through… More

Meritocracy That Works

– Loren E. Lomasky, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: If the aim of social policy is to raise the abilities of the less well-off, without trying to achieve parity across races and classes, then speculation concerning the genetic basis… More

Moral Intelligence

– Michael Young, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: In its main outlines theirs is a story of progress. Intelligence—or cognitive ability, as they prefer to call it most of the time—seems to have swept almost all before it.… More

Methodological Fetishism

– Brigitte Berger, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: For all its wealth of data, skillful argumentation, and scope, The Bell Curve is a narrow and deeply flawed book. Murray and Herrnstein have fallen prey to a methodological… More

Dispirited

– Glenn C. Loury, National Review, December 5, 1994.
Excerpt: Reading Herrnstein and Murray’s treatise causes me once again to reflect on the limited utility in the management of human affairs of that academic endeavor generously termed… More

Mainstream Science on Intelligence

– Wall Street Journal, December 13, 1994.
Excerpt: Since the publication of “The Bell Curve,” many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstate current scientific evidence. Some conclusions… More

The Bell Curve

– Chester Finn, Commentary, January 1995.
Excerpt: As any author can attest who has brought forth a book and waited months for even the hometown paper—let alone the New York Times—to review it, the instant celebrity accorded… More

Ethnicity and IQ

– Thomas Sowell, The American Spectator, February 1995.
Excerpt: The Bell Curve is a very sober, very thorough, and very honest book—on a subject where sobriety, thoroughness, and honesty are only likely to provoke cries of outrage. Its… More

The Bell Curve and Its Critics by Charles Murray

– Charles Murray, Commentary, May 1995.
Excerpt: In November 1989, Richard Herrnstein and I agreed to collaborate on a book that, five years later, became The Bell Curve. It is a book about events at the two ends of the… More

Intelligence and the Social Scientist

– Leon R. Kass, The Public Interest, Summer 1995.
Excerpt: Someone who has not read the book, but “knows” it only from the largely irresponsible things written and said about it, will be surprised to discover that The Bell… More

Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate

– Ruth Lister, ed., IEA Health and Welfare Unit in association with The Sunday Times London, 1996.
Excerpt: IN 1989 Charles Murray visited Britain in search of the ‘underclass’, courtesy of The Sunday Times. Four years later he returned to warn that the crisis of the ‘underclass’… More

Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns

– Ulrich Neisser, chair, report of a Task Force established by the American Psychological Association, American Psychologist, February 1996.
Excerpt: In the fall of 1994, the publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve sparked a new round of debate about the meaning of intelligence test scores and the nature… More

Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics

– Steven M. Teles, University Press of Kansas, 1996.
Excerpt: There is no way to overestimate the effect that Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground had on the intellectual debate on poverty. Murray’s modest proposal, the outright… More

The Murray Manifesto

– Daniel Casse, Weekly Standard, January 20, 1997.
Excerpt: Charles Murray, the author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, two of the most-discussed books of the last 15 years, has taken on the task of presenting a more sober, respectable… More

IQ since The Bell Curve

– Christopher F. Chabris, Commentary, August 1998.
Excerpt: In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray set out to prove that American society was becoming increasingly meritocratic, in the sense that wealth and other positive social outcomes… More

How Think Tanks Achieve Public Policy Breakthroughs

– Lawrence Mone, Manhattan Institute, May 29, 2002.
Excerpt: It was back in 1984 that we sponsored what was to become a landmark book: Losing Ground, by Charles Murray, which was published by Basic Books. Charles, at the time, was a not very… More

Race and IQ: Part III

– Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com, October 3, 2002.
Excerpt: I happened to run into Charles Murray in Dulles International Airport while he and Richard Herrnstein were writing “The Bell Curve.” When I asked him what he was… More

Of Human Accomplishment

– Denis Dutton, The New Criterion, February 2004.
Excerpt: Readers familiar with Charles Murray’s work (Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life) know that he… More

The Manhattan Institute at 25

– Tom Wolfe, in Brian Anderson, ed., Turning Intellect into Influence, Manhattan Institute, 2004.
Excerpt: But when the smoke cleared, Losing Ground was still standing. It had proved impossible to pigeonhole it in any ideological fashion. Murray had served in the Peace Corps in Thailand… More

Research and Welfare Reform

– Lawrence M. Mead, Review of Policy Research 22:3 (May 2005).
Abstract: Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes… More

Interview with James Heckman

– Douglas Clement, The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, June 2005.
Excerpt: Region: In 1995, you wrote a very strong critique of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray’s book about IQ, genetics and ability, which argued that nature far outweighs… More

Ending Welfare As We Knew It by Myron Magnet

– Myron Magnet, National Review, December 19, 2005.
Excerpt: There’s no better proof of the adage that ideas have consequences than Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. The magisterial 1984 classic… More

Charles Murray: Abolish the Welfare State

– Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, March 29, 2006.
Excerpt: Within a few years of the publication of Losing Ground, Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin began his rounds of welfare reform, replacing by-right welfare payments with work… More

The Battle of Ideas

– The Economist, May 23, 2006.
Excerpt: It would be foolish to underestimate Mr Murray’s ability not just to stir debate but to steer policy: 12 years after “Losing Ground” was dismissed as the work of a… More

The Check Is In the Mail

– Lawrence M. Mead, First Things, October 2006.
Excerpt: Toward the end of In Our Hands, Murray makes clear that his priority is not really to overcome the dysfunctions behind poverty. Rather, it is to restore the small-government… More

Sentimental Education

– James Pierson, The New Criterion, September 2008.
Excerpt: Murray thinks that the nation would be better served if we lowered our expectations about what schools can accomplish and found new ways to train and educate students outside the… More

Murray’s Truths

– Liam Julian, Weekly Standard, September 22, 2008.
Excerpt: Charles Murray has written a bracing book about education, one determined not only to upset apple carts, but explode them. In varied ways he has succeeded, and for that we should… More

Interview with Charles Murray

– David Kelley, The Atlas Society, August 5, 2010.
Excerpt: Kelley: Let’s begin by talking a little about the method and procedure of Human Accomplishment. You employ a method, which you explain very clearly, of measuring… More

White Blight

– Kay Hymowitz, City Journal, January 25, 2012.
Excerpt: Charles Murray is back, and the debate about wealth and inequality will never be the same. Readers of the political scientist’s earlier work, especially The Bell Curve and Losing… More

The Great Divorce by David Brooks

– David Brooks, New York Times, January 30, 2012.
Excerpt: 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… More

Values Inequality

– W. Bradford Wilcox, Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2012.
Excerpt: 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… More

The Virtue Deficit

– Ron Haskins, National Review, February 6, 2012.
Excerpt: Charles Murray writes important and provocative books. His latest book, Coming Apart, joins Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1994) as, in my view, among his most important… More

Can the Working Class Be Saved?

– Ross Douthat, New York Times, February 11, 2012.
Excerpt: Coming Apart, the book that’s launched a thousand arguments this winter, is a brilliant work with an exasperating conclusion. What’s brilliant is Murray’s portrait, rich in… More

What Charles Murray Gets Right

– Ross Douthat, New York Times, February 14, 2012.
Excerpt: “Coming Apart” offers a convincing account of how meritocracy has exacerbated the problems that Murray describes — encouraging the best and brightest to work and live and… More

Lunch with the FT: Charles Murray

– Edward Luce, Financial Times, March 9, 2012.
Excerpt: I ask Murray about the reaction to Coming Apart. Though hailed by a New York Times columnist as probably one of the most important books to be published this year, others have… More

Mind the Gap by Yuval Levin

– Yuval Levin, Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012.
Excerpt: Charles Murray’s profound and important new book has, for the most part, been received as merely the latest volley in the inequality debates. Its champions have tended to praise… More

American Caste

– Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal, Spring 2012.
Excerpt: When Charles Murray’s best-selling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 appeared a few months ago, the book’s fictional working-class neighborhood, Fishtown,… More

Two Americas, Growing Apart

– Jonathan Rauch, Reason, June 2012.
Excerpt: Unless you live in a cave, you know the controversial work and reputation of Charles Murray. Losing Ground, published in 1984, proposed eliminating welfare as we knew it and became… More

A Tale of Two Cities

– R. Shep Melnick, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2012.
Excerpt: Charles Murray knows how to draw attention. Soon after Coming Apart appeared, nearly everyone who follows public affairs knew of the yawning gap separating the declining,… More

The Case for Conservative Civil Disobedience

– Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post, May 6, 2015.
Excerpt: From the tea party to Occupy Wall Street to #BlackLivesMatter, America has spent much of this young century questioning its premises. And as the battles over federal spending,… More

Our Corrupt Government by Christopher DeMuth

– Christopher DeMuth, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2015.
Excerpt: Charles Murray’s By the People takes Madisonian decline in a different direction. Its title, of course, is from the poetic invocation of republican government at the crescendo of… More

America Against Itself

– Interview by Sean Collins, Spiked Review, August 2016.
Excerpt: With the publication in 2012 of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, political scientist Charles Murray – celebrated and denigrated in equal measure for his… More

Multimedia

Apollo, The Race to the Moon

– Video with Catherine Cox, "Apollo, The Race to the Moon," CSPAN, July 20 1989.
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, authors Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox discussed their recent book, Apollo, The Race to the Moon. Rather… More

Book Discussion on The Bell Curve

– Video, C-SPAN, November 8, 1994.
Summary: The co-author discussed his book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The book focuses on human intelligence and the way social problems are affected… More

In Depth with Charles Murray

– Video, In-Depth, C-SPAN, aired February 6, 2005.
Summary: Charles Murray was interviewed about his life and work. He also responded to telephone calls, faxes, and electronic mail from viewers. A video was shown of Mr. Murray in his… More

Charles Murray “Real Education”

– Video, BookTV, C-SPAN, September 5, 2008.
Summary: From FreedomFest 2008, held in Las Vegas, Charles Murray talks about his latest book which takes a critical look at the educational system in America and proposes ways to improve… More

The State of White America

– Video, Bradley Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, April 4, 2011.
Summary: Over the last half century, America has developed a new lower class and a new upper class that are different in kind from anything it has ever known. These developments are not… More

Charles Murray on the State of White America

– Video, C-SPAN, April 4, 2011.
Summary: Author and political scientist Charles Murray spoke about American cultural values and economic disparity. He said that over the last half century, America had developed not only… More

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

– Video, panel at the Cato Institute, October 24, 2011.
Summary: Featuring the Editor in Chief of The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, Ronald Hamowy, with comments by Charles Murray and William Galston. Moderated by Jason Kuznicki, Research… More

Discussing Charles Murray’s Coming Apart

– Video conversation, EconLog, March 9, 2012.
Summary: Arnold Kling organized a video conference to discuss Coming Apart. Participants were Brink Lindsey, Bryan Caplan, Megan McArdle, Reihan Salam, and Ross Douthat. There was not much… More

Charles Murray on Colbert Report

– Video, The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, March 27, 2012.
Summary: Charles Murray talks about his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, and suggests a way to address the growing division between the classes. (7:24)

Charles Murray on Coming Apart

– Video, Hoover Institution, April 10, 2012.
Summary: This week on Uncommon Knowledge, longtime American Enterprise Institute fellow Charles Murray discusses his controversial new book, Coming Apart, about what American was, is, and… More

Why America is Coming Apart

– Video, American Enterprise Institute, June 24, 2012.
Summary: It used to be that America meant something to all Americans. But that common understanding is dissolving, explains AEI scholar Charles Murray in his new book, Coming Apart: The… More

Charles Murray: Are You a Snob? Take the Test.

– Video, Big Think, March 8, 2013.
Summary: American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray has designed a quiz he hopes will have “a salutary effect on bringing to people’s attention the degree to which… More

The Bell Curve Revisited

– Video, the Program on Constitutional Government, Harvard University, March 14, 2014.
Summary: Charles Murray, on “The Bell Curve Revisited.” Charles Murray is a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of famous and influential books, among… More

Are We Really Coming Apart?

– Video, panel at the Aspen Institute, March 18, 2014.
Summary: Two very different scholars of American society look at the United States and the growing gap in values and behaviors among communities and classes within them. What is happening… More

The Curmudgeons

– Audio, Ricochet podcast, April 17, 2014.
Charles Murray discusses his book The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life

How to Spend your Twenties

– Video, American Enterprise Institute, August 11, 2014.
Summary: AEI scholar Charles Murray explains how spending your twenties in unorthodox ways will better prepare you for your future and help dismantle the growing divide in American society.

Charles Murray and Jonah Goldberg on Civil Disobedience

– Video, American Enterprise Institute, May 11, 2015.
Summary: The American ideal of limited government is on life support. Is it time for civil disobedience? Charles Murray says yes. Murray has been writing on government overreach for more… More

By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission

– Video, Cato Institute, May 13, 2015.
Summary: Civil disobedience may be the only avenue left for millions of Americans who just want to go about their business undisturbed. Charles Murray explains his dangerous idea in the new… More

How Government Got So Big

– Video, Opinion Journal, Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2015.
American Enterprise Institute Scholar Charles Murray on his new book, By the People, and the policies that led to the growth of bureaucracy.

Power to the People

– Video, Stossel, Fox Business, May 18, 2015.
Charles Murray discusses the kind of civil disobedience he advocates in his book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission with John Stossel.

Charles Murray: Rebuilding Liberty

– Video, lecture at the Commonwealth Club, June 10, 2015.
Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Author, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission David Davenport, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution —… More

After Words with Charles Murray

– Video, BookTV, C-SPAN, June 11, 2015.
Summary: Charles Murray talked about his book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission, in which he argues that it is now possible to roll back the power of the federal… More

By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission

– Video, lecture at the Aspen Ideas Festival, June 30, 2015.
Have we come to the end of the American project as the founders intended it? Join social scientist Charles Murray, who worries that the essence of the American promise — liberty and the… More

The Bell Curve: IQ, Race and Gender

– Video, discussion with Stefan Molyneux, Freedomain Radio, September 14, 2015.
Summary: In continuing our discussion on Human Intelligence and the predictive powers of IQ, Charles Murray joins the broadcast to discuss the latest science regarding ethnic and gender… More

Immigration and Less-Educated Workers

– Video, panel discussion hosted by Center for Immigration Studies, September 28, 2016.
Summary: The Center for Immigration Studies hosted a panel discussion focusing on low-skill Americans dropping out of the labor force, and the role mass immigration may play in the trend.… More