Tag: Class Divide

Topics

Books

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essays

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentary

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multimedia

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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