Current Quarter Expenses.
Posted on 02/18/2012 6:37:10 AM PST by Kaslin
We are experiencing an ever widening cultural divide, according to Charles Murray.
Upper-middle class professional types may pretend that they are cultural relativists, accepting of whatever lifestyle their fellow human beings happen to choose. In reality, they live by old fashioned puritan values, however. They get married and stay married. They work hard and work long hours.
Not so for the blue collar, never-got-beyond-high-school class, however. A shocking number aren't even working at all. Many are not getting married in the first place. Of those that get married, the divorce and separation rates are soaring.
What about happiness and well-being? About 65% of the upper middle class professional types say they are in happy marriages. That number has been dropping steadily for the past 40 years for the working class types; and today it stands at 25%!
Murray, by the way, is the author of Losing Ground, the book generally credited with sparking welfare reform in the United States, and The Bell Curve, the book that generated a national debate on the role of IQ in our society. When he speaks, people on both the right and the left tend to listen. His latest book, Coming Apart, is another block buster.
Just so you don't think what Murray is describing is all about race or about immigrants, the entire analysis in it is focused on non-Hispanic whites. Within the white population a cultural cataclysm is underway. One part of that population (about 20% of the total) is firmly attached to traditional values. The other part (about 30% of the total) is undergoing cultural disintegration.
In 1960, these two groups of people lived similar lives. Today, they are headed in opposite directions.
Take divorce. Between 1960 and 1980, Murray shows that working class whites' divorce/separation rate rose from about 5% to about 15%. Over the next 20 years it more than doubled again, rising from 15% to 35%. The professional class also saw an increase in the divorce rate rise between 1960 and 1980: from about 1% to about 7.5% between 1960 and 1980. But it then completely leveled off: the professional class divorce/separation rate has been flat for the last thirty years. The same pattern holds for children growing up in broken homes. There has been a steady increase for the working class and a low plateau for the professional class.
What about work? In 1968, only 3% of prime age males with no more than a high school education were "out of the labor force." By 2008, that figure climbed to 12% — almost one in eight. Meanwhile, little has changed among males with a college education.
Part-time work is another indicator of the decline of industriousness among the working class. Among prime age males with no more than a high school education, the fraction working fewer than 40 hours a week doubled — from 10% in 1968 to 20% in 2008. Among the college graduates, the rise was much smaller: from 9% to 12%.
Writing in The New York Times the other day, David Brooks noted that the key ingredient in the cultural disintegration of working class life style is the role of men:
Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.
Over the past 40 years, women's wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It's not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It's the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.
Religious beliefs are changing too. Secularism rose 11 percentage points (from 29% to 40%) for the upper middle class, but rose 21 percentage points (from 38% to 59%) for the working class.
What about cause and effect? It should be obvious that culture affects economic outcomes, but some on the left think it's the other way around. Here's an amazing statement by Paul Krugman writing in The New York Times:
Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
As usual, Krugman has it completely wrong. When Charles Murray was in Dallas the other day I suggested to him that culture is like the economists' notion of a "public good." We all benefit from it, even if we personally do nothing to create it, nurture it, or defend it. But if the institutions that sustain a culture are weak and eroding, then the culture itself will disappear and everyone will be affected by that change.
What is happening in working class America is the disintegration of the American way of life.
Traditional values died in the 60’s,woodstock anyone?.
A lot of America’s social sexual problems are based in something that was long not even noticed. Many children today are brought up with almost no socialization with the opposite gender.
Thus there are a huge number of adults who have never done anything social with the opposite gender. They have never played with them, worked with them, had any friends other than in their own gender, and more and more, never even dated them until they were adults, when they were expected to “find someone and marry them.” Like, how?
Girls and women think they are broadcasting all sorts of sexual attraction cues, that initiate interaction with boys and men. But the vast majority of men have no idea, just the few, often of low character, who do. So girls and women think they have no choice but to associate with these men, as nobody else “pays them attention”.
And many girls and women are so deprived of attention, that they turn into “attention junkies”, confusing attention with affection, even if that attention is violent, uncaring, exploitative and mean.
If you ask adults, they *assume* that their children were socialized in school and in church. But this is not the case. In both situations, adults keep the children busy doing other things.
For children, and now even for adults, there are almost no opportunities for polite and extended interaction, chaperoned, with no demands that they have to do something.
What, in a bar, with drunks? Church again, with people they are only in the same room with for an hour, once a week?
If you isolate a dog from other dogs when it is growing up, it will still want to mate, but it will see other dogs as hostile and unfriendly. It won’t know how to interact with them. Why should humans be different?
While this sounds academic, the reality is that it is making life miserable for millions of people, and harming our society and our children in a multitude of ways.
We must devise some means for boy and girl children to interact, in a chaperoned situation, in which they are not permitted to self-segregate by gender, nor distracted by what adults demand they do.
So true.
We are becoming England.
The Media and its so-caled "journalists" are so thoroughly suffused with it that they cannot see what's going on or the terrible contribution they're making to it.
It's the same with so-called "liberals" (they're anything but liberal) all across the board--from academia to Hollywood to Washington to the press and everywhere else.
It is to our advantage that we are smarter than they are and think clearly, but it's going to take all the resources we can find just to counteract the destruction wreaked by these morons.
I agree that 1965, for the reasons you stated, is the watershed year. As a Catholic, I can tell you from the research that vocations to the priesthood and church attendance peaked in 1966 and have been in yearly decline ever since, no doubt resulting from the overall decline triggered by the Great Society.
Are there fifty righteous people in any one of the cities?
Charles Murray will be on CSPAN 2 at 7:30pm to discuss his book in case you’re interested.
The Great Society certainly destroyed the black family structure in the US. In two generations the illegitimacy rate has become > 70%. No politician or MSMer seems to want to mention any of that.
Just put more $$ into the “schools” that will fix everything.
Placemark.
I can't wait to see all the school uniforms. No more baggy pants. Don't forget the ties boys!
“watching my slacker neighbors sit on their asses and collect welfare, disability, free health care, etc” (Hosea 7:1-2)
The thief comes inside. The Bandits raid outside. Now their exploits surround and encircle them.
Foreigners sap his strength, but he does not realize it. His hair is sprinkled with gray, but he does not notice.
The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour. Were it to yield grain, foreigners would swallow it up.
In 1958 a list of 45 stategems was distributed by CPUSA from the main CP. It was read into the Congessional Record by a Politician from Florida, I think, in 1963. If you read it, all 45 have been accomplished either wholly or partially. Everything from acceptance of perversion, UN involvement, taking over one or both political parties, and education. Google it.
Girls and women think they are broadcasting all sorts of sexual attraction cues, that initiate interaction with boys and men. But the vast majority of men have no idea, just the few, often of low character, who do. So girls and women think they have no choice but to associate with these men, as nobody else “pays them attention”.
Your whole post was very good, I keyed on this section though. In my experience while raising my sons is that many if not most children are horribly scarred by the divorces of their parents. And they are very leery if not close to being terrified of marriage. It’s not that they don’t want to be in a loving marriage and have a family, they are afraid of the consequences if it doesn’t ‘work out’ and they get a divorce from their spouse.
As one of them once told me, “Dad, from what I can see of my friend’s dad’s situation, divorce makes you a slave to your ex until the kids are grown up.”
All I could tell him is that if you decide to get married be very, VERY sure of what you are getting into.
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