7.4 /10 1 Votes7.4
Media type Print Originally published 31 January 2012 Page count 416 | 3.7/5 Goodreads Pages 416 ISBN 0307453421 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Charles A Murray books, Social class books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 is a 2012 book by Charles Murray, a political scientist and W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Murray describes what he sees as the economic divide and moral decline of white Americans that has occurred since 1960. He focuses on white Americans in order to make it clear that the decline he describes was not being experienced solely by minorities, whom he brings into his argument in the last few chapters of the book.
Murray describes several differences he sees forming between and causing two emerging classes—the New Upper Class and the New Lower class—among which are differences in or lack thereof in regards to religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc. Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. Much of his argument is centered on a notion of self-selective sorting that began in the 1960s and 1970s, when he argues that cognitive ability became the essential predictor of professional and financial success, and people overwhelmingly began marrying others in the same cognitive stratum and living in areas surrounded largely by others in that same stratum, leading to not only an exacerbation of existing economic divides, but an unprecedented sociocultural divide that had not existed before in America.
Reception
Bryan Caplan reviewed Coming Apart on his blog EconLog, calling the book "another social science page turner, written with earnest eloquence and full of fascinating information" but went on to criticize Murray for glass half empty thinking. Caplan concluded that the message he got from Murray's book (different from Murray's own conclusion) was that traditionalists who preached virtuous lifestyles needed to discard their populist anti-elitist attitude and instead embrace elites as exemplars of the virtues they preached. Caplan followed up by noting that some of Murray's pessimism was overstated and a result of myopic focus on specific indicators: for instance, Murray focused on an apparently steep decline in marital happiness even though overall happiness had held almost constant over the same time period. Later, Caplan wrote a blog post attempting to reconcile Coming Apart (which blamed the decline in moral character) with Murray's two other books: Losing Ground (which blamed the welfare state and the incentives it set up) and The Bell Curve (which blamed cognitive stratification and the difficulties that the increasing complexities of modern life presented to low IQ individuals).
Statistician Andrew Gelman wrote a lengthy review of Coming Apart on his blog. The book was also reviewed by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, David Frum in The Daily Beast, Roger Devlin in The Occidental Quarterly, and Foseti on his/her own blog.
The book was included in The New York Times´s list of 100 Notable Books of 2012.