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

by Charles Murray

Trends in marriage are important not just with regard to the organization of communities, but because they are associated with large effects on the socialization of the next generation. No matter what the outcome being examined—the quality of the mother-infant relationship,5 externalizing behavior in childhood (aggression, delinquency, and hyperactivity),6 delinquency in adolescence,7 criminality as adults,8 illness and injury in childhood,9 early mortality,10 sexual decision making in adolescence,11 school problems and dropping out,12 emotional health,13 or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life—the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family’s socioeconomic status.14 I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties. In any case, the change in the family structure in which the children of Fishtown grow up has been huge.

anthropologists, Bronisław Malinowski. In his 1930 book, Sex,

EUROPEANS HAVE BEEN disdainful of Americans’ enthusiasm for work. “Americans live to work,” they say, “while Europeans work to live.” Many Americans have agreed, me among them, and felt sorry for Europeans. Yes, you can overdo it. There is more to life than work, and a life without ample space for family and friends is incomplete. But this much should not be controversial: Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life.

Read biographical sketches of prominent men and women of the past … and you will see proudly proclaimed memberships and officerships in a wide array of the same fraternal, veterans’, women’s, and civic associations that also involved millions of non-elite citizens.… Those who were leaders had to care about inspiring large numbers of fellow members. Members counted; and leaders had to mobilize and interact with others from a wide range of backgrounds or they were not successful. To get ahead within associations, ambitious men and women had to express and act on values and activities shared with people of diverse occupational backgrounds.7

This indictment of the European model represents a minority position, at least among intellectuals, and so do my perspective on happiness and my conclusion that the American project is disintegrating. For an evocation of the European model as the ideal, I recommend Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.2 Two companion volumes reflecting the European perspective on religion and happiness are Phil Zuckerman’s Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment and Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science.3 For the case that American culture shows great continuity over the last two centuries, enduring to the present, I recommend Claude Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character.4 Fischer and Michael Hout also wrote Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years, which takes many social and economic trendlines in this book further back than 1960.5

In a fair society, it is believed, different groups of people—men and women, blacks and whites, heterosexuals and homosexuals, the children of poor people and the children of rich people—will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes

in life: the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs, the same proportions who become English professors and theoretical physicists, the same proportions who become stand-up

up comedians and point gu...

that doesn’t happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last forty years, the premise that significant group differences cannot exist has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation reaching into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everythin...

A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding—and more fun—to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.