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

by Charles Murray

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