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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 Hardcover – Jan. 31 2012
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Charles Murray
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Charles Murray
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Product details
- Publisher : Crown Forum; 1st edition (Jan. 31 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307453421
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307453426
- Item weight : 669 g
- Dimensions : 16.36 x 3.3 x 24.16 cm
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Best Sellers Rank:
#267,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #324 in Ethnic Studies (Books)
- #446 in Sociology of Class
- #2,248 in United States 20th Century History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Product description
Review
"I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s 'Coming Apart.'”
--David Brooks, The New York Times
"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 happiness."
--W. Bradford Wilcox, The Wall Street Journal
"'Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010' brims with ideas about what ails America."
-- The Economist
“a timely investigation into a worsening class divide no one can afford to ignore.”
--Publisher's Weekly
“[Charles Murray] argues for the need to focus on what has made the U.S. exceptional beyond its wealth and military power...religion, marriage, industriousness, and morality.”
--Booklist (Starred Review)
"Charles Murray ... has written an incisive, alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American society."
--Roger Lowenstein, Bloomberg Businessweek
--David Brooks, The New York Times
"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 happiness."
--W. Bradford Wilcox, The Wall Street Journal
"'Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010' brims with ideas about what ails America."
-- The Economist
“a timely investigation into a worsening class divide no one can afford to ignore.”
--Publisher's Weekly
“[Charles Murray] argues for the need to focus on what has made the U.S. exceptional beyond its wealth and military power...religion, marriage, industriousness, and morality.”
--Booklist (Starred Review)
"Charles Murray ... has written an incisive, alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American society."
--Roger Lowenstein, Bloomberg Businessweek
About the Author
CHARLES MURRAY is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention in 1984 with Losing Ground. His subsequent books include In Pursuit, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, In Our Hands, and Real Education. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Our Kind of People
In which is described the emergence of a new and distinctive culture among a highly influential segment of American society.
ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1987, ABC premiered an hour-long dramatic series with the cryptic title thirtysomething. The opening scene is set in a bar. Not a Cheers bar, where Cliff the mailman perches on a bar stool alongside Norm the accountant and Frasier the psychiatrist, but an airy room, perhaps attached to a restaurant, with sunlight streaming in through paned windows onto off-white walls.
The room is crowded with an upscale clientele gathered for drinks after work, nattily uniformed servers moving among them. Two women in their late twenties or early thirties wearing tailored business outfits are seated at a table. A vase with a minimalist arrangement of irises and forsythia is visible in the background. On the table in front of the women are their drinks- both of them wine, served in classic long-stemmed glasses. Nary a peanut or a pretzel is in sight. One of the women is talking about a man she has started dating. He is attractive, funny, good in bed, she says, but there's a problem: He wears polyester shirts. "Am I allowed to have a relationship with someone who wears polyester shirts?" she asks.
She is Hope Murdoch, the female protagonist. She ends up marrying the man who wore the polyester shirts, who is sartorially correct by the time we see him. Hope went to Princeton. She is a writer who put a promising career on hold when she had a baby. He is Michael Steadman, one of two partners in a fledgling advertising agency in Philadelphia. He went to the University of Pennsylvania (the Ivy League one). Hope and Michael live with their seven-month-old daughter in an apartment with high ceilings, old-fashioned woodwork, and etched-glass windows. Grad-school-like bookcases are untidily crammed with books. An Art Deco poster is on the wall. A Native American blanket is draped over the top of the sofa.
In the remaining forty-five minutes, we get dialogue that includes a reference to left brain/right brain differences and an exchange about evolutionary sexual selection that begins, "You've got a bunch of Australopithecines out on the savanna, right?" The Steadmans buy a $278 baby stroller (1987 dollars). Michael shops for new backpacking gear at a high-end outdoors store, probably REI. No one wears suits at the office. Michael's best friend is a professor at Haverford. Hope breast-feeds her baby in a fashionable restaurant. Hope can't find a babysitter. Three of the four candidates she interviews are too stupid to be left with her child and the other is too Teutonic. Hope refuses to spend a night away from the baby ("I have to be available to her all the time"). Michael drives a car so cool that I couldn't identify the make. All this, in just the first episode.
The culture depicted in thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects, and whose sex lives were emotionally complicated and therefore needed to be talked about. The male leads in thirtysomething were on their way up through flair and creativity, not by being organization men. The female leads were conflicted about motherhood and yet obsessively devoted to being state-of-the-art moms. The characters all possessed a sensibility that shuddered equally at Fords and Cadillacs, ranch homes in the suburbs and ponderous mansions, Budweiser and Chivas Regal.
In the years to come, America would get other glimpses of this culture in Mad About You, Ally McBeal, Frasier, and The West Wing, among others, but no show ever focused with the same laser intensity on the culture that thirtysomething depicted-understandably, because the people who live in that culture do not make up much of the audience for network television series, and those who are the core demographic for network television series are not particularly fond of the culture that thirtysomething portrayed. It was the emerging culture of the new upper class.
Let us once again return to November 21, 1963, and try to find its counterpart.
The Baseline
The World of the Upper-Middle Class
Two conditions have to be met before a subculture can spring up within a mainstream culture. First, a sufficient number of people have to possess a distinctive set of tastes and preferences. Second, they have to be able to get together and form a critical mass large enough to shape the local scene. The Amish have managed to do it by achieving local dominance in selected rural areas. In 1963, other kinds of subcultures also existed in parts of the country. Then as now, America's major cities had distinctive urban styles, and so did regions such as Southern California, the Midwest, and the South. But in 1963 there was still no critical mass of the people who would later be called symbolic analysts, the educated class, the creative class, or the cognitive elite.
In the first place, not enough people had college educations to form a critical mass of people with the distinctive tastes and preferences fostered by advanced education. In the American adult population as a whole, just 8 percent had college degrees. Even in neighborhoods filled with managers and professionals, people with college degrees were a minority- just 32 percent of people in those jobs had college degrees in 1963. Only a dozen census tracts in the entire nation had adult populations in which more than 50 percent of the adults had college degrees, and all of them were on or near college campuses.
In the second place, affluence in 1963 meant enough money to afford a somewhat higher standard of living than other people, not a markedly different lifestyle. In 1963, the median family income of people working in managerial occupations and the professions was only $61,500 (2010 dollars, as are all dollar figures from now on). Fewer than 5 percent of American families in 1963 had incomes of $100,000 or more, and fewer than half of 1 percent had incomes of $200,000 or more.
Our Kind of People
In which is described the emergence of a new and distinctive culture among a highly influential segment of American society.
ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1987, ABC premiered an hour-long dramatic series with the cryptic title thirtysomething. The opening scene is set in a bar. Not a Cheers bar, where Cliff the mailman perches on a bar stool alongside Norm the accountant and Frasier the psychiatrist, but an airy room, perhaps attached to a restaurant, with sunlight streaming in through paned windows onto off-white walls.
The room is crowded with an upscale clientele gathered for drinks after work, nattily uniformed servers moving among them. Two women in their late twenties or early thirties wearing tailored business outfits are seated at a table. A vase with a minimalist arrangement of irises and forsythia is visible in the background. On the table in front of the women are their drinks- both of them wine, served in classic long-stemmed glasses. Nary a peanut or a pretzel is in sight. One of the women is talking about a man she has started dating. He is attractive, funny, good in bed, she says, but there's a problem: He wears polyester shirts. "Am I allowed to have a relationship with someone who wears polyester shirts?" she asks.
She is Hope Murdoch, the female protagonist. She ends up marrying the man who wore the polyester shirts, who is sartorially correct by the time we see him. Hope went to Princeton. She is a writer who put a promising career on hold when she had a baby. He is Michael Steadman, one of two partners in a fledgling advertising agency in Philadelphia. He went to the University of Pennsylvania (the Ivy League one). Hope and Michael live with their seven-month-old daughter in an apartment with high ceilings, old-fashioned woodwork, and etched-glass windows. Grad-school-like bookcases are untidily crammed with books. An Art Deco poster is on the wall. A Native American blanket is draped over the top of the sofa.
In the remaining forty-five minutes, we get dialogue that includes a reference to left brain/right brain differences and an exchange about evolutionary sexual selection that begins, "You've got a bunch of Australopithecines out on the savanna, right?" The Steadmans buy a $278 baby stroller (1987 dollars). Michael shops for new backpacking gear at a high-end outdoors store, probably REI. No one wears suits at the office. Michael's best friend is a professor at Haverford. Hope breast-feeds her baby in a fashionable restaurant. Hope can't find a babysitter. Three of the four candidates she interviews are too stupid to be left with her child and the other is too Teutonic. Hope refuses to spend a night away from the baby ("I have to be available to her all the time"). Michael drives a car so cool that I couldn't identify the make. All this, in just the first episode.
The culture depicted in thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects, and whose sex lives were emotionally complicated and therefore needed to be talked about. The male leads in thirtysomething were on their way up through flair and creativity, not by being organization men. The female leads were conflicted about motherhood and yet obsessively devoted to being state-of-the-art moms. The characters all possessed a sensibility that shuddered equally at Fords and Cadillacs, ranch homes in the suburbs and ponderous mansions, Budweiser and Chivas Regal.
In the years to come, America would get other glimpses of this culture in Mad About You, Ally McBeal, Frasier, and The West Wing, among others, but no show ever focused with the same laser intensity on the culture that thirtysomething depicted-understandably, because the people who live in that culture do not make up much of the audience for network television series, and those who are the core demographic for network television series are not particularly fond of the culture that thirtysomething portrayed. It was the emerging culture of the new upper class.
Let us once again return to November 21, 1963, and try to find its counterpart.
The Baseline
The World of the Upper-Middle Class
Two conditions have to be met before a subculture can spring up within a mainstream culture. First, a sufficient number of people have to possess a distinctive set of tastes and preferences. Second, they have to be able to get together and form a critical mass large enough to shape the local scene. The Amish have managed to do it by achieving local dominance in selected rural areas. In 1963, other kinds of subcultures also existed in parts of the country. Then as now, America's major cities had distinctive urban styles, and so did regions such as Southern California, the Midwest, and the South. But in 1963 there was still no critical mass of the people who would later be called symbolic analysts, the educated class, the creative class, or the cognitive elite.
In the first place, not enough people had college educations to form a critical mass of people with the distinctive tastes and preferences fostered by advanced education. In the American adult population as a whole, just 8 percent had college degrees. Even in neighborhoods filled with managers and professionals, people with college degrees were a minority- just 32 percent of people in those jobs had college degrees in 1963. Only a dozen census tracts in the entire nation had adult populations in which more than 50 percent of the adults had college degrees, and all of them were on or near college campuses.
In the second place, affluence in 1963 meant enough money to afford a somewhat higher standard of living than other people, not a markedly different lifestyle. In 1963, the median family income of people working in managerial occupations and the professions was only $61,500 (2010 dollars, as are all dollar figures from now on). Fewer than 5 percent of American families in 1963 had incomes of $100,000 or more, and fewer than half of 1 percent had incomes of $200,000 or more.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Explains trump and the social and economic crisis facing amercia that threatens its future
Reviewed in Canada on September 11, 2018Verified Purchase
This book is one of my favourite books that I have read showing the social collapse and degradation in American life is causing the lower class whites to become an underclass will the top 20% rocket upwards into there enclaves. Horrifying book describes the rise and appeal of Donald trump as well which, has been a consequence of this degradation.
One person found this helpful
Helpful
Reviewed in Canada on September 17, 2012
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In Coming Apart, Charles Murray presents, and defends through an amazing amount of statistics, that America is coming apart at the seams. We are coming apart because "the American project has been historically based on industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity" and the united culture in which the American project began is now a divided culture. Murray questions whether or not the American project can exist much longer in such a divided culture.
Coming Apart isolates the white culture of America to avoid the impact of race on the formation of values. Murray compares the culture of the 1960s to the culture of 2010 using a wide array of studies. At times, the amount of information is almost too much to take in. But the implications are hard to miss.
To make it easier on the reader, Murray created two fictional communities, Fishtown and Belmont. Fishtown represents those without a college education and who works in a blue collar jobw or low level white collar jobw. Belmont represents those withe a college degree and who work in high-prestige professions or management. These two fictional neighborhoods represent the top 20% of education and income (Belmont) and the bottom 30% of education and income (Fishtown). And the differences between the two are staggering.
On all four values of hard work, honesty, marriage, and religiosity, Belmont and Fishtown are night and day apart. Marriage is still a practiced value in Belmont, but not so much in Fishtown. A large number of children are born to single mothers in Fishtown, but not in Belmont. Unemployment is through the roof in Fishtown.Etc., etc., etc.
Murray's point is not that the two extremes are, well, the two extremes, but that they are the two extremes based upon the values they embrace. Because Belmont still values hard work and marriage, they are in the top 20%. Because Fishtown has abandoned the same, they are in the bottom 30%.
His larger point is that the divide between these two "cultures" is getting worse and problematic. The Belmonts of America are increasingly self-isolating from the Fishtowns, to the point that most Belmontians have no idea what life in Fishtown is like. And since the Belmontians are the influencers and decision makers of America, they have lost touch with the reality that most of Americans experience. His analysis of "super ZIPS," where these Belmont clusters have isolated from the rest of America is worth the price of the book alone.
Murray is careful not to say that Belmont is higher and mightier than Fishtown per say. In fact, Belmont is in real danger. Belmont itself is forsaking the convictions that what made Belmont is the values of hard work, marriage, and religion. If Belmont thinks it can reach the same end on a different path than the values that brought it there, Belmont may end up like Fishtown.
Coming Apart will make you think, and leave you thinking with a whole lot of "what do we do with this" kind of thoughts. But a good book is supposed to do that. But you will come away convinced that America is indeed, coming apart.
Coming Apart isolates the white culture of America to avoid the impact of race on the formation of values. Murray compares the culture of the 1960s to the culture of 2010 using a wide array of studies. At times, the amount of information is almost too much to take in. But the implications are hard to miss.
To make it easier on the reader, Murray created two fictional communities, Fishtown and Belmont. Fishtown represents those without a college education and who works in a blue collar jobw or low level white collar jobw. Belmont represents those withe a college degree and who work in high-prestige professions or management. These two fictional neighborhoods represent the top 20% of education and income (Belmont) and the bottom 30% of education and income (Fishtown). And the differences between the two are staggering.
On all four values of hard work, honesty, marriage, and religiosity, Belmont and Fishtown are night and day apart. Marriage is still a practiced value in Belmont, but not so much in Fishtown. A large number of children are born to single mothers in Fishtown, but not in Belmont. Unemployment is through the roof in Fishtown.Etc., etc., etc.
Murray's point is not that the two extremes are, well, the two extremes, but that they are the two extremes based upon the values they embrace. Because Belmont still values hard work and marriage, they are in the top 20%. Because Fishtown has abandoned the same, they are in the bottom 30%.
His larger point is that the divide between these two "cultures" is getting worse and problematic. The Belmonts of America are increasingly self-isolating from the Fishtowns, to the point that most Belmontians have no idea what life in Fishtown is like. And since the Belmontians are the influencers and decision makers of America, they have lost touch with the reality that most of Americans experience. His analysis of "super ZIPS," where these Belmont clusters have isolated from the rest of America is worth the price of the book alone.
Murray is careful not to say that Belmont is higher and mightier than Fishtown per say. In fact, Belmont is in real danger. Belmont itself is forsaking the convictions that what made Belmont is the values of hard work, marriage, and religion. If Belmont thinks it can reach the same end on a different path than the values that brought it there, Belmont may end up like Fishtown.
Coming Apart will make you think, and leave you thinking with a whole lot of "what do we do with this" kind of thoughts. But a good book is supposed to do that. But you will come away convinced that America is indeed, coming apart.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Exceptional book no matter what nation you from. This book provides a lesson for us all. Thanks Charles Murray.
Reviewed in Canada on January 31, 2018Verified Purchase
Exceptional book no matter which you belong. This is a must read. Very insightful and thought provoking. Well worth the price.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in Canada on October 24, 2019
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Good read
Reviewed in Canada on September 8, 2020
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Definately an eye opener and brain nourishment. Worthy of discussion.
Reviewed in Canada on July 7, 2017
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A brilliant analysis of growing class divisions in the USA.
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Reviewed in Canada on August 19, 2019
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Great book
Reviewed in Canada on July 27, 2013
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This book is an excellent read. Murray tells the story of America through data. Full of insights and charts - quite enjoyed it...
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Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 14, 2021Verified Purchase
Superb analysis of American decline.
Chris X
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very interesting study
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 17, 2020Verified Purchase
Well worth a read
David Ryan
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gives good statistics and compelling spin on sociological changes in America ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2018Verified Purchase
Interesting book. Gives good statistics and compelling spin on sociological changes in America which have clearly been overlooked
David Hugh-Jones
5.0 out of 5 stars
This was enjoyable and clearly argued, and I thought ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 20, 2017Verified Purchase
This was enjoyable and clearly argued, and I thought it had a bit more of a clear thesis than Robert Putnam's Our Kids.
Alexander H
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very timely book, should be top of the reading list for every public servant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 9, 2016Verified Purchase
Excellent work. His central arguments are equally applicable here in the UK; see Brexit. Could have done with some demographic stats to give more weight to his observations on Europe.