Charles Murray and the Ruling Class

There's a podcast up on Powerline with Steven Hayward interviewing Charles Murray and Steve Sailer on race and Year of George and the Great Awokening.

Charles Murray, of course,  is the author of several books on big government and race and IQ, and Steve Sailer blogs on the Unz Review and always has naughty statistics on race. 

This gives me a chance to pass Murray's major books in review. Here are some excerpts from a review of Murray's work that I wrote in 2014.

First, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980, published in 1984, says that

the liberals confidently instrumented their Great Society legislation with studies and social science research that would confirm their "elite wisdom." But when the results came in and pronounced the failure of their policies, they said nothing and did nothing.

Then came The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1996.

[I] thought it good, but unexceptionable. Of course IQ is important in an age when wealth doesn't come in broad rich acres but right between the ears. I read [the] warning about a cognitive elite but didn't really pay much attention, not then. 

Then Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 - 2010 in 2012 that I thought the best of his books.

Hey kids, let's look at White America and see how it's doing! My takeaway is that [Murray says] that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine. (Hey, why wouldn't it, since the elite has used its power to make America in its own image!) The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don't marry and the men don't work.

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Coming Apart starting here.

Since then, Murray has written Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America in 2021. As the blurb says:

American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. 

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Facing Reality starting here.

But this week we had Charles Murray on a podcast, and the big takeaway for me was his comment on the reaction to The Bell Curve published in 1996.

The key section starts at about 10:00. Says Murray:

People didn't read The Bell Curve even when it first came out... Were there responses I respected and of course the politic thing for me to say is, to be very serious, yes, there were... Well, it's really hard for me to think of any that impressed me and there were some were written by very famous scholars that I just thought were pure "horse manure." and others in which I thought they were knowingly lying, that these people were too smart and too well informed not to know that they were lying about what was in the book.

OK. So there's a "tell" here. What is going on? Why don't liberals want to honestly discuss the question of IQ and race? The Bell Curve said that jobs increasingly required high cognitive skills, and that people without high cognitive skills would be at a disadvantage. E.g., especially, blacks.

The answer is The Sixties. In the Sixties liberals set the future by passing Civil Rights laws that made discrimination by race and sex illegal. And they passed the Great Society legislation that mandated a bunch of handouts to the poor. And they started Affirmative Action that deliberately discriminated against whites.

Charles Murray in Losing Ground said that the handouts didn't improve the lives of the poor.

Charles Murray in The Bell Curve said that the future belonged to the cognitive elite, and blacks would be particularly disadvantaged.

Charles Murray in Coming Apart said that, looking at whites only, the cognitive elite were doin' fine, the middle were doing so-so, and in the lower classes the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much. In other words The Bell Curve was right. The policy of the cognitive elite discriminates against all people with a less-than-magnificent IQ -- including whites with low IQs.

Oh, and by the way, since Coming Apart was published we now know about the white working class "dying of despair" from drink and drugs. Golly, that couldn't possibly be about the low IQ whites just not being able to make it in the economy that privileges high IQ could it? Nah! Not a chance.

You expect our liberal friends to say, oh well, looks like we screwed up? So let's all get together and try to fix things?

Well, the record of the last 35 years since Losing Ground in 1984 is pretty clear. Our liberal friends aren't going to admit that they screwed up: not on big government programs and not on race. Instead they say the whole thing is due to white racism. And patriarchal sexism, and vile homophobia. And anything else, including the kitchen sink, that they can throw at ordinary Americans.

And if you disagree with them you are going to be downrated on Google Search because "disinformation," fired from your job, and canceled from social media.

I mean, if the black crime rate is nine times the white crime rate it can't be because the politics and programs of our liberal friends in the cognitive elite actually Make Things Worse. No. It must be the "hate" of far-right white supremacist armed insurrectionists.

And that is where America is today. Unless and until we do something about it.

Murray Facing Reality, Yes You Liberals

The point of Charles Murray's Facing Reality is quite simple. Whatever you fervently believe with every cell in your activist brain, liberals, human groups are different.

(The bigger meaning of Facing Reality)

That means that if you use government or secular religion to force group outcomes to be "representative" of society as a whole you are going to have to use force. A lot of force.

And even when you use force, it will probably not make much difference.

Charles Murray has spent his life showing liberals how their fervent beliefs are in fact virtue-signalling fantasies -- from way back before "virtue-signalling" became a thing. Let's recapitulate.

In Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, 323 pages, published in 1984, Murray wrote that the Great Society was a wrong turn and failed, and that liberals should know it because they instrumented all the wonderful new programs so they could boast about their successes, so the numbers are all there for anyone that cares. But the liberals didn't want to write about the failures. So they didn't.

In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 845 pages, published in 1994 and co-written with Richard Herrnstein, Murray argued that the future would belong to those with more "cognitive ability." I.e., black Americans would not do well in the job market of the future. Liberals said that Murray was a racist.

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, 407 pages, published in 2012, Murray wrote that, considering only white Americans, the cognitively able were doing fine with great careers and merger marriages (of cognitive able men to cognitively able women), the middle 50 percent were doing so-so, and at the bottom the cognitively disabled men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.

Now in Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, 151 pages, published in 2021, Murray says told-ya so liberals. Groups that test with lower IQ have worse outcomes in life and work and crime. Period, full stop, science.

For me Facing Reality crystallized two notions that hadn't previously crystallized in my brain.

First, I have known for a while that humans do not give up their fervent beliefs when presented with "science" that demonstrates their ideas are wrong. Not at all. Instead humans go for one more Big Push, a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only when their brilliant ideas lie around them in graveyards from here to the horizon do people give up on their glorious vision of a better world. So this is it. This is our Great Purge. That is the meaning of "systemic racism" and Wokism and pushing Critical Race Theory into the nation's schools. Liberals instinctively know their ideas have failed. So the response is to destroy their political opponents. Humans always do things like that when things start going wrong. 

Second, "woke" corporations are a natural and physical response by corporations to the double-bind the Civil Rights era puts on them. The original Civil Rights Act in Title VII provided for affirmative action and the idea that the only way to show an absence of bias was by showing that a corporation's workforce "looked like America" from janitor to CEO. Thus, if a traditionally marginalized group is "underrepresented" at any level in a corporation then the corporation is just sitting there, like a rabbit before a coyote, easy prey for any lefty activist group hungry for a nice tasty lunch today. But, because of the distribution of cognitive ability in different groups it is physically impossible to achieve this. So all a corporation can do is salute and contribute to BLM and close the accounts of Republican candidates at their bank.

So, if gubmint programs can't achieve what they promise to do, because reality, what is the point of them? The point is that every government program is a war on some horrid monster, and the noble supporters can expect loot and plunder from here to eternity.

Thus, all politics is about ginning up a war on some frightful enemy and then sharing the loot out among the supporters. There are four ways to do this.

You can declare some small neighboring country an enemy and invade and conquer them, as Bismarck did to Denmark (!) in 1862. This is the best strategy, because it unites the whole country against an insignificant foe that can't really fight back.

You can declare that Japs and Nazis are the enemy and have a world war over it. This is obviously a high risk strategy: what if you lose? But still, you get to unite the whole country to fight the monsters: keep your fingers crossed.

You can declare some large minority to be an enemy and fight a culture war against them, as the left is doing right now against "white supremacists." The danger is that you might ignite a real civil war, as happened in the US culture war of the 1850s. But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

You can declare a small minority to be the cause of all our problems, and unite the rest of the country against them, as Hitler did with the Jews. Not much fun for the small minority. Hey, I wonder if the current liberal use of blacks as a helpless victim small minority might not rebound in a "backlash."

See, I think that the real need for liberals to "face reality" is that there is a good chance that their present way of dividing the nation -- as all politics does -- might work against them. What if whites and Latinos and Asians all decide that low IQ blacks are a problem in the workforce, and a menace on the streets? You can say that the group differences between blacks and the rest mean that blacks are helpless victims. Or you can decide that since blacks commit about 50 percent of all murders that blacks are an existential problem. 

Suppose we experience the US politics of the last 50 years as a continuous effort of liberals to insist that blacks are "helpless victims" and to cancel anyone that disagrees, because raciss.

In the end life, the universe, and everything is a throw of the dice. That's what modern "science" says.

Murray Facing Reality: the Outcome

OK. So the two truths in Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America are that Americans of different races, as groups, have different cognitive ability and they have different crime rates. But what does it all mean?

(Back to Murray Facing Reality: The Setup)

What it means is that liberal governance, based upon the idea that the only just society is a society in which everything in all walks of life should be racially balanced, is going to make things worse.

Let us leave aside the trivial meaning, when it comes to crime. The job of the police is to crack the heads of lower-class thugs whether they are 19th century Irish, 20th century Italians, or 21st century blacks. If you don't police the young thugs then you will get vigilantes and gangs stepping in to keep the peace. And we don't want that, right, liberals?

No, the bigger problem is that the policy of race norming in the workplace cannot work: forcing every corporation, at every level, to display the right proportion of races. In fact, it will make everyone angry, from whites and Asians diversified out of jobs for which they are best qualified to blacks boosted up into jobs beyond their cognitive comfort zone.

Let's look at the problem both at the average and at the extreme.

At the average you have the average black at at IQ of 91 and an average white at an IQ of 103. Now, as Murray says, studies show that IQ is a good predictor of performance. This means that if you hire an average black for a position he/she will perform worse than an average white.

Do you see the problem here? It is that the average white around the office will think that the average black is a fool and a dunce, because the average black in the office with an IQ of 91 will be performing a lot worse than the average white in the office with an IQ of 103.

Let's suppose that science tells us that for a particular job a corporation needs an employee with an IQ of 103 and it hires on that basis. OK, right away it means that the pool of blacks will be smaller than the pool of whites. If our employer is completely race blind and hires only on the basis of IQ that means that blacks will be "underrepresented" throughout the corporation at jobs that require an IQ level of 103.

I don't think that the bean-counters at race-enforcement central are going to like that.

Now let's talk about the extreme. Let's talk about a job that needs an IQ of about 135, such as "a full professorship at an elite university" or "a senior position in the IT industry." What is the talent pool of 25-29 year-olds in the whole United States, by race, for that job?

[You are talking] about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins compared to 50,700 Asians and 160,100 Europeans.

In other words there are 57 whites nationwide that could do the job for every one black. So, if you were conducting a totally colorblind job search then you would hire a black once in every 50 job searches.

Imagine what the race-counters at race-enforcement central would say about that! 

Of course, in fact one third of the hirees would be Asian, because the average Asian has an IQ of 108 to the average white's IQ of 103 even though Asians are only about 6 percent of the population. So Asians would be way overrepresented in the top-dog jobs. Right now, as we all know, the race-counters at Ivy League colleges discriminate against Asians because otherwise they would be the majority of students!

Ok, now let's forget about the race-counters at race central. Let's think instead about ordinary people. Suppose we proceed on our current diversity and inclusion course and preferentially hire blacks for elite positions. What would that mean to the people boosted up into positions for which they do not have the cognitive chops?

Well, we know what it means at elite colleges, which search out blacks to study at their universities. Studies show that blacks -- and kids in general -- fail when they study at a university where the rest of the student body has much higher cognitive ability than they do. I think the gold standard on this finding is Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. They showed that black students -- er, students in general -- do much better when they go to a college with a student body that matches their test results than when they go to an elite college where the other students have significantly higher test results.

If we project this finding from the university to the workplace, then we are looking at blacks who are much more likely to fail at their jobs than their white counterparts -- because they have a significantly lower cognitive ability than the job requires.

And one thing more. If corporations hire unqualified people for their top jobs then the performance of these folks playing out of their league is going to lower the performance of the corporation as a whole and that is going to affect the lower-level employees -- not to mention the customers.

We are actually seeing this work out in real time at shops like The New York Times where "midwit" journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones -- of the "1619 Project" -- and Mara Gay -- troubled by American flags on Memorial Day weekend -- make fools of themselves by parroting the elite conventional wisdom without having the chops to perform on the elite stage.

And that is to say nothing of the ordinary middle-class whites that get shouldered out of the ordinary middle-class jobs for which they are qualified in order to satisfy the moral preenings of the educated ruling class.

There's another problem with race-conscious hiring, particularly in government: "aggressive affirmative action" at the city level means less competent police, prosecutors, health-care workers and K-12 public school teachers. It's the science.

The presence of incompetent or marginally competent people in those jobs is only occasionally important to members of America's upper middle class... The burden... is borne overwhelmingly by America's poorest and most vulnerable populations.

You may say that the poorest and most vulnerable populations can do something about that by voting the rascals out. You may say that our liberal friends are devoted above all else to government services that help the poorest and most vulnerable. I couldn't possibly comment. 

Let us give Charles Murray the last word.

The problem, he says, is that "affirmative action" morphed from "initiatives... to seek out qualified Blacks who were being overlooked" into "government-sponsored preferential treatment in determining who gets the educations and the jobs."

The solution, he says, is to "Eliminate all forms of government-sponsored treatment by race."

And the place to start is "to restore the American creed as the ideal shared by a consensus of the electorate." 

The Democrats need to treat racial preference policies "as pragmatic measures to deal with residual racism... and disassociate himself from the rhetoric of systemic racism."

The Republicans "must stop posturing as the guardians of true Americanism and instead say... that the people who love this country have always been on both sides of the political spectrum and still are today."

I said I'd give Charles Murray the last word. And I will, for today. But not tomorrow.

Murray Facing Reality: The Setup

I had an aha moment in the first chapters of Charles Murray's short polemic Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America. Nothing remarkable really. As he says in the introduction:

American White, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

That was what The Bell Curve was all about back in the 1990s.

American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.

Sorry liberals. Those are Facts, backed up by Science. And you are the Party of Science, remember?

His book made me realize what "systemic racism" and wokism is all about.

It is about the fact that to our liberal friends it cannot be true that the whole liberal project is a steaming pile of ordure. 

America's problems cannot be because ruling-class liberals have been wrong and wrong again and that their vision to make America into a just and equal society will never work. No, it's all the fault of those racist sexist homophobic evil white supremacists and right-wing extremists.They are what holds us back. It must be, because liberals are the good guys.

The point is that, over fifty years since the civil rights acts, it is intolerable to our liberal friends that there are still large group differences in America, particularly between white and black. Their faith was and is that civil rights law would eliminate group differences, and inaugurate a new era of equality. Somebody, somewhere, somehow has sabotaged the holy quest, and they must be stopped.

The whole point of Murray's book is to tell liberals: No. Your vision was always fatally flawed, and the last 50 years has proved it. Humans are different, liberals, and the differences mean different outcomes, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away. The next big push... No Child Left Behind in 2001 or a campaign to root out systemic racism in 2021 will change things.

Remember "Big Push?" That's what the Brits called their failed offensives on the western front in World War I. 

So Murray says no to the next Big Push. "[M]ean differences between groups are a reality and will be with us indefinitely." But against that is the saving faith, not just for liberals but for conservatives who say:

"The differences must be temporary. If they aren't... but they must be."

Sorry Charlie. There are real differences between the races in America. And there always will be. And that means different outcomes. You know what happened with the Big Pushes of World War I? They killed off the flower of youthful Britain. And France and Germany too.

OK. Let's get down to race. Just a social construction, after all.

America is multiracial America. Murray dissects it in three different ways: overall, Big City America, and America Outside the Big Cities.

Murray	Colloq.	Total US	Big-City	Rest of US
Total Population		325m	127m	198m
European	White	60%	45%	71%
Latin	Hispanic	18%	25%	14%
African	Black	13%	17%	10%
Asian	Asian	6%	9%	3%

You can see that America is still majority white, overall and in the rest of America. But whites are a minority in Big City America.

Now Murray gets down to brass tacks. Specifically:

1. When Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latins take cognitive ability tests, their "mean" results are different.
2. Race differences between Africans and Europeans in cognitive ability have not changed since the 1980s.
3. The tests predict future outcomes.

Do you see the point here? It is that you cannot expect populations with different cognitive abilities to have similar performance.

And you can see why our liberal friends are foaming at the CRT mouth. If we have been spending hundreds of billions every year on "helping" the marginalized and the oppressed it cannot be -- it cannot be -- that in the case of Africans (blacks) the whole effort is a big fat zero. There must be "malevolence" preventing it, because, per Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

There must be a fault. And since it can't be the educated, evolved liberal elite, and it can't be the helpless victims of the marginalized. Well, you get the point.

The test scores between Africans and Europeans are about one standard deviation, between Latins and Europeans is about 0.7 of a standard deviation. And Asians test about 0.25 of a standard deviation better than Europeans.

That mans that Asians are going to outperform Europeans are going to outperform Latins are going to outperform Africans. Period.

The point is that if you, the ruling class, want to make the proportions of workers in jobs and professions "look like America" you are going to have to go beyond affirmative action and diversity. You are going to have to blacken the entire white America as systemic racists and send them to the back of the line.

And here are the latest IQ numbers:

	IQ
European	103
African	91
Latin	94
Asian	108

If you construct bell curves of the IQ distribution of each of the four race categories there is plenty of overlap. So there are plenty of bright Africans, and plenty of dumb Europeans. But...

Since the most prestigious, powerful and highest paying jobs are so concentrated among people on the right-hand side of the [bell curve], a variety of important social and economic consequences... are inevitable.

In other words, there is no way in hell that it is possible for average people to succeed at the demanding jobs leading great institutions, creating new businesses, and ruling the nation. And that is what our liberal friends cannot allow themselves to think, let alone to admit.

And it gets worse. But that is for next time.

A Hollow Elite: The Roots of Wokeism

Over the weekend I wrote up a 4-part review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Because, even though I bought and read Coming Apart back in 2012 when it was published, I wanted to be sure I knew all the ins and outs of his book.

As you may know, Murray wrote the book after being anathematized as a racist for The Bell Curve published in 1994 which first advanced the idea that modern society was becoming one in which you needed good cognitive skills to succeed and that certain groups -- blacks in particular -- that exhibit lower IQ than the norm were going to be on the short end of the cognitive age. OK, he said: I'm a racist. Let's analyze the cognitive age for whites only.

I tend to summarize his book thusly: "the top 20 percent is doin' fine, with great careers and merger marriages, the middle 50 percent just so-so, and in the bottom 30 percent the men don't work much and the women don't marry much."

My new summary goes something like this: The US economy over the last 50 years has transformed life and work, and in particular benefited a "cognitive elite" of people with extraordinary cognitive skills. This cognitive elite is now the "new upper class" in America. But people lacking in high cognitive skills have not done so well, and in particular the bottom 30 percent has been hard hit. There aren't many good jobs for people without at least a high-school education, and so we also have a "new lower class" in America, where people don't work much, and don't marry much, and don't feel at all happy.

Perhaps the strongest point in Coming Apart is Murray's analysis of the new upper class of the cognitive elite that has segregated itself off from the rest of America into a cultural "bubble" and doesn't know much about the rest of America. Back in the day, when nearly everyone went to church and belonged to fraternal organizations they necessarily mixed -- and had to get along with -- people very different from themselves. No longer. And the growth of the welfare state means that people no longer have to get together to achieve social and community goals. They leave it up to politicians, government and its bureaucrats.

Murray proposes that to live a happy and meaningful live you have to score on the four ancient virtues: industry, honesty, marriage, religion. The new upper class scores well on all four virtues: they live worthy lives with, as I say, "great careers and merger marriages."

Writes Murray, "the new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them." It is a "hollow elite." For, while the new lower class has suffered and declined over the last half century, the new upper class has no idea that there is a problem; has no credible analysis of the problem; and demonizes anyone that tries to develop an analysis and a solution to the problem.

Things can't go on like this, Murray reckons: something has to give. And he comes up with a four-part prophecy, that involves the collapse of the European model of the welfare state and its intellectual underpinnings, the development of an alternative to the welfare state, and Americans asserting their allegiance to basic Americanism.

That's when I understood what the new ruling-class woke-ism is all about.

If a ruling class is challenged it has two basic options. It can grant the validity of the challenge and start to reform its corrupt institutions. Or it can double down and declare war on the insurgents. And that is how to understand the culture war, cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and Wokeism.

I dare say that in 2009 with the inauguration of the First Black President and a Democratic Congress with a 57-41 Democratic Senate and a 257-178 House our new upper class imagined that politics as we know it was all over and social justice -- fundamental transformation -- would rule for a thousand years. Instead they got a series of jolts. First of all was the Tea Party in 2009-10 and the flipping of the House with a 64 seat GOP gain leading to a 242-193 alignment. Then President Obama won reelection with less of a majority than his first election. Then the Senate flipped in 2014 to 54-44 Republican. Then the impossible happened in 2016 and a crude populist nationalist won the presidency.

Do you see the point? You can interpret these events in two ways. You can either say, that "we" have a problem. Or you can react with incredulity: "Inconceivable" as Wallace Shawn (son of New Yorker editor William Shawn) said in The Princess Bride. And that's when people start looking under rocks, or start chanting "Russia, Russia."

This is what you call a failure of prophecy. And governing elites tend not to say: wow, our whole world view is contradicted. Instead they tend to double down and to opt for a Reign of Terror and Virtue. Or Great Purge. Or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. And society ends up with a mammoth butcher's bill.

Now my guess is that the current wokeism and cancel culture and war on "systemic racism" is making things worse for the new lower class, and not better.

This is not rocket science. Ask yourself: how do "we" help people with less than stellar cognitive skills live a meaningful life in a congitive age? Give 'em welfare? I doubt it. I would say that we need, just to start, a reform of education and credentialing that creates pathways for people without high cognitive skills. And it would help create a adult culture for such people to help them get married, have children, own a home of their own, and live a meaningful life with modest security. In the larger sense, this means encouraging the lower orders to develop a sense of "agency" and permit them to create a world in which they can live lives of meaning.

Ask yourself: do I have a clue how a person of low cognitive ability would go about building a life with meaning in a cognitive age? I sure don't. 

But since our new upper class lives in a bubble and uses its cultural and political and economic power to dominate the rest of society with no backtalk allowed we have done nothing to help the "cognitively challenged."

You can see this bubble mentality in the #WeBelieve yardsigns that I like to believe are the work of the women of the new upper class. All of its assertions, from Black Lives Matter to Science is Real to Love is Love are trite expressions of new-upper-class conceit. They mean nothing to the new lower class, except for Black Lives Matter which will lead blacks to utter ruin.

I like to say that politics is division and government is force. The point of politics is for a warrior to rally the young men to his banner to fight the foreign foe on the border. The point of government is to reward the supporters of the rulers after they have won the great victory.

The problem is, of course, that the need to rally the nation to war happens only once in a generation, or less. So what do the politicians do the rest of the time? And there are other people, besides the supporters of the regime, who, you might say, also have a right to live a prosperous and meaningful life. Whatabout them?

The current administration's agenda has been simply stated: climate change and systemic racism. Do you see that there is nothing for the ordinary American in this agenda? Climate change is a ruling-class fantasy that empowers the rulers to spend vast quantities of money and order people around in a rerun of World War II. Systemic racism is a play to rile up the lower "people of color" and teach them that "they are owed," tempt them with government handouts and their problems are the fault of "white oppressors" who are...

Yes, the oppressors are not the new upper class that has an almost complete control of culture, politics, and the economy but, presumably, the white Commoners of the middle class. Who have absolutely no input into the national political and economic agenda, except when they vote for Trump to "Make America Great Again."

There is nothing in the Biden administration agenda to address the agenda of ordinary American Commoners, and there is nothing to address the problems of the new lower class that goes beyond handing out goodies.

Look, every upper class screws up. It must do so, because it looks out on the world and instinctively tries to adapt it to suit people like them and to dangle baubles that it imagines will attract the support of others. And there are millions of people who are not like them, who will eventually get angry about the blindness and the injustice of the rulers.

But when the people have clearly said that, hey, things are not working out for people like us, then the ruling class has two options. It can admit "we screwed up" and try to achieve a "redress of grievances." Or it can double down.

It is pretty obvious what our "hollow elite" has decided. And it is telling that its decision demonstrates an astonishing hubris, to ignore the possibility that there might be problems out there among the peasants about which we bright shining stars in the political firmament know nothing.

Coming Apart: Why It Matters

After establishing in Parts I and II of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 that a new upper class -- a "cognitive elite" -- was coming to dominate the culture, politics, and the economy, and a new lower class that didn't work much and didn't marry much was causing a cratering of lower-income America, Charles Murray now turns to the question: What do we do about it?

As he says: 

The trends of the last half century... signify damage to the heart of American community and the ways in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.

So, something has to change. Social democrats may call for a "distribution of wealth." Social conservatives "may see a compelling case for government policies that support marriage, religion, and traditional values." Murray, a libertarian, sees "a compelling case for returning to the founders' conception of limited government."

Central to his argument is the difference between the Italian town of Montegrano in the 1950s, where nobody did anything for anyone that wasn't family. Compare this to St. George, Utah, where, on one day in the 1950s, the town newspaper reported a blizzard of volunteer organization meetings and accomplishments -- in a town of 4,462 people.

Or take the 112 Protestant churches in Manhattan and the Bronx at the turn of the 20th century and their 38 industrial schools, 45 libraries, 44 sewing schools, 40 kindergartens, and so on. Then there were the secular fraternal organizations: Elks, Moose, Odd Fellows.

They drew their membership from across the social classes, and ensured regular, close interaction among people of different classes.

To get these organizations to work, their leaders had to "mobilize and interact with others from a wide range of backgrounds or they were not successful."

Whatabout today? Well the data seems to indicate that the new upper class is doing fine, with attendance at city council meetings and parent associations in the schools. It is pretty clear that social and civic interaction has declined drastically in the new lower class.

This is reflected in estimations of other peoples' trustworthiness: high in Belmont and declining in Fishtown. Ethnic diversity erodes social trust, even within an ethnic community.

All of which leads to deep unhappiness. Wanna be happy, in the Aristotelian sense of "lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole?" Then you need to practice the four virtues, because

Happiness = Baseline happiness + satisfying work + happy marriage + high social trust + strong religion

In other words, happiness is a combination, of success in the four "sources of deep satisfactions: family, vocation, community, and faith." They are entwined and go together. In the welfare state all these activities are separated and enfeebled and run or supervised by government.

A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life... If that same man lives under a system that says the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then the status goes away... Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say "I made a difference."

Report of people being "very happy" has gone down a bit in Belmont, from 50 percent to 40 percent. But in Fishtown from 35 percent to 15 percent.

 The new upper class practices the four virtues, but issues a "set of mushy injunctions to be nice" to the rest of society. The upper class practices the old virtues, with hard work, stable families, civic work and higher religious membership, but "we have to respect everyone else's way of doing things, regardless of gender, race, sexual preference, cultural practices, or national origin". "No derogatory labels for anyone" except for "people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." The new upper class practices the old virtues, "but it no longer preaches them."

What of the future? Murray has "four predictions" that are really prophecies.

First, what happens in Europe will not be pretty as their welfare state implodes.

Second, science will undermine the moral underpinnings of the welfare state, because human nature cannot be changed.

Third, there will be an increasing understanding that there is a fairly simple alternative to the entire apparatus of the welfare state, a basic income proposed by Murray in his In Our Hands.

Fourth, Americans will prove their allegiance to the American project, in some kind of Great Awakening.

America's new upper class must "once again fall in love with what makes American different." It needs something more than piecemeal legislation or Supreme Court decisions. We need to talk about how America is exceptional and why it should stay exceptional.

Coming Apart: The New Lower Class

Just as America now has a new upper class "who are more and more removed from the lives of everybody else" we now have a new lower class.

In 1900, 90 percent of American workers were employed in low-level white collar or technical jobs, manual and service jobs, or worked on farms... [By] 1960, 81 percent of workers were still employed in those jobs... In the years after 1960 America developed something new: a white lower class that did not consist of a fringe, but of a substantial part of what was formerly the working-class population.

Murray asserts that the pre-1960 America was notable for the practice of four "Founding Virtues." Industriousness: even "the penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was consumed by it." Honesty: "the extraordinary respect which people pay to the law." Marriage: Feminist Harriet Martineau thought that "marriage is in America more nearly universal, more safe, more tranquil, more fortunate than in England." Religiosity: Although many Founders were Deists, they all agreed that "Religion was essential to the health of the new nation."

Murray proposes to track what happened to the founding virtues between 1960 and 2010 in two representative neighborhoods: Boston's upscale Belmont and Philadelphia's downscale Fishtown. In real life the two places are not purely upper class or lower class, but Murray will assume they are.

In 1960 64 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Fishtown and only 6 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Belmont. By 2010, only 30 percent qualified for Fishtown and 21 percent qualified for Belmont.

Marriage: In Belmont in 1960 95 percent of white people were married; in 2010 83 percent were married. In Fishtown in 1960 84 percent of whites were married; in 2010 only 48 percent were married. In Belmont in 1960 about 75 percent of white reported "very happy" marriage. In went down in the 1980s but in 2010 was back up to 73 percent. In Fishtown, 67 percent of marriages were "very happy" in 1960. In 2010 only 52 percent. OK, how about this. In Belmont, the percent of children living with both biological parents dipped from 97 percent in 1960 to 87 percent in 2010. In Fishtown this percentage dipped from 94 percent in 1960 to 35 percent in 2010.

Industriousness: Prime-age males not in the workforce went from 5 percent to 15 percent for men with "high school diploma or less." That went from 1.5 percent to 3 percent for males with "BA or higher." Whatabout women? In 1960 40 percent of Belmont women were in the labor force and 33 percent of Fishtown women. By 2010 nearly 80 percent of Belmont women were in the labor force and 72 percent of Fishtown women. Heads of household? In Belmont in 1960 about 90 percent worked 40 or more hours per week and in Fishtown 81 percent worked 40 hours or more. In 2010, Belmont about 88 percent of heads of household worked 40 or more hours a week but in Fishtown a little over 60 percent worked 40 or more hours a week.

Honesty: Using violent crime arrests as an index, In Fishtown it went from about 120 arrests per 100,000 population in 1960 to about 750 per 100,000 in 1995 and descended to about 600 per 100,000 in 2010. In Belmont violent crime arrests are almost non-existent, less than 20 per 100,000 in 1960 and lower still in 2010.

Religiosity: In Fishtown "de-facto seculars" went from about 40 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 2010. In Belmont it went from about 30 percent in 1960 to about 40 percent in 2010.

In the real Fishtown, these days, they talk about "family people" and "lower class." The family people are slowly moving out. Still, Fishtown appears to be gentrifying, with factories "turned into chic loft apartments." And so houses "that were worth $30,000 in the 1990s are selling for $200,000 and up." So pretty soon the family people will cash in on their houses and move to the suburbs, and the lower class will be unable to afford the rent.

Murray ends up with "three problematic categories" in the new lower class: 

1. Men who aren't making a living -- from 13 percent to 30 percent in Fishtown
2. Single women with children -- up from 5 percent to 18 percent in Fishtown
3. Isolates -- people with no involvement in community organizations

Or, as I like to say: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

Up next: What to do now.

Coming Apart: the New Upper Class

In Coming Apart Charles Murray proposes that today's America has a three class system, with a new upper class that features a "cognitive elite," along with a new lower class, and "everybody else." His first job is to describe the new elite that is different from the old elite.

Back in the day, "upper class" meant the "old-money rich of the Northeast United States" and the closest equivalent of today's new upper class was called "The Establishment," and the thing about them was that they weren't that different from ordinary Americans. They just "had more money." Even in Cambridge, Mass., the world of Harvard and MIT was not that different from the rest of America. In those days, "the intellectuals of Harvard Square didn't have the critical mass to reshape the community." 

But now? David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise describes Wayne, PA, once a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia.

The town... has six gourmet coffeehouses... [a] fabulous independent bookstore... [There is] Studio B, a gift emporium that hosts creative birthday parties... Sweet Daddy's sells gourmet jelly beans... The Great Harvest Bread Company... where they sell apricot almond or spinach feta loaf for $4.75 a pop.

Mainstream America does not read newspapers, but new upper-class America reads The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, and they read the New Yorker and the Economist. The upper class doesn't listen to talk radio, but they do listen to NPR. They don't watch much TV, and certainly not "game shows, soap operas, music videos" etc. Foreign travel is a big deal to mainstream America, but routine for the new upper class, which has "coworkers and colleagues from around the world." Then they put an enormous investment into their children as "helicopter parents."

In the working world, the new upper class has a flexible, creative environment. For "everybody else" things are still pretty regimented.

And, of course, the new upper class tends to be liberal. And high IQ. As Murray writes,

the higher-tech the economy, the more it relies on people who can improve and exploit the technology, which creates many openings for people whose main asset is their exceptional cognitive ability.

This is where Murray got into trouble with The Bell Curve when he observed that blacks to not score high on cognitive ability. The new upper class did not want to here that in the mid 1990s.

But if cognitive ability is really important and affects the bottom line big time then it make sense that such people will be making a lot more in 2010, relative to others, than in 1960. Median family income for the top one percent shot into the stratosphere starting in the mid 1990s.

If you have exceptional cognitive ability you will be bullied by the kids at an average school. No problem, elite colleges have been selecting out the exceptional students since at least 1960. The exceptional students do well at selective colleges and marry exceptional students and have exceptional children that get into selective colleges. As Murray says:

Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper-middle class, and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite.

Guess what. Racial residential segregation has been decreasing, but socioeconomic segregation has been increasing, and "the affluent increasingly segregate themselves off from the rest of American society." They live, increasingly, in SuperZips (in the 95th to 99th percentile of income). For instance, if you take graduates of Harvard Business School class of 1979, 61 percent lived in SuperZips in 2004. It's no wonder that the new upper class has a "whiff of 'we're better than the rabble' mentality." Call them Overeducated Elitist Snobs (OES). Oh and SuperZips vote Democrat, big time. And they are typically represented by doctrinaire liberals in Congress.

And they live in a liberal bubble. Murray provides a questionnaire for his urban educated readers to determine how bubbly they are. For instance: "Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?"

But there is a bright side to the new upper class. "As individuals, the members of the new upper class are just fine -- engaging, well mannered, good parents and good neighbors." And they are good performers. When the NYPD hired 300 policemen in 1940 on the basis on test scores the results were spectacular, for the 300 "achieved far higher rank and suffered far fewer disciplinary penalties than the typical class of recruits."

And the new upper class has made spectacular improvements to the economy, from the information economy to the design and durability of most consumer products. And the medications!

But could we roll back the inequality? Hardly, for the talented would head for the hills. 

The new-upper-class culture is not a product of great wealth... It is driven by the distinctive tastes and preferences that emerge when large numbers of cognitively talented people are enabled to live together in their own communities.

Places like Marin County are not about wealth so much as about culture.

But the new upper class is "ignorant abut what much of the rest of the population lives." The question is how to change that, assuming that force majeure will not work. 

Up next: The new lower class.

Coming Apart: The Setup

Why is Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 just about white people? Is Murray a racist?

Well, there's a history on that. In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It argued the importance of IQ, or intelligence, in the economy of the future, which Murray and Herrnstein said would be an economy in which you needed to be a member of the cognitive elite to thrive. But what about the low IQ people, especially blacks, that test lower on IQ that whites? How dare you, said liberals, you racist.

So, in 2012 Charles Murray said, OK, let's see what has happened over the last 50 years in white America, and see how things worked out on the intelligence front. So that's what Coming Apart is all about the new cognitive elite Upper Class, the kind of people that live in Belmont, a fancy suburb of Boston. And it's about the new Lower Class, the kind of people that live in Fishtown, a down-at-heels neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Murray starts the book by painting a picture of American life the day before the Kennedy assassination. It was remarkably homogeneous, with a third of households watching The Beverly Hillbillies every week. There were only three TV networks, and limited restaurant choices. Almost everyone was married and only 3 percent of children were "illegitimate." At the movies the Production Code limited nudity and sexual situations and cursing. But Jim Crow still reigned in the South and 20 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.

But still the times they were a-changing, with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ralph Nader would soon publish Unsafe at Any Speed. Bob Dylan was in the air and the Beatles were changing popular music.

And then President Kennedy got assassinated and legislative genius Lyndon Johnson became president and legislated civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and increased welfare. The rest is history. And the subject of Coming Apart. But only white people, because it would be racist for Murray to write about the rest of America.

Next: The New Upper Class.

Charles Murray's Last Broadside "Facing Reality"

Way back in the 1990s Charles Murray was the second tier in Herrnstein and Murray on The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

The point of any Bell Curve is that if you measure anything about humans in a human community, most people will cluster towards the average, with less and less people as you get away from the average. Thus, there are a ton of people with average intelligence, a few with above-average and below intelligence, and only one or two complete geniuses and one or two complete idiots.

Herrnstein and Murray "noticed" that humans are not all alike. In particular different "races" have different "bell curves" where intelligence is concerned. And, given that, as we now say, "experts agreed" that jobs in the modern economy were increasingly requiring cognitive skills rather than manual skills, that could result in a bit of a cock-up on the race front, because blacks present a bell curve on intelligence shifted quite a bit to the left -- i.e. lower -- when compared to whites.

La Wik: "Murray's work has been and remains highly controversial."

Er, no, Wikkie. His work is only controversial to liberals and lefties, because it drives a stake into the heart of their belief system, and they can't deal with that. Because safetyism.

You can see why liberals jumped all over The Bell Curve at the time. Their religion said that humans were equal, and that any inequalities between person and person and between black and white were due to discrimination. But if Herrnstein and Murray were right then we would never get to a perfect world where the racial breakdown of everyone from CEOs to garbage workers would match the racial percentages in the nation.

So Charles Murray had to be racist-racist-racist and sent to the academic equivalent of Outer Slobbovia.

Murray's response, ten years later in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, was to show that if you purged race out of his Bell Curve prophecy -- and racistly only racistly analyzed racist whites -- the argument about cognitive skills still applied. In today's America the white cognitive elite, with degrees and credentials and careers up the ying-yang, are doing fine. The white commoners in the middle are doing so-so, and the white underclass, the bottom 30 percent, are really sucking air: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The liberal response to Coming Apart was basically not to respond.

But you will notice that liberals today are basically conceding Murray's point. Today's liberals say that IQ tests are racist. And they say that whites do better in school and life because of "white privilege" or, failing that, because of "systemic racism." Rather than admit that, not surprisingly, people with different backgrounds, different origins, different genetic inheritances (i.e., race) have different capabilities, as common sense would suggest, they say that it's all a conspiracy of white males since the dawn of time.

So why do East Asians have the highest IQs in America? Huh? White privilege? Mandarin classism?

So now lefties are saying that teaching the classics of Greece and Rome is racist. And getting coverage in The New York Times. Mind you, I am all in favor of increasing the teaching of the classics of South and East Asia. We systemic racists might learn something from them.

Anyway, Charles Murray, now age 78, is publishing one last broadside, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. It looks like he is taking the bull by the horns. Or double-shotting his guns, etc. From the blurb at Amazon:

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

I.e., The Bell Curve, dummy.

You did know, didn't you, that East Asians have a higher average IQ than Jews have a higher average IQ than "whites" have a higher average IQ than "Blacks." But race is a social construct.

My theory is that average IQ is a measure of the time that a particular cultural group has been literate. And, of course, literacy parallels involvement in Axial Age religion and commerce. I suspect that East Asian elites -- mandarins -- and South Asian elites -- Brahmins -- have the longest experience of literacy. So they are the most intelligent. Not exactly rocket science.

Only, recent immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria apparently have higher IQs that native American Blacks. Could that be a benefit of Brit colonialism compared to All-American plantation slavery and Jim Crow and unionized public education? You tell me.

I tell you what I really think. I think that our liberal friends are half way into an intellectual collapse. They don't study history and philosophy and politics and economics any more, because if they did they would face irreconcilable differences with their lefty secular religion. Case in point, Jan Psaki challenging a reporter's question on the $15 an hour minimum wage. But the CBO says that increasing the minimum wage would cost up to 1.4 million jobs. This is not rocket science. But I'll bet that a whole generation of Democratic political activists have just steered away from ever dealing with the question. So that they literally know nothing.

The reason that elite scions went to college back in the day, and studied the classics, was because the ruling class wanted their young sprouts to know how the political power game was played back in the day. They figured the young'uns would learn something. When young scions of the ruling class don't learn all that hard stuff they remain ignorant of the nuts and bolts of ruling.

Here is something from Ben Stein about recently deceased George Schultz that I didn't know.

When he was secretary of State under the great Ronald Reagan, Eretz Israel was struggling with intense inflation. Secretary of State [Schultz] sent my father [Herb Stein], along with a super smart economist named Stanley Fischer, to Israel to help.

After many meetings with top Israeli officials, Pop and Dr. Fischer created a plan (kindly called the Stein Plan), to reestablish a new Israeli Shekel backed by the United States. The plan worked like a charm. Even now Israelis — thanks to Secretary Shultz — consider the Stein Plan salvation.

See what I mean? Those clueless lefties running Israel back then Literally Had No Clue about a functioning monetary policy. But the knowledge of How to Do It was right there, if only someone had opened an economic textbook. Only, if your entire leadership had been to activism school rather than economics school, well, then you need to send Herb Stein over there to teach 'em how to do it. You get the point.

And I suspect that the same is true about all the swamp creatures in the Biden administration. Only, the lefty geniuses that rule us would rather die than take advice from a conservative economist.

Ten Reasons Why Our Liberal Ruling Class is in Trouble

In The Ruling Class Gaetano Mosca writes that a ruling class needs certain qualities in itself as a group and in its individuals.

1. It should be united. 
2. It should be careful about unrest in the masses and respond to it. 
3. It should be able to adapt to changes, in wealth, knowledge, etc. 
4. It should be excellent in the virtues of the age. 
5. It should be seen to be excellent in the virtues of the age. 
6. And so on.  

 You can see that our liberal friends are not doing too well on the ruling-class virtue front. But let us count the specifics. Just to help them out.

1. A good Ruling Class does not steal elections; it does not need to.
2. A good Ruling Class does not even appear to steal elections; such behavior is beneath it.
3. A good Ruling Class does not call the masses "deplorables" or "bitter-clingers." It is the benevolent lord of all it surveys.
4. A good Ruling Class does not legislate a "Great Society" and instrument it with social science so it can praise itself and then find out that it made things worse, and then do nothing about it. (Charles Murray in Losing Ground)
5. A good Ruling Class does not call Charles Murray a racist for pointing out in The Bell Curve that the modern era benefits the "cognitive elite" and that blacks, that exhibit lower than normal IQs, would likely not do too well compared to people with high IQs.
6. A good Ruling Class does not ignore Charles Murray in his Coming Apart when he writes:  that the top 20 percent of whites in America is doin' fine with great careers and merger marriages; that the middle 50 percent of whites is doin' so-so; that the bottom 30 percent of men don't work much and the women don't marry much.
7. A good Ruling Class does not hang the white working class out to dry for half a century.
8. A good Ruling Class does not let blacks molder away in crumbling, crime-ridden cities for half a century.
9. A good Ruling Class does not censor the opposition with its tame tech lords. It does not need to.
10. A good Ruling Class does not let its supporters riot in the cities. It would be beneath such crudity.

I could go on. My point is that a good Ruling Class does not have to cheat. It does not make life great for itself and its supporters at the cost of real decline in the welfare of people outside the Ruling Class. It allows a little fun and frolic from the masses, because it wants to know what the masses think and feel, the better to rule them.

And another thing. A good Ruling Class knows when it is in trouble, and knows what to do and does it. It does not dig the hole deeper.

Contra Harari: Analyzing "Sapiens" on Empire

Because Yuval Noah Harari is a professor he naturally sees the coming empire of the educated Gentry as a Good Thing in his Bill-Gates pleasing Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind.

Most of the time in the past 2,200 years, most humans have been ruled by an empire. Says he:

As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics.

You know, because "melting ice caps."

I suppose that Sapiens was conveniently written at the last moment before a clear rebellion against the global elite of educated gentry really got into the saddle, such as the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the nationalist Fidesz party in Hungary, Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK.

My line is that we won't get global government, a single human empire, until the Trisolarians are on their way to take over the Earth. Why? Because politics is division. So long as there is no global threat, so long will humans be disunited. (Yes, that is what the global threat of climate change is all about.)

However, Harari wouldn't be properly within the Overton window of fellow professors and think-tankers without tut-tutting about the 500-year European world empire of roughly 1500-1945: the Spanish clobbering the Aztecs and Incas, and looting them of all their silver and gold; the Brits going to India and causing the First Bengal Famine: "the British conquest of India cost the lives of millions of Indians, and was responsible for the continuous humiliation and exploitation of hundreds of millions more." Then introducing slavery to the Americas after it has been eradicated in Europe. And Africa.

See I think that the European imperialism of the last 500 years is far more consequential and interesting than that. 

First of all, the initial voyages to the Americas were conceived and sold as investment opportunities, not as the natural expansion of a territorial empire ruled over by Pharoahs or Roman Emperors.

Secondly, although the Spanish and Portuguese started out frankly as looting expeditions, plundering the Americas of gold and silver for use in military adventure back in Europe, things started to change quite quickly. The Brits in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, they were there to trade. (Because hey, kids, trading makes a lot more money that simple loot and plunder). Their military dominations issued from the need to deal with neighboring feudal chieftains and stop them from looting and plundering the trading operations of the Europeans and the Indians and Indonesians that joined them. I suspect that the scandal of the Bengal famine of 1770 was that, since the Brits were ruling Bengal, it became a "thing." I'm sure there were famines aplenty before the Brits showed up, but, hey, back in the day, famines were just a part of life! A bunch of people died; the local rajah had do deal with reduced revenue for a while, and life went on.

Thirdly, the "imperialists" were mostly nobodies, like Clive and James Cook. And that was true not just of the leaders but the ordinary nobodies. My father's family had a business in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century; my mother's family had an export business between the world wars in Kobe, Japan. They were nobodies that could earn a decent living doing business across the world in countries that weren't yet up to speed on capitalism and the life of the market economy.

Fourthly, issues like slavery and human rights became issues as the European empires developed. I like to think that is because the nobodies weren't to the manor born; they weren't really into being top dog as the old nobles were. Plus, I believe, slavery and serfdom did not pay. And then came the moment in 1820 when some Brit administrator in India observed that the Indians didn't really like their imperial overlords. Really, old chap? The imperator cared whether his subjects liked him? That's the point: as the European hegemony proceeded, notions of self-government began to take over the world. As early as the Indian Mutiny in 1857 advanced Brits began to realize that they couldn't rule India forever. But it wasn't time to leave, not just yet, old chap.

Harari is a loyal member of his tribe, the global educated elite. And that tribe fervently believes that the average Commoner can't be trusted to govern with the enlightened wonderfulness of the educated elite. Thus nations are over, finished, and can never be allowed to raise their brownshirt face again because you know what happens with nationalism: literally Hitler! We see that with the current political emergency in the US. The educated elite fervently believes that we are one and a half steps away from "far-right" white supremacy, unless the educated elite cancels anyone that shows his head above the parapet.

I believe that the global educated elite are fools and knaves, and have no better idea about governance and human welfare than the emperors of old. Far better for the nations of the world to blunder along from one self-imposed crisis to another than for a self-congratulatory elite to seize the reins of power, for the benefit of all the world.

Because here's the problem. What happens when the globalist rulers rulers screw things up? As they always do. Who gets to step in and fix things? Under our current flawed system, we get alternation in office where the voters get to throw the rascals out every 8-10 years. I haven't seen anything from our global masters to indicate how they propose to enact the principle of Alternation in Office in their global empire that allows for the correction of mistakes on the political front. In all the supranational institutions from the EU to the UN to the World Bank to the IMF it's a case of Buggins' Turn, with one globalist turning the reins of office over to the next apparatchik in line. And a jolly good racket it is, for those in on the inside.

I look forward to an age of nation states all over, quarreling like mad, but never quite coming to blows. As the US never quite comes to blows with Canada and Mexico, and indeed as the nations of the Americas never quite come to blows.

But there is a problem. Without the hegemony of the global educated Gentry, where is honor, where is vanity, where is power for the worthy elite that is wiser and more evolved than you and I? It's a global problem.

Dying of Despair: What Should We Do About Cultural Decline?

Our elite betters have being doing a little worrying lately about the decline of the white working class. Whether it is Charles Murray in Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, or J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, or now Deaths of Despair by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

According to Steve Sailer, Case and Deaton compare the "declining lifespans of working-class white Americans since the turn of the century" -- featuring suicides and drug usage -- with the much more optimistic culture among African Americans.

What's the difference? Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that poor and working-class whites are universally devalued as racists and deplorables while blacks are "a triumphant race, celebrated all over the world for their soul."

In fact, cases of groups and tribes and nations "giving up" are not at all uncommon. Whatabout native Americans? Whatabout Russian men in the aftermath of the Soviet Union? And whatabout Germans that were universally convicted of war and race and anti-Semitic crimes after World War II?

My point is that groups and nations are giving up all the time. Just don't let it happen to me and mine!

But I also have a theory about this. I call it Little Darlings, and get seriously into it with "The Cruel Fate of the Ruling Class's "Little Darlings." My argument is simple. If the ruling class is saying how wonderful you are, and is shoveling free stuff at you, and bidding for your votes, be wary. They are not doing it because they like you, or because they care about people like you. They are using you as foot-soldiers in their power project.

And the day will come when they don't have a use for you.

I like to use the example for Napoleon's march on Moscow in 1812. He marched the flower of France to Moscow and spent the summer there. But when it was time to retreat then it was every man for himself and many starved and died. Napoleon himself, of course, returned to France in a carriage protected by an armed guard.

When you've been praised and flattered and patted on the knee for years, it is a shock to the system when suddenly Sugar Daddy don't have that twinkle in his eye no more.

That is what has happened to the white working class, and for understandable reasons. In the 1960s our liberal friends stopped obsessing over the exploitation of the working class. They moved on to the exploitation of blacks and women. So the ruling class narrative changed.

From the 1960s onward, it became increasingly unfashionable to criticize blacks, but trendy to criticize whites. Not surprisingly, blacks reacted to this new dispensation with increasing exuberance, while whites became more depressed and withdrawn. As black egos expanded after their civil rights victories, they increasingly shot each other in knuckleheaded beefs. Meanwhile, as White Privilege became a preoccupation of the press, whites increasingly shot themselves, or drank themselves to death, or overdosed on synthetic or natural opioids.

In other words, people really do care what you say about them.

Of course, people are now worrying about the white working class. What do "we" do about their "deaths of despair?"

Well, my advice would be the same as the advice of Frederick Douglass.

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!

And this is true of all groups that well-intentioned elitists decide to help. But then there are the ill-intentioned elitists, that are spewing pejoratives at the groups they wish to marginalize, calling them racists, white supremacists, and Nazis.

The evil of all this talking-up and talking-down, I think, is well illustrated by the situation of the Jews. Jews have tended to be a small minority within a larger community, and this has exposed them to the risk of being a convenient scapegoat for the larger community. The whole purpose of the scapegoat phenomenon, according to Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, is to get a divided community to unite. But the only way you can do that is to battle against a common enemy.

How do the Jews do it, and keep their morale up through Pogroms and Holocausts? They do it by creating and maintaining a culture of innocence. Jews can never be wrong, because anti-semitism and centuries of oppression. Sure, it works, but it also keeps Jews as outsiders, eternally vulnerable to a society that needs a scapegoat, as the Russian Czar needed in 1905 and as Hitler needed after World War I. See, I don't think that developing a culture of innocence is a good idea, any more than I think that scapegoating a small minority is a good idea.

And that is why I urge blacks and women to return to the cry of Frederick Douglass. "Do nothing with us!" Why? Because while it is great to be the Little Darling of the ruling class, there will come a day when you need to stand on your own two feet and when you will not have the ruling-class cheering section and the ruling-class pom-pom girls on your side. And what will the robin do then, poor thing?

Well, unless you have developed the requisite intestinal fortitude in advance you will perhaps lose heart, and become like the culturally marginalized all down the ages. Except the Jews.

Anyway, someone has been "doing something" about the white working class. His name is Donald Trump. He is telling the white working class -- and all Americans together -- to cheer up because he is going to make America Great Again.

So I say, take heart! And then fortify yourself with a stiff course in intestinal fortitude so that when the Trump Era ends you have the courage and the strength to push back against ruling-class Mean Girls.

Charles Murray - Table of Contents

Charles Murray and his books

By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission

1. By The People: Part I: Where We Stand
   
   
2. By the People: Part II: Opening a New Front
   
   
3. By the People: Part III: A Propitious Moment
   
   
4. Summing Up "By the People": We Want More
   

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

1. Coming Apart: The Setup
   
   
2. Coming Apart: the New Upper Class
   
   
3. Coming Apart: The New Lower Class
   
   
4. Coming Apart: Why It Matters

Facing Reality

1. Murray Facing Reality: The Setup
   
   
2. Murray Facing Reality: the Outcome
   
   
3. Murray Facing Reality, Yes You Liberals
   

Commentary

1. The Underclass: Remember Them?
   
   
2. New Party Leader Addresses Brit "Broken Society"
   
   
3. Let's Make a Deal on Immigration
   
   
4. Just Don't Say the M-Word
   
   
5. Democrats' New War on Poverty
   
   
6. MoveOn dot Next?
   
   
7. Conservatism Brain-Dead?
   
   
8. America's Class Divide
   
   
9. Duck and Cover, Mr. President
   
   
10. Romney's "Gaffes"
    
    
11. Is the Future Cognitive?
    
    
12. America's Verdict on Obama
    
    
13. Misunderstanding Charles Murray
    
    
14. The Democrats' Educated Voter Problem
    
    
15. Liberals Out of Touch
    
    
16. Marriage: It's For the Next Generation
    
    
17. America's Moral Challenge
    
    
18. The Next Great Moral Movement
    
    
19. Obama's Great White Whale
    
    
20. Poor Having Fewer Babies
    
    
21. Merry Christmas, Suckers
    
    
22. Three Liberal Injustices
    
    
23. How Obama Guys Worry About Inequality
    
    
24. Inequality: Good Cop, Bad Cop
    
    
25. Liberals on the Wrong Side of Main Stream of Life
    
    
26. Liberal Fingerprints All Over It
    
    
27. The Top 20% Just Wants to be Free
    
    
28. The Real Inequality Problem
    
    
29. What are Police For?
    
    
30. Put Not Your Trust in Princes
    
    
31. A Letter to Charles Murray
    
    
32. How Liberals Wrecked Upward Mobility
    
    
33. Liberal Robert Putnam Still Doesn't Get It
    
    
34. The Obama Implosion Alert.
    
    
35. Working Class Angst: The False God of Politics
    
    
36. Shoulda Woulda Coulda Avoided Trump
    
    
37. Sorry, Charles Murray, You Don't Get It
    
    
38. What Do You Mean by "Hate" and "Xenophobia" Liberals?
    
    
39. Yes, What Should Democrats Do Now?
    
    
40. We are not in Conservative Kansas Any More
    
    
41. Middlebury is Feckless, According to Murray
    
    
42. The Damore Case: What Do Liberals Want
    
    
43. What Fools These Liberals Be
    
    
44. Politics is Downstream from Culture is Downstream from Religion
    
    
45. Two Economies: Remember Charles Murray
    
    
46. What Do We Know About Sex in the Lower Classes?
    
    
47. The Left's Power of Silence
    
    
48. Global Problem #1: Birthing a Religion for the Educated
    
    
49. The Worm in the Apple of all Administrative Institutions
    
    
50. Understanding Tlaib: The Culture of Innocence
    
    
51. The Left's Dilemma: It Can't Undo Its Mistakes
    
    
52. Suppose Blacks are Now Becoming "Commoners"
    
    
53. Applying Yarvin's Gentry, Commoners, Clients to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart"
    
    
54. Deficits: Where Does It End?
    
    
55. Another Three Layer Theory: From Joel Kotkin
    
    
56. Dying of Despair: What Should We Do About Cultural Decline?
    
    
57. Contra Harari: Analyzing "Sapiens" on Empire
    
    
58. Ten Reasons Why Our Liberal Ruling Class is in Trouble
    
    
59. Charles Murray's Last Broadside "Facing Reality"
    
    
60. A Hollow Elite: The Roots of Wokeism
    
    

Another Three Layer Theory: From Joel Kotkin

Really, anybody that has half a brain understands human society in some kind of a three-layer theory. Now Joel Kotkin joins the party. In "The Two Middle Classes" he divides the middle class into clerisy and yeomanry. Then there are the serfs. Actually he also has a class of oligarchs on top. So does Curtis Yarvin with his three layers system. Thing is the top class, whether you call them oligarchs or ruling class, aren't a lot of people.

But Kotkin describes his clerisy in the same way that Yarvin describes his Gentry.

[T]he clerisy [is] a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.

Just like Yarvin's Gentry. Back to the clerisy.

Although certainly not unanimous in their views, the clerisy generally favors ever-increasing central control and regulation...

Today’s clerisy are concentrated in professions whose numbers have grown in recent decades, including teaching, consulting, law, the medical field, and the civil service... Some professions that were once more closely tied to the private economy, such as doctors, have become subsumed by bureaucratic structures and—in the United States, at least—shifted from a dependable conservative lobby to an increasingly progressive one.

Yeah, like my yoga teacher, a retired physician.

At its apex, the clerisy today is made up largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent. This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent.

That is one of the findings of Charles Murray in Coming Apart. But you knew that.

Enough about the bloody clerisy. Let's talk about the yeomanry.

The perspective of the traditional middle class [yeomanry] generally differs from that of the clerisy, and constitutes what Piketty labels the “merchant Right.” These people make their living in the marketplace, and that often places them in conflict with both the oligarchs, who continually seek to crush or absorb their businesses, or with the clerisy, which hands down environmental and other regulations that inhibit their activities. 

Yeah!

Now Kotkin has a basically pesssimistic outlook on things, that unless we do something...

An independent and assertive property-owning middle class that can thrive remains the only force able to challenge ever-growing centralization. Without them, there is likely no way to prevent a new feudal order from emerging in the future. As the radical social theorist Barrington Moore suggested a half-century ago, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy.” 

But I am more optimistic. That's because my world view says this essentially Marxian view, that the workers and the petite bourgeoisie will be "immiserated" as profit margins decline, has been proved wrong by history.

Why? Because the story of the last 200 years is that the forecast "immiseration" has always been liquidated by yet another technological revolution that upset the apple cart and removed the "ever-gowing centralization."

Of course, maybe This Time is Different, and we have reached the limit of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years in which real per-capita income in the rich countries has increased by 30 times.

But maybe not. And the truth is that nobody knows. The neighbor across the street is doing a fusion-power startup. And down in California Lockheed is doing the same. What happens if and when those chaps come on line? Does Google get even bigger, or does an ageing Google get pushed aside by the young upstarts figuring out how to leverage fusion power into the stratosphere and beyond?

And another thing. One of the problems with a clerisy sitting in the catbird seat protected by government power and perquisites is that it loses its sharpness. The whole point of going into the clerisy is to avoid the greater risks of the market system and its startup culture and Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. But that means that you are choosing the easy path instead of hiking out into the unknown.

It's a sensible choice, to stay safe. And most people that hike out into the startup jungle are never heard from again. But the ones that do make it change the world, and put the old oligarchy and its fawning clerisy out of business.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Deficits: Where Does It End?

The deficit hawks are always there, worrying about deficits as far as the eye can see. And they are right. Sooner or later the bill will come due.

Here's a piece featuring Fed Chairman Jerome Powell worrying about how the Fed can fight the next recession when interest rates are already at all time lows. Well, it turns out that he'll just print money, like the last time. But whatabout the budget?

“Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path when the economy is strong would help ensure that policy makers have the space to use fiscal policy to assist in stabilizing the economy during a downturn,” Powell told the House Financial Services Committee.

Yes, Yes. Of course. Let's Do Something about the deficit and solve all our problems. We could, you know. Because we did it before. See my "Federal Debt Analysis" and this chart.

See what's going on? In World War II our politicians shot the federal debt up to 120 percent of GDP to fight the Nazis and the Japs. Then, for the next 35 years until 1980 they brought the federal debt down to about 30 percent of GDP.

Look what happened then. Our politicians, led by Ronald Reagan, pushed the federal debt up to 60 percent of GDP by the end of the 1990-91 recession.

Then we had the mother of all financial crashes, 1929 excepted, in 2008. And our politicians ran the federal debt up to 100 percent of GDP.

So you tell me. What is different about now compared to the 35 years after WWII?

Well, all I suggest is that, back in the day, the ruling class all agreed -- nod, nod, wink, wink -- to haul the debt down from the wartime peak at 120 percent of GDP. No talking out of school, chaps, we just do it.

But then the Dems did the Great Society in the 1960s and failed to curb it when the data showed it was a failure, as documented by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So chaps like Ronald Reagan said: OK, if you Dems aren't going to curb your failed programs we aren't going to play green-eyeshade accountants over taxes. We are just going to cut tax rates and let her roll. Hey, the spending programs all benefit your Dem voters anyway; it's your job to look after them.

And that has been the rule ever since. When Dems get in they up taxes a bit and spending a lot. When GOPs get in they cut taxes a chunk and increase spending a bit.

President Trump has done nothing except continue that policy. Only now the federal debt, instead of 30 percent of GDP in 1980, is over 100 percent of GDP.

So, sooner or later, something will have to give. But what?

OK. So what gives? Well, roughly speaking 25 percent of the federal budget is defense, 25 percent is health care as in Medicare and Medicaid, 25 percent is Pensions including Social Security, and the rest is up for grabs, except for interest on the debt which right now is at about 10 percent of the federal budget.

Right now, nobody is willing to cry Uncle. Old men won't let anyone touch their Social Security. Old women and daughters of old women won't let anyone touch their Medicare. Defense? Maybe. Welfare? Maybe. The "Remainder" that includes interest on the debt? Well, that's the money that the educated Gentry feeds on in grants and deep-state sinecures.

So you can see that nothing will happen until the pips begin to squeak.

And you can be sure that whatever happens the old geezers like me will demand to keep the benefits we paid for and the deep state will demand its grants and sinecures.

So the guy that will get hurt will be that fellow behind the tree.

The only optimistic thought is that the ruling class will want to solve the problem without a total economic meltdown because if there is a true economic meltdown then their power as a ruling class might come under revolutionary challenge.

And we wouldn't want that would we?

But, there is a problem. Look at Nancy Pelosi. I look at Nancy Pelosi and I don't see a full deck of cards. I see someone blundering around in a strange land that Daddy never told her about.

And that could be a problem.