Monday, February 06, 2012

How David Frum Convinces Me He Is In Fact Lazy

This is embarrassing: Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?

Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put...

Coming Apart details the social problems that have overtaken the poorer half of the white American population over the past generation. This population is less committed to the workforce than its parents and grandparents were. It has more trouble with the law. It has more children outside marriage.

None of this information comes as news to anybody. Social observers have been making these points for years. The novelty of Coming Apart is Charles Murray's remarkable—and telltale—uncuriosity as to why any of this might be happening.

I should probably pause to note here that Charles Murray and I have had our personal innings. When I was sacked from the American Enterprise Institute in 2010, Murray posted a blog insisting that I had been fired—not for writing this blogpost—but for laziness...

Well, now is your time to shine Davy my lad. Show me what you got:

Here is the book's one discussion of the idea that the social troubles of lower-class America might be related to the (rather notorious) economic troubles of lower-class America. It's such a revealing and fascinating statement that I will quote at length, both on the passage's own merits and to ensure that the argument is given its full context.



A natural explanation for the numbers I have presented is that the labor market got worse for low-skill workers from 1960 to 2008. More [working-class white] men worked short hours because they couldn't get work for as many hours as they wanted; more of them were unemployed because it was harder for them to get jobs; more them left the labor market because discouraged by the difficulty of finding jobs.

In one respect, the labor market did indeed get worse for [working-class white] men: pay. Recall figure 2.1 at the beginning of the book, showing stagnant incomes for people below the 50th income percentile.** High-paying unionized jobs have become scarce and real wages for all kinds of blue-collar jobs have been stagnant or falling since the 1970s. But these trends don't explain why [working-class white] men in the 2000s worked fewer jobs, found it harder to get jobs than other Americans did, and more often dropped out of the labor market than they had in the 1960s. On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive - an important proviso - falling hourly income does not discourage work.

Put yourself in the place of a [working-class white] man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you've been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter's helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it? As of 2009, a very bad year economically, the median hourly wage for drivers of delivery trucks was $13.84; for carpenter's helpers, $12.63; for building cleaners, $13.37. That means $505 to $554 for a forty-hour week, or $25,260 to $27,680 for a fifty-week year. Those are not great incomes, but they are enough to be able to live a decent existence - almost twice the poverty level even if you are married and your wife doesn't work. So why would you not work if a job opening landed in your lap? Why would you not work a full forty hours if the hours were available? Why not work more than forty hours?

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

Really? C'mon Davy. I mean I'm pretty certain you haven't read all of the book, but I'd have thought you would at least read the part of it you quote. When Murray says... "On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive - an important proviso - falling hourly income does not discourage work." What the hell else is Murray supposed to do? Put in an alarm to sound when the page is reached? Obviously Murray is suggesting men no longer have to work (or at least work as hard) to survive, and this fact shows up in the numbers. Murray suggests in an interview this fact may have something to do with the Great Society programs of the 1960's, which causes Frum to get his panties all in a wad.

Here Frum attempts to mock Murray's argument:

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

Yeah, it doesn't work so well when you have had trouble convincing your reader you have even read Murray's book. But I'll cut Frum some slack and suggest it wasn't because he was playing video game and watching porn. Maybe he was busy reading Dostoevsky. (You never know.)

Ah, but Frum has an alternative explanation, one he has seemed to glean entirely from reading signs at Occupy protests:

Across the developed world, we see the wages of the bottom half (and in some cases more than half) have stagnated, even as gains have accrued to the top 20%, bigger gains to the top 5%, and the biggest gains to the top 1%.

This trend toward inequality varies from country to country—more extreme in the United Kingdom, less extreme in Germany. The subsequent destabilization of working-class social life likewise varies from country to country. But if the trend is global, the cause must be global too. Yet that thought does not trouble Murray.

OK, so the person with less than a high school education won't work because he has an inchoate sense that on a global scale, people are doing better then he is?

That's your "explanation"?

Are they being moved by the Hegelian world defining spirit? Or are they on the verge of revolutionary class consciousness brought about by their immiseration, possibly brought on by video games and porn?

Look, no one has to like Murray's book, but to write an honest to goodness critique of the thing means you have to actually engage with what it says; not what it would be convenient for it to have said. The sad fact is Frum's entire screed is so shoddy the conclusion is quickly reached that it is a product of intellectually laziness.

The word simply fits.

ADDING:

This isn't the first time I've found Frum's social science skills, shall we say lacking?

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