February 27, 2012

Reviewing the reviews of Coming Apart

In VDARE, I review the reviews of Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Read the whole thing there.

By Steve Sailer on 2/27/2012 Labels:

72 comments:

Anonymous said...

You posted at vdare! Now that weird stalker who kept asking why you don't post there can shutty.

2/27/12, 12:30 PM
Anonymous said...

great point about murray's previously ignored books.... i guess he 'got the message'.

....................

We've become more sexualized - hyper sexualized - and more decadant, pornography is everywhere, yet the scope of what we can talk about is actually narrower than, say 50 years ago.

2/27/12, 12:43 PM
Anonymous said...

Steve -

Isnt feminism relevant? Doesnt it turn out that the whole conceit of second wave feminism - that the 1960s world was rigged in men's favor and that the only responsible thing to do was focus exclusively on woman's problems and the advancement of women relative to men - something of a hoax.

How can people discuss men's problems and the deficits they face relative to woman and not mention the 50 year plus social project aimed at ensuring those outcomes?

2/27/12, 12:49 PM
Anonymous said...

Krugman and Frum are wrong.

Murray is comparing 1960 with 2010. Even if wages stagnated during the latter part there can be no question that real wages for unskilled workers is higher now than it was 1960.

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/hourly-wage-and-compensation-growth-for-productionnon-supervisory-workers-1959-2009/

Also Krugman is getting the causality backwards. Wages would have gone up more without social breakdown.

2/27/12, 1:08 PM
Anonymous said...

"Keep in mind that Murray’s greatest solo book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, the product of a half dozen years of original research, disappeared almost without a ripple when published nine years ago."

No, I think it was because it was so boring, turning achievement into a game of baseball statistics. Also, its point had been made before by others in the culture war. Though the book is ostensibly about 'human achievement' and covers cultures from around the world, it should really be called 'white male achievement' because the real point of the book was just that.

Anyway, it wasn't much of a book to stir up much in the way of controversy or discussion. I finished about 1/3 of it and thought enough. My idea of culture isn't poring through indexes of Art Books and seeing who got cited more.

2/27/12, 1:10 PM
FredR said...

This is not a criticism, but your vdare articles remind me a little bit of the way Cato the elder was supposed to have ended every speech, no matter what the topic, by calling for the destruction of Carthage. I don't know any latin, but you should get a little tagline that translates as "immigration must be curtailed" or something.

2/27/12, 1:20 PM
Anonymous said...

I grew up the next town over from Kristof at about the same time. The economy of the area was mostly farms and logging with a bit of light industry. It was close enough to the major metro areas that a few professionals could commute; I note Kristof's parents were college profs, and there are a couple well-regarded small colleges nearby. The area wasn't particularly wealthy; you don't get rich on logging and farming. But the families were mostly intact.

A lot of the logging has gone away, and improved technology has wiped out a lot of the lumber mill worker jobs. A lot of the farming has changed from orchards and row crops to wine and the nursery industry. That led to importation of illegal immigrants. Or, rather, the lack of enforcement led to illegal immigrants. It used to be a major berry growing area, for example, and teenagers made school money working in the fields. The growers largely switched to illegals, who were serious about picking and not a a bunch of goof-offs. In the 60's and into the 70's and even early 80's there weren't many illegals, but given the lack of enforcement their use exploded. Along with this came all the pathologies you'd expect: drunk driving, driving without licenses, etc. The net effect of this is that even though the agriculture sector is growing higher value crops that are more labor intensive the benefits of this have largely passed the white working class by.

And meth use is quite widespread as well, in both the illegal and white working classes.

2/27/12, 1:24 PM
Mercer said...

I am reading Going Solo by Eric Klineberg. It is about the growing number of people living alone. A key factor is the increasing income of women. Many women when they don't need a male income feel they would rather not have a man at home to clean up after. I doubt any preaching from Murray will change such women.

2/27/12, 1:42 PM
Anonymous said...

ACK!!!

Don't tell me that Google just changed the Cascading Style Sheets for Blogger.com.

PLEASE TELL ME THAT THIS NEW LOOK IS AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE!!!

2/27/12, 1:49 PM
Pacific Sardine said...

You have a knack, reminiscent of Twain and Oscar Wilde, for reading people's darker and more base thoughts. Good stuff; it's uncommon in my reading material at least.

2/27/12, 1:50 PM
Anonymous said...

Very good.

2/27/12, 2:02 PM
Dahlia said...

Steve,
I agree with you that the kids of single-parent homes cannot compete with other children while they may have had a chance in the past.

I also agree with some of the other reviewers that the working class has suffered due to enlarging the labor pool.

Where I diverge is I don't think you have it quite right about how large a role this plays; I don't think it's that large.

First, a story. I picked peas when I was a teen back in the 90's. There were whites of various ages and only elderly blacks (who still tipped their hats to any white person). Anybody new couldn't help but notice and ask. The elderly did it out of habit or tradition while the younger poor blacks didn't find it worth their while: they were well-fed, clothed, entertained, etc., presumably by the government, so why bother. My father experienced the same with his farm in a different industry and part of the state.

In my working-class neighborhood and amongst my working-class family members, I see a complacency and even overall sense of contentment among the younger ones that is not there with their parents and grandparents: a divide that I remember from my pea-picking days amongst the blacks.

Boats, motorcycles, hunting trips, cruises, few children, etc., I sense less a feeling that they feel oppressed or hopeless and more that they plan to go gently into that good night.

And as far as Roissy? Anybody who starts off with the premise that women rule, I can't take seriously. The battles would be easier if it were so, as one need only to fix the collective will, but the enemies are other men who have been outsmarting us. A most painful thought.

2/27/12, 2:27 PM
Anonymous said...

It's critical that, despite Murray's CYA, that someone publish an article in a mainstream publication pointing out that one of the causes of the sad state of white males, and minority males also, is the wave of low skilled Hispanic immigration.

Another cause is the influx of women into the workforce, as Murray does point out I believe.

And the third cause is the high level of welfare for unwed mothers.

Altogether, this is what causes the low rate of marriage amongst the white poor and amongst minority poor.
Robert Hume

2/27/12, 2:44 PM
Whiskey said...

I think Roissy's comments and the immigration part are the most cogent explanations for the social disorder. It is not as if the White working (and Middle) class looks to moral authority for what the Kennedys or Bushes preach. Or practice.

Rather it is the calculation of family formation. Which is affected by both provider ability and female preference for same. My criticism of Murray's book such as it is, would be that he does not show how the middle class is moving towards the lower-class spectrum in behavior, and offer remedies such as stopping immigration and a cultural demand to women to "women up" by accepting responsibility.

If Blacks are moving on the expressway to social doom, and Mexicans/Hispanics have just recently gotten onto the expressway, the White Middle class is headed there, and the working class is entering the on-ramp. An examination of sexual and market pressures plus culture offers in my view a good opportunity to see the relative effectiveness of each factor at play.

2/27/12, 2:55 PM
Vinteuil said...

Wow. Amazing, brilliant, marathon review.

I wonder if Murray is even aware of the existence of guys like Roger Devlin & Roissy.

2/27/12, 3:17 PM
Laban said...

I note that you use the expression "Libertarianism in One Country". In the UK, two academics, Paul Hirst and Graeme Thompson, coined the phrase "Globalisation In One Country" to describe the UK, a place where vital strategic industries are sold to investors from nations who would never allow their own strategic industries to be sold abroad.

Locus classicus is the UKs sale of its nuclear power generation to EDF, owned by the French state, while that same French state passes laws to protect its strategically vital yogurt manufacturers.

2/27/12, 3:20 PM
Anonymous said...

Great review. Covered a lot of ground.

Good of Murray to write about the relationship between the upper class and the lower.

He brings up something that the upper class doesn't want to admit - they *hate* the lower class. Someone who doesn't have a college education and works in a factory is equivalent to an untouchable in the Indian caste system. Sub human.

2/27/12, 3:23 PM
DaveinHackensack said...

Related to this, Steve, have you read Jonathan Chait's take on the GOP considering 2012 their "last chance to stop history" ("2012 or never").

Quick excerpt:

"In that light, the most surprising response to the election of 2008 is what did not happen. Following Obama’s win, all sorts of loose talk concerning the Republican predicament filled the air. How would the party recast itself? Where would it move left, how would it find common ground with Obama, what new constituencies would it court?

The most widely agreed-upon component of any such undertaking was a concerted effort to win back the Hispanic vote. It seemed like a pure political no-brainer, a vital outreach to an exploding electoral segment that could conceivably be weaned from its Democratic leanings, as had previous generations of Irish and Italian immigrants, without altering the party’s general right-wing thrust on other issues."

2/27/12, 5:10 PM
Anonymous said...

Steve published this comment way back when and I still think it was one of the most cogent comments ever posted here. The proliferation of sexually frustrated Stormfronters on this blog may make that faint praise, but this lady knows her stuff. She was talking about blacks but it's clear these same social pathologies are prevalent in the growing white underclass.

"If you're a young underclass woman, one of the first things you notice is that there are not many marriage-worthy men in your social milieu. A whole lot of them are unemployed or in prison or dead.

So even though you may want to get married, you figure your prospects are pretty dim. If you wait to marry before having children, you probably won't have children.

You might as well have them now because, well, why wait? You're not getting any younger. More to the point, your mother and other female relatives are not getting any younger. And since they're the ones you'll have to rely on for child care and support, it's important to have your kids before they develop Type II diabetes and kidney failure and all the other health problems that tend to afflict black underclass folks more than white privileged types.

Will having kids hold back your career? Well, if you have an IQ of 80 and are looking for a reason to drop out of high school anyway, then no.

You’ve probably already figured out that your prospects of a good job are dim, and getting dimmer by the day, especially with immigrants flooding in by the millions to take the few jobs you're qualified to do.

So for you, its not a choice of a ghastly life as a welfare mother or good life in the burbs. Fate and the immigration mavens have already decreed that you will get mostly crumbs from America's bounteous economic table. The only choice you have is between a crummy life with kids or a crummy life without kids.

Your lack of career prospects just makes having kids look that much more attractive. Children are about the only thing you can produce that people will view as being truly valuable.

Besides, if you can't count on a spouse for love and companionship, kids become doubly important because they'll be the only family you’ve got.

So becoming a single mother makes quite a bit of sense to you. You realize it’s a scary prospect and a hard life, but what are your options?

You may not exactly be looking to get pregnant, but when it happens -- well, is it really all bad? Lots of others have done it before you. In fact, in your neighborhood, girls who have babies out of wedlock are becoming the norm."

2/27/12, 5:40 PM
Anonymous said...

The right end of the tail curve "subsidizing" the left end also works out to the favor of said right end. The top 5th of income earners earned less than they did when the borders were closed to immigration. Only the very wealthy have gained as a result of cheap labor.

2/27/12, 6:03 PM
Anonymous said...

For those of you who are trying to make this into yet another gender issue please bear in mind that both the single moms and the workshy dudes in these scenarios are adults living in a free country. If these men and women had the brains/ability to significantly improve their lives they'd straighten themselves out and find themselves a better quality mate pool to choose from. Of course having kids by multiple men does reduce a woman's chances no matter how much she improves herself with work and education, but that's not nearly as big a problem for a guy on the dating market.

2/27/12, 6:09 PM
Anonymous said...

"I am reading Going Solo by Eric Klineberg. It is about the growing number of people living alone. A key factor is the increasing income of women. Many women when they don't need a male income feel they would rather not have a man at home to clean up after. I doubt any preaching from Murray will change such women."

It's not so much that women don't wanna clean up after men. It's that once women become educated and hooked to popular culture, they want the fantasy male who is worth cleaning up after. What woman would not wanna be married to some guy who looks like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan? Most would women would gladly cook for them and clean up after them. But they don't wanna clean up after Joe Schmoe.

2/27/12, 6:32 PM
Anonymous said...

But then, it's the same other way around. Once young males felt no pressure to grow up, get married, and have kids, they dreamt of the fantasy female. But few women are fantasy gals.

2/27/12, 6:33 PM
Anonymous said...

Actually, for smart black girls in the inner city, being a single mom opens up lots of opportunity that doesn't happen if they are just single girls looking to get ahead. Without the connections of middle class blacks, the only way for them to get the good jobs and paid-for college is to have that one kid. Then the floodgates of free stuff really open up.

Having a child (out of wedlock) can be part of a larger plan to get the credentials to get a decent diversicrat job. Sheesh.

2/27/12, 6:35 PM
Anonymous said...

Another problem is rise of glamour materialism or glamaterialism.
Before young people got hooked to 'lifestyles of rich and famous' view of life, they appreciated having a simple life, simple house, simple clothes, simple spouse, and simple things in life. Greatest generation after WWII was content with simple happiness.

But 60s happened and came new freedoms. One freedom emphasized MEANING. Life had to be meaningful, and so bunch of kids dropped out and looked for 'meaning'. In the process, they lost knack for simple happiness.
But another aspect of 60s--the go go yrs of prosperity and 007 glamour--was money, money. And this slick aspect of the 60s came to full bloom in the 80s, the age of Gordon Gekko.
It was no longer enough to have a simple job, simple house, and simple happiness. One had to have it all. This made young people restless and unappreciative of simple stuff. Filled with fantasies of having everything instantly, many never bothered to struggle to earn the simple stuff in life. It's like the dog that wants the bone reflected in the water loses even the bone in his mouth.

Look at blacks. There was a time when blacks would have been happy to have a decent simple lives. But with the rise of funky glamour and badass hype, just having a job wasn't enough. You had to be like Don King or Whitney Houston. Rappers don't so much sing about injustice of poverty as 'look at my limo, my fancy suits, my gold plated guns, my juicy ho's, etc.' Poor black kids who fixate on such stuff have no taste for simple work and simple achievements in life. They are too busy fantasizing about the cool world to live in the real world.
But same goes for a lot of white guys. Look at the losers in HIGH FIDELITY. They are so into rock music and dreams of fame that they never do anything real. And they have no appreciation for simple things in life.
I almost miss the communist emphasis on the nobility of work: any kind of work. It was like the Puritan/Amish work ethic.

I think many Mexican immigrant families stay together because they can still find happiness in simple securities and joys of life. But when their kids watch too much TV and wanna be Tony Montana and when the girls wanna be Lady Gaga, then it falls apart.

2/27/12, 6:45 PM
Anonymous said...

I'm not so sure that lower class white males are failing due to lack of well-paying jobs. Nor do I believe that women necessarily look down on men who don't make more money.
It's natural for men and women to want the company of one another. Most women will happily settle with another guy even if he makes less money if he's decent(and of course handsome). Even among the upper classes, there are many cases of men married to women who make more. A male doctor can be married to a female lawyer who makes more. Or a male professor will be married to a woman administrator who makes more.

The problem is less with women than with men. Some men may not want to marry or be with a woman who makes more out of hurt pride. He may care more about the income issue more than the woman does.

But another problem is the infantilism of so many guys. They really need to grow up. In BLUE VALENTINE, the real problem was not so much that the guy made lousy money but he was a jerk who still acted like some teenager or young dude in his early 20s. Women don't only care about money. They want a guy who's adult, dependable,and decent. Even if he's not making big money, he will be loved and appreciated if he has positive qualities. A lonely woman in her late 30s making 50,000 a yr will gladly marry some guy making 30,000 a year if he's decent and nice. My aunt made more money than my uncle, but they were the perfect couple as long as I could remember. But then, my uncle was a real upstanding guy.

2/27/12, 6:55 PM
Anonymous said...

"Actually, for smart black girls in the inner city, being a single mom opens up lots of opportunity that doesn't happen if they are just single girls looking to get ahead"

Please cite these programs, with program name, link and explain how being an unwed mother helps. Maybe you are better versed in the social welfare system than I but from what I have read it gives most people just enough to keep from starving.

2/27/12, 7:07 PM
Anonymous said...

There was a time when society was united by the chain of conventions. This had a unifying effect on both privileged and lowly. Given the importance of conventions, the educated/smart couldn't just do as they pleased and the less privileged had to adhere to social standards.
The bad thing about conventions is they could be stuffy, rigid, stultifying, and etc for both ideas and behavior.

So, the breakdown of conventions felt liberating for everyone, top to bottom, in the 60s. There was more freedom for educated to think new ideas, more freedom for artists to explore and express. And more freedom for all people, young and poor, to find happiness and feel liberated and exult in new kinds of music and behavior.

But over time, this liberating force became the slave-master of the underclass. Under-educated and/or poor people became slaves of their own savage/barbaric instincts. Initially, the unleashing of new freedoms really made them feel free. It felt good to dress more casually and shake their booties. But as they became addicted to their own hedonistic desires and drives, they became the slaves of animalism. Thus, freedom led to a new kind of tyranny. Not political or cultural tyranny but emotional tyranny of the savage soul. Today, many blacks and whites in UK and US think they're free cuz they act wild and crazy, but they are prisoners of their rabid savagery and barbarism. They've been let out of the cage physically but they're emotionally locked within the cage of their savage souls. The cage used to be on the outside; now, it's in the inside. What is locked inside the cage of barbarism is the civilized soul.

Overly stuffy civilization had kept the instinctive soul of the underclass locked up, and so underclass Britons called their superiors "guv'nor". It was understandable why this kind of stuffiness had to go. But mistakenly, some thought that instinctive soul running wild and free would mean more freedom. Instead, it has become the new master and has locked up the civilized soul and thrown away the key.

The new freedoms hurt the poor/dumb/uneducated more than the rich/educated/smart. For smart people, more freedom was handled more creatively, cautiously, intelligently, etc. Geeks at Harvard use freedom to explore computer codes, write plays, compose new kinds of music, to work on economic theory.
But for the less intelligent and uneducated, more freedom means surrendering to animal desires of wanton sex, fatty foods, dumb music, and etc. It's too bad that too many rich educated people make their fortunes by pandering to this shit that they personally despise.

2/27/12, 7:10 PM
Anonymous said...

White underclass, the prisoner of freedom.

2/27/12, 7:10 PM
Anonymous said...

"What woman would not wanna be married to some guy who looks like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan? Most would women would gladly cook for them and clean up after them. But they don't wanna clean up after Joe Schmoe."

Most women are just as realistic about their place on the pecking order as men, and most know they aren't Pierce Brosnan worthy. A better explanation is that it is easier for a working class woman to support kids than to support kids plus a chronically unemployable husband with an expensive strip club habit.

2/27/12, 7:11 PM
Florida resident said...

Thank you, God, that You created Steve Sailer !
Thank you, Mr. Sailer !
I am extremely glad also that you, Mr. Sailer, resumed writing for VDARE.
Your F.r.

2/27/12, 7:13 PM
Hunsdon said...

Anonydroid said: If these men and women had the brains/ability to significantly improve their lives they'd straighten themselves out and find themselves a better quality mate pool to choose from.

Hunsdon replied: Ability can be broken down into internal and external factors, say "capacity" and "opportunity." For most of human history, capacity was a sine qua non, but opportunity was a very chancy thing. For a brief shining moment, America let an awful lot of people with the capacity to better themselves have the opportunity to better themselves.

2/27/12, 7:14 PM
DaveinHackensack said...

Laban,

"In the UK, two academics, Paul Hirst and Graeme Thompson, coined the phrase "Globalisation In One Country" to describe the UK, a place where vital strategic industries are sold to investors from nations who would never allow their own strategic industries to be sold abroad."

See this book review, from Saturday's FT, about how the UK gutted its manufacturing industry: "The workshop that was". According to the review, the book notes that Britain's share of global manufacturing exports in 1952 was 25.4%; by 2009, it had slipped to 2.9%.

2/27/12, 7:17 PM
Anonymous said...

"I am reading Going Solo by Eric Klineberg. It is about the growing number of people living alone."

Maybe it should be called CUMMING APART.

2/27/12, 7:18 PM
Anonymous said...

OH BOY, HERE WE GO AGAIN. WOULD FINLAND'S SCHOOL SYSTEM WORK IF 50% OF FINNISH CHILDREN WERE BLACK OR MEXICAN? What we should envy is not Finnish schools but demographics.

2/27/12, 7:50 PM
Svigor said...

And as far as Roissy? Anybody who starts off with the premise that women rule, I can't take seriously. The battles would be easier if it were so, as one need only to fix the collective will, but the enemies are other men who have been outsmarting us. A most painful thought.

Well said. Now tell it to Whiskey. When I hear him say "women are the enemy," I think, "would it were so"...

2/27/12, 8:22 PM
alsdkfjalsdkfj said...

@Robert Hume - this article from not too long ago:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/02/inequality-in-california.html

comes close - it explicitly links California's fate to Hispanic under-achievement.

2/27/12, 9:05 PM
dogzma said...

"A better explanation is that it is easier for a working class woman to support kids than to support kids plus a chronically unemployable husband with an expensive strip club habit."

I think you're on to something, Anon.

As to the other Anon's comment about working class whites having an IQ of 80. I've lived among them and doubt it. With this group you will often get learning disabilities combined with not taking school all that seriously. You'll also get a strong focus on the peer group which will greatly determine aspects of identity.

BTW, it's pretty easy to get pregnant out-of-wedlock. Even a chick with an IQ of 110 could do it.

2/27/12, 10:25 PM
unimpressed said...

"...comes close - it explicitly links California's fate to Hispanic under-achievement."

I find it hard to fault anyone for California's decline other than whites. Hispanics just follow the pack.

2/27/12, 10:27 PM
Anonymous said...

Charles Murray proven wrong. Rich more immoral and likely to take candy from kid.

Does this mean Amy Chua is not only more likely to burn her daughter's teddy bear but to take her candy bar? Who knew?

2/27/12, 10:37 PM
Anonymous said...

Santorum: High gas prices caused mortgage crisis, 2008 recession.

Santorum needs to be sent to a sanatorium.

2/27/12, 10:45 PM
Anonymous said...

Santorum needs to be sent to a sanatorium.

He's not wrong though. The oil spike did cause the mortgage crisis and recession. If oil was a lot cheaper, a lot of mortgages would not have gone bad, and a lot of economic activity would not have stopped, leading to recession. If oil goes high enough, even white collar professionals like doctors, lawyers, etc. won't be able to pay their mortgages when they and their customers can't drive to work cheaply.

2/27/12, 11:17 PM
No Name said...

Great review Steve. When did your comment section become such a disaster area? Its like all the smart people left.

2/28/12, 1:44 AM
Matko said...

Jonathan Chait's take on the GOP considering 2012 their "last chance to stop history

He loves to mention the alleged higher education of white liberals, while glossing over the education levels of non-white minorities that are supposed to help build up a permanent Democrat majority.

2/28/12, 2:36 AM
Peter Pan said...

Its like all the smart people left.

Komment Kontrol is a kruel mistress.

2/28/12, 2:51 AM
Conatus said...

Illegitimi non carborundum, don't let the bastards get you down...but my fave is semper ubi, sub ubi. Say it slowly and let the Latin scholars amongst you translate word for word...until you get the laugh.
Always where under where.

2/28/12, 3:39 AM
Luke Lea said...

From my new site:

For tomorrow's working families we propose factories in the countryside run on four-hour shifts. Under this arrangement both parents would work half-time outside the home, and in their free time would build their own houses, cultivate gardens, cook and care for their children, and pursue other leisure-time activities. They would care for their elderly parents instead of putting them in nursing homes, and not retire at 65 but go on working for as long as they were able.

2/28/12, 3:54 AM
Anonymous said...

@alsdkfjalsdkfj
thanks, however the Mc Donald article doesn't discuss the white working classes problems. It's all about how the poor Latino capabilities are crushing California.

Also, while very good, City Journal isn't what I would call MSM. What is needed is something like the Washington Post or New York Times.

Robert Hume

2/28/12, 4:13 AM
DaveinHackensack said...

Matko,

"He loves to mention the alleged higher education of white liberals, while glossing over the education levels of non-white minorities that are supposed to help build up a permanent Democrat majority."

A corollary of that is that the GOP reaching out to Hispanics isn't a "no brainer", because there is a significant difference between Hispanic Americans, on average, and the Irish- and Italian-Americans of previous generations: Hispanic Americans aren't climbing the socioeconomic ladder like previous immigrant groups did. Because of that, it's in their economic interests to be perennial constituents of the Democratic Party.

At the moment, the only racial minorities the GOP can successfully court without tossing aside any remaining economic policy differences between the major parties are Indians and East Asians. Considering that there are already 2 Indian-American GOP governors, the party has made some progress on that front. Less so, perhaps with East Asians, but, in any case, the numbers of these groups probably aren't large enough to change the optics of the GOP convention materially.

2/28/12, 5:51 AM
The Anti-Gnostic said...

A lonely woman in her late 30s making 50,000 a yr will gladly marry some guy making 30,000 a year if he's decent and nice.

Why should any man do that? Woman gets to punch above her weight with numerous bad boys then when she's old and barren offer sloppy seconds to the dependable schlep? Then yammer him into his grave because he's not like the cash-rich arseholes she dated in her 20's? He can probably cook and clean better there her, he's got his videogames, his beer, his buds, snag some younger tail every now and again if he cares to exert himself for it.

Women who want to marry aren't bringing anything to the table.

2/28/12, 5:57 AM
Anonymous said...

Vintage Steve.

Steve has found his old form again, writing long, involved and argumentative pieces back at his natural home Vdare.
Some of us thought that our weekly Steve Vdare pieces were a thing of the past.

2/28/12, 6:07 AM
Anonymous said...

A lot of guff has been passed about young white men in general (not just working class men), failing to 'grow-up' and living like perpetual teenagers and eternal playboys - this 'phenomenom' apparently being fuelled by micro technology.The idea is that today's yoth and not so youth are hooked on the asperbery delights of pixellated, machine made mega byte blandishments. Whether being lost in the perpetual childhood of fighting imaginary beasts on TFL screens, or drowning, nay immersing themselves on all the 1001 fleshly pornographic variations San Fernando's Porn Valley can throw at them, the dea is that today's manhood has given up on real women, sociability and interactions in place of electroincally aided comfort blanket early childhood fantasy.
Perhaps.But the general derogation of white men as the ultimate victims of protected minority spoils systems, biased divorce laws and subsequent destruction of wealth etc, didn't help.
All we are seeing is the backlash and the revnge of the boy's toys.

2/28/12, 6:18 AM
diana said...

I haven't read the book yet, just scanned it at Barnes & Noble, but I have a question. Murray claims that Fishtown's crime rates have gone up. Is this true? Of course, illegitimate births have gone up and all the other indicia of social decay, but I wasn't aware that white working class crime rates have gone up.

2/28/12, 6:21 AM
Dahinda said...

Why, when talking about immigration, it's always a minority issue? I worked in the trades in Chicago for many years. When the Soviet Union fell in the early 90's thousands of Poles, Czechs, Russians, and Ukrainians, poured in and took over the electrician, plumber, painter, and carpenter trades. To them $8 or $9 was great even though the union scale in Chicago was much higher. Apartment complexes and office buildings suddenly had their entire maintenence staffs comprised of mainly Eastern Europeans, amny of which were illegal. This is on top of the Mexicans, Indians, and even Irish (yes, there are many Irish illegal aliens in Chicago and even a few English) that were also competing for jobs. Because of this immigration, the work in my field got slow and I went back to school and finished my Computer Science degree just in time for all of the offshoring of programming jobs!

2/28/12, 6:44 AM
Anonymous said...

"Great review Steve. When did your comment section become such a disaster area? Its like all the smart people left."

Fishtowners took over.

2/28/12, 7:27 AM
Anonymous said...

"Santorum needs to be sent to a sanatorium."

"He's not wrong though. The oil spike did cause the mortgage crisis and recession."

No, oil spike didn't cause the crisis. It finally exposed it.

2/28/12, 7:30 AM
Anonymous said...

whatever the political attitudes are of the new upper class, their attitudes and actions isolate them from mainstream America


I'm not sure how "peoples political attitudes" and actions can be so easily separated from "their attitudes and actions".

There's a lot of praise for Murray on the right, much of it seemly because the left says nasty thins about him. But if you just ignore the left and evaluate him on his own merits, his argument is not without its flaws.

2/28/12, 7:52 AM
Jacob Roberson said...

Anonymous said...

My idea of culture isn't poring through indexes of Art Books and seeing who got cited more.

To me, art critique is like those Magic Eye things which I can never see. "Is the author hiding behind me laughing?" Then again I don't understand art and Murray seemed to absolutely luuuv the subject so I'm sure he disagrees.

2/28/12, 7:57 AM
Jacob Roberson said...

Oh and, good article Sailer. As always I don't feel I'm getting BSed, unusually in political writing.

2/28/12, 8:08 AM
Rohan Swee said...

"Preview" seems to cut off the top of my post - test to see how this shows up.
test...................................

Laban Tall: re "globalisation in one country". That's what came to my mind, too, when I read this in Steve's article:

I would add that Americans on the right half of the Bell Curve are going to have to subsidize their fellow citizens on the Left Half of the Bell Curve one way or another. The least corrupting way to do it is through a market system rigged slightly to bribing them into honest toil by not forcing their wages into a race to the bottom against everybody else on Earth.

But why would the right-hand want to do that? I think by now it's apparent that "forcing a race to the bottom" was the point of the whole exercise, no?

Most on the right-hand of the curve no more really care about the deteriorating conditions of the national left-hand than we care about the working conditions of Foxconn employees or "bringing global millions out of poverty". (That last one serves as a soothing counterpoint to any uneasiness elicited by the first two, because, unlike the first two, it works fine with "shareholder value".) We only start caring when the depredations of "globalisation in one country" start metastasizing into our own little precariously held slices of the no-longer-far-enough to the right bits of the bell curve.

2/28/12, 9:02 AM
Anonymous said...

"while that same French state passes laws to protect its strategically vital yogurt manufacturers."

Was it Norway that had butter shortage recently?


"Once young males felt no pressure to grow up, get married, and have kids, they dreamt of the fantasy female. "

I don't think that it works that way. Consider these astute observations of Mencken from In Defence of Women.

http://www.heretical.com/miscella/mhusbach.html

Another excerpt from the same book lays waste to the Patriarchy theory by pointing out that the law was on the side of the wife, undermining authority of husband long before the "smash patriarchy" started doing the rounds.

http://www.heretical.com/miscella/mmarrlaw.html

By Patriarchy theory, I mean the subservience of women in marriage, and what I think the feminists meant. If we go by the definition of the word, then it might have achieved its objective, though being fatherless isn't quite the same as being with a father who lacks authority.


"Even among the upper classes, there are many cases of men married to women who make more."

Which are more likely to end in divorce despite being more self-selected?

Feminism brought choices to women from the upper classes. If you think of it as informal quota for women in male-dominated spheres, which class of women would have filled it first? Who gets to taste the power relinquished by men?

The women of the lower classes had to work before feminism's 'victory' of right to work. Their choices or the lack of them, hasn't changed.

Would the lower class male decimation would have been that easy if the fortunes of women weren't independent from their husbands?

"The problem is less with women than with men. "

Precisely, that's why women deserve more help.
Isn't that the way gender dialogue works?


"A better explanation is that it is easier for a working class woman to support kids than to support kids plus a chronically unemployable husband with an expensive strip club habit. "

Or if we reverse the genders, it is easier for a working class man to support kids than to support kids plus a wife. (no need to include the expensive habits separately)

But then, if men were that practical there wouldn't be all this talk.


"Most women are just as realistic about their place on the pecking order as men"

They are not. Any guesses why not?

2/28/12, 10:53 AM
Anonymous said...

"Charles Murray proven wrong. Rich more immoral and likely to take candy from kid."

This was based on how people drive, right? People with fancy cars violate more rules than people with normal cars. But which people are more likely to steal cars? Rich people or poor people?
I think auto-theft is a bigger problem than running lights when cops are not around.
Also, rich people might be breaking more rules on the road because they have busier schedules.

Btw, what amazes me is how the this study looked at just one behavior and then came to such general conclusion.
Suppose we take a different approach: secretly video all the shoplifters at Walmart. I'll bet poor people--especially of certain races--are more prone to stuff things into their clothes. So, should we say poor people of race ____ are more prone to steal?
Or, would that be 'racist'?

But if indeed it's true that rich people are less moral, does it mean certain ethnic groups that happen to be richer are more crooked? Now, which group in the US is richest? So, can we say that members of that race/group are most likely to cheat? Vell?

2/28/12, 11:20 AM
Geoff Matthews said...

I enjoyed the your review of the reviews. It was well done.

2/28/12, 1:10 PM
Rohan Swee said...

"Great review Steve. When did your comment section become such a disaster area? Its like all the smart people left."

Fishtowners took over.

Good one.

Seems to be a law that the quality of a blog commentariat declines over time. Some variant of Gresham's Law, maybe, or the smart people just get bored and go looking for something new.

Guess I've found my level.

2/28/12, 3:05 PM
RKU said...

DaveinHackensack: ...there is a significant difference between Hispanic Americans, on average, and the Irish- and Italian-Americans of previous generations: Hispanic Americans aren't climbing the socioeconomic ladder like previous immigrant groups did.

Yes, that's certainly correct. As I keep pointing out, the national data seems to indicate that Hispanics of today have been advancing economically considerably *faster* than did the Irish and Italian immigrants of old, partly because the economic structure of our society has changed. But who cares about actual data when people can just quote their assumptions back and forth to each other.

Considering that there are already 2 Indian-American GOP governors, the party has made some progress on that front.

I see something *very* different in such datapoints. Basically, the support of the GOP is over 90% white and there's considerable concern in certain quarters that the party might therefore eventually evolve an actual white-oriented ideology. Therefore, the conservative media is heading this off by ensuring that a *hugely* disproportionate share of the top GOP leadership is non-white, regardless of whether these non-whites are even remotely qualified. A white party substantially led by non-whites isn't likely to develop a white consciousness.

Hence those two South Asian GOP governors, Marco Rubio and those Hispanic GOP governors, Herman Cain, Michael Steele, and a very long list of others. For related reasons, a truly remarkable fraction of prominent GOP figures seem to be closeted gays, which otherwise seems a bit odd in a strongly anti-gay political party.

2/28/12, 5:00 PM
rob said...

For related reasons, a truly remarkable fraction of prominent GOP figures seem to be closeted gays, which otherwise seems a bit odd in a strongly anti-gay political party.

No wonder the party is so psychotic over gays living together and saying they're married. When gays have somthin'-somthin' waiting at home, they might be less likely to hang out in public restrooms waiting for wide-stanced Congressmen.

2/28/12, 7:57 PM
TGGP said...

"As I keep pointing out, the national data seems to indicate that Hispanics of today have been advancing economically considerably *faster* than did the Irish and Italian immigrants of old"
I am surprised. Sailer has already explicitly discussed that comparison and its flaws, with particular reference to the long-standing hispanic population in New Mexico, as well as the book "Generations of Exclusion". I'd like to see that data. If you just link it here I may not be alerted, but if you go to my blog entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com you can comment there or find my email address.

2/28/12, 8:10 PM
Anonymous said...

Blue model.

2/28/12, 11:25 PM
Kylie said...

"Please cite these programs, with program name, link and explain how being an unwed mother helps."

It helps because the woman is a single mother--an automatic "victim" in today's society. And I don't see why the commenter to whom you're replying should have to supply chapter and verse when all you have to offer for your baseless assumption is "what I have read".

"Maybe you are better versed in the social welfare system than I but from what I have read it gives most people just enough to keep from starving."

Are you kidding no question mark. I won't even ask where you've been reading this tripe. It's bullsh!t.

I won't bother looking up links but I will tell you from my first-hand observation over a period of years that single mothers are far from starving though I grant you that through their poor food choices and unwillingness to prepare nutritious meals, they may be malnourished. But they are not undernourished. You are aware of the obesity epidemic rampant in the black community, aren't you? Has it never occurred to you that that low-income African-Americans are considerably larger than no-income black Africans and it might be because only one group is "starving"? (Helpful hint: it's the latter, not the former.)

Single black mothers are eligible for Section 8 housing, food stamps and Medicaid (In case you haven't noticed, this covers shelter, food and medical care). There is also a generous social safety net in the form of "community centers" which provide vouchers for everything from clothes to cab fare to school supplies. Single black mothers also get generous gift baskets at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Unlike you, I have been in the homes of black people living in the projects. I never saw one such home that didn't have a large color TV, cable and video games. The people who buy their food with food stamps buy more expensive food and more name brands than I do. Their homes are not lavishly furnished but aren't much worse than the "starter apartments" that recent college graduates used to make do with back in my day. They have sofas, beds, coffee tables, etc. And yes, pantries full of food. It is true that often their children don't get enough nutritious food--but that is totally due to their dysfunctional life-styles--not to lack of government assistance. When you go off on a drug binge or end up in jail for a few days or sell your food stamps on the black market for drugs, you usually don't bother to fix your children nourishing meals. But the lack is in your parenting skills, not in the generosity of the government.

Next time you submit a comment, try having a modicum of knowledge to back it up and ditch the hyperbole.

2/29/12, 8:14 AM
Anonymous said...

Murray's book may be most useful in subverting the notion of 'privileged white America'. Liberals would have us believe that whites are privileged, and they take pride in being so generous with stuff like AA. Since whites have so much, why shouldn't they share their bounty with struggling non-whites?

Murray's book counters this silly notion of ONE WHITE AMERICA. There may be two or three white Americas, and many whites are hurting. If liberals believe it's wrong for rich to look down on the poor, then Murray's book suggests affluent liberal types who look down on poor whites as rubes, rednecks, and bigots are heartless bastards.

But there's something for liberals too. Murray blames poor whites for being stupid, and this gives liberals an opportunity to slip in and accuse Murray himself of heartlessness. It's funny in a way. Murray accuses affluent liberal whites--even the 'conservative' ones are socially pretty liberal--of failing to lead the dumb white underclasses. But because Murray blames the white underclass for many of their problems, it gives the liberals a chance to step in and say, 'heartless Murray accuses white victims of economic downturn for their own misery.' If Murray's solution is moral sermons by the affluent, the liberal solution is... more big government and welfare?

2/29/12, 8:59 AM
Anonymous said...

Did Murray fail to have a hit book because of BELL CURVE? I dunno. Pat Buchanan's books have been far more controversial, but he's had a string of best-sellers, even with the pretty shocking UNNECESSARY WAR, which was widely discussed in the media. Buchanan was interviewed in MSM about the book, and it was reviewed even in the New York Review of Books.
Ann Coulter has also been strident and insulting, but she's had a whole bunch of hit books.

The problem with Murray is he's a conservative who seeks intellectual approval and appreciation from liberals and neocons. Also, his style is more analytic than polemical. He's too 'intellectual' for most conservatives who want redmeat stuff and too 'prejudiced' for liberals with their cult of politically correct 'rationalism'. Liberal rationalism is really about 'be reasonable' than 'use reason', 'reasonable' meaning 'if you want our support and approval, be reasonable and don't break taboos because if you do, we'll break your legs.'

So, Murray's been caught in a no man's land between the right and left. His values/views lean to the right but his style/approach leans to the left, i.e. he speaks the language of academese that the liberal side is more familiar with, but he uses it to batter than buttress the walls of liberalism. Liberals may seem as a kind of Trojan Horse. A man who looks, talks, and writes like one of them but may be slipping in taboo ideas 'discredited' and rejected by all 'good decent rational people'.

Liberal political culture is head-ish while conservative political culture is heart-ish. Murray is neither a liberal egghead nor conservative of the heart. He's more like an eggheart.

2/29/12, 9:09 AM
heartiste said...

thanks for the link steve.

anon feminist:
"I'm not so sure that lower class white males are failing due to lack of well-paying jobs. Nor do I believe that women necessarily look down on men who don't make more money."

they don't, at least not consciously, if those men compensate for their lower income with a powerful alpha attitude. but that's not usually the case. furthermore, the marriage market is a different beast than the sex/dating market. a cool jerk jobless dude a woman has a fling with would have no incentive, thanks to the woman's choices, to increase his beta provider qualities.

"It's natural for men and women to want the company of one another."

sure, but the reproductive goals of men and women are at odds. this creates a sexual marketplace where the natural urge to get together is fraught with drama, backwards progress and trickery. it's the stuff romance novels -- aka female porn -- are made of.

"Most women will happily settle with another guy even if he makes less money."

incorrect. most women are incredibly loathe to settle, much more averse to the idea than men are at any rate. this is because the risk of getting pregnant by beta or omega seed has much more profound consequences for a woman than the risk of having bad sex with an unattractive woman has for a man.

"Even among the upper classes, there are many cases of men married to women who make more."

usually those men in the upper classes have high social status jobs and real power which would compensate for the friction that would result from a wife having higher income.

"The problem is less with women than with men."

not really. although men are not a blameless sex, women are the final arbiters of who is having sex with whom. thus, men respond to the choices that women make. if women --who are, after all, the hypergamous sex -- are choosing to forego marriage, long gestational dating periods, or the idea of only having children within marriage, then men will give women exactly what they want. men are the ultimate sexual adaptability machines; they will do what it takes to get laid.

"Some men may not want to marry or be with a woman who makes more out of hurt pride."

true. but men like that suffer from attitude problems that are the real turn-off to women. a man who makes less can keep a woman in thrall with a don't-give-a-shit attitude.

"In BLUE VALENTINE, the real problem was not so much that the guy made lousy money but he was a jerk who still acted like some teenager or young dude in his early 20s."

that wasn't his problem. his problem was that he became beta and clingy, which gave his wife the willies and caused her to find him less attractive. when they first started dating, he was a charming cad.

3/1/12, 11:20 AM

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