Last week, my dad shot me an e-mail that I had to check out Charles Murray's latest book. Then Amy P said to check it out. Then David Brooks said it was the best book of the year. When people mention Charles Murray, my brain sorts the conversation into the same folder where I put links to Powerline blog posts, and I promptly start thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner or what color I plan to paint the hallway.
With all this hoopla, I am struggling to make myself focus on him.
Murray's new thesis is that we are mistakenly thinking about the 99% v. the 1%. Instead, we should be looking at the gap between the upper 20% and the lower 30%. These two tribes are increasingly isolated from each other. They differ not only in terms of their bank account balance, but in their behavior. Brie v. Pork Rinds. SATS and college tours v. guns and fireworks. Because he focuses on white America, Murray doesn't get tied up in the race problem, which plagued him in the past.
I'm not sure what Murray writes is terribly new. It seems to continue the tradition of the Culture of Poverty research.
He's also stuck with a chicken and egg problem. Does watching lots of TV and avoiding community affairs cause the lower 20% to be poor? Or are people who are out of work and depressed by the bleak economic landscape looking for cheap thrills with the TV and pork rinds?
UPDATE: Take the Quiz!! I scored a 13. Not the bubble, baby!
Apt. 11d 
I’m of a mixed mind on this. On the one hand, melted Brie served with chunks of pumpernickel is the best, easy appetizer ever. On the other hand, guns and fireworks are clearly superior to college.
Anyway, I still think the issue of the 1% is the bigger problem.
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“Does watching lots of TV and avoiding community affairs cause the lower 20% to be poor? Or are people who are out of work and depressed by the bleak economic landscape looking for cheap thrills with the TV and pork rinds?”
That’s kind of trivializing things, no? I think what Murray is saying is that while liberals (like our hostess) are always very enthusiastic about getting the poor to eat more nutritious, fresh-cooked food or conform their lifestyles to ours in similar ways, they are unwilling to confront the real issues, for fear of being “judgmental.” The real issues are divorce, illegitimacy, and substance abuse. I would be interested in hearing a cogent explanation from a liberal of why he or she is more concerned with the food choices of the poor than their sexual choices.
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Because he focuses on white America, Murray doesn’t get tied up in the race problem, which plagued him in the past.
Sort of like the Daughters of the American Revolution?
I’m not going to start thinking deeply about a Holocaust denier’s new book just because his new topic is about how Christians can uplift themselves. And I’m not going to start thinking deeply about a racist’s new rants just because he has chosen to limit himself to the problem of how to improve the White Race, as if that somehow fixes things.
Some people should just be placed in the “ad hominem” category where you ignore them because of who they are. Maybe he has a great point, but I’ll wait until it starts coming from someone who has not devoted his life to legitimizing racism before I stop to give a first thought.
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Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t guns a pretty expensive hobby?
Fireworks, too, actually, if you do it on the sort of apocalyptic scale that makes it worthwhile.
“Does watching lots of TV and avoiding community affairs cause the lower 20% to be poor? Or are people who are out of work and depressed by the bleak economic landscape looking for cheap thrills with the TV and pork rinds?”
Avoiding community involvement or church-going means that you have lower odds of striking up a chance conversation that will turn into a job, or at least work. (“There’s a lot of trees down from the storm. Let’s say you and me go out and make some money.”) As they say, 80% of success in life is just showing up. Networking is if anything more important for the survival of people at the bottom 30% than it is for people at the top 20%.
Even in our current economic environment, work isn’t scarce (unless you live in some godforsaken place like Michigan). It’s jobs that are scarce.
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“Maybe he has a great point, but I’ll wait until it starts coming from someone who has not devoted his life to legitimizing racism before I stop to give a first thought.”
But what if Murray’s right? Wouldn’t that make quite a lot of difference in how we think about poverty and education and affirmative action? We can’t just throw data away when it doesn’t please us.
It’s one thing to argue that Murray is wrong. It’s another to just yell “unclean, unclean!” when he’s mentioned. That does not impress.
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Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t guns a pretty expensive hobby?
Guns aren’t expensive, especially if you amortize the cost of the gun over its expected useful life. Finding a place to shoot is going to be expensive if you aren’t rural or don’t have rural connection. Ammo is expensive these days, even rimfire compared to what I recall from childhood. You’ll probably have to take up reloading if you want to shoot a bunch and aren’t rich. If you do reload, you’ll have enough powder around that fireworks won’t be a problem.
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The real issues are divorce, illegitimacy, and substance abuse.
I think the returns on investment for efforts that can be undertaken without a college degree and a relatively narrow set of skills are too low to encourage many people to avoid the sorts of choices Murray worries about. If the best-case scenario of playing it safe is $10/hour in a place where rent on a decent place is $1,000, drinking too much tonight without worrying too much about tomorrow can be your highest expected utility path in life. If you do manage to form a marriage and a family, you’ve got precious little space to fix any problem that comes down the pike. A great deal of the talk on this kind of stuff boils down to, “People who aren’t like me shouldn’t have kids/sex/any respite from the workhouse/beer.”
I’m coming to the conclusion that free trade will turn out to have been the death of the American middle class. If you can’t hold the manufacturing wage for the U.S. above the world market rate (i.e. what a subsistence farming is willing to take in order to not be a subsistence farmer), you’ll have too many people who can’t earn a reasonable living to keep things together politically. And things aren’t holding together politically for the middle class.
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as Ragtime notes, Murray has so far been wrong about everything; not only wrong, but morally culpable as well.
This time, he’s wrong again. What a surprise.
As Lance notes, you can take an online test to see if you are a real American as defined by Murray. The test includes a coding bug that says for a score of 12, “you scored between 13 and 16”.
This innumeracy seems a perfect analogue of Murray’s ‘arguments’, clearly plainly explicitly and unequivocally wrong.
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I think Dave Ramsey is if not the solution, a very important part of the solution. He’s a personal finance guy and he talks to people on the radio from every part of the economic spectrum, he gives them hope, and he provides small workable steps for making almost anybody’s life better. Here’s a clip from the preview lesson of his 13-week Financial Peace University (starting around the 14 minute mark gives you a good idea of it):
http://www.daveramsey.com/fpu/preview/
The 13 classes cover:
–an overview
–marriage, kids, communication and money
–developing a monthly spending plan
–dumping debt
–credit scores and dealing with collectors
–resisting marketing
–good and bad insurance
–bargaining for deals
–investing
–paying for college and retirement
–career development and work
–real estate and mortgages
–“how generous giving can completely revolutionize your attitude and improve your finances, business and relationships”
You may be thinking, well that’s for rich people, but it’s really the other way around. A lot of this material is more important for economically marginal people to know, because they get ripped off in more ways than an upper-middle person can imagine (even a really sympathetic liberal upper-middle class person who listens to a lot of NPR).
There’s a once-a-week class with a video lesson and then small group work. DR is Evangelical and talks a fair bit about what the Bible says about debt, which I realize is cooties for a lot of people here, but I am not familiar with any secular program that does the same thing. (The unfortunate thing about a lot of financial advice and financial counseling is that it’s thinly disguised salesmanship.)
Another option that I can’t find a cite for right now is a sort of support group for the struggling where people meet for mutual encouragement and are paid for taking discrete steps toward self-betterment.
“I’m coming to the conclusion that free trade will turn out to have been the death of the American middle class. If you can’t hold the manufacturing wage for the U.S. above the world market rate (i.e. what a subsistence farming is willing to take in order to not be a subsistence farmer), you’ll have too many people who can’t earn a reasonable living to keep things together politically. And things aren’t holding together politically for the middle class.”
A more optimistic view of this is that we are in the middle of a disruption similar to the Industrial Revolution, which was very destructive at the time, but led to mass prosperity. That might sound too rosy a scenario, but really, somebody has to buy all that stuff that’s being manufactured, and it’s not going to be people making subsistence wages.
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When speaking of someone’s work, it’s really helpful to read said work.
Otherwise, one ends up repeating one’s own convictions, which doesn’t improve the debate. It makes the conversation very shrill, and reveals one’s own ignorance and prejudices.
For what it’s worth, I’d bet that most people who condemn The Bell Curve haven’t read it. If you haven’t read it, you can’t rely on others’ summations–because it’s quite probable that they haven’t read it, either.
Likewise, RTFB in this instance, too. The isolation of the elite from the rest of American society is real, and growing. By the way, Murray doesn’t talk about the top 20%. He is talking about: I hereby operationally define the new upper class as the most successful 5 percent of adults ages 25 and older who are working in managerial positions, in the professions (medicine, the law, engineering and architecture, the sciences, and university faculty), and in content-production jobs in the media. As of 2010, about 23 percent of all employed persons ages 25 or older were in these occupations, which means about 1,427,000 persons constituted the top 5 percent. Since 69 percent of adults in these occupations who were ages 25 and older were married in 2010, about 2.4 million adults were in new-upper-class families as heads of household or spouse.
This is the elite the SAT built. (my interpretation. I’m not far enough in the book to know if Murray agrees, but as the principal concern of The Bell Curve was the stratification of American society by the SAT, I think it’s likely it’s on his mind, too.)
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Doug K., Thanks for the link to the bubble quiz!
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I got a 13 on the quiz! Yay me. But that’s because I watched the Transformer movie and didn’t hate it.
No, I didn’t read the book, Cranberry. The reviews of the book, even from conservatives, have been so-so. If people keep talking about it, I might borrow it from the library. Not ready for that yet.
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Track records are useful things to keep track of. Brooks and Murray both have extensive ones.
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I got an 8 out of 20.
I lost a comment I wrote this morning (I’ve got to start saving). Here’s another try.
Dave Ramsey is very helpful for people on all points of the economic spectrum, from new doctors to people who need help saying no to debt collectors so that they will have money left to pay for groceries and keep utilities on. Before I started listening to DR on the radio about 5 years ago, I had no idea how many ways there are to skin broke people (14% (or even 19%) car loans, furniture rental, pay day loans, rule of 78s consumer product loans, negative amortizing mortgages, etc.).
DR has a very good 13-week program called “Financial Peace University.” There’s a video and text overview here:
http://www.daveramsey.com/fpu/preview/
Here are the topics covered each week:
–preview
–marriage, communication, kids and money
–writing a monthly spending plan
–“dumping debt”
–credit and dealing with collectors
–resisting marketing
–good and bad insurance
–getting good deals
–investing
–career building and extra jobs
–real estate and mortgages
–“how generous giving can completely revolutionize your attitude and improve your finances, business and relationships”
Now, DR is Evangelical and he talks a fair bit about what the Bible says about money and debt, which I realize is cooties for a fair number of people here. However, I don’t know of any secular equivalents for Financial Peace University. Unfortunately, a lot of financial advising and education is just thinly veiled salesmanship for dubious financial products.
The beauty of the DR plan is that he gives you small steps (the Baby Steps)
http://www.daveramsey.com/new/baby-steps/
to follow one at a time to make progress. Even if circumstances don’t allow you to make it to the end of the Baby Steps, anything you can manage to do will make your life easier and less stressful. DR is really good at giving hope and a feeling of being in control to people who are at the end of their rope.
I can’t find the link or the name right now, but outside DR-world, there’s also a support group for the financially struggling. Even without explicit teaching, members are able to encourage each other and to make progress, helped by financial incentives when they do stuff for self-improvement and self-help.
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If anybody bothers to watch the Dave Ramsey preview video, the meatiest part starts around 14 minutes.
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MH “I think the returns on investment for efforts that can be undertaken without a college degree and a relatively narrow set of skills are too low to encourage many people to avoid the sorts of choices Murray worries about. ”
David Frum’s review of the book is basically themed around this point by MH.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles-murray-book-review.html
(I am like Ragtime, and refuse to seriously consider anything that Charles Murray says. It’s vaguely possible that he might say something interesting but then someone else is going to have to say it before I respond. And, yes, we both seem to admit that this is indeed an ad homenim decision that judges based on the person and not the content).
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I may have gotten something over 10 (can’t tell for sure, ’cause the test failed to give me a score). But, my bubble is much thicker than that (and I did give my self credit for my body hurting after a long day in the lab — I used to do all night experiments — and counted surgical scrubs & lab coats as uniforms). Maybe though, those things do put a leak in my bubble.
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I got an 8, but I’ve giving myself 5 bonus points for living in Pittsburgh. There’s got to be some advantage to it.
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I got a 16. But then, my dad was a chicken farmer.
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When speaking of someone’s work, it’s really helpful to read said work.
As with the similarly ludicrous right-wing “Read The Bill” contingent during the health care debate, the argument that one must read a racist work to determine that it is racist is simply wrong. It is simply a tactic to shut up those one disagrees with — “if you did not fully absorb that footnote on page 219, then you missed the whole point!” Reading the book is neither necessary, nor sufficient, as it does not inform you of facts that are not in the book.
It is sufficient to note that, based on sound scientific principals,
A. I do not agree that “race” denotes a biologically distinct thing — certainly there are biological/genetic differences between the French and the Japanese, but not of a more significant nature than between Brits and Russians, or between Kenyans and Liberians; and
B. And I do not agree that “IQ” measures a biological characteristic. The difference in “IQ” between whites blacks in America is comparable to the difference between the (genetically identical) Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. In many cultures with a caste-like minority, that minority scores lower on IQ tests.
Given that I find no scientific basis for “race” or “IQ”, it is ludicrous to think that a person needs to read a book on the relationship between race and IQ to determine one’s opinion on the topic, or the purveyor of its bunk.
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Jonathan Gruber, intellectual architect of Romneycare and Obamacare, just placed Murray’s “Losing Ground” on his list of 5 most important books about public finance (even though he states that “Murray’s facts were largely wrong.”)
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I’m having my sisters take the quiz (way less elitist than me, as I am an airhead librul academic and they are down to earth wives of police officers and mechanics), and my teacher-sister said “I got 8 and a real problem with that quiz.” My nurse-sister got an 11 and so did I. Curious what accountant-sister got.
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I want to know who the nascar driver is. I guess I could google nascar drivers until that picture came up and identify him that way? Presumably he’s famous.
(Hmh, it didn’t really work. Junior? Tony Stewart? I can’t look at the picture without taking the quiz again, so I’m doing face-matching from memory).
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Wendy,
I think there’s a pretty big male-interest bias on that quiz.
Ragtime,
And yet the various US racial/ethnic groups score in very predictable ways, with Asians always scoring highest. Odd, that.
We’ve discussed at length how varied humans are vis a vis intelligence, attention span, energy level, sensitivity to detail, sensory acuteness, memory, etc. We’ve also discussed how predictably many of these features are inherited (although there’s always an opportunity for the totally unexpected turn of the genetic kaleidoscope). Put the mental/temperamental diversity and the inheritedness of those features together, and there is potential for substantial differences between different ethnic groups (taken on average). The great-great-grandson of 10 generations of Lithuanian rabbis will be (on average) a different critter than the great-great-grandson of 10 generations of Basque sheepherders. Likewise, the descendant of 10 generations of illiterate Nepalese yak-herders is going to be (on average) a different critter than the descendant of however many generations of Brahmins. (Again, that’s on average. There are always flukes, in either direction.)
It seems to me a bit odd for liberals to fight Murray so hard. If anything, substantial differences in genetic capital are an argument for liberalism, rather than the reverse.
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I’m pretty sure it’s Jimmie Johnson (I gave myself credit on the quiz based on that, anyway). I know about Nascar mainly because I worked for a publisher that did a lot of Nascar books, and I sometimes had to top-edit them (though Johnson is more recent than my tenure there, I still am half-aware). I’m not sure that type of exposure is what the quiz was aiming at… after all, I’m one of those liberal, recycling, non-smoking, veggie-eating, gay-right-supporting elites. Yet managed to score as relatively in touch.
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The quiz is nonsense: I scored 9/20, which is absurd, because I am more disconnected from ‘real’ American culture than anyone. I didn’t even drink till 18 months ago, and even now I mainly drink girly drinks. (Mark you, where I come from huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ were for the aristocracy). I just like (real) conservatives and evangelical Christians, and have spent enough of my life so far on the left that union halls are not unfamiliar. And all three of those make me even more disconnected from real America than my proper liberal American neighbours. I even spell neighbours with a pretentious midatlantic accent. I’m insulted.
Mark you, I just asked 160 students at a public university how many of them have heard of Roy Orbison. Three.
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“I didn’t even drink till 18 months ago, and even now I mainly drink girly drinks.”
We need to set up some sort of exchange program so you can spend some time with MH in Pittsburgh and learn to eat sandwiches with French fries in them.
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“Mark you, I just asked 160 students at a public university how many of them have heard of Roy Orbison. Three.”
There is nothing so dead as old pop culture.
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I hardly know any evangelical Christians. Nearly everyone I know is Catholic or the boring types of Protestant, at least as far as white people.
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And yet the various US racial/ethnic groups score in very predictable ways, with Asians always scoring highest. Odd, that.
If by “predictable” you mean “in conformity with America’s informal caste system,” or “in alignment with my racist assumptions,” then I agree.
In America, Japanese and Korean residents “predictably” score among the highest in IQ.
In Japan, where there is extensive racism by Japanese-origin against Korean-origin residents, Japanese-origin residents have a “predictably” much higher IQ than Korean-origin residents. Ask any Japanese racist, and she’ll be glad to explain why that result is obvious.
Odd, that.
So are Korean-Americans and Korean-Japanese different races, or is Charles Murray a racist slimebag? Please show your work.
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Ragtime thanks for the concise summary I can use to explain why I never debate Murray and the intelligence data.
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I got an 8, but I bet if I didn’t have a PhD in religious studies I wouldn’t have my evangelical Christian friends (who also have PhDs, so maybe they don’t really count).
I think it would be important to ask whether you knew anyone who was in jail, or how many people you knew who had ever been arrested for anything besides protesting. Also, the military question would be better if it related to how many people you know who are serving in the military right now. I would also ask about health insurance, and I might ask where people get their national and international news.
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That quiz was just a joke, btw. It was “inspired” by Charles Murray.
I don’t really want to read the book, so let me ask a question for the one person who did. The summaries of the book that I read mostly talked about the bad behavior of the bottom 20%, which was the blame for the poverty? Did the book also complain about the top 20%’s snobbery about REAL American culture – beer, fast cars, guns? If so, that’s just beautiful.
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I got a 10, but I’d taken it before and gotten an 11. I grew up in East Tennessee. My family is right down the road from a huge Nascar location. I’ve dined at restaurants with Dale Earnhardt’s picture on the wall. I did factory work. Mr. Geeky did it every summer. I waited tables all the way through college. But I don’t drink Bud Light. I didn’t watch Transformers, but I don’t much like movies, period. My brother-in-law (does that count?) is an evangelical Christian, as are several of my husband’s aunts and uncles and cousins. We eat at those chain restaurants several times a year. And we have lived a couple of times in places where we’re not surrounded by folks with degrees. I suspect that about 30% of our current neighbors do not have college degrees.
I read the article, Murray’s own summary/excerpt from the book, and here’s a good take-home message:
” Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you’re not part of that America, you’ve stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.”
Some of the rest of the article makes me bristle a little. Blaming single parenthood for part of the issue, for instance. It’s a chicken and egg problem, really. He also seems to suggest, (and does have data, but it’s correlation not necessarily causation) that men who aren’t working are just lazy. I don’t have data in front of me, but I’m pretty sure manufacturing and blue collar jobs have been disappearing for about 20 years. And there are tons of jobs that didn’t used to require college degrees that now do.
I still think the thesis is right. It might be worth reading just for that.
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Thanks, Laura. I do agree with that idea, too. It does get annoying, though, when your neighbor parks his car on his front lawn or the other neighbor shoots a BB through your dining room window. Really.
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“If by “predictable” you mean “in conformity with America’s informal caste system,” or “in alignment with my racist assumptions,” then I agree.”
How does that work with Asians scoring highest in the US, despite not being either politically, culturally or numerically very influential? If score differences are all just the effects of racism and oppression, why don’t white Americans score higher than Asian-Americans? Shouldn’t the man be doing a better job of keeping this minority down?
(I should note that I don’t think that differences in group performance are entirely based on biological intelligence, or that biological intelligence will get you all the way–we all know smart people who are missing some essential personality features for success. I haven’t read them recently, but in Thomas Sowell’s Trilogy Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures and Conquests and Cultures, Sowell talks of middleman ethnicities and the way in which these entrepreneurial minorities pursue a particular cultural strategy of academic achievement, insularity, and close relationships with fellow group members (there are probably some other characteristics I can’t remember). The overseas Chinese in Asia, the Lebanese and East Indians in Africa, the Greeks and Armenians in the Near East and Middle East, Jews in Europe and Jews and Koreans in the US are examples of middleman minorities. On the other hand, this particular strategy probably doesn’t work for ethnicities that are of equal average intelligence and work ethic with the surrounding population. It helps to be just a little bit smarter than the people you are horse-trading with.)
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I have a few more thoughts on inter-ethnic impressions of stupidity. I’m somewhat Swedish (3/16ish) and back in the day, the US stereotype was of the “dumb Swede.” That particular stereotype has pretty much vanished without a trace (except in the Swedish-Norwegian joke wars). I’m not sure what created the dumb Swede stereotype or why it died, but perhaps the ponderous, deliberate Scandinavian manner or their struggles with the English language played some part. The dumb Polack joke is still around, but the Polack seems to have taken on a life of his own, mostly quite unmoored from application to actual Polish people.
(On the same theme, there’s a Jewish joke that goes like this. A Polish nobleman laughs three times at a joke: the first time when you tell it, the second time when you explain it, and the third time when he finally gets it.)
So, there is a very natural tendency to see members of other ethnic groups as less smart than your own (especially in cases where when you speak together, you are speaking your language and they don’t have that home turf advantage). But it’s worth noting that thinking other ethnic groups stupid is not a universal rule. Even while hated, the middleman minorities would not be described as stupid. They might be deemed cunning, clever, chiseling, greedy, etc. but never stupid.
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Oh, and I think the fact that I’ve called the police on my neighbors in the last couple of years gives me an extra point or two. 🙂
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That really depends on what the call was about. If you called to enforce HOA rules, probably not so much with the bonus points.
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Amy P:
“Asians” don’t score highly. East Asians do. IIRC, SE Asians (who came over mainly as refugees) score about as well as Latino immigrants. Japanese Americans are as a group the highest income earners in the US. Not surprisingly, since test scores correlate with income, Japanese Americans tend to score highly. The tiny portion of highly educated Chinese people who come to the US also have children who score highly (though there’s more variation among Chinese in scores), as do Koreans (who have immigrated from a 1st world country with a good education system.) I imagine the children of recent European immigrants to the US score equally highly if we selected them out as a group. Too lazy to double check, but I’m pretty sure high income white students score very highly too. “Whites” as a whole score lower than Asians, because poor whites score poorly (though in aggregate not as poorly as SE Asians), and there are far more poor whites than Cambodians. Also, Asian-Americans don’t face the same sort of entrenched stigma that African-Americans and some Latinos (mainly those who are more indigenous) do. (Not to dismiss anti-Asian racism, but it’s just not the same). Another interesting group to look at are, say, South Asians in the US. As a whole, S. Asians in the US tend to be very affluent and perform well in school. In the UK, S. Asians face similar issues that African-Americans do here, and are not considered high performing. Interestingly, W. Indian immigrants in the US as a whole are better off and perform more highly than African Americans, although African Americans are on the whole better off than people in the West Indies. Hmmm…
There appears to be a general trend. First wave immigrants who face significant language barriers and/or have little education and face stigma in the US do not so well. Educated bourgeois immigrants with little language difficulty tend to do well. Stephen Steinberg’s “The Ethnic Myth” is about this. Generally, one’s position/skill set in the old country helps you out for the first or second generation, and then, barring discrimination, people tend to even out. (Cue “How the Irish/Italians/Jews etc. became white.”)
On the whole “dumb Swede” stereotype, such a stereotype appears to be about as strong as “dumb blonde” jokes (to which it might be related), and had about just as much discriminatory power. Far more influential was the eugenics lobby, which clamored for more Scandinavian immigration to counter act the inferior S/E European immigration waves. Of course, Scandinavians, facing little language barrier or discrimination, have always been successful in the US, and tend to score on aggregate above average on tests (if we use religion as a rough proxy), as fitting with people who on the whole are above average income-wise. (They were until recently the ethnic group with the highest rate of college attendance, except instead of integrating into the WASP college system, they built their own so non-Scandinavians weren’t really paying attention.)
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Oh, it was a domestic violence situation. I definitely get bonus points.
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Domestic violence is every where. No bonus points unless the fight was about NASCAR.
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harry b,
I had to look up Roy Orbison. I knew he was some sort of singer, but I thought he might be Country Western (there are a bunch of Country Western Roys).
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Roy had a moment in the 80s. It’s hardly ancient history if it was on the sound track of “Pretty Woman.”
Speaking of religion and social class and jokes, I now have a joke about Pentecostalists with PhDs who startle the rest of the congregation by using hand sanitizer after snake handling. Now I just have to figure where I could use it.
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Listen to just about any serious popular songwriter talk about Orbison. Well, just listen to those songs; complex, rich, tragic, sung like a tormented angel.
I believe that several of my sociologist friends (and I mean the quanty ones who really know this stuff and do it about 100 times better than Murray) are on top of the book, and will do what needs to be done in terms of determining whether the analysis stands up. I’m glad I lack those skills, because it is a case where doing the work of the lord requires really paying a lot of attention to satan. Anyway, you can expect responses before too long by people who are well informed and serious social scientists.
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“Roy had a moment in the 80s. It’s hardly ancient history if it was on the sound track of “Pretty Woman.””
After I looked it up, I remembered that. But initially I was probably confusing Roy Orbison with Roy Clark (of Hee Haw).
“Speaking of religion and social class and jokes, I now have a joke about Pentecostalists with PhDs who startle the rest of the congregation by using hand sanitizer after snake handling. Now I just have to figure where I could use it.”
My husband used to email pretty regularly with a very bright physicist, trained at a hotsy-totsy department, who was also a young earth creationist.
Putting on my PC hat, not ALL Pentecostals do snake-handling. Most (like the Assemblies of God church I grew up in) just do glossolalia and interpretation of glossolalia, although that’s pretty startling too, if you’re not used to it.
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Glossolalia wouldn’t allow me to use my hard-won knowledge that the zoo makes kids use hand sanitizer after they touch a snake.
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I got an 11.
I blame the fact that I had to attend a Rotary meeting to pick-up a grant award for work last year.
Also, Ricky Bobby taught me more about Nascar than I ever wanted to know.
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Roy Orbison = Lefty Wilbury.
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Mark you, I just asked 160 students at a public university how many of them have heard of Roy Orbison. Three.
Mercy!
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Now I’m playing all my Wilburys. Tweeter and the Monkey Man=best parody of Springsteen ever. Because in Jersey anything’s legal, as long as you don’t get caught!
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I would have had a higher score, had I had any friends who are evangelical Christians. Well, they’re not thick on the ground in Massachusetts. I decided adults who were raised in evangelical households didn’t count. Nor did Greek Orthodox, although our friends are very devout.
Funnily enough, I’d say the Mormons are on the upswing in the area, building new churches, while the Catholics are closing churches. (There is a difference in scale.)
Did the book also complain about the top 20%’s snobbery about REAL American culture – beer, fast cars, guns? If so, that’s just beautiful.
Haven’t gotten to that part. At present, he’s outlining the Super Zips, and the settlement patterns of elite college graduates. I have to say, the changes in the country in certain towns are staggering. We didn’t buy a house in the town I grew up in, because the town’s now SO expensive. I attended school with a much more socioeconomically diverse group–not only doctors’ and lawyers’ kids, but nurses’, single mothers, fire fighters’, shop owners’. Now, I think the families are mostly married professionals.
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I flipped through the book at Barnes & Noble last weekend; I took the full-length quiz and scored something like 65? 67? Anyway…more than enough to establish my working-class bonafides.
My curiosity is going to get the better of me someday and I’ll read the book. For right now, I find it really curious that although he titles it to reference “white America”, he seems to actually refer to a specific smaller slice of white America—the more rural, Anglo-Saxon or Scots-Irish Protestant slice. People from, or descended from Southern and Eastern Europe are conspicously absent. I’m wondering if that’s because we don’t neatly fit into his premise (we screw up the data!) or if he has a pre-WWII definition of “white”.
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