What is Reddit's opinion of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

nice.

In "coming apart"

Charles Murray notes how we have a recent phenomia of consuming different media by SES. Pro wrestling and reality TV both fall into lower SES media. and I imagine most of the media trump consumes does too.

Ribs should make anyone happy. I'm glad you're not affected, at least not just yet. But there's something seriously wrong with our broader social fabric. There's a long-term trend toward atomization and disillusionment in broader society, one that begin in the 1960s (during the last big outburst of unrest in the US) and that's continued today. During this time, fertility has crashed, social institutions have dissolved, divorce rates have spiked, and wage growth (relative to general productivity) has stagnated (a departure from a trend hundreds of years old). Over the past ten years or so, the public has stopped caring about fundamental values like the freedom of speech, the freedom of association, and equality before the law. The operation of the political machine has become increasingly unpredictable and irregular. The economy seems to be held together by improvisation. Why? What caused this decay? Who caused this decay?

Mes parents seraient probablement pas deux déviations standards plus élevé que la moyenne de QI et moins non plus ?!

T'aurais probablement besoin de lire ce livre là

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https://www.amazon.ca/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

yeah, the way I see it is that colleges should select the applicants who are both the most qualified and who will mutually help to create the best collegiate experience for their classmates. Racial quotas don't seem to have any rightful part in that, but affirmative action (which I agree with to some degree, though I think maybe it isn't executed very well and may actually be harmful in some cases, as when people are put in situations where they cannot succeed) has skewed the proportions somewhat.

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Geographic, racial, and ethnic diversity may also play a role in creating a better campus experience-- I've been reading Coming Apart and it covers how most of the cognitive talent in the US groups itself into Super Zips (really wealthy zipcodes usually bordered by equally or nearly as wealthy zipcodes), and that those elites are also producing a disproportionate amount of the cognitive talent in the next generation (I believe this is true across all races). So selecting merely on cognitive ability would lead to a disproportionate amount of people raised in this new elite bubble being admitted into the top tier colleges, which would probably have negative effects on the campus experience. It's a tricky issue.

The topic specifically says "DC Bars". A bazillion comments are talking about drinking. People from flyover country are amazed that it's socially acceptable to drink during the workday, but apparently this is not a big deal in DC. You just defended it yourself, and when I pointed it out, you suddenly changed the topic to restaurants. WTF?

> on an afternoon for lunch. I'm drinking. Gasp.

I'd get fired if I came back to work from lunch with alcohol on my breath. The fact that you consider it normal speaks volumes about how out of touch you are.

lol in office

There's a great book by conservative political scientist/writer Charles Murray called "Coming Apart" where even he admits that the growing lack of interaction between the classes is largely responsible for failed policies of and lack of care/compassion from the elites in both private/public sectors.

Everybody can benefit from seeing how the other half lives.

Right-wing news sources are running with Ronan Farrow's assertion, in a panel on Real Time with Bill Maher, that Bill Clinton "has been credibly accused of rape." Clinton's exploits are old news, of course, but in the interest of not talking about Epstein, I don't actually want to talk about what Bill did or didn't do.

My question for the Motte is: does anyone have a good handle on the history of the locution, "credibly accused of rape?"

I feel like I've seen it a lot lately, though I first noticed it during the Kavanaugh appointment hearing. I found its epistemology extremely troubling at the time. To refer to someone as having been "credibly" accused of anything is to embed a question-begging assertion into what might be taken on the surface as neutral reporting. Traditionally, American news media avoids suits for libel by reporting the allegation of criminal acts. There are probably some interesting arguments for why they shouldn't even be allowed to do that, but set those aside for now; assuming we're okay with the news media reporting allegations so long as they are clearly labeled as allegations (and remember that by "okay" here I mean "should not be held liable in tort"), doesn't the phrase "credibly accused of rape" violate the rule?

After all, "credibly" means believably or plausibly. But the plausibility of an accusation is precisely what juries are supposed to determine in a criminal prosecution.

In fact the phrase "credibly accused" seems like a linguistic troll on the order of "it's okay to be white." It is an invitation for people to express disbelief, which is outside the Overton framing of "believe all women," and so it is a locution people generally allow to pass without comment. It seems like a sneaky way to shift people's priors.

So I think it is pretty clever, as rhetoric goes, but it seems like a relatively recently-weaponized phrase--

--until I check Google Ngrams, anyway. And then I notice that it was and is a common phrase in the discussion of Catholic clergy and sexual abuse (appearing e.g. here in 2007). In this context, "credibly accused" looks like a way of saying, in effect, "yes, we know that sometimes people make spurious accusations, but these don't look spurious and so we are giving them our full attention." But the epistemic problem still seems to be there: the word sounds like a way of saying "we are taking these accusations seriously," but--is it possible to take an accusation seriously without putting the burden of persuasion on the accused to, essentially, prove a negative? The "credibly accused," in short, are not merely accused--they are nudged into the territory of "presumed guilty."

So, I was able to determine to my own satisfaction that "credibly accused" (of sexual misconduct) was not a phrase invented for today's culture war battles, though the roots of its current popularity do seem to be in the 60s or 70s. But its current associations with sexual misconduct, I can't find a clearer history on. I do seem to recall seeing the phrase recently deployed against Donald Trump in connection with extant impeachment inquiries, also, but I can't find that article now, likely thanks to Ronan Farrow. So whatever its origins, it does seem to be steadily increasing in popularity.

But it does look like rhetorical sleight-of-hand to characterize allegations as "credible accusations." And I am left wondering when the phrase made the transition from "a way of distinguishing between spurious and plausible stories" to "a way of taking the victim's side." The timeline seems to very roughly track America's coming apart. If we assembled a list of similar rhetorically-weaponized phrases from today's culture wars and ran them through Google Ngrams or similar, would it parallel these charts?

The book by Charles Murray called "Coming Apart: The State of White America" touches on this quite a bit. How in the last 50 years, females have increased their incomes and career involvement exponentially due to a myriad of factors one of which is going to college, resulting in them wanting to seek out partners who are of the same or greater income, intelligence, and education. This results in people of the same high education and high income partnering up with each other, and not with the rest of the population. While historically rich people would tend to partner with rich people, what we have seen from the 1950's to today goes beyond just inherited family estate wealth.

I am greatly summarizing what was touched on in the book, but it's a fascinating read that at the conclusion you are left with data and statistical explanations of why the direction today is what it is on this subject.

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https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1661563525&sr=8-1

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With regards to society needing a radical cultural shift where a man's value is not associated with his economic usefulness to provide....that will never happen. Women are wired to seek out providers (what is needed to provide has changed over time but the factors of wealth, masculine strength, and intelligence are always being subconsciously evaluated. Many women on the flip side say we need a radical cultural shift where a woman's value is not associated with her physical appearance of youth and beauty.....that will never happen. Men are wired to seek out female youth and female physical traits (which indicate higher levels of estrogen) since they are the best indicators of successful child bearing. That's just the way it is, and when it comes down to it the purpose of existence of life is to procreate and create more life (I know this is controversial though), so it's best to go along than to try and fight hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of our particular human race, and the millions and millions before it

Sure, I agree that socialism and the welfare state aren't the same, but they have the same moral flaw. Socialism just has a worse case of it since state socialism doesn't recognize property rights to the means of production, at least when strictly followed in Communist countries. Labourite socialism (Great Britain, c. 1945 to 1979) was a compromise, in which the commanding heights of the economy were state owned, such as the steel industry and coal mines, but the retail sector remained in private hands.

We have to make a distinction between crony capitalism and the true free market system. Crony capitalism is how Carlos Slim, for a while, became the world's wealthiest man, by his control of the main Mexican phone company; he used his influence in Mexico's congress to keep out competitors. This is the main characteristics of Russia's semi-free market also. In industries without natural barriers to entry (i.e., de Beers' control of diamond mining in South Africa), long-term monopolies are inevitably the result of legislation, not the natural outcome of economic success.

The business cycle's timing is driven by central banking's control of the money supply. This is the key insight of Austrian economics. It explains why so much malinvestment occurs mistakenly at the same time, thus causing economic crashes when the artificial money spigot is turned off. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's "Monetary History of the United States" explained the leading factor behind Great Depression in the period of 1929-1933 was driven by a collapse of the money supply by about 1/3 when the Federal Reserve pulled back from having pumped up the money supply in prior years. They did that in order to help out the English Pound Sterling, interestingly enough.

To call something "racist" is merely a standard liberal way to avoid engaging in a serious sociological argument. It refutes nothing by itself. Notice that the piece by Murray is called "The coming WHITE underclass." He simply takes Moynihan's insight about black family instability and applies to whites also. Isn't that evenhanded of him? How is that "racist"? His book "Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010" merely updates and documents this argument in much greater detail. It explains why people are less happy despite the general standard of living has risen. The problem of family instability is crucial to understanding poverty in America today, such as through illegitimacy and divorce, compared to what was poverty in 1950''s America, when these forces were far weaker. Moynihan was right; liberals simply have to reckon with how much inequality in America is caused by variations in the family structure of different ethnic groups. By the way, a key reason why Asians have higher incomes than whites is because they have less divorce and illegitimacy than whites do, besides, of course, their generally greater value placed on educational success. It's why Asians are suing Harvard for racial discrimination because race quotas are being used to keep them out, much as Jews were kept out several generations ago for the same kinds of reasons.

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

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Furthermore, nothing was done here to refute the Christian form of Ayn Rand's argument that I made above, which is that the Eighth Commandment is violated by the welfare state, social democracy, socialism, and communism. That's the crucial issue above all. "Social justice" isn't accomplished by stealing the money of those who earned it and giving it to those who haven't, which is what the left, in any permutation, thinks.

 

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Another book you should add to your list: <em>Coming Apart</em>, by Charles Murray.

Here's a WSJ article where he explains the thesis of the book.

You seem to be aiming at two separate points, both of which are mistaken. The first point is something like what you said below--

> the point being that it's virtually certain that anyone whose extended family is largely untouched by the prison system in the US enjoys that status by dint of privilege, not innocence as the law defines it.

I'm entirely confident that you are just wrong about this. My confidence is born of the particular circumstances of my family--most of whom still belong to an insular religious minority. The suggestion that I must be related to many more criminals than I know, by virtue of some combination of statistical inference and privilege, is amusing but entirely fallacious, and not just because that's not how statistics works (though that should, I think, be reason enough!). I have a countable number of relatives who think that breaking the speed limit is a sin before God. Their faults are not few (a claim most will happily own) but with rare exception they are indeed quite innocent before the laws of the land.

But perhaps more to the point, even if you take Cardinal Richelieu's "six lines" to them, they are still innocent of the sorts of things that tend to actually land people in jail, viz. violent crime and property crime. I do not approve of the degree to which people are incarcerated for drug crimes in the United States, but that is not why most people are in jail. Most people who are in jail are there because they lack the self-regulation to abstain from harming others or destroying property. Which brings us to your other, actually quite unrelated point:

> Be careful that your comfort with the current system isn't just because it's biased in your favor.

First, I never said I was "comfortable" with the current system. But second--the only way the current system is clearly biased in my favor is that I don't resort to physical violence. I don't smash things, or burn them, or shoot people, or punch people, or otherwise destroy things when I am angry, or afraid, or whatever. I recognize that this is a systemic bias, but it is a systemic bias against people who tend to resort to physical violence. It is probably one reason why men are so wildly overrepresented in our prison population: the system is biased against the sex that tends to respond physically rather than verbally. But it's not biased against them by virtue of their sex; it is biased against them in a way that seems entirely correct, to me. It is biased against people who have poor impulse control and pose a credible threat to the safety of others.

I'm even willing to acknowledge that this is often not their fault. A lot of people are a danger to others because of genetic or environmental factors well beyond their control. But this does not change the fact that they are a danger to others.

My own personal filter bubble is the product of being raised in an insular minority, and going from there to academia, where I've spent most of my adult life. People who are prone to punching people in anger, or carrying a gun to a government protest, or vandalizing a road sign, or shooting heroin, are just not the kind of people I meet anywhere, ever. "Show up at a protest with a gun" is behavior that belongs to a cluster of cultural possibilities so far outside my own as to be practically unthinkable. My suspicion is that I am talking about a class division, and that this class division is what /u/BluntEdgePosting is noticing in their comment above.

The after effects, sure. But I don't think you can make the case that racism is the primary thing keeping black people down today. For example, take the period between the civil war and the civil rights act of 1964. Black people advanced socially in that time period much more quickly than in the period since the civil rights act, despite the fact discrimination was both legal and extremely common, at least in the south. This tells me there's something else going on. You can see a lot of the problems that plague the black community also plague some white communities, namely crime, poverty, and drug use. Charles Murray writes about said white communities here. And they appear to have similar causes, poor work ethic, single parenthood, and so on. As Thomas Sowell points out,, black culture and redneck culture aren't as dissimilar as you might think.

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

I found this book to be very interesting on the topic. It doesn't set forth a specific solution, but does a good explanation of how we are coming apart in America.

Coming Apart by Charles Murray

Wikepedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)

Goodreads link

Amazon link

Publisher’s Blurb: In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

Charles Murray's Coming Apart is another good one.

Affirmative action has a much larger impact on discriminating against White people than you suggest.

Almost everything was better for straight, White men before the 1960's liberal cultural revolution.

You're also in the minority if you're being honest about liking multiculturalism.

>I see you've never been poor! It doesn't work like that - when you are hand-to-mouth, you are highly stressed (for obvious reasons), and the stress of any such situation pretty much negates the ability to make foresightful long term plans - this is basically human psychology/physiology.

And yet sixty years ago, despite any demographic cross-section of the U.S. being poorer, this wasn't a problem. Marriage rates were higher among the lower class and single mothers were rarer.

I've become tired of this obscurantism and denialism surrounding the social issues of the poor. Yes, I'm sure in any cross-section of the United States, the poor have it worse, and are more stressed out and so forth. I don't doubt that in psychology, stressed people make worse decisions. That still doesn't explain the disparities of the world around us.

The United States, despite its problems, still has the richest poor people in the world. They work fewer hours on average than they did in generations past, and live in healthier environments. Despite this, I'm to believe that the reason they're all making worse life decisions than their grandparents is because of the crushing stress of their relative poverty?

People poorer than them, even living in an age without plentiful condoms and legal abortion, managed to have fewer kids outside of marriage and say together. At some point we must dispense with vague appeals to the miasma of poverty - this is about values, institutions, and a civil society in disrepair. The white working class has become totally disconnected in their values and behavior from the generations that came before them. They aren't lacking money; They need shame, discipline, and the fear of god.