Introduction by David Theroux, President, The Independent Institute:
G
ood afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is David Theroux, I am the
president of The Independent Institute. I am delighted to welcome you to
our Independent Policy Forum.
As many of you know, the Institute regularly sponsors programs featuring
outstanding experts to address major social and economic issues,
especially as they may relate to important new books. For those of you
new to the Institute, you will find background information on our
program in the packet at your seat. The Independent Institute is a
non-profit, non-politicized, scholarly research and educational
organization which sponsors comprehensive studies of critical public
issues. The Institute's program adheres to the highest standards of
independent inquiry, and the resulting studies are widely distributed as
books and other publications, and are publicly debated through numerous
conference and media programs, such as in our forum today.
Our purpose is a Jeffersonian one of seeking the truth regarding the
impact of government policies, and not necessarily to just tell people
what they might want to hear. In so doing, we will not take the public
pronouncements of government officials at face value, nor the
conventional wisdom over serious public problems. Hence, we invite your
involvement, but be prepared for new and challenging perspectives.
Webster defines "dystopia" as the opposite of utopia, "in which
conditions and the quality of life are dreadful." Today, it does not
take much to see the extent of urban America's problems: drugs,
shootings, teen pregnancy, poverty, illiteracy, racial hatred, despair.
The degree of social pathologies is staggering and is getting worse.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned in the 1960s of threatening trends in
America's civic culture with the disintegration of the black family,
trends he credited to government social welfare programs. Yet his
forecasts pale to the reality around us today. For example, where in
1965, 26% of black births were to unwed mothers, today, 68% of all
births among African-Americans are to unwed women, and the trend is
following a similar course for whites, for whom the rate has risen to
22%. Furthermore these births are not to the well-heeled, well-educated
Murphy Browns, who only comprise 4% of unwed mothers. Instead, the bulk
of these births, 82% in fact, are to women with a high school education
or less. Fully 44% of births to white women below the poverty line are
illegitimate. And it is now widely recognized that this illegitimacy
begets illegitimacy -- crime, violence, school failure, etc. It is
Charles Murray who has demonstrated so overwhelmingly how government
social welfare policies are driving these trends and us all down a road
to dystopia.
Where political leaders once led a "War on Poverty" funded with vast
billions of dollars confiscated from the public to fuel the armies of
social workers and bureaucrats, today, virtually no one believes in such
notions. Instead, both liberals and conservatives are seeking ways to
get people back to work, reconnected to their families and communities.
Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it," and recently, even
Donna Shalala has decried the epidemic of fatherless children and the
maladies resulting. But the debate still lingers over whether government
is a force for betterment or the crippling factor.
Is the welfare state, for decades viewed as the progressive embodiment
of virtue and salvation for the plight of the disadvantaged, actually
the major engine of social decline? Is the welfare state actually a "War
on the Poor" and us all? Is the welfare state itself pathological? Could
the Jeffersonian notion of less and less government be the route out of
this malaise?
At this special Independent Policy Forum, a decade after his landmark
book that created a national sensation, Losing Ground, Charles Murray
will discuss the problem of civil disintegration and how a society built
upon individual liberty and personal responsibility is central to our
overcoming the growing social maladies around us. In his book, In
Pursuit, he examines the basis of community as rooted in individual
behavior and the institutions necessary to create and maintain what
Tocqueville marveled at in his book, Democracy in America -- a free and
prosperous society consisting of a complex assortment of
non-governmental organizations designed to handle the myriad problems of
both economic and civic well-being.
We are delighted to be sponsoring this special program today. More than
anyone, Charles Murray has demonstrated in his published books and
articles and his many TV and other public appearances, how to understand
the serious problems of urban decay, family disintegration, crime, and
so forth.
The Washington Post has stated that, "Charles Murray will get you
thinking," and we know that this will be the case. A member of the Board
of Advisors of The Independent Institute, Charles Murray is the Bradley
Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has been a senior fellow
at the Manhattan Institute and chief scientist at the American Institute
of Research where he supervised studies in urban education, welfare,
adolescent pregnancy, criminal justice, and much more. He received his
B.A. in history from Harvard University and Ph.D. in political science
from M.I.T., and earlier served in the Peace Corps in Thailand
I am very pleased to introduce him now to speak on "Freedom, Welfare and
Dystopia," after which he will be happy to answer your questions. May I
present Charles Murray.
Presentation by Charles Murray:
I am delighted to be here today speaking at The Independent Institute
because this marks the release of In Pursuit, a book of mine which has
just been recently republished. We all have favorites I believe; those
of us who write books -- and whereas I respect Losing Ground and I am
grateful for all it has done for me, I love In Pursuit. To see it back
in print is very gratifying.
I finished In Pursuit in 1988, and I took a long time thinking about
what I wanted to do next. Finally, in November of 1989, I engaged in a
collaboration with Richard Hernnstein designed to produce a book dealing
with the relationship of I.Q. to a wide variety of social issues. Some
of my friends took me aside and firmly but gently asked me if I was out
of my mind. It's still an open question as to whether I was, but the
fact is it is now 1994, and in my hotel room this morning I was working
on the page proofs for the appendices. The book will be out in October,
and the title that has evolved over the last four years is The Bell
Curve: Intelligence and Social Structure in American Life.
Why on earth, I was asked, did I want to take on I.Q. Not only because
it is a pariah among ideas, but also because as a classical liberal,
even a wishy-washy one as I am often described as being. The whole point
of the United States is that the people are treated as individuals. What
can there possibly be in the social policy realm that should be
influenced by the fact that people differ in I.Q.? It is a good question
and could be answered by saying that if this country were still being
run as it was as recently as 1950, there would be no good reason for
worrying about individual differences and intelligence as they relate to
social policy issues. But the fact is that a variety of changes have
occurred since then in the way we govern this country, which makes the
issue very salient indeed.
What I would like to do today is augment some of the material you have
in the packet passed out to you. In my discussions of "The Coming White
Underclass,", I give a brief over-view of what I see as a very dangerous
direction in which the country is heading. More briefly, I also try to
describe what, at least, I believe are the outlines for how we should
deal with this.
As I was eating lunch, I was looking at the outline of my speech and I
kept saying to myself, "This is not a 30 minute talk." This speech will
resemble a telegram in some respects. In the "Q&A" perhaps we can talk
some more about the details that I skip over. But if I seem to be saying
things without proving them to you, believe me I understand, but my
forthcoming book is 900 pages long, and it will give you ample
opportunity to fill in the details.
I have an apocalyptic vision; that is my co-author, Dick Hernnstein, and
I do. Fortunately, apocalyptic visions are usually wrong. Yet I am
unable to figure out why it is this particular one is wrong. Still it
has a bright side. The bright side starts with a revolution that
occurred in the United States, oddly enough, most rapidly in the 1950s.
That revolution was a kind of invisible migration: the United States
suddenly became much much more efficient in identifying talent,
especially intellectual talent, and getting it to college even if you
were poor, even if you were disadvantaged, even if you came from a
little town in Kansas. No matter where you came from or what your
background was, suddenly in the 1950s, the nation got a whole better at
finding you and taking advantage of you. A real quick example: In 1952,
the first year for which we have data on this, the mean SAT verbal score
at Harvard for its incoming freshman class was 583. Now, if any of you
have children that want to apply to Harvard next year and their mean
verbal is 583, I do not suggest that you have them apply. It is a good
score but it's certainly nothing special, and can be duplicated in the
classes of any good state university. Within eight years, by 1960, the
mean verbal score for incoming Harvard freshman was 680. Harvard in the
period of 8 years went from being a socioeconomic elite school with a
few smart students to a cognitively elite school with a lot of rich kids
in it.
This was a change reflected throughout the entire university system in
the United States for reasons Dick Hernnstein and I are still not
entirely confident we understand, but which we know happened. At the
same time, the occupational structure of this country was changing
radically so that "brains" were being rewarded in ways they had not
before. This may be offensive to some people in the room but it used to
be that some years ago, if you had a certain kind of real high cognitive
ability in math, let's say, the kind of thing that makes you a super
mathematician, what could you do with it? Well, you could teach math in
a university, probably. What can you do today? You can make millions of
dollars in the software industry and sometimes even run for governor of
California.
If this is the case, then I'm certain Ron Unz could have done many other
things as well, but there are some people who have very narrow
intellectual abilities that are now being rewarded in the market-place
in ways which they were not a few years ago. Furthermore, the numbers of
these positions expanded explosively so that the number of jobs in this
country that are involved with things that require a high I.Q. has gone
from a few percent of the jobs to on the order of 40 percent. In other
words, there was for the first time in human history enough jobs to soak
up the cognitive talent that was around. Here is where I start to head
into the dark side of the picture. In 1900, by mathematical necessity,
we know that the vast majority of people with high I.Q. were working in
ordinary occupations scattered throughout the country. A great many of
these people were housewives. Many others were carpenters, small store
owners and the rest. We know that by mathematical necessity because
there just were not enough jobs to soak up people with high
intelligence.
Today, jobs migration has, among other things, created a parfait out of
American society that did not used to exist. The people in this room are
living proof of what is going on. And with that has come a kind of
isolation and segregation of what we call the cognitive elite from the
rest of the country. Mickey Kaus, the social critic who wrote the book,
The End of Equality said that he went to Harvard in 1969 and that he
seriously doubts he has known anybody with combined SAT scores of less
that 1200 since. He is probably right. The people in this room by and
large, I'm sure there are statistical exceptions to this, but the people
in the room, by and large, associate with, live with, and are married to
people who are in a very small fraction of the right-hand tail of the
bell curve of ability. So that when I mentioned a SAT verbal of 583 a
minute ago, a lot of you were thinking of your kids and saying "Gee,
that's nothing special at all." The fact is 583, if you take all 18 year
olds in the United States, is about the 98th or 99th percentile. But for
you folks in this room, 583 is a pretty pedestrian score. This is the
kind of segregation I am talking about. And as this happens, a bunch of
other things happen. For example, people in the cognitive elite tend to
watch a lot less commercial television than the rest of the population.
They watch different movies; they even drive different cars; they don't
listen to talk shows nearly as much. I could go on down the list in
which the experience of a segment of this population is increasingly
divorced from the rest of society.
This would not be a problem except for something else which is going on,
which is that the cognitive elite also has acquired an enormous amount
of power. Furthermore, that power is cutting across traditional lines of
antagonism. It used to be that the intellectuals were on the Left and
business people were on the Right, and they fought it out. Well,
technically speaking, most intellectuals still are on the left but, on
the other hand, if you're a professor at Stanford you may do very well
when you put together your salary and royalties from your books and your
consul-ting fees and so forth, you're making well over six figures. A
lot of your interests have thus become the interests of people with
money. Similarly, if you go look at the mail boxes of young corporate
lawyers you will see in a depressing number of instances copies of The
New York Review Books there, which leads them to share with
intellectuals a variety of the same concerns.
What makes this especially dangerous is that in the 1960s and 1970s, we
had a major change in what you can do if you control the levers of
government. Until the 1960s, the cognitive elite, like Archemedes,
lacked a place to stand even if it had ideas about how it wanted to move
the world. Whatever you think of what has happened to social policies in
the 60s, 70s and 80s, this much you cannot deny: For better or for
worse, the reach of the federal government was opened up so that now
there is nothing left that the federal government may not do if the
federal government has sufficient votes in Congress to pass the
legislation. There are no clear, bright lines anymore in American
jurisprudence that limit what the federal government can do. There is
nothing set aside whereby we can say, "We don't care how many votes you
have, that is off limits." In that context comes the cognitive elite
with enormous political power because now it not only has the brains,
but it also has the money and it has the positions.
If you want to see an example of why one should be scared of the
cognitive elite, look at Clinton White House. The Rhodes scholar, as far
as I.Q.s are concerned, are real high. They all know each other; they've
all associated with each other; they're all part of a network. It's
scary.
Now, lets turn to the other tale of the distribution, the left-hand tale
of the bell curve. I have written about this issue before without
referring to I.Q. I have been writing about it for 10 years. What now
has to be added to this problem is: It used to be that if you were poor
in the United States it didn't have much to do with any of your other
personal qualities. For example, we have taken the poverty line back to
about 1939 using census data to compute what proportion of people in the
United States who were poor according to the official definition. Again,
I don't want to be quoted on the number, but it was well in excess of 50
percent of the American population in 1939. Fifty percent was below the
poverty line, and, by the way, that's not because of the Great
Depression. If you go back to 1928 and 1927, before the Depression
started, the best estimates are you're probably looking at 70 or 80
percent of the population that was, in official terms and using constant
1990 dollars, poor. But to paraphrase the conversation between F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, the only difference between the poor
and everybody else was that they had less money. The poor constituted a
very broad cross-section of the population. Many of the people in this
room, including myself, had parents or grandparents who were poor at
that time.
As the poverty line goes down, as you reach a point where you only have
10 or 11 percent of the population below the poverty line, you change
the selection of that group and they become identifiably different.
Similarly, with all sorts of other social problems, there is a marked
eschew in the distribution of abilities so that if you are going to have
job training programs for chronic welfare mothers, as we are going to do
with the Clinton welfare plan, you had better design those programs so
that they will work for the population with a mean I.Q. of about 85, 86,
87.
Mind you, if in your minds you are thinking what race has got to do with
this, the phenomena I'm talking about applies to whites as well. You
simply have a large population at the bottom of American society that is
doing very badly and that is going to continue to do worse because as
the economy changes, there is, frankly less and less that we can teach
someone with an I.Q. of 86 or 87 that will repay the cost of the
teaching. If that sounds harsh, it is because the reality is harsh. It
is not that we do not know how through educational interventions,
through any kind of interventions, to shift the cognitive functioning at
the low part of the distribution to any extent. You add into that a set
of public policy-created situations through which we have systematically
made life more difficult for people on the low end of the distribution.
As I'm listening to myself right now, and this is one of the first time
I've talked about these issues in public, I am sort of editing myself as
I go along and I'm saying, "For Heaven's sake, you have just raised an
issue you cannot possibly explain this afternoon." But I will start to
right now: There are all sorts of ways in which people of a very wide
range of abilities can do just fine if you don't make life difficult for
them. Yet a great deal of what we have done with social policy makes
life difficult. Let me give you an example. (I'll skip the 1040 form.)
Let's take something like crime. Everybody has a moral compass and is
capable of living a morally autonomous life, but a friend of mine once
said that everyone has a moral compass, but some are more susceptible to
magnetic storms than others. If you have a society in which not very
many things are crimes, but the things that are crimes are really bad:
robbery, destruction of property, rape, murder, assault, fraud, etc. If
when you commit one of those crimes, you are usually caught, and then if
when you are caught you are processed rather rapidly into a situation
where you are punished and the punishment is meaningful, if all of this
happens fairly regularly, it is real easy to have a moral compass
pointing in directions of right and wrong. You simply know what you
should do.
But if you have a criminal justice system in which a huge number of
things become crimes, if when you commit one of these crimes you are
very seldom caught anyway, if when you are caught you are often times
simply let out without anything happening to you, if what you are
actually prosecuted for is not what you really did but was something
else that was plea-bargained, and if, after all that, what happens to
you bears no relationship to the severity of your crime, it is real
tough to figure out what is right and what is wrong.
Now, you may say, "Well, Murray is just giving a rationale for getting
tough on crime." I hope you don't react that reflexively. I want you to
take seriously what I'm saying as it's a lot tougher to live a moral
life when the signals are that mixed. It becomes even tougher when the
intellectual elites are fascinated by sophisticated kinds of moral
reasoning, like the moral reason-ing that is behind sophisticated
situations, like, "Is it right if your wife is dying of a disease to
steal medicines from the pharmacy?" You can decide that indeed, it is
right. I'm willing to buy that, but the trouble is that it's real hard
to live a moral life if instead of saying, "Thou shalt not steal," the
lesson is, "Thou shalt not steal unless there is a really good reason
to," and that is what we have done.
I can give you other kinds of ways in which we have made life very
difficult for people of limited ability that have to do with marriage,
the rewards of marriage, and with sweat equity. One of the things that
this country was best at was telling people to parlay a whole bunch of
assets into success, to simply work real hard to compensate for
shortcomings. Any of you in this room who have tried to operate or run a
small business recently or open one knows you had better be pretty smart
for reasons that have nothing to do with how difficult it is to run a
business but have everything to do with jumping the bureaucratic hoops
in the way.
The prognosis: Bleak. We have a situation now wherepeople with money and
people with influence and the people with brains, all of them are
coalescing into a single group that does not want to think of itself as
made up of bad people. They want to see themselves as helping and
compassionate. On the other hand, they have some fairly exigent interest
in having their children go to schools that they find satisfactory, of
having their streets be safe and of not stumbling over the homeless when
they go on their way to work. The result of all this, it seems to me, is
very likely to be what I have called and we together call in the new
book, the "Custodial State."
The Custodial State will be characterized as it develops and th is is
not in some respects so much a prediction as a report of things already
in progress. It will be characterized by a variety of things. First,
child care in the poor neighborhoods of town will increasingly become a
function of the state as it is more and more acknowledged that an awful
lot of the people who are parents in that part of town are incompetent
and there is too much neglect and abuse. The solution will be we just
have to take care of those kids all day. The homeless will vanish. This
is the safest prediction of the lot. We have sort of had our compassion
fatigue as it is sometimes called, and the homeless will disappear. By
the way I'm not against that. What I am against is and what I am being
cynical about is the way it will be incorporated into what I'm sure will
be an elaborate rationale for why its good now whereas before it wasn't.
Policing will become strict, yet it won't necessary become strict in the
poor neighborhoods. The affluent and the cognitive elite will make damn
sure that crime doesn't go on in their part of town, which may also
still leave them with plenty of time to talk about how the United States
incarcerates the highest proportion of people of any country in the
world and to deplore the way in which we're putting people in jail from
the poor part of town, all the while knowing that those folks if not put
in jail are very unlikely to victimize.
The underclass will grow. The underclass has been fairly stable in terms
of its numbers for a while. It will start to grow again because of a
variety of phenomena, particularly because it is going to get
increasingly difficult for kids to escape from the underclass because of
what is holding them back now is going to get worse. It is not any
inherent lack of abilities or any inherent lack of desire to get out,
but rather if you grow up socialized in a society that is as different
from the mainstream society as the underclass society is becoming, you
can't assimilate. You can't function in another world.
Racism is likely to re-emerge in a much more virulent form. This country
has had for the last ten or twenty years in its public pronouncements,
the most pristine conversation about race. Oh, the things we shall not
say about race in public, yet listen to the conversations in private,
after a few drinks and when nobody is listening. You've all heard them.
They're getting worse instead of better and they're getting worse in all
the races. This is not strictly a white phenomena. And that also will
continue I'm afraid because we have been so unwilling to raise those
issues. At the same time, we are going to have an underclass that is
increasingly frightening. The rubber band that has been stretched so
tight in the national dialogue about race is likely to be released and
snapped too far in the other direction.
In short, I am describing a situation in which the natural course of
events is likely to take us in a direction whereby the underclass is
treated pretty much as we treat Indians on reserva-tions. We spent a lot
of money on American Indians, yet reservations are generally awful
places to live. Still we do spend a lot of money to make ourselves feel
good. I don't want that future to occur. But it is not going to be
avoided by changes at the margin. The Clinton welfare plan is not going
to make a whole lot of difference, nor am I afraid is Jack Kemp's plan.
If we are going to change social policy so that this future does not
come to pass, we must fundamentally rethink what it is we are trying to
accomplish. I try to state that in In Pursuit, the book I mentioned
earlier as well as I could, and we tried to state it again in the Bell
Curve.
I will summarize it in a way I'm afraid will sound unpersuasive because
I cannot get into detail. But it comes down to this: A great deal of
what needs to be done in order to enable people to pursue happiness in
this country is what was done in the original conception of this
country, but then lost. Namely, it was understood that the stuff of life
and the ways in which people have a place in the world that makes them
valued is the working of the little platoons as Evanburg put it. The way
we reach the age of 70 and can look back on who we have been and what we
have done with pride, no matter what our level of ability, has been
mostly measured in terms of the life immediately around us. I think that
is true for everybody. I think when I am 70, should I be so fortunate to
live that long, I don't think I'm going to sit out in the front porch
being satisfied about the books I've written. I think I'm going to be a
lot more satisfied if at that time, I can see myself as having been a
good husband to my wife, a good father to my children and a good
neighbor to my friends.
I think that applies to everybody, but it applies in another kind of way
to the folks who have got the short end of the stick in the kinds of
cognitive gifts I've been talking about because if I haven't been a good
husband, a good father and a good neighbor, I can still say at least I
wrote some good books. But if you haven't had that kind of outlet, the
only alternatives, the main alternatives, are those rules. What we have
to do is return to the family and to the neigh-borhood the functions
that are necessary in order for people to play those roles for that is
what social policy is. A second thing we have to do is to stop making
rules that are congenial to people who are smart and make life difficult
for people who are not. That means simplify this country and simplify
this government. Not in little tiny ways; I'm not talking about cutting
the growth of government regulation. I'm talking about the equivalent of
zero-base budgeting and thinking about what it makes sense for the
government to get involved in. I want to go back to a notion whereby it
is assumed unless there is an utterly compelling reason otherwise, let
people live their own lives and do as they damn well please as long as
they don't physically harm any-body else. I'm talking about the
Jeffersonian notion, the Washingtonian notion, the Madisonian notion,
that this is the way people live satisfying lives. Getting from here to
there is going to be a difficult task; it is not the kind of thing which
lends itself to specific Congressional agendas right now. The first
thing that must be done is to understand that is the direction we need
to go and not just for abstract reasons of liberty, but as a way for
providing for our neighbors that most precious gift we can confer on
each other: a place of value for our fellow citizens.
© 1996 The Independent Institute. Permission is granted to reprint or
broadcast this article if credit is given to the author and to the
Independent Institute. Nothing in this article should be interpreted as
necessarily reflecting the views of the Independent Institute or as an
attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any legislation.
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