Problem Identified, Solutions Deficient

Charles Murray is always interesting, often profound. Here writing for The Federalist, he uses a book review to start a riff on what is really causing the widening split between the haves and have nots in our society.

Murray concludes the book, Robert Putnam's Our Kids: the American Dream in Crisis, does a good job of describing the messiness of lower class lives in today's America.

We hear the voices not just of the unemployed whose well-paying manufacturing jobs were exported abroad, but also of people who quit jobs because they didn’t feel like working or who can’t hold jobs because they make lousy employees.

Some low-income parents in the accounts are fiercely devoted to their kids; others created children casually and walked away from them casually. There’s rampant incompetence visible in the new lower class—incompetence on the job, as parents, in interpersonal relationships. There’s rampant irrationality and unrealistic expectations, with many respondents oblivious about the steps required to get from point A to point D in life.

On the other hand, Murray evaluates Putnam's solutions for those problems as the old liberal answers of "throw more public money" at the shared aspects of their lives: school, health care, housing.

The roster of standard interventions to reduce the opportunity gap is almost entirely focused on factors that have modest causal roles.

As Murray shows, the Left's "solutions" don't have much impact, not nearly enough to close the gap. The problem isn't lack of money, increasingly it is genetic, the result of assortative mating. That is, smart people having smart children and not-smart people having not-smart children.

In the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), replicating Putnam’s assignment rules, the mean IQ of the college group was 23 points higher than that of the high school group.

In case you’re wondering, that’s not a function of race. Among non-Latino whites, the difference was 22 points. In statistical terms, those are differences of about 1.5 standard deviations. For the population as a whole, the average person in the high-school group was at the twenty-ninth IQ percentile while the average person in the college group was at the eighty-fourth percentile.

Since children’s IQ is correlated with parental IQ, it is not surprising to learn that the means of the children of the high school and college groups are also separated—by about 19 points in the same NLSY cohort.

IQ has a substantial direct correlation with measures of success in life, and it is also correlated with a variety of other characteristics that promote success—perseverance, deferred gratification, good parenting, and the aspects of personality that are variously called “emotional intelligence” or “grit.”

The poor are isolated because of what Robert Reich called "the secession of the successful," meaning those with ability moved to different neighborhoods, joined different employers, and no longer live among life's losers. Murray has little faith in society's ability to reverse this trend.