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I've been reading Charles Murray book, Coming Apart and watched the interview he had with Reason TV. In the book and interview, Murray discusses white America, and the pulling away of social classes. Giving two towns for the reader to take into consideration: Belmont, MA. and Fishtown PA. In Belmont, people are college educated, get and stay married, lead healthier lives, and pass all of these things onto their children. Fishtown is the opposite: people have the typical jerry springer family filled with baby mama/daddys, they likely only graduated high school or less than that and they are unhealthy with a lower life expectancy. Another thing that i found fascinating is that apparently, Many men are simply not working at all, and this is seemingly concentrated amongst the less educated as well.The effects of this on the marriage market is well documented. '
One thing that has been on my personal mind lately is how to actually fix or help fish towns residents? A bit of personal background here: I am a child of immigrants who is a year away from a bachelors degree, I have a help desk job at a nice company, in my major (IT), with hopes of working in software development. (I will be the first in my family to obtain a BAS, I've been flirting with perusing a masters degree). I'm currently dating a women who's family is the typical Fishtown resident Murray describes (She herself is a lovely girl). Her family behaves poorly. Her sisters constantly engage in borderline prostitution. They have no work. No money outside of that which they receive from men. One has multiple children, none of them regularly attend school. They are beaten regularly by their frustrated mother. Their fathers are no where to be found or worse, are actively harmful (ie, taking the son to a drug house). Ive been blessed that both my parents are married and educated. (My mother studied nursing, My father actually had a degree in his home country that did not carry over to the US, and began studying real estate instead, he now has a real estate license, and CDL, we were actually upper-middle class until 2008 hit). She is attempting to make it out herself by studying finance, however one interesting data point that I've come across is that people who grew up poor tend to lag behind, even after obtaining the degree. Which is even more frustrating: even if a Fishtown resident somehow makes it out: they will not have as much of the funds as they had hoped. Perhaps this may because of the types of degrees they obtain (ie. someone from the hood obtains a degree in education, hoping to help and educate others who are in her same position.) Given that education correlates pretty highly with income, ive always felt as if fostering values around education and its importance would be a crucial first step and the environment many are in seems to make this highly difficult, even after obtaining such education. She herself has told me how awfully stubborn her mother is with her bad health habits. I want to preference this by saying im no elitist who wants to look down on such people: My heart is quite heavy with sorrow for them.
Murray sites an array of causes he believes are to blame: IQ, changing social norms, and the welfare state. Im not personally a fan of taking away welfare from those who may have fallen on hard times, even if that means that some one may potentially abuse it, and the cat seems to be out of the bag with many of the social norms, many of which changed due to technology (contraceptives changing sexual norms for example). I know many working class men personally who couldnt even bother with condoms, despite their mass availability, and who'd scoff at the idea of passing up a potential encounter or partner. I dont have deep enough knowledge of IQ to even begin to think of a solution, assuming this is a possible cause.
There is one thing ive personally have planned on: Being responsible. Ive always used condoms with my current partner. I do not want to have my children out of wedlock. I want to marry my wife and have children with her and only her. I want my kids to go to school, (a school in a high income neighborhood, where they can learn and thrive). And in-still hard work ethic in them to excel academically. Continue building my projects and studying leet code so that i can be a better programmer and get the software job that will pay for the house in said neighborhood. Which i suppose is all i can do. Control my own actions and hope that others see and follow my example.
Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America. In almost every way, our society is less equal than it was in 1962. Across domains that don't seem like they should be related:
Fitness Hobbyist athletes of today would largely stomp on the professionals of 1962 in fitness metrics. Nobody in 1962 ran marathons as a hobby, now it is common, no PMC office lacks a marathon guy. Lifting weights was weird, and maybe kinda gay. Now it is common. The lifts and PR times of your average Crossfit box would be jaw-dropping at any of the few existing gyms in 1962. The fitness obsessed are stronger, faster, better than their 1962 equivalents. And yet in 1962 the average person was in better shape than the average person in 2024. They weren't overweight or obese, they could walk ten miles if asked to do so. A randomly selected man of 1962 could join a touch football game or help you move furniture in a way that your randomly selected man of 2024 often cannot.
Sex 1962 society was more monogamous, and because of the drive to achieve pair bonding, most people could get one long term partner and marry them and stay together. More men had sex with one woman in the past year compared to today, but more men had sex with anyone. In 2024, it is vastly easier for some men to get laid, your top percentage of men can get vastly more sex with vastly more partners. But there are also vast numbers of men who never have sex, have no long term partners, and few prospects of getting them.
Cooking Imagine I took 100 mothers from my local high school today, and 100 mothers from my local high school in 1962, and Iron-Chef'd them with scratch ingredients and told them to bake me a cake. I posit that the 1962 mothers would all make more or less the same mediocre American cakes, with some ethnic-white flourishes or particular talents, but mostly pretty similar stuff. But virtually all would know how to make a cake given flour, butter, eggs, sugar. The 2024 mothers, a large percentage would simply have no idea how to make a cake from scratch without premade ingredients, only a vague concept of what to do with the ingredients, and we'd get some truly sad attempts. But among the 2024 mothers, there are also some percentage of hobbyists, Great British Baking Show and youtube obsessives, who will make a ridiculously good cake, vastly better than anything that the 1962 mothers would even know how to attempt. All one has to do to figure this out is look at old cookbooks and new cookbooks.
Physical appearance Paul Newman vs Chris Evans. Or just compare Superman to Superman, or even Hugh Jackman in different Wolverine roles. The earlier physiques are easy for a man with good genetics if they don't screw it up or attainable for most men with a bit of effort, the current physiques are impossible without at least two of good genetics, extreme effort, and pharmaceuticals.
Education More Americans than ever have completed college degrees, the value and difficulty of which we can debate but there is no question that completing years of education highly correlates with intelligence. Fewer books are read every year in America. Authors lack the popular celebrity impact they once had. Literary prizes lack the credibility and punch they once did. PhD Theses of 1962 and earlier are often pretty readable, covering a basic or normal topic. PhD theses of 2024 are often whacko, out there, unreadable to anyone without a master's in the topic already, citing obscure theories unknown to anyone outside deep academia.
Gun Ownership Gun ownership has declined from a narrow majority of households in the 70s to a third as of 2014. At the same time, many gun owners today have an absolute arsenal compared to the men of the 60s and 70s. A lot of Old Timer Fudds at my small town gun club think it's insane that the young guys want to own anything other than a shotgun, a deer rifle, a .22, and a revolver. A small percentage of gun owners in America own a vast number of firearms. This simply wasn't a normal middle-class pursuit in the 1960s.
There are other places it feels like there's something there, but I don't know how to parse them with any rigor. Religiosity, racial tolerance, "handyman" skills, foreign travel, military service, automobile driving. It feels intuitive that in the past, a base level of each was expected in every middle class man and variation was rare; and today extremes at both ends are more common while the middle is shrinking.
We live in the age of the Barbell Shaped distribution. There's something deeper there.
Tyler Cowen would say that Average is Over.
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