Coming Apart : the State of White America, 1960-2010

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating explanation for why white America has become fractured and divided in education and class, from the acclaimed author of Human Diversity . “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.”—David Brooks, New York Times 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. The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America. From the bestselling author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, this startling long-lens view shows how America is coming apart at the seams that historically have joined our classes. 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. The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America In the bestselling tradition of Hillbilly Elegy, the acclaimed bestseller than explains why white America has become fractured and divided in education and class 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. The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America. Prologue: November 21, 1963 The Formation of a New Upper Class Our Kind of People The Foundations of the New Upper Class A New Kind of Segregation How Thick Is Your Bubble? The Bright Side of the New Upper Class The Formation of a New Lower Class The Founding Virtues Belmont and Fishtown Marriage Industriousness Honesty Religiosity The Real Fishtown The Size of the New Lower Class Why It Matters The Selective Collapse of America Community The Founding Virtues and the Stuff of Life One Nation, Divisible Alternative Futures Acknowledgments Data Sources and Presentation Supplemental Material for the Segregation Chapter Supplemental Material for the Chapter on Belmont and Fishtown Supplemental Material for the Marriage Chapter Supplemental Material for the Honesty Chapter Supplemental Material for the American Community Chapter Supplemental Material for the Chapter About the Founding Virtues and the Stuff of Life Notes Bibliography Index A critique of the white American class structure argues that the paths of social mobility that once advanced the nation are now serving to further isolate an elite upper class while enforcing a growing and resentful white underclass.