Most importantly, suppose for a second that every "fact" about the status of the u----c---- that Murray provides is accurate and not misleading. Some of them are accurate, although almost all are presented to mislead. The boom economy is not creating opportunities for the most disadvantaged people (let alone most of the working class). Incarceration rates are very high. Single-parenthood is one of several tickets to poverty. Murray even understands that participation in families, communities, and meaningful work is a social necessity. The horror of the essay is that Murray's tone, causal analysis, and policy implications are, respectively, evil, absurd, and evil.
As a thought experiment, substitute the following for his obscene final paragraphs: "The U.S. capitalist system creates the problems described in the analysis. Some liberal government intervention, e.g., social insurance income support, social-service subsidies, can ameliorate them (and there is lots of evidence for this). Radical restructuring of our society, e.g., some form of democratization of labor and capital markets, can solve them." These conclusions make a lot more sense, given the narrative, than Murray's junk.
Murray is a notorious and effective fact-twister. It takes a long time to sort out where he's hidden the bodies, but because he is a dishonest polemicist, they are always discovered in the end. See the huge academic literature dissecting The Bell Curve, e.g., Does the Bell Curve Ring True?
For example, my take was that recent declines in the crime rate is mostly a demographic phenomenon: the population includes a smaller share of people [men?] aged 16-30, the peak crime-committing years, now than during the high-crime years. I would like to know the crime rate adjusted for age-structure. It's really hard to sort through Murray's "rates," e.g., imprisoned person per crime versus imprisoned person per capita, and to decide if his argument holds any water. On the other hand, the proposition that the mass incarceration effort of the past 20 years has contributed to the lower crime rate is not a priori crazy; it's just a nasty indictment of our society.
Sincerely,
Michael Ash mash at econ.berkeley.edu University of California tel 510/643-7094 [off] Department of Economics & 510/644-0338 [res] Institute of Industrial Relations 510/643-7064 [lab] 2521 Channing Way 510/642-6432 [fax] Berkeley, CA 94720-5555 http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~maash