In 1994 Charles Murray, with the late Richard Herrnstein , wrote “the Bell Curve”, a book widely derided by the politically correct for a simple statement of fact about racial differences in intelligence scores (not surprising, since such tests are culture biased). That missed their essential point, which was that forces were already at work in America to vacuum “the best and brightest” out of all classes of society and isolate them as an intellectual elite. Murray’s latest book looks at how that process has progressed over the period 1960 to 2010, as America has increasingly split into a highly educated, highly paid class of “knowledge workers” on the one hand, and everyone else on the other hand (the 99% of recent protests). Increasingly the highly educated, highly paid knowledge workers work together, live together in separate communities, intermarry, have children who are similarly educated and who intermarry, and in general are both culturally and genetically drifting away from the rest of the nation.
This split has had good effects (the vitality of Silicon Valley, and the increasing world competitiveness of America in the technology fields) and bad effects (the breakdown of critical social values in the rest of the nation), and Murray explores these. In particular, he worries that the elite class, out of liberal ecumenical political correctness ("who am I to tell other people how to live"), has ceased to promulgate key social values (like the work ethic) to the rest of the nation, with disastrous consequences.
This is not a question of something that social policy should fix – it probably can’t fix it. It is more a case of seeing where the nation is going, and thinking about the natural consequences of this shift. Well worth reading.
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