Review: Coming Apart
TL;DRAbstract
Many sociologists express distain for Charles Murray. They regard him as an unregenerate conservative, although he describes himself as a libertarian. This is a shame because, as Jonah Goldberg states, he is “arguably the most consequential social scientist alive.” Murray, a political scientist, has certainly been influential with respect to social policy. His writings about the welfare system have clearly had more impact on legislative reforms than have those of any identifiable sociologist. As a result, he deserves a hearing. In his most recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he takes a step beyond what he wrote in The Bell Curve. In that earlier work, he argued that intelligence was becoming more concentrated in the upper reaches of the social class spectrum. Thanks to the ubiquity of an educational system that, despite its continuing iniquities, generally rewards academic merit, intelligent persons with lower class roots have been provided an upward path,
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Many sociologists express distain for Charles Murray. They regard him as an unregenerate conservative, although he describes himself as a libertarian. This is a shame because, as Jonah Goldberg states, he is “arguably the most consequential social scientist alive.” Murray, a political scientist, has certainly been influential with respect to social policy. His writings about the welfare system have clearly had more impact on legislative reforms than have those of any identifiable sociologist. As a result, he deserves a hearing. In his most recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he takes a step beyond what he wrote in The Bell Curve. In that earlier work, he argued that intelligence was becoming more concentrated in the upper reaches of the social class spectrum. Thanks to the ubiquity of an educational system that, despite its continuing iniquities, generally rewards academic merit, intelligent persons with lower class roots have been provided an upward path,
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