About the book
Political scientist Charles Murray traces how white Americans split into two classes in the half century after 1960. On one side he places a new upper class defined by educational attainment; on the other, a new lower class marked by its absence. Drawing on five decades of statistics, he compares the two on marriage, work ethic, religiosity and community life, and argues the gap has little to do with income inequality. Murray ties the divide to a sorting process in which cognitive ability came to predict success and people married and settled among others like them. He limits the evidence to whites to show that the trends do not follow racial lines.
Harvard professor Greg Mankiw said Murray showed him that rising inequality cannot be explained by economic forces alone, since social trends such as marriage patterns may matter just as much.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Greg Mankiw (Professor/Harvard)
Murray made me realize that in thinking about the growth in inequality in recent decades, we need to think about more than just the economic forces at work. Sociological trends, such as differences in marriage patterns, may be just as important in explaining why the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown so large.
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