Economics and Ethics

Two book reviews in economics and ethics from the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics

Mark D. White

Thanks to the indispensable Heterodox Economics Newsletter (latest issue here), here are two recent book reviews that may interest our readers, both from the latest issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (6/1, Spring 2013). [In the interest of full disclosure I must note that I blurbed the first book and the second was published in my "Perspectives in Social Economics" series from Palgrave Macmillan.]

Economics as Applied Ethics: Value Judgements in Welfare Economics, by Wilfred Beckerman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), was reviewed by our own Jonathan B. Wight, who finds it "a well-written textbook geared to advanced undergraduate or graduate students of economics, many of whom are largely and regrettably innocent of the ethical problems inherent in conventional economic analysis." After a detailed critical breakdown by chapter, Wight concludes that:

Overall, this book is highly recommended. It covers the selected topics with depth and sensitivity. The writing is generally excellent, but there are occasions of repetition and unevenness, as if the chapters were compiled separately and merged later. A student reader who is not already familiar with basic ethical theories could benefit from a primer in some places. For example, the book discusses Amartya Sen’s theory of commitment, however it does not dig very deeply to explain or defend that notion, whether from a deontological or virtue ethics approach.

The book devotes a lot of attention to questions of equality and justice, particularly on the work of economist philosophers such as John Broome, Partha Dasgupta, Ian Little, and Amartya Sen. This is
appropriate, interesting, and relevant. However, the book does not appear to address research in experimental economics, biology, and psychology that might be relevant to some of these questions, such as the work in neuroeconomics by Paul Zak, experimental work by Vernon Smith, or recent philosophical work on virtue ethics by Deirdre McCloskey. This is the normal limitation of any text that strives to be concise, yet students should understand there is much more to ethics and economics than can be conveyed in this book.

Approximating Prudence: Aristotelian Practical Wisdom and Economic Models of Choice, by Andrew Yuengert (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), was reviewed by Ricardo F. Crespo. According to Crespo, 

Yuengert shows in this book that economic modeling undertakes only a partial analysis of economic action, because it ‘puts away’ interesting features of its subject that deserve to be taken into account. He proposes adopting the Aristotelian account of human action—more specifically, of practical wisdom—as the benchmark against which to consider economic modeling. He maintains that “economics can learn much about its limits from Aristotle, who describes aspects of choice behavior that cannot be precisely modeled” (p. 3). Thus, the aim of the book is to determine what aspects of human behavior cannot be captured by the economists’ models.

After a careful analysis of the book's structure and arguments, Crespo concludes that it

provides the useful service of identifying the characteristics of human action that economic models cannot take into account. It is useful because it explains the challenge to positive economists of trying to incorporate these characteristics into their approach, and because it highlights the features that economists must consider in their normative work. The contribution of the book lies in its originality. Economics books are not usually about what economics cannot do.

Both the author and the reviewer are Aristotelian economists, and readers benefit greatly from Crespo's detailed analysis of Yuengert's use of concepts such as eudaimonia  and contingency (the latter is comparison to Knightian uncertainty). (See Crespo's Academia.edu page for his own work on Aristotle and economics.)

New book: The Manipulation of Choice (including free chapter)

Mark D. White

My latest book, The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism, was released earlier this month by Palgrave Macmillan in both paperback and hardcover. In the book, written for popular audiences, I discuss the ethical and practical problems with the idea of "nudges" as popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book of the same name.

Walter Olson of the CATO Institute writes that "the 'libertarian paternalism' theory promises to use the state to help correct citizens' wrong decisions without asking their consent, yet also without truly entering the realm of coercion. Too good to be true? Indeed it is, as this book helps to show. Mark White gives us the sort of analysis we need to nudge back." Our own Jonathan B. Wight also comments that: "The Manipulation of Choice states that paternalists impose their own values and goals onto hapless consumers and citizens. Hence, public policies designed to correct the imperfections of behavioral irrationality are coercive. This is an important point and one that needs to be debated."

If you're interested, Palgrave has made the first chapter available for free, and I have written several blog posts recently tied into the book, including one at this blog commenting on Cass Sunstein's recent review of another book on paternalism at The New York Review of Books, and a post at Psychology Today on the nudge concept in general. (See also past posts at this blog on paternalism.)

Cass Sunstein on paternalism in The New York Review of Books

Mark D. White

In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, law professor and former OIRA chief Cass Sunstein reviews Bowdoin philosophy professor Sarah Conly's recent book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism. I have not yet read Conly's book; while I am very interested in what Conly says, I am even more interested in what Sunstein, one of the chief advocates of libertarian paternalism, has to say about it.

Sunstein starts his review by citing Americans' widespead and deeply held disdain for paternalism, and then quotes the famous passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty in which Mill says that the coercive power of the state must be used only to prevent persons from harming each other and never to protect a person from himself or herself, based on the position that no one knows a person's interest better than that person. Then he summarizes the behavioral research (on the part of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others) that shows that people systematically and predictably make bad choices because of cognitive biases and defects in their decision-making processes. This much will be familiar to those who have read his academic work with Richard Thaler or their popular book Nudge, and in fact Sunstein finishes his introduction with a brief description of nudges, subtle changes in the choice environment (or choice arhcitecture) designed to steer people toward making better choice by taking advantages of the flaws in their decision-making. (This is the concept with which I take issue in my book The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism.)

Then Sunstein turns to Conly's book, Against Autonomy. According to his review (which I will assume is accurate), Conly argues that coercive paternalism is justified by cost-benefit analysis—specifically, when the harms prevented are greater than the costs involved, including the possibly significant but finite amount of offense to persons whose autonomy is violated. Regarding people's self-knowledge, she makes a distinction between means and ends, arguing that people may be aware of their ends but are sometimes mistaken regarding the best means with which to pursue them. She believes, for instance, that everyone values his or her health, but nonetheless chooses unhealthy foods. Therefore paternalism, whether in the form of nudges, taxes, or bans, would promote people's final ends by helping them choose better means. Conly is much more willing than Sunstein and Thaler are to restrict freedom of choice—even while recognizing its very real value—if the benefits of the resulting behavior are large enough, arguing that the more important autonomy of ends is thereby promoted.

Sunstein admires Conly's ideas but has several criticisms, with which I agree (again, not having read the book). He suggests that autonomy may be considered an end in itself, making it different to trade off against means to achieving other ends. Alternatively, if autonomy is valued merely as means, that value may well be so great as to outweigh any benefits from paternalism. This is a common problem with any consequentialist system that admits its own costs as possible inputs to any decision: it risks defeating itself. (Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell's book Fairness versus Welfare also suffers from this problem; I make this point in my criticism of the book here.)

Most interesting, Sunstein questions Conly's distinction between means and ends:

Conly favors a paternalism of means, but the line between means and ends can be fuzzy, and there is a risk that well-motivated efforts to promote people’s ends will end up mischaracterizing them. ... In some cases, moreover, means-focused paternalists may be badly mistaken about people’s goals. Those who delay dieting may not be failing to promote their ends; they might simply care more about good meals than about losing weight.

I agree completely, but I would maintain that this criticism applies just as strongly to Sunstein and Thaler's libertarian paternalism as it does to Conly's more blunt paternalism, as both presume people have certain ends and then judge their decisions to be ineffective in pursuit of them; the only difference between them in this regard is how far they're willing to go to influence behavior in the "right" direction.

I respond to this element of paternalism—especially with regard to Sunstein and Thaler's libertarian paternalism—in The Manipulation of Choice. The idea is simple: people may make bad choices all the time, but no one knows that they're bad choices except the people making them. If I eat a donut, I may regard it as a bad idea because I'm watching my weight. Or, I may regard it as a good idea because I successfully used it as an incentive to finish a book chapter, or a chance to catch up with an old friend, or even an indulgence deliberately chosen in full awareness of its deleterious health effects because I like donuts. Since the paternalist has no knowledge of my ends, he or she cannot possibly judge my action to be an effective or ineffective means to reach them. Instead, the paternalist presumes common ends—such as health or wealth—on the part of a person (which I call value substitution) and then judges his or her decisions in light of those ends, resulting in paternalist interventions regarding diet and retirement planning (for example).

As Sunstein states, not all people are dieting or watching their weight, so we can't assume that unhealthy (but extremely tasteful) food choices are thwarting their ends at all. By that same logic, however, people have all kinds of financial plans too, so their "failure" to sign up for 401(k) programs cannot be assumed to be a bad decision (as Sunstein and Thaler claim in much of their work). However, the nudge of automatic enrollment would affect everybody equally, regardless of their reason for not enrolling, because it plays on the congitive biases and dysfunction that we all share. People are either too lazy to change the default choice or they're not, regardless of their preference; nudges don't discriminate between motivations, since they affect flaws in our decision-making of which we're not aware.

In his final paragraph, Sunstein recalls his introduction and agrees with Conly that behavioral research calls Mill's anti-paternalism into question. The pioneering work of Kahneman, Tversky, and their colleagues may make us question the decisions we make to achieve our ends, but it does not imply that there's anything opaque or unknown about our ends themselves. To be fair, there is psychological research that suggests this, such as the work described in Timothy Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves. But even if we do not know ourselves and our interests as well as we like to believe, we still know them a lot better than regulators and legislators do—and as long as this is true, it is impossible for paternalists to judge people's decisions or presume to improve them, whether with nudges or more direct measures.

Interview with Julian Reiss, author of Philosophy of Economics: A Contemporary Introduction

Mark D. White

The good people at Routledge have posted an extensive Q&A with Julian Reiss, Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, regarding his forthcoming book Philosophy of Economics: A Contemporary Introduction. From the lead-in:

Philosophers since Aristotle have asked questions and offered opinions about economics, broadly defined. But during the 20th century economics developed into a field which was, as Julian points out in the beginning of his upcoming work, “hostile to philosophical reflection.” Economics became a science: economists began to see in “the economy” a space made up of empirically observable facts interpretable by the assumptions, methods, and models familiar to students enrolled in Econ 101 classes. In recent years, though, certain economic realities—the financial crisis, e.g.—have challenged those assumptions, methods, and models. A writer for the Economist described the consequence of recent challenges to the science of economics: “OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked [since 2008], few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself.”

Julian’s book introduces readers to the field in which many of those challenges are now being articulated. Questions of ethics, of the nature of human rationality when faced with economic decision-making, of the verifiability of economic models—these questions and more are all now being asked anew about economic practices and decisions. This interview hopes to open those questions to all curious readers.

Read the entire interview here.

Is health or health care a public concern, a right, or a need?

Mark D. White

One of the topics that fascinates me, but which I never seem to have time to catch up on, is the moral/political status of health and health care. In most cases (other than particularly infectious or contagious diseases), I consider health and health care to be matters of personal choice and responsibility, but I'm eager to hear the arguments on the other side as well.

Two articles in the latest issue of The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (40/2, Summer 2012), part of a symposium on pharmaceutical firms and the right to health, address this issue:

"Health as a Basic Human Need: Would This Be Enough?" by Thana Cristina de Campos

Although the value of health is universally agreed upon, its definition is not. Both the WHO and the UN define health in terms of well-being. They advocate a globally shared responsibility that all of us — states, international organizations, pharmaceutical corporations, civil society, and individuals — bear for the health (that is, the well-being) of the world's population. In this paper I argue that this current well-being conception of health is troublesome. Its problem resides precisely in the fact that the well-being conception of health, as an all-encompassing label, does not properly distinguish between the different realities of health and the different demands of justice, which arise in each case. In addressing responsibilities related to the right to health, we need to work with a more differentiated vocabulary, which can account for these different realities. A crucial distinction to bear in mind, for the purposes of moral deliberation and the crafting of political and legal institutions, is the difference between basic and non-basic health needs. This distinction is crucial because we have presumably more stringent obligations and rights in relation to human needs that are basic, as they justify stronger moral claims, than those grounded on non-basic human needs. It is important to keep this moral distinction in mind because many of the world's problems regarding the right to health relate to basic health needs. By conflating these needs with less essential ones, we risk confusing different types of moral claims and weakening the overall case for establishing duties regarding the right to health. There is, therefore, a practical need to reevaluate the current normative conception of health so that it distinguishes, within the broad scope of well-being, etween what is basic and what is not. My aim here is to shed light onto this distinction and to show the need for this differentiation. I do so, first, by providing, on the basis of David Miller's concept of basic needs, an account of basic health needs and, secondly, by mounting a defense of the basic needs approach to the right to health, arguing against James Griffin who opposes the basic needs approach.

"A Right to Health Care" by Pavlos Eleftheriadis

What does it mean to say that there is a right to health care? Health care is part of a cooperative project that organizes finite resources. How are these resources to be distributed? This essay discusses three rival theories. The first two, a utilitarian theory and an interst theory, are both instrumental, in that they collapse rights to good states of affairs. A third theory, offered by Thomas Pogge, locates the question within an institutional legal context and distinguishes between a right to health care that results in claimable duties and other dimensions of health policy that do not. Pogge's argument relies on a list of “basic needs,” which itself, however, relies on some kind of instrumental reasoning. The essay offers a reconstruction of Pogge's argument to bring it in line with a political conception of a right to health care. Health is a matter of equal liberty and equal citizenship, given our common human vulnerability. If we are to live as equal members in a political community, then our institutions need to create processes by which we are protected from the kinds of suffering that would make it impossible for us to live as equal members.

But what I most look forward to reading is What Makes Health Public?: A Critical Evaluation of Moral, Legal, and Political Claims in Public Health by John Coggon, whom I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to at the "Regulating Bodies and Influencing Health" symposium in Rotterdam in June.

John Coggon argues that the important question for analysts in the fields of public health law and ethics is 'what makes health public?' He offers a conceptual and analytic scrutiny of the salient issues raised by this question, outlines the concepts entailed in, or denoted by, the term 'public health' and argues why and how normative analyses in public health are inquiries in political theory. The arguments expose and explain the political claims inherent in key works in public health ethics. Coggon then develops and defends a particular understanding of political liberalism, describing its implications for critical study of public health policies and practices. Covering important works from legal, moral, and political theory, public health, public health law and ethics, and bioethics, this is a foundational text for scholars, practitioners and policy bodies interested in freedoms, rights and responsibilities relating to health.

Does cognitive science relieve us of responsibility--or require us to redirect our effort?

Mark D. White

In this morning's New York Times, James Atlas discusses recent books about cognitive processes and neuroscience, such as Jonah Lehrer's Imagine: How Creativity Works, Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, and Leonard Mlodinow's Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Atlas highlights several interesting things about this publishing trend, including the increasingly analytical focus on the "how" of thought rather than the more existential "why," and the shrinking space allowed for true agency to operate amid of the ever-expanding, hidden wiring in the brain. The latter concern motivates the title of his piece, "The Amygdala Made Me Do It" as well as his characterization of this genre as "Can't-Help-Yourself" books.

Even though I'm an advocate of autonomy, willpower, and self-knowledge myself, I find little to be troubled by here, and quite a bit to be excited about. Freud, of course, posited that much of our thought happens under the surface, and this idea has been brought into modern experimental psychology and described in books such as Timothy D. Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (which I highly recommend). And it is the title of Wilson's more recent book, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, that suggests a positive interpretation of these developments, as described by Atlas:

The Power of Habit and Imagine belong to a genre that has become increasingly conspicuous over the last few years: the hortatory book, armed with highly sophisticated science, that demonstrates how we can achieve our ambitions despite our sensory cluelessness.

The discovery of increasing levels of complex scaffolding underneath conscious thought processes need not threaten intentional choice, but rather help to enable it. Citing David Hume, Williams James, and Daniel Kahneman (no Adam Smith, Jonathan!), Atlas focuses on the importance of habits to everyday action, and how the conscious mind can redirect those habits for its own ends, such as countering a habit of watching TV with a healthier habit of exercising. Such a person is making an intentional and strategic choice by harnessing the power of habit; our habitual nature is thus transformed from a liability to an asset, from a weight to a tool.

The danger lies in letting the easy intertia of habit take over and forgetting we have the responsibility to choose which habits to nurture and which to reject. The current picture of our brains casts each of us as the CEO of our minds rather than the entry-level employee or even middle manager: we have the ability to command and direct our cognitive resources, but we retain responsibility for what we do with them.

Revise and resubmit... with style!

Mark D. White

This weekend's Wall Street Journal featured an article by Helen Sword entitled "Yes, Even Professors Can Write Stylishly," in which she criticized the quality of writing by most academics--and praised the exceptions, explaining some features that make good academic writing shine. (More can be found in her book, Stylish Academic Writing.) Having done my share of both writing and editing for various audiences, as well as lots of reading and refereeing, Sword's article got me to thinking about the challenges of academic writing and the pursuit of style in it.

I would tend to think that scholars in the humanities (such as philosophy and law) have more latitude--and more responsibility--to write stylishly than those in the physical and social sciences. Scientific writing is often rigidly formatted (sometimes explicitly by journals): present the problem, explain the model, derive results (theoretically or empirically), and interpret the results. This should all be written well, of course, but I think style is of less concern when you're explaining a negative second derivative or a statistically significant coefficient.

I remember writing my early economics articles (in theoretical industrial organization), in which it seemed all I was doing in the middle 80% of the paper was bridging the gaps between equations. The only "real" writing came at the beginning and the end, the parentheses that held the "stuff"--but ironically, the parentheses were the only part most people would read, so I learned quickly that careful attention to them was crucial.

Writing in the humanities--a category in which I would include non-scientific economics--is less structured. This gives scholars more freedom to exercise their personal style, and at the same time provides less scaffolding under which to hide bad writing. Naturally, philosophers and legal scholars, who are trained at crafting arguments, often have the most polished prose, but many economists excel at this as well.

Personally, I find much more stylistic freedom writing books (or contributions for edited volumes) than journal articles. While I agree with Sword that journal editors (and referees) value clear writing as much as anybody, I don't know if I'd agree that they appreciate stylish writing. Maybe it's just me, but I feel constrained to write very formally when I write for a journal; based on what I read in journals, it seems that is what most journal editors expect. (I say "most," because I know some journal editors that are exceptional in this way.)

I tend to be a fairly good mimic when I write, so I've been able to adopt my writing style to whatever venue I'm writing for, whether it be journal, newspaper op-ed, popular magazine, academic book or popular trade. Out of those, the journal "style" is definitely my least favorite, and happily I'm at a stage in my career where I'm no longer dependant on journal publications for professional advancement. But while books may reach a wider audience (especially outside academia), there is a degree to which regular journal publications help keep your name in the thick of things in a particular academic community, so in that sense I miss writing for journals. (It's just not as enjoyable--and shouldn't writing be enjoyable?)

Mimckry does not always pay off, though. For instance, Deirdre McCloskey is my favorite academic writer as far as style is concerned. I adore her tone--playful and gracious, yet firm and forceful--and I have to be very careful not to indulge my inner mimic and churn out third-rate McCloskeyisms when I write!

I make no claims to any significant degree of craft or style in my writing, academic or popular. I am very grateful when friends or colleagues read my work and say they can "hear my voice" in it, and I am especially happy when they say this in reference to my academic writing, in which it is more challenging to be myself. (My natural voice comes out much more easily in my chapters in the Blackwell Philosopy and Pop Culture books and my Psychology Today posts.) Whatever academic style I have is most apparent in Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character, especially in the introduction (available here). I'll just keeping trying to improve and hone my style as I keep writing. (And writing. And writing. And...)

Call for abstracts: Edited volume on law and social economics

Mark D. White

Call for abstracts for edited volume

Law and Social Economics

To be edited by Mark D. White, College of Staten Island/CUNY

Planned for inclusion in the “Perspectives from Social Economics” series from Palgrave Macmillan

By its very nature, law is a social enterprise concerned with values such as justice, dignity, equality, and efficiency, but the economic approach to law (or law and economics) focuses on the last goal to the exclusion of the rest. Social economics emphasizes the importance of ethical values to economic theory, practice, and policy, but it has engaged very little with legal studies (or law and economics).

In 1993, Steven Medema published his article “Is There Life Beyond Efficiency? Elements of a Social Law and Economics” in the Review of Social Economy, in which he laid out various ways in which social economics could contribute to the economic analysis of law. In the twenty years since his article appeared, however, few have picked his baton, much less run with it.

This book is an attempt to rectify this situation. Proposals for chapters are welcome on any aspect of law-and-economics on which social economics can make a contribution, and are welcome from economists, legal scholars, and scholars from related disciplines.

Possible topics include:

• Social-economic approaches to the various categories of legal studies, such as
  • Private law (tort, contract, property)
  • Criminal law
  • Procedure
  • Jurisprudence
• Methodological critiques of mainstream economic approaches to the law, such as
  • Maximizing conception of individual choice
  • Efficiency criterion for evaluating laws and institutions
  • Application of game theory, behavioral economics, or experimental economics to legal issues
• Examination of the history of law-and-economics scholarship
• Suggestion of topics neglected by mainstream law-and-economics

Proposals should include name and affiliations of all authors, tentative chapter title, and abstract, and should be sent to Mark D. White at profmdwhite@hotmail.com by April 30, 2012. Tentatively, first drafts of chapters will be expected by November 30, 2012, with final drafts due by February 28, 2013.

New book: Neuroeconomics: Hype or Hope?

Mark D. White

The special issue of Journal of Economic Methodology on neuroeconomics (highlighted here previously) is now available in book form: Neuroeconomics: Hype or Hope?, edited by Caterina Marchionni and Jack Vromen. The chapters are as follows:

1. Introduction Caterina Marchionni and Jack Vromen

2. When economics meet neuroscience: Hype and hope Uskali Mäki

3. The disunity of neuroeconomics: a methodological approach Roberto Fumagalli

4. Inductive modeling using causal studies in neuroeconomics: brains on drugs Moana Vercoe and Paul J. Zak

5. The philosopher in the scanner (or: How can neuroscience contribute to social ontology?) Francesco Guala and Tim Hodgson

6. Why neuroeconomics is relevant for economics, despite different questions, abstractions and all that Emarh Aydinonat

7. Where economics and neuroscience might meet Jack Vromen

8. The methodologies of neuroeconomics Glenn Harrison and Don Ross

9. Neuroeconomics: a radical replacement of economics? Michiru Nagatsu

10. Do neurobiological data help us to understand economic decisions better? Alessandro Antonietti

11. Explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries – the case of neuroeconomics Jaakko Kuorikoski and Petri Ylikoski

Charles Murray's Coming Apart discussed by David Brooks and W. Bradford Wilcox

Mark D. White

Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, gets reviewed this morning by both David Brooks in The New York Times and W. Bradford Wilcox in The Wall Street Journal. Murray's thesis is that the gaps in income and wealth in America are no more important than the gaps in culture and values between the more and less affluent. To make his point more forceful, he restricts his analysis to white people, in order to prevent critics from arguining that the decline in values he points out is an issue with racial and ethnic minorities only. These trends are certainly apparent across most if not racial and ethnic groups but it is less recognized in whites, the discussion of which may be Murray's greatest contribution to the discussion.

Of course, your opinion of Murray's thesis is going to depend on what values he chooses, and (according to Wilcox) he focuses on "four 'founding virtues'—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion." I doubt many would have issues with the first two, but the last two will turn off a lot of people (including me, to some extent). Personally, I'd prefer that "marriage" be changed to "family" and "religion" be changed to "community" (since the ethical component of religion is already covered by "honesty," or the whole exercise, really). Perhaps Murray puts his virtues in these broader contexts--I have not yet read the book--but I would guess he chose "marriage" and "religion" because participation in them in measurable (social scientist that he is).

Wilcox, the director of the National Marrriage Project, naturally uses Murray's analysis of marriage (which echoes Kay Hymowitz's Marriage and Caste in America) as an example:

The destructive family revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s has gradually eased—at least in the nation's most privileged precincts. In the past 20 years, divorce rates have come down, marital quality (self-reported happiness in marriage) has risen and nonmarital childbearing (out-of-wedlock births) is a rare occurrence among the white upper class. Marriage is not losing ground in America's best neighborhoods.

But it's a very different story in blue-collar America. Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and nonmarital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

Brooks also cites the marriage gap alongside other factors (using the word "tribes" rather than "class" to emphasize the "tenuous common culture linking them"), but links them to the gap in behavior that he feels is Murray's chief contribution:

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). ...

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Wilcox points where this disparity in values and behavior cashes out:

The economic and political success of the American experiment has depended in large part on the health of these founding virtues. Businesses cannot flourish if ordinary workers are not industrious. The scope and cost of government grows, and liberty withers, when the family breaks down. As James Madison wrote: "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea."

This is certain to prompt some heated discussion in the coming months. The statement above is too vague to draw significant conclusions, which will come only from a careful reading of Murray's book. Of course, the role of virtue, or ethics in general, among all members of society and its importance to the economy in particular is of great interest to us at this blog. (Start reading, Jonathan!)

Brooks applies Murray's results to the rhetoric from both sides of the political aisle:

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the most fascinating part of this discussion is how income inequality and cultural inequality interact. In particular, I wonder how much of the decline in "virtuous" behavior that Murray observes among the poor is a result of choices driven by poverty (scarcity), and how much have those behaviors perpetuated that poverty. (This is not to excuse this behavior, necessary, but to understand it better.) And by the same token, the wealthy can certainly be applauded for their virtuous behavior, but to a certain extent it is easier to be good when you have the means, and the extent to which this plays a role should be acknowledged as well.

Whether Murray discusses this issue in these exact terms remains to be seen (after I read the book!), but he does make a political statement, summarized by Roger Lowenstein in his review of the book in Businessweek:

One question I wish he had taken up: Are the “new upper class” and the problems of the lower class related? Coming Apart treats them as separate. That gets to my frustration, which arises in the concluding section. Until then, Murray had merely diagnosed the cultural divide. Now he claims to know the causes. He blames the government and the “welfare state.” This section brims with political resentments; the carefully researched facts give way to bitter generalizations such as “only a government could spend so much money so inefficiently.” The author who tactfully, and wryly, demonstrated how little readers know about the lives of working-class whites, writes of “bureaucrats” with no appreciation, or even interest, in what they actually do. He does not explain why social cohesion should be less today when the Great Society experiment peaked in the 1960s. While blaming the debilitating effect on incentives of social programs, he fails to acknowledge the idea that most Americans probably feel less coddled, less protected today than in 1970.

It's interesting that both Brooks and Wilcox left this part out of their reviews, while endorsing more activist policies on the part of the government to shore up the working class. As valuable as Murray's empirical observations are, it is crucial that we understand them, interpret them, and act on them in a way that doesn't make the situation worse--whatever that may mean.