The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion

how odd. somehow, “falling away from marriage and religion” didn’t seem to have hurt the Swedish working class any. Might that be because marriage and religion have fuck-all* to do with social inequality?

whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world

what the fuck is “cultural equality”? the US has been a racist country since its inception, and the libertine, deist/atheist Founding Fathers never shared much in the way of culture with the puritans and assorted other fundies among the hoi polloi.

I suppose you can make the claim for less class-segregationism than in Europe at the time, but that’s “damning with faint praise” at best.

When Americans used to brag about “the American way of life”—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace.

no, I’m pretty certain they’re talking about “the way we never were”, as it were. There never was a single “American way of life”; hell, until the proliferation of mass media, there wasn’t even a unifying language, with parts of the country being German speaking, parts being Spanish-speaking, etc.

It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

this is code for “they were all bible-believing protestants” isn’t it.

We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America.

this is exactly backwards. even for white-men-only, the 20th century has democratized higher education, which was formerly only for the elites. And post 60’s we even let non-whites and women get college degrees!

At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

no, I’m pretty fucking certain it’s poverty.

That’s as far as I could force myself to read. What a deeply stupid screed

- - - - - -
*well, not fuck-all. less inequality seems to correlate with less religiosity, but that’s exactly the opposite of what this doofus claims

I think you adequately summed up what is wrong with the book in the brief description.

New Rule:  No glorifying the mid-20 century/ 1950’s without noting the high rate of unionization, high government spending during that period, the GI Bill, or the fact that the US had the strongest economy in the world (due to the fact that most of the industrialized world got destroyed in WWII, a condition which will probably never be repeated).

I couldn’t read through the whole thing, and I’m sure there must be a more egregious example out there in the universe, but I haven’t seen it - that was the most blatant use of “I’m going to cherry-pick super specific data to fit my conclusion” that I’ve ever seen. 

When I was in college (a million years ago), I got into a huge fight in the middle of a sociology class after my (ridiculously biased) professor kept spouting ridiculous nonsense about black people and poverty and cited Murray as his source.  This was right after The Bell Curve had come out. 

The fact that multiple classmates (black and white) came up to me after class and thanked me for calling the professor on his obvious bullshit might have been my proudest moment in college.

Hmmm. I must admit I lost interest in the linked to article when it started wandering off into medieval notions of poverty (blaming the poor). The interesting thing is that income inequality has been very poor in the US for a lot longer than people realise - back as far as WWII, the US was far more unequal than Britain.

Yes the US was a lot wealthier than others after WWII - a small share of a bigger cake looked pretty good at the time. But the wealthy elite existed back then; it didn’t suddenly spring into existence when Reagan’s ‘trickle down” economics bunk started.

Most of the “cultural inequalities” are wealth related - marriage is harder to afford if you’re poor and the stresses of being poor are more likely to cause a breakdown in the marriage, etc.

Part of what’s regrettable about this is that Murray is right in one sense: there really has been, over the last three or four decades, a separation between the upper and lower classes. Everyone knows this because we all have those income inequality charts that tell us this. If Murray were really interested in the causes behind this separation, he’d have done his research and analyzed how specific economic policies drove the stratification of America. But that would mean doing work, and it’s much easier to just blame the hippies and their permissive attitudes rather than figure out how actual material inequalities drive the cultural ones (and perhaps question whether we should really be all that concerned about these supposed cultural inequalities anyway).

The economic boom of the 1950s and 1960 also coincided with the corporations and rich paying their fair share of taxes, that magically still left them wealthy, and in business.

Also: all the New Deal policies meant that the unemployed still had money to spend through unemployment insurance, and Social Security lifted nearly half of those seniors who would have otherwise lived below the poverty line.

Unions were stronger, which boosted the number of workers who not only made a living wage, but guaranteed pensions, private businesses had to keep up, and many also offered pensions to attract workers.

Health insurance companies like Blue Cross were non-profits, and a major illness didn’t bankrupt the uninsured. When Medicare began seniors benefited further.

A segment of the population were also able to retire with their mortgages paid off (instead of having the bank foreclose), more money seniors had to spend and pump into the economies.

Add in that major corporations hadn’t been given tax breaks to take their jobs and factories overseas, and if memory serves trade regulations that didn’t leave the U.S. always in debt.

Oh, and another thing, Democrats (real Democrats) had been power for decades, which was no coincidence.

I disagree with #5 on income inequality in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S.

Yes, there were still rich and poor, but the New Deal policies, fair taxation for the rich and corporation, and the G.I. Bill were all factors in creating what I believe I’ve read was the largest middle class in U.S. history.

High school graduates (especially white male) could earn a wage large enough to support a family,  own a home and car. 

All the relatively inexpensive education (public schools and college) also created upward mobility, in wealth and status, it became an established notion that children (especially white male) would enjoy a better standard of living than their parents.

However, this wasn’t something the 1% wanted, and made it their goal to dismantle that system, which they have succeeded with the bought help of the Republicans, and the Democrats who ape them.

I would like to read a good analysis of the economic and social divergence in American society in recent decades.

This ain’t it.

Oh, and I was alive and sentient when that phrase when “Americans used to brag about “the American way of life,” and I remember it used primarily meant to reflect the ideas of a country that practiced democracy, politically, and that it was possible with hard work to get to the middle class or higher.

The phrase “American Way of Life”: generally was thought of in political and economic terms, not some gasbaggy cultural war “involving marriage, honesty ... and religiosity.”

At least not in my experience of those I grew up with in the lower and middle class. (Ah, maybe some religion thrown in, to seperate us from those godless commies.)

For similar reasons, it’s impossible to understand the recent economic collapse without looking at the ways that racialized poverty is entrenched and profitable for the 1%.

http://www.thenation.com/article/165159/hard-knocks-bronx

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/business/blacks-face-bias-in-bankruptcy-study-suggests.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

You know, I don’t comment here very often, but I lurk constantly, and I just hafta say, the quality of the discussion at Pandagon is just awesome. 

I especially want to applaud the righteous fisking Jadehawk gave to this particularly odious bit of bogosity in comment #1 - BRAVO!  And I like Isabella’s new rule in comment #3, and everybody else here, too.  I only wish people like you guys could be our pundits, talking heads and Democratic politicians, instead of the helmet-haired morons and corporate suckups we’re stuck with in this pathetic cultural climate.  Thanks, guys.

@judybrown: Oh, I can be just as wrong as the next opinionated critter who lets their prejudices run out of control, but the graph on relative income inequality on the article I linked to is probably sourced from the US Census Bureau data for the US. Probably because Wikipedia have changed their graph to a different index since I linked to their graph.

It’s still possible that the US Census Bureau is wrong of course, but they’re a better quality source than I am It looks like the US was the most equal (in terms of income) during the 1950s and 1960s than it has ever been since, but even so was less equal that many European countries.

But income inequality has gotten a whole lot worse since - the US is now at more unequal income levels than it was at in 1929!

veryz at 06:08 PM -

The US now has greater economic inequality than Cameroon and Cote d’Ivoire:  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html

New Rule:  No glorifying the mid-20 century/ 1950’s without noting the high rate of unionization, high government spending during that period…

I’ve heard this a few times on progressive blogs, usually as a defense for the stimulus.

But people forget that the Keynesian stimulus has a rejoinder: Austerity during the recovery.

Ergo, the 50’s were characterized by low government spending, as Truman and Ike practiced the other side of Keynesianism.

Here is Total Spending, controlled for inflation and population:

http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1945_2010USd_12s1li011mcn_F0t

And Total Spending agian, as a % of the GDP:

http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1945_2010USp_12s1li011mcn_F0t

Manju, you neglect to mention that during the 1950s the top tax rate was above 90%, which is the other other side of Keynesianism. It seems high taxes don’t really hurt the economy. http://www.faireconomy.org/files/images/tax_gdp.gif

Manju on 01/21 at 06:30 PM -

Needs more Robert Byrd.

Manju, you neglect to mention that during the 1950s the top tax rate was above 90%, which is the other other side of Keynesianism. It seems high taxes don’t really hurt the economy.

1. Even liberal Economists will tell you that 90% is on the other side of the laffer curve. So in all likelihood that particular tax did indeed hurt the economy (since it did not increase revenue).

2. You have to be careful of correlation fallacies. You don’t want to say; “high taxes don’t really hurt the economy”. Since the 50’s also correlate to spending cuts, you just gave the RWing this: “Spending Cuts don’t hurt the economy.”

You don’t want to go there. That’s teabagger land.

The point is that spending cuts and tax hikes will slow an economy, in the Keynesian paradigm. But that OK…if you are near full employment. You have leeway and at some point you do have to reduce your debt. Recovery is that point.

Manju, the 1950s spending cuts were a result of the draw down after world war II, not so much cuts to social programs. In that post war period, because of the GI bill and major housing program, you saw almost every single white man eligible for a free college education and major financial help buying a home for his family. The government (along with labor unions) more or less created the prosperous white middle class. The number of welfare programs increased though the 1960s more or less, but the explosion in government spending in more recent times is largely the result of the aging population and the explosion in the cost of medical care.

Also, since you are the exulted king of hyper-focus on annoying technicalities, the laffer curve does not say that higher taxes hurt the economy; it just that government revenue falls when the tax rate is too high, that government revenues will increase when the rate is lowered down to a certain point. The hurt the economy thing is all Keynes.

Isn’t it weird how the Republicans always want to go back to the 50s and 60s without any of the good parts?

But people forget that the Keynesian stimulus has a rejoinder: Austerity during the recovery.

No, people don’t forget that.  HTH.  HAND.

alysia,

Nothing you wrote, except arguably your odd technicality, contradicts anything I wrote. Indeed, you confirmed my major point: the 1950’s saw spending cuts…and my secondary one: 90% is on the other side of the laffer curve.

Glad to see we agree. I look forward to a discussion on civil rights.

The number of welfare programs increased though the 1960s more or less, but the explosion in government spending in more recent times is largely the result of the aging population and the explosion in the cost of medical care.

Govt spending on welfare…does not include Healthcare, Pensions, or Education…from 1950 to 2010, controlled for inflation and population:

http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1950_2010USd_12s1li011mcn_40t

And as a % of the GDP:

http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1950_2010USp_12s1li011mcn_40t

As Harris-Perry so succinctly stated on The Colbert Report about people waxing nostalgic about the past and all its wonderful wonders, “. . .there is no moment in American history where it is nostalgic and better to have been a little black girl.”

I’d be wary of anything that ill-defined from a right-wing website.  I love to use those to bash teahadists with their misconceptions.

But the site specifically has some twisted definitions, like ‘Welfare’?  WTF is this supposed to mean?  Does it control for the change in state to federal spending that occurred?  The change in price controls and surplus purchases on the commodities markets?

Prolly not, since it is a Libertarian serfdom site.

Crissa,

I didn’t know it was a libertarian site. I got it from a liberal on Oliverwillis.com, who used it to try to prove to me that the 50’s consisted of deficit spending (He failed to control for inflation, population, etc).

Seemed like a handy tool. I’ll have to find a replacement.  As a rule of thumb, I try to restrict cites to sources within my opponents own ideological confort zone.

Yeah, like I said, I love using that one for total spending or military or taxes or deficit; but their categories are actual lies - they don’t define them at all.

Crissa,

They define the categories. See here:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2012USbn_13bs1n_40#usgs302

If you open the Welfare tab, you see the breakdown. Whats extraordinary is that you can further break it down to Fed, State, and local.

I recall Paul Krugman arguing recently that there was no stimulus if you include Sate and Local cuts. Virtually nobody, including Krugman until that column, seems to do this.

Its an extraordinary tool. The site seems quirky libertarian but usually the neo-confederates only include nominal dollars. Charting a graph of US debt using non-adjusted numbers is a sure-fire way to Pavlov the Savages into a frenzy. That and railing against jobs going oversees due to free trade, since Comparative Advantage is like Evolution…but I digress.

Hopefully its legit. I think I’ll ask a liberal economist to take a look.

what the fuck is “cultural equality”?

Going from context, I think Marx called it “false consciousness”.