I like to think of myself as a cautious optimist, but the prognosis may be more intractable than Murray can admit to himself. I do not want to draw too close a connection between education, money, and basic human dignity, but most would concede that they are entangled, if not causally related. The sorts of jobs that one can do without an education are not very many, are growing fewer, and regardless are not particularly conducive to human dignity. They do not pay well, and while money cannot buy happiness, its absence makes the pursuit of happiness altogether, shall we say, more challenging. Nearly universal access to education, including higher education, has done little to change the basic dynamic. That a few are up to the challenge and a growing majority are not should come as no particular surprise. At all but the most selective institutions, any administrator at any college will tell you that a significant number of students arrive, as we like to say, under-prepared. They lack the basic intellectual skills, the numeracy and the literacy necessary to even begin developing expert thinking and complex communication skills. They are consigned to remedial education courses in math and English, high school and in some cases even grade school level courses, where a few find they are up to the challenge and develop the necessary skills, but most founder for a while and drift away. The euphemism, "under-prepared," is a convenient one for those of us in higher education. It allows us to defer responsibility to those who struggled before us -- if only the high schools had done a better job of "preparing" the students for college. Even better, we can avoid making invidious judgments about the students themselves. To say one lacks proper preparedness is one thing, to say one lacks intellectual capacity for full participation in the economic life of the country is quite another, and yet as technology keeps "upping the ante" for a growing number of our students that may well be the necessary judgment, and again, the question becomes, "what to do with them?"
Murray's argument seems to be deeply flawed in at least one respect. On the one hand, he seems to credit genetics as the underlying cause of the widening gap between the poor and the wealthy. Like is attracted to like, and under an assumption of homogamy within the marriage market, the smartest people are drawn to each other because they share similar tastes, interests, and values. The smartest people tend to accumulate the most wealth and gather together in communities of the wealthy reflecting and reinforcing those tastes, interests and values. The smartest people tend to have the smartest children who are socialized to those tastes, interests, and values, and because they have the means, the smartest people send their children to the best schools, where the virtuous cycle repeats itself. On the other hand, he seems to blame the modern welfare state for a good deal of the decay in the moral and ethical standards of industriousness, honesty, family, and religiosity among the lower income Americans. The modern welfare state has trapped the American poor and working poor in a Pavlovian cycle of dependency and entitlement, drugs and crime, and single parent (or even worse absent parent) households. Those in the upper income tiers don't seem to share in those problems, at least not to the same degree, or in the same way. It is the nature/nurture argument writ large. Nature and the invisible hand of the marriage market is responsible for the virtuous cycle. Nurture and government social engineering is responsible for the vicious cycle. It is questionable, however, if a dismantling of the welfare state will produce anything like a great awakening of personal responsibility. In the absence of even the most modest of alternative proposals, the welfare state seems to be wrapped in an ideological chicken and egg dispute. Has the welfare state caused the decline in moral and ethical standards or has it emerged as a palliative answer to the pragmatic question, "what to do with those who have been intellectually and economically alienated from the modern economy?" The answer is likely "yes."
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