Murray's Coming Apart: The Chipotle Epilogue

One of the unexpected fruits of my encounter with Charles Murray's Coming Apart  (see the preceding week of posts) was a lengthy and edifying Facebook discussion of Chipotle Mexican Grill.

I put this query to my varied group of Facebook friends

I am reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart. He has a quiz to see if his readers are in touch with regular Americans. One of the questions was this: How many times in the last year have you eaten at one of the following restaurant chains? Applebee's, Waffle House, Denny's, IHOP, Chili's, Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday's, Ponderosa Steakhouse.

In his explanation, he said that members of the new upper class are likely to go to McDonald's sometimes, but are likely to skip the casual-dining chains for fancier non-chain restaurants. That is an interesting claim in itself.

My real question to you, FB friends, is his further claim. He did not include Chipotle Mexican Grill, which is also a top-ten casual dining chain, because it "is to the casual-dining genre of restaurants as Whole Foods is to grocery stores."

Is this true? I have never been to Chipotle, but I had not any impression of them as fancier than the others.

This query drew a rich response - 37 and counting, as of this writing - from just the kind of well-educated white managers and professionals who Murray say constitute the "new upper class."

Most who wrote agreed with Murray's basic contention that Chipotle had a different model that the other casual-dining restaurant chains. A sample of these kinds of comments:

Chipotle is for those who want fast-casual but are environmentally and/or health-conscious since Chipotles use sustainable and relatively local meats in each franchise.

I pick up "to go" from Chipotle very often. They market hormone free meat and fresh ingredients. You choose all toppings and they feature less mainstream brands such as Izze sodas and organic milk for kids. If that's fancy, I guess so.

I think Chipotle is part of Bobo [bourgeois bohemian] culture. The ingredients are infinitely better than most chain restaurants and customers can feel better knowing they are eating happier animals. 

It's not fancy, but I do think they are more hipster than a place like Qdoba. They advertise their sustainability and freshness much more. 

Some were more cynical about the actual difference between Chipotle and the other casual-dining chains:

I also wonder if a lot of this isn't about marketing. I noticed the comments above on Chipotle's advertising about sustainability, quality ingredients, etc. Cynically: really? Or do they serve the same stuff but market to the niche of people who fit the same socio-economic profile as Applebee's customers but want to try to eat responsibly. I think Murray's reasoning may be circular. It's not that (independently defined) elites -- for example, those with college degrees or X amount of money in the bank -- like Chipotle but not Applebee's. It's that elites - defined as those who like Chipotle -- like Chipotle. And what makes Chipotle elite? It's own advertising and Murray's perception of elite values.

In the end, though, I don't want to lose sight of Murray's larger point.  He contends that the class of highly educated managers and professionals who mostly run the country eschew the kind of places that the middle-middle of the country regard as good.  My overall feeling is that Murray is right. I have sometimes eaten real fast food for convenience, but if we go out to a sit-down dinner, it is almost always at a non-chain place. And this is due to exactly the kind of mild snobbery that Murray is talking about. I don't object to the food - I am not very picky - but I do object to the pseudo-Gemeinschaft and underlying sterility of the casual-dining chains. 

The only one I have eaten at in the past year is Waffle House, and this is because its proletarian quality is neither fake nor hidden.

Murray Coming Apart 5: Wrong on the Main Point

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

Charles Murray's main point is that a new upper class has emerged that is increasingly isolated from the rest of America, which is bad because this new upper class rules over the rest of America.  Likewise, he says a new lower class has emerged that is increasingly dysfunctional and in need of rule by others.

I think the main error in Murray's account of the new upper class is that it doesn't really cohere as a class, and it is not really the upper class.  He makes the puzzling and off-handed assertion late in the book that the new upper class is a subset of the upper-middle class.  This is not right.  This is not how upper classes work. I think it would be more correct to say that the upper-middle class and the working rich have been transformed by elite college graduates married to one another.  While the two top classes of managers and professionals have always been the haunt of top college graduates, in the past generation they passed a tipping point.  Now a sizable majority of Belmont consists of college graduates, heavily elite college graduates, who are married to similarly well-educated spouses. The majority is what is new.

However, the upper middle class, and even the working rich, are not the upper class.  The upper class are the owners of capital, many of whom do not work, and quite a few of whom are heirs. They have a disproportionate influence on the economic and political life of the nation whenever they choose to exercise it.  They live beyond the realm of the McMansion or Craftsman bungalows of the high earners.

Which brings us to another point.  The educated manager and professional class is increasingly divided into what I think of as the country club and coffee house wings.  As Bill Bishop demonstrated in The Big Sort, educated, high-earning Republicans tend to live in different communities, and different kinds of communities, than educated, high-earning Democrats do.  Far from forming a unified new upper class, the educated upper middles are increasing polarized.

Murray Coming Apart 4: Adding Non-Whites Barely Changes the Pattern

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

In the Bell Curve, Murray wrote 12 chapters about IQ and white Americans, making 90% of the book's argument about the growth of the "cognitive elite."  Then he added a chapter about IQ and race to make an entirely secondary point.  However, 90% of the storm of controversy about the book concerned that one chapter.

This time, Murray put right in the subtitle that this book is about white America.  Nonetheless, he does have one tiny chapter near the end where he looks at what happens to the trends in Belmont and Fishtown when he adds in non-whites.  And the answer is: almost nothing.  Belmont is disproportionately Asian, but the Asian group, still in single digits, closely follows the white pattern.  Fishtown is disproportionately black, Hispanic, and Asian, but each group is still a minority.  Moreover, the black pattern, which is somewhat worse than the white, is balanced out by the Hispanic and Asian patterns, which are slightly better.

The big difference between the racial effects in The Bell Curve and Coming Apart is that the former is about all of America, whereas the latter is only about the top and the bottom.  Most black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, like most white Americans, are in the middle. That means they are not included in the analysis of the new upper class and new lower class that makes up most of Coming Apart.

Murray's main conclusion is that America is coming apart, but on class lines, not on racial or ethnic lines. And inside the new upper class, and inside the new lower class, the people are becoming more like one another, even as the two classes are becoming more different from one another.

Murray Coming Apart 3: The Essential American Virtues

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

"If just one American virtue may be said to be defining, _______ is probably it."

How would you fill in that blank?

I would have said "liberty" or "the love of liberty."

Charles Murray does not. Instead, he says "industriousness" is the defining American virtue.

Murray offers four virtues as foundational for the American project: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion.

He considers frugality and philanthropy as virtues that eighteenth century Americans might also have argued for.  And he allows that social conservatives might argue for self-reliance. 

This is an interesting list in many respects.

I think it is very curious that a libertarian like Murray would not put liberty first, and that instead he thinks social conservatives would put a cousin of liberty (self-reliance) on the essential virtues lists.  I think he is just wrong about what either group primarily values.  I can see how social conservatives might be content with religion, marriage, and philanthropy as covering the crucial bases, with liberty as a necessary enabling (but secondary) virtue.

I think it is also curious that he does not even offer what social liberals might think of as essential virtues - first and foremost, equality.  I believe this is because Murray believes that too much emphasis on equality is what is undermining the American project.

The four virtues that he keeps are important to America, though perhaps moreso today than in the founding era.  American virtues were developed against European virtues, and compared to Europeans we are now, and have long been, more religious, more committed to marriage (which is proven by our high divorce and remarriage rate), and more industrious.  I have never thought of America as notably more honest than Europe, though perhaps 18th century visitors thought so because we eschewed false court manners. In any case, Murray finds it hard to find good indicators of honesty.

I would offer one further nominee for a distinctive American virtue, though perhaps only sociologists think of it this way: our social mobility.  As everyone knows, we have a very unequal society in class terms.  Nonetheless, most Americans believe our social structure is legitimate because we believe we can move up or down by our own merits.  This is a cousin to "self-reliance," but with more recognition of the trajectory that most Americans expect over their life course, not just their ability to be independent at any one moment.

And treating social mobility as a distinctive virtue requires treating liberty and equality, despite their obvious tension with one another, with equal seriousness.

Murray's Coming Apart 2: The New Generation of the Cognitive Elite

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued that since the Second World War our educational system has become very efficient at tracking high-IQ students into college, and the highest-IQ students into elite colleges.  In this book, Murray continues that theme with newer data.  He shows that after two generations of tracking brains into college and stocking the high-income occupations with college brains, the "cognitive elite" is now efficiently reproducing itself.

In previous generations, the elite of money married money.  But it is hard to pass on the skills that made the money.  Now, the elite of brains marries brains, and brains are more heritable.

Murray shows the mean white IQ of two generations of adults by the level of education they attained. I will reproduce that simple table here.  What is interesting here is that, even though 50% more people graduate from college than did a generation ago, the central characteristic of those who graduated - their intelligence level - has not. The first column represents the mean IQ of people who were 25 in the mid-'80s; the second, those who were 25 in the mid-'00s:


88, 89  No degree
99, 99  High School diploma/GED
105, 104  Associate's degree
113, 113  Bachelor's degree
117, 117 Master's degree
126, 124 Ph.D., LLD, MD, DDS

The upper-middle class dominates college enrollment, especially at elite colleges. This fact is well known.  Murray argues that this is true even with affirmative action.  Why?

“The reason that upper-middle-class children dominate the population of elite schools is that the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.”

Murray's Coming Apart 1: SuperZips

This week I will be blogging on Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010. If you would like to read the short version of his argument, see "The New American Divide" in the Wall Street Journal.

Murray's main point is that a new upper class and a new lower class have grown in the past generation. The new upper class is a brainy meritocracy who met in elite colleges and reap high incomes from their mental skills and work ethic. Murray fears that this new elite is now so large and rich that they can live an isolated life from other classes, especially from the new, and increasingly incompetent, lower class.

I will start with the best feature of Murray's analysis: the SuperZips, and the ideal types of "Belmont" and "Fishtown."

Murray shows that managers and professionals who run America are increasingly concentrated in neighborhoods where most people are college graduates, and live in households making over $200,000 per year. He uses zip codes as his unit of analysis, which are fairly large and mixed areas. Nonetheless, in a generation, the zip codes in which managers and professionals concentrate, mostly around large cities, have switched to having college graduate majorities, and have incomes (in constant dollars) which would in 1960 would have been in the top 1%, but are now only in the top 5%. These SuperZips also have a great disproportion of elite college graduates.

The main tool that he develops for comparison is an imagined "Belmont" and "Fishtown," based on the real upper-middle-class suburb of Boston and the real working-class-neighborhood of Philadelphia, respectively. The ideal-typical communities combine the qualities of their comparable upper-middle enclaves and working-class communities. Comparing such things as marriage and crime rates in this composite Belmont with the composite Fishtown is a very helpful way of compressing complex data.

And in general he shows that things have been steadily good in Belmont, whereas they have declined dramatically in Fishtown.

The rest of this series will cover the main points of Murray's findings, and my critiques and appreciations of his findings.

Millennial Protesters May Hate Institutions, But Are Weak On Alternatives

David Brooks has a pretty good column starting from the viral video "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus." Brooks notes, gently, that the young man who made such a strong criticism of religion, Jefferson Bethke, humbly backtracked when some theologians set him straight.

Brooks took that retreat as an example of a larger phenomenon.  I think he really has the Occupy movement in mind, though he never says that.  Brooks' summary is this:

This seems to be a moment when many people — in religion, economics and politics — are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them.

I am struck by the fact that this diagnosis matches what popular demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss predicted for the Millennials - today's twentysomethings.  Howe and Strauss thought that they would be a new "silent generation," nice people, good team players, but weak on a theory of institutions.  I don't know how old Jefferson Bethke is, but his screen name is bball1989, which makes me think he is 22.

I am glad young people are finding a way to raise a critical voice.  But they do need a positive, institutional theory of what they want instead.

Silly Idea: Divorce to Boost Economic Demand

Matthew Yglesias has a very silly column in Slate arguing that more divorces would stimulate the economy, because creating more households creates more demand for things households need.

This is a perfect example of being penny wise and pound foolish. Most importantly, the cost in human misery of divorce would far outweigh the short-term economic benefit. But even at the economic level, the short-term demand from new households would, I believe, be more than offset by the loss of productivity as married men became divorced men.

The Main Social Problem: Weak Marriage Rate in the Bottom Classes

Mona Charen has a fine column, "Social Pressure to Marry is Dead." She makes this strong claim:

"The collapse of marriage among the lower and lower-middle classes is rapidly tapping our national strength."

I agree. In fact, I believe this is the number one domestic problem in our country. If the poorer classes married and stayed married, child poverty would nearly disappear, crime of all kinds would decline, drug use would decline, household poverty would go way down, home ownership would stabilize, and general happiness would rise.

I think in general that things are getting better in the world. This includes the marriage rate among the educated classes, which is rising.

But one thing that is getting worse is the marriage rate among the bottom classes. And this is dragging everything else down.

The Rise of "Herbivorous" Men in Japan

Men with no interest in sex or women are now so common in Japan that they have a name: herbivorous.

A third of teenage boys in Japan (age 16 - 19, not the young ones), say they have no interest in sex. Some of them say they despise sex.

One possible cause: most teenage girls in Japan (59%) say the same thing.

40% of married couples report that they have not had sex in the past month.

The Japanese fertility rate is 1.37, way below the 2.1 children per fertile woman necessary to replace the existing population.

The idea that large fractions of young men would have no interest in sex is hard to grasp.

No one knows why.

How the Richest Woman in India Became the Leading Spouse in Her Marriage

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is the richest woman in India. She heads the drug company Biocon. Ariel Levy's fine portrait in the New Yorker shows the unexpected course that led a science-trained young Indian woman to fight sexist resistance to make a big business success.

I was particularly interested in how Mazumdar-Shaw's marriage balanced with her business career. Mazumdar-Shaw is married to John Shaw, from Scotland. Late in the profile, Levy gives this account of how the Mazumdar and Shaw union settled their particular work/life question.

Mazumdar-Shaw thinks of her husband as "a very secure person" who is comfortable in his supporting role. "After we got married," John Shaw recalled, "we sat down and Kiran said, 'Now, John. You've got a career in the textile industry. I've got a career in the biotech industry. One of us has got to give up our career, and it's not me.'" When he looked at her ledgers, he agreed.

Every marriage comes down to the individual qualities of the couple.

Still, I can't help but think that if Kiran Mazumdar had married an Indian, she might have gotten more resistance from her husband when she suggested that he give up his career.

And perhaps of all the non-Indians she might have married, she was fortunate in marrying a Scot - he agreed that he should be the one to step back and support when he looked at her ledgers.

Sounds like a fine partnership.

Jay-Z Announces He Will Keep Calling Women "Bitches."

I view the marriage of celebrities with trepidation, especially popular musicians. Nonetheless, I have some hopes for the union of Beyonce Knowles and Jay-Z (Shawn Carter). They married before they had their first child - a rarity in their world. They are very publicly supportive of marriage and parenthood - also unusual, especially for a rapper.

I was delighted, therefore, to hear that Jay-Z proclaimed that the birth of his daughter had cured him of using the word "bitch" to refer to women

Alas, it is not to be. For reasons which are hard for me to understand, Jay-Z's publicist has released a statement that the rapper is not going to give up on calling women "bitches," after all. Despite being married and being the father of a little girl.

The more I think about this, the harder it is to understand.

A Possible American Trollope: Louisa May Alcott

Some months ago I asked for suggestions of which novelist, if any, was the American equivalent of Anthony Trollope.  Most respondents thought there wasn't one.

I am now reading Little Women for the first time.  I see a strong moral similarity between Alcott's project and Trollope's. He draws on a broader social world.  On the whole I think he is the better writer. Still, Alcott seems to be engage in a similar project at the same time, and with comparable popularity.

I offer this idea for the consideration of my literary readers.

Monogamy Succeeds Polygamy as Part of the Civilizing Process

Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, about which I blogged recently, argues that the civilizing process of the modern era is one of the main reasons for the massive decrease in violence in the world.

Pinker does not treat the change in marriage norms specifically in his consideration of the civilizing process. I have long thought, though, that one of the great social benefits of monogamy is that it should reduce the violence by groups of unmarried men that is a predictable by-product of polygamy. This, I think, is why monogamy is nearly universal in developed nations, despite the wide variety of religious and cultural traditions that these different nations developed from.

A new study by Joseph Henrich and others at the University of British Columbia found "significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault, robbery and fraud in polygymous cultures found in Asia and Africa." By contrast, monogamy leads to more paternal investment, long-term planning, economic productivity, savings, and child investments.

These social advantages explain why even those who benefit the most from polygamy - rich, high-status men - are willing to switch to a monogamous social norm. The civilizing process leads to monogamy because of its greater peace and social investment for society as a whole.

Low IQ Correlates with Racism Through Social Conservatism

A fascinating study by Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Canada, found that people with low intelligence in childhood were more likely to be racist adults. This was expected, given earlier research on education and racism.

The new finding tried to answer how, exactly, the two became connected. Hodson's conclusion:

The factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

The researchers speculate that conservative ideologies offer a more black-and-white worldview, which would be more appealing to people who finding it hard to take the position of the Other.

These findings correspond with Hetherington and Weiler's studies of authoritarianism and polarization which I blogged about before. Hodson's psychological study does not really look at the political mechanism by which low-IQ people find out about socially conservative ideologies. Political scientists Hetherington and Weiler, on the other hand, point to the fact that conservative organizations and parties have, over the past generation, actively sought out fearful people.

It seems a reasonable step to me to suppose that low-IQ people are more fearful than others. That would be an excellent subject for the next study.

Sovereignty vs. Majesty

I am participating in the Christian Life and Witness conference at Georgetown College on the subject of "From the Academy to the Church."  Nicholas Wolterstorff, a distinguished Reformed philosopher from Yale, was drawing a distinction between the Reformed approach to higher education and a conservative Baptist approach (Georgetown is a Baptist college).  In the course of presenting an ideal type of the Reformed approach, he was asked about what is often considered the key Reformed doctrine, the sovereignty of God.

Wolterstorff surprised me by saying that Calvin does not seem to speak of the sovereignty of God. Instead, Calvin promotes the idea of the majesty of God.

Wolterstorff thought this difference presented Calvinism in a more hopeful light, because he reads the idea of God's sovereignty as the foundation of the most notorious Reformed doctrine, double predestination.

I, however, have always favored the idea of the sovereignty of God. I do not, though, connect it with predestination.  Instead, I see it as a claim by the Reformed that all of Creation has one order, which we can investigate by reason.

We agreed that "sovereignty" and "majesty" are clearly similar ideas.  It may be that they are simply different translations of the same word.

My question to you is this: Which term you find resonates better with your understanding?  It seems to me that sovereignty is a concept better adapted to a democratic culture, whereas majesty is a more monarchical concept.

Still wrestling.  Very fruitful conference, though.

Children as a Happy-Making Gift.

I have been synthesizing two lines of happiness research.

People who give more are more likely to report that they are very happy.

People who have children are more likely to report that they are very happy, even though children typically diminish their marital happiness.

I think it is very fruitful to think of raising children as a gift, a gift to society.

Giving the gift of raising children should make it more likely that you will be very happy.

Facebook is Not an Echo Chamber

Some people fear that social media creates an echo chamber in which we only hear opinions from like-minded friends which confirm our own.

Eytan Bakshy, a researcher at Facebook, conducted a fine, huge experiment. Facebook normally shows you links that your friends have posted. Using a modest sample of 253 million users, Bakshy suppressed some of that sharing, to create an experimental and a control group. He wanted to see how much people shared links, whether they shared links that were kept from them but that they found some other way, and whether they shared more from their strong-tie or weak-tie friends.

If Facebook were an echo chamber, we would mostly be sharing links from friends and from strong ties more than weak.

What Bakshy found is that we do share links from our close friends. And we do share links that we would have gotten from our close friends - Bakshy hid them, but we found them anyway. So far, so echo-y. But we also share links from our weak ties, ones we would not have seen otherwise. And the number of links we get and share from weak ties overwhelm the number we get from close ties. Weak ties bring us novel information.

My experience confirms this finding. I share opinions with close friends every day on Facebook. But I also get contrary information all the time. Some comes from a few close friends who do not agree with me. But most comes from weak ties - acquaintances who are "friends" but not really close friends. Even more often, people I do not know contribute comments to a friends' post disagreeing with that friend. Almost daily I find myself reading and checking a contrasting idea that someone I sort-of know put on Facebook.

This keeps me honest. Good for busting the echo chamber.

Big-Time Sports Did Not Eat Division III College Life

"How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life," by Laura Pappano in the New York Times, is an excellent and sad story.  Two interesting statistics that she reports:

Between 1985 and 2010, average salaries at public universities rose 32 percent for full professors, 90 percent for presidents and 650 percent for football coaches. 

A study of University of Oregon students found that for every three games won by the football team, the grade-point average for men dropped 0.02, widening the G.P.A. gender gap by 9 percent.

The good news is that this is only a problem at Division I schools.  Division III schools, like Centre College, do athletics right.  And not all Division III schools are small, like Centre.  The University of Chicago, for example, or Washington University, are full-scale research universities.  But they keep sports in proportion.

Physical activity is a fine part of a well-rounded education. Athletics is a good addition to academic education. For those who don't want their academic priorities totally distorted by semi-professional sports teams operating near their academic institution, Division III does academic/athletic balance right.

World Population Pyramid Shows Some Big Declines Coming

This world population pyramid is fantastic.

Want to see something scary? Look at the population of Japan, Russia, and Italy now, vs. 2030.

I think world population is likely to stabilize. But some countries are looking at a demographic shrinkage so large that their societies will be fundamentally changed.