commentators

Charles Murray: The Hallmark of The Underclass

In recent weeks this blog has featured articles by US-based commentators which have recorded America's recent social progress (see here and here) but, in the wake of Katrina, sociologist Charles Murray uses a column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) to paint a picture of a problem controlled, not solved.

Murray argues that crime may be down, for example, but criminality is up.  America hasn't transformed its social injustices it has excluded them from mainstream society.  It has separated itself from the underclass by putting them in prison or housing them in ghettoes.

Here are three extracts from the article:

INCARCERATION OF CRIMINALITY: "When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.  This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million. If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons..."

UNWORK: "Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job..."

ILLEGITIMACY: "Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly? In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here is the illegitimacy ratio -- the percentage of live births that occur to single women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25% milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure was 35% -- of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio in 2003 was 68%."

Andrew Sullivan: How to rebuild society

A recent article by David Brooks on America's moral revival was one of the first posts on this blog.  In yesterday's Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan deployed his pen to reinforce Mr Brooks' belief that American society is improving.

Sullivan, a gay man who cannot be caricatured as moralistic, writes that America is seeing "the reconstitution of the family, the decline of illegitimate births, the collapse of crime, the reinvention and expansion of work. "

The following factors are particularly important for Mr Sullivan:

1. The way government has reformed once perverse incentives for bad behaviour.  He highlights the 1996 welfare reforms which make non-work and illegitimacy much harder.
2. Increase in work-rates because the devil finds the wrong kind of work for idle hands.
3. Increased ownership of homes and shares - because "give people a stake in their own society and they tend to take care of it — and themselves — a little better. "
4. The way cities like New York have successfully deployed technology to focus police resources on crime and drug hotspots.
5. Increased incarceration: "The more criminals in jail, the fewer thugs on the streets. Prison worked. Crime fell. "
6. Teacher accountability reforms that drove up standards in failing schools simply through the fear of looming transparency.

But, for Sullivan, like Brooks, Britain needs to understand that change in civil society is indispensable to progress:

"Government can and must help where it can with better policing, tougher educational standards, welfare reform. But it’s civil society — that hard-to-define Burkean mélange of families, friends, small organisations, volunteers, churches and PTAs — that is the critical instrument of change.  The real shift can only come from below — from a million small decisions to scrub a wall of graffiti, to rear a child, marry a loved one, teach an immigrant, turn off a mobile phone, look out for an elderly neighbour, decline that last beer. These things change not when politicians or bishops demand that they do. They change when people have finally had enough of the boorishness that selfishness sustains."

Wade Horn: Government help for married couples is an exercise in 'limited government'

Writing to last Friday's Times Julian Brazier MP tackled the fallacy that the Conservative Party, as the party of economic liberalism, should also be a party of social liberalism.  He noted how 'lifestyle choices' led to more misery and less economic liberalism:

"Fifty-six per cent of single-parent families in this country depend wholly or mainly on the State for their income. This remains one of the fastest-growing elements in the social security budget, which now accounts for one third of all public expenditure. Furthermore, evidence both here and abroad shows that children born and reared by married two-parent families, even from low-income groups, are far less likely to drop out of school, get into trouble with the law and, in extremis, fall into the state-funded care system."

Conservatives are good at recognising the costs of family breakdown.  They're less good at finding remedies.  Dr Wade Horn, George W Bush's 'minister for the family', is an honourable exception.  Dr Horn runs the Bush administration's Healthy Marriages Initiative.  This initiative is targeted on low income neighbourhoods where couples cannot access marriage support services because either they can't afford to, or simply because they're aren't any such services available.  On today's National Review Online Dr Horn writes:

"The initiative is based on solid research indicating that what separates stable and healthy marriages from unstable and unhealthy ones is not the frequency of conflict, but how couples manage conflict. The good news is that through marriage education, healthy conflict-resolution skills can be taught."

He concludes with a powerful rebuttal of those small government fundamentalists who object to any kind of public policy intervention:

"The president's Healthy Marriage Initiative is an exercise in limited government. Here's how: I run the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. My agency spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs. If one goes down the list of these programs — from child welfare, to child-support enforcement, to anti-poverty assistance to runaway-youth initiatives — the need for each is either created or exacerbated by the breakup of families and marriages. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to understand that controlling the growth of these programs depends on preventing problems from happening in the first place. One way to accomplish that — not the only way, of course, but one way — is to help couples form and sustain healthy marriages."

David Brooks: America's moral revival

David Brooks, writing his regular New York Times column, highlights a number of encouraging trends within US society.  These include:

• A 50%+ drop in family violence;
• A 55% reduction in overall violent crime (don't we wish we had that here!?);
• Consumption of hard liquor down 30%;
• A 28% reduction in teenage pregancies;
• Teenage suicides down, divorce down, abortions down, elementary school test scores up...

The list goes on.

Brooks believes that America is living through a "moral revival".

At the heart of this revival, he says, is a rejection of "stupid ideas".  Those stupid ideas include - the idea "that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel."

Other aspects of the revival include better parenting, young Americans' reaction against divorce and the emergence of effective neighbourhood and charitable groups.