@doschicos:
I agree with you, one of the problems with Murray’s assesment with single parent households is he doesn’t look at the income disparity, he assumes the problem is cultural. Murray can claim all he wants that the ills of rural/blue collar america (blossoming drug use, kids born outside marriage, etc) that it is because people don’t go to church any more, don’t have the ‘old values’, which basically is blaming ‘moral turpitude’ rather than the very real difference in economic circumstances that lead to these ills. I hate to tell Murray, but that 50 something year old person who loses their factory job who has grown children who face economic deprivation, likely had all the lessons their parents and churches and schools gave, they likely were told to work hard, to dedicate themselves, to get married and work towards the American dream, and they probably tried to give that to their own kids, but when you lose hope, as many people have, because of the economic dislocation, no matter of preaching is going to change that. The African American community, for example, is often described as having a very strong influence of churches, of religious belief, and they are generally pretty conservative, and yet despite that it didn’t help with the ills facing the community, it didn’t stave off epidemics of kids born out of wedlock, drug use, issues with decent jobs…the blue collar communities Murray is talking about, especially down south and in the midwest, are communities where churchgoing, especially evangelical Christianity, has a strong influence, yet look at the slide in those communities, it says that this isn’t about the culture it is about people facing economic dislocation.
For all the myths I read about the Great Depression, probably the last time so many lost hope, all the stories about how families pulled together, how the hard times brought people together, the real history of the depression shows many of the same ills we see today affecting more and more; it may have been buried, but it was there, rampant alcoholism (drugs were a lot more rare back then), families where the father walked away, crime, spousal abuse, you name it, were at high levels (not surprising) during a period a lot of people thought might be the end of things…one of the ironies of Murray and others who promote this idea of a ‘moral’ culture being the difference, kind of have things brass-ackwards IMO, that the relative economic boom of the post war period, where the blue collar workers actually had the ability to live a ‘middle class lifestyle’ also brought the ‘moral uprightness’ or whatever you want to call it, too, and if you look at communities that did not benefit from the post war boom, African Americans, Hispanics, people living in rural areas that didn’t share the economic boom, you would see the ills we are talking about, despite it being a ‘moral times’
