Why America Is Dividing

Charles Murray has done it again. His new book, Coming Apart, has blown the lid off the most crucial development socially in the United States over the last 50 years: the rise off bastardy. He concentrates on whites.

The book is receiving a lot of attention. His books usually do. Losing Ground in 1984 was a great book. It exposed the welfare state as a fraud. It has not decreased poverty. It was right, and the Left attacked it.

The Bell Curve a decade later was a great book. It exposed the new elite, based on IQ, and the liberal university system that trains this elite. It was right on both counts, and the book was savaged by liberals.

His new book is getting attention, but the liberals are ignoring its main argument: the rise of bastard culture since 1960. Here is what he writes. His two towns are fictional: Fishtown (lower-class white) and Belmont (upper class white).

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Read More at The Tea Party Economist By Gary North, Tea Party Economist