There was a time when I was generally skeptical, even hostile, towards the views of Charles Murray, at least as they pertained to education. But I found plenty to like about Real Education, and now he's given a very strong speech at the American Enterprise Institute (which he turned into an article for the Washington Post yesterday) which I think deserves to be taken seriously. So is he becoming more convincing or am I becoming more easily convinced?
Take a look at this long passage from both the speech and the article:
Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: what I label "the equality premise" and "the New Man premise." The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people -- men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays -- will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life -- the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and who become CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. Much of the Democratic Party's proposed domestic legislation assumes that this is true.I'm confident that within a decade, the weight of the new scientific findings will force the left to abandon the equality premise. But if social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon? It can be built upon the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American idealism: People must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured not by equality of outcomes for groups, but by the freedom of individuals, acting upon their personal abilities, aspirations and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.
The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise -- which says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions -- is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible. More than that, the new findings will confirm that human beings are pretty much the way that wise observers have thought for thousands of years.
The effects on the policy debate will be sweeping. Let me give you a specific example. For many years, I have been among those who argue that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe -- the single most important force behind the growth of the underclass. But while other scholars and I have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, I cannot prove that alternatives could not work as well, and so the social democrats keep coming up with the next new program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.
Over the next few decades, advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, and I predict that they will lead to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons why boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence unsocialized to norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. But social democrats will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth.
Now consider this finding from the study I mentioned last week on the record-high number of births in the U.S. in 2007: "28 percent of white babies were born to unmarried mothers in 2007, compared with 51 percent of Hispanic babies and 72 percent of black babies."
As Murray says, many single woman will do a wonderful job of raising their children. But on average, across millions of children, those with two parents will tend to do better in school, in work, and in society. And as long as there are these huge gaps by race, white children will, on average, do better. Some social interventions--particularly great schools, I think--can change the picture at the margins. Others look to the broader/bolder agenda. But nothing will replace the role of the family.
Still, are you looking for a reason to believe that the gap will narrow nonetheless? Consider this: "The shares of births to unwed mothers among whites and Hispanics have climbed faster than the share among blacks, but from lower starting points."
How's that for a "race to the bottom"?
