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Dec. 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:35
Who Can We Blame? | Ep. 908
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Are Republican areas the reason for declining life expectancy?
Are Democratic areas the reason for rising income inequality?
And are you your own soulmate?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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What exactly are you waiting for?
Okay, so we'll get to all ImpeachmentGate related things a little bit later on in the program.
I'll be honest with you, I'm kind of bored with the impeachment stuff.
I feel like most people are kind of bored with the impeachment stuff because nothing much is happening.
The Republicans did release a long report, about 120 page report.
On the impeachment gate related stuff, basically their report says exactly what you'd expect it to say, that none of it holds up to scrutiny, that basically the charges are empty, that the Democrats haven't proved their case.
The Democrats did apparently present in committee their own impeachment report which will say exactly the precise opposite.
They have not released that one publicly yet.
When it comes out we will analyze it.
With all of that said, we are basically in a holding pattern right now, because no new information is coming out, because the impeachment procedures are moving forward in the Judiciary Committee, but the Trump administration is not taking place, is not taking part.
The White House is not sending any counsel there, saying that we have not been given any guidance on exactly what we're even supposed to be doing there.
And no new facts are being brought to bear at this point.
And we all know where this is going anyway.
The Democrats are going to vote to impeach Trump in the House, and then it's going to go to the Senate, and then the Republicans aren't going to do anything in the Senate.
So basically, the only question right now is a question of timing.
It's a question of when, not of if.
Everybody knows what's going to happen.
And so we'll get into sort of those developments a little bit later.
We'll also get into developments surrounding the Inspector General report.
The IG is supposed to put out a report next week with regard to the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and its origins as to whether that was initiated in good faith or whether it was initiated in bad faith.
Apparently, there's some conflict between the IG of the Department of Justice and William Barr, the Attorney General.
We'll get to all of that in a little bit.
But I want to talk about something that I think is more important right now, and that is the belief that is prevalent across the country that every problem in a particular area is due to differences in politics, that it's not overall trends in the United States that are affecting differences in the United States.
It is, in fact, local politics.
Now, listen, people on the right are guilty of this.
People on the left are guilty of this.
The fact is that when you have a local problem, like, say, homelessness, where homelessness is endemic in a city, and the only authorities who are capable of taking care of that are the authorities in the city, then obviously you're going to look to the local authorities and see exactly how they're handling the problems.
Is Utah handling, is Salt Lake City handling the problem differently than Los Angeles?
How is Seattle handling the problem compared to Oklahoma City and what are the effects of that, right?
You're going to look at differences in policy.
When you're looking at broad national trends, like for example declining life expectancy, Or when you're looking at broad national trends like the opioid epidemic or like income inequality, how much of that is due to local policy and how much of that is due to broad national trends?
Now the reason this matters is because folks on the left are apt to suggest that problems that seem to be located more heavily in red areas are the fault of red state governors and red state partisanship.
And folks on the right are apt to suggest that problems that are more prevalent in blue areas are obviously the result of blue state partisanship and blue state governance.
But the truth is that the more endemic problems in American society right now, I don't think are actually especially the result of local governance.
They seem to be much more the result of broad national and international trends.
And the reason this is important, again, is because it is very easy to get caught up in the idea that if, for example, there's an opioid epidemic that seems to be predicated largely in red states, that this is the result of red state governance.
If only they'd expand Medicaid, then that would fix the opioid epidemic problem.
Not a lot of evidence to suggest that.
On the other hand, you see from folks on the right that as income inequality rises in major cities, in places like New York, that this must be the fault of democratic governance in those cities.
If it were not for democratic governance in those cities, income inequality would be falling.
Again, I don't think that that is necessarily true either.
Okay, so let's jump into why this subject matters.
So today, there's an article in the New York Times talking about the wealth-poverty divide in American cities.
And what this article basically shows is that America's largest cities are the most income unequal.
Those are the areas where income has divided the most.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so there's an article in the New York Times today all about the wealth-poverty divide.
And kind of unsurprisingly, it finds that the wealth-poverty divide is the greatest in large American cities.
So all the places where you would expect the left to complain the least, Are the places that have the highest income inequality.
According to the New York Times, in 1980, highly paid workers in Binghamton, New York earned about four and a half times what low-wage workers there did.
The gap between them in a region full of IBM executives and manufacturing jobs was about the same as the gap between the workers near the top and the bottom in Metro New York.
Since then, the two regions have diverged.
IBM shed jobs in Binghamton.
Other manufacturing disappeared, too.
High-paying work in the new knowledge economy concentrated in New York, and so did well-educated workers.
As a result, by one measure, wage inequality today is much higher in New York than it is in Binghamton.
In fact, if you look at the chart that the New York Times has put together, the ratio of 90th percentile wages to 10th percentile wages in 195 metro areas, cities like New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, they far outpace cities like Binghamton, New York, in terms of income inequality.
San Jose, tremendous income inequality.
Fairfield, Connecticut, tremendous income inequality.
According to the New York Times, what has happened over the last four decades is only partly a story of New York's rise as a global hub and Binghamton's struggles.
Economic inequality has been rising everywhere in the United States, but has been rising much more in the booming places that promise hefty incomes to engineers, lawyers, and innovators.
And those places today are also the largest metros in the country.
New York, LA, San Francisco, San Jose, Houston, and Washington.
This particular chart, put together by the New York Times using data from a recent analysis by Jason Abel and Richard Dietz of the New York Fed, captures several dynamics that have remade the U.S.
economy since 1980.
Thriving and stagnant places are pulling apart from each other, and within the most prosperous regions, inequality is widening to new extremes.
That this inequality now so clearly correlates with city size, the largest metros are the most unequal, also shows how changes in the economy are both rewarding and rattling what we have come to think of as superstar cities.
In these places, inequality and economic growth now go hand-in-hand.
In other words, as we move from manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, as we move from a place where physical labor makes up a large part of the wage base to a place where capital-intense Capital intensity and intellectual labor makes up a large part of the of the wage base.
What you're starting to see is rising wages in one sector of the economy and stagnating wages in another sector of the economy.
So in big cities where you had a lot of people living who are not actually part of the quote-unquote knowledge economy and then you have a bunch of people who are being drawn to this knowledge economy and companies that are moving in because there are a lot of major universities there and have the intellectual capital you're starting to see The income gap widened and this is not exactly a result of city policy per se.
This is more a result and high rates of taxation are not dampening this.
High rates of taxation are not actually solving the problem, right?
Seattle has pretty high city taxes.
LA has really high city taxes.
New York has extremely high city taxes.
Redistribution isn't going to do the trick.
Instead, what we are watching in the United States, and again, this is a broad national trend, so cities are where it's most obvious, just because cities are the place where a lot of these new jobs are being created.
But what we are watching is the knowledge economy, the wages are taking off, and in the old manufacturing economy, the wages are not taking off in the same way.
And this is what has led to so much social unrest.
It's what led to this sort of populist uprising, the economic move against capitalism.
In many cases, this belief that capitalism is going to leave too many people behind, even though we are creating jobs at an exorbitant rate in the United States, even though we are reaching all time low levels of unemployment in the United States.
There's a feeling that some groups in America are leaving other groups in America behind.
And those groups in America that are being left behind are not just being left behind by the economy.
They're also being left behind in terms of social values.
It's a broad national trend, and so blaming that on major cities and suggesting that major cities are the problem is not right on behalf of the right-wing.
On the other hand, it is also not correct on behalf of left-wingers that it's our major cities that are driving American growth because of liberal governance.
That is not correct.
Major cities are driving American growth right now because we are shifting from a manufacturing-based economy into a knowledge-based, intellectually-based economy.
And that is changing the nature of the economy.
So when you hear people on the left say things like, well, blue states are richer than red states.
That's not because they're blue states.
The reason that they are richer than red states very often is because these are major metropolitan areas.
When you have major metropolitan areas and people live closely together, they're very tempted to have government step in.
But those are also the areas where you have high levels of income inequality.
It's the areas where you're going to have a San Jose like city with a bunch of homeless people living on the street and people living in penthouses.
It's where you have tremendous levels of growth, but also a lot of underclass stagnation.
Economically speaking, that is not the fault of the liberal city, nor is it to the credit of liberal cities.
And on the other hand, you have people like Paul Krugman suggesting that declining life expectancy in red areas is due to red state culture, which of course is not true either.
It is just possible that the reason that a lot of red states are voting red is because they are trying to cling to some form of institution That is going to fill in the gap that is being left by the economy.
In other words, as people move to blue cities in order to get jobs, as the economy stagnates in a lot of red states, people are saying we need to fill the social gap with something that is going to provide us a sense of meaning.
We need a restoration of a certain sense of social morality the left ripped away over the course of decades.
The reason that comes up is because Paul Krugman has an awful column today in the New York Times.
It's incredibly simplistic and statistically Illiterate basically in which Paul Krugman suggests that life expectancy is declining in red states And it's increasing in blue states, and this is due to red state and blue state governance as we'll see in just a second That does not make a whole hell of a lot of sense so Paul Krugman says his column is titled America's red state death trip now again Let me just point out if you are going to attribute
The declining life expectancy in red states and rising life expectancy in blue states to governance itself, then you would also have to attribute, presumably, income inequality in blue areas that is rising steadily and faster than in red areas to liberal governance.
So which is it?
Or is it possible that both of these trends are being driven by broad national trends, not by local governance?
That the problem of life expectancy is not being driven by the governance in Georgia any more than the problem of income inequality is being driven by policy in New York.
Things around the fringes that can exacerbate these problems, obviously.
If you are in New York, for example, and you create rent control policies that basically prevent new building, this is going to increase the price of rent over time, and what you're going to end up with is more people living on the street.
There are policies you can take that are going to exacerbate the problem, but the underlying trends are actually broader, and everybody is struggling to deal with them.
So simplistically boxing this into life expectancy going down in red states because red states are badly governed, Or income inequality going up in blue states because blue states are badly governed?
This is ignoring the underlying trend and what exactly is driving all of this.
So Paul Krugman, being kind of a fool, does exactly this.
He has a piece today, as I say, titled, America's Red State Death Trip.
He says, E pluribus unum, out of many one, is one of America's traditional mottos.
And you might think it would be reflected in reality.
We aren't, after all, just united politically.
We share a common language.
The unrestricted movement of goods, services, and people is guaranteed by the Constitution.
Shouldn't this lead to convergence in the way we live and think?
In fact, however, the past few decades have been marked by growing divergence among regions, along several dimensions, all closely correlated.
In particular, the political divide is also increasingly an economic divide.
Well, I think that it is also fair to say that the economic divide is also increasingly a political divide.
So, the arrow of causality may run either way.
What Krugman is trying to say is because you're a red state, you're backward.
Well, maybe it's possible that because red states are being left behind economically in a lot of ways, because everybody's moving to major metro areas, that that is causing people to vote for Republican policies in order to allow them the opportunity to grow economically.
If you vote for big state policies, what you end up doing is actually driving down your opportunity in those states, so it's people who are voting their own interests.
And there's this peculiar idea on the left that if you vote Republican, you're always voting against your own interests if you are not wealthy.
And this is something that's put forward by Thomas Frank in a book called What's the Matter with Kansas?
And it's idiocy.
Maybe people are voting in their economic interests, they just don't perceive their economic interests in the same way that Thomas Frank does.
And maybe they also perceive that their economic interests are tied very closely into their social interests.
And that having a left that crams down social policy, that cuts against church, that cuts against family, is quite bad for their local community.
And as we'll see, that is actually the trend.
What we are actually seeing right now is two trends in the United States.
One is economically leading to greater income inequality, which again, I've never seen income inequality itself as a huge problem, simply because if everybody's GDP per capita is growing, meaning if you are earning more than you did last year, not per capita, right?
If you are earning more than you did last year, why do you care that somebody else is earning more than they did last year at a greater rate than you are?
I mean, that's just pure jealousy.
But if we are concerned with income inequality, then our new knowledge-based economy is creating a sort of bubble, an income inequality bubble.
And at the same time, we are a quickly secularizing country.
And those two things are not going to hit everybody equally.
They're not going to hit every area equally.
The income inequality bubble is going to hit specifically the areas where income is the highest, right?
Which would be the big cities.
And the social policy bubble is going to hit those areas specifically that in the past were reliant on social institutions like churches and marriage, and now no longer are engaging in those sorts of activities.
I'll explain in just one minute.
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Okay, so Paul Krugman continues, and he suggests, of course, that red and blue voters are moving in different directions in terms of life expectancy, and he tries to blame that on Republican policy.
Krugman says, Democratic-leaning areas used to look similar to Republican-leaning areas in terms of productivity, income, and education, but they've been rapidly diverging, with blue areas getting more productive, richer, and better educated.
In the close presidential election of 2000, counties that supported Al Gore over George W. Bush accounted for only a little over half the nation's economic output.
In the close election of 2016, counties that supported Hillary Clinton accounted for 64% of output, almost twice the share of Trump country.
Now, do you think that is due to great liberal governance, or do you think that that is due to the shift away from manufacturing, the shift toward a service and knowledge-based economy that thrives in major cities like San Jose?
The economic trends in the United States are toward big cities.
That is why people are moving to big cities.
It's why the migration patterns are all toward big cities.
But, says Paul Krugman, the thing is, the red-blue divide isn't just about money.
It's also increasingly a matter of life and death.
And here's where Krugman goes way off the rails, suggesting that if you live in a red area, you're gonna die.
If you live in a blue area, you're gonna live.
People ought to shift their areas red to blue, and then they will live.
Somehow voting for Democrats is finding the well of eternal life.
He says, back in the Bush years, I used to encourage people, encounter people who insisted the U.S.
had the world's longest life expectancy.
They hadn't looked at the data.
They just assumed America was number one on everything.
Even then, it wasn't true.
The U.S.
life expectancy has been below that of other advanced countries for a long time.
Okay, even there, he is neglecting to take out of the system homicide and car accident death and suicide, which does actually put the United States number one in life expectancy last time I checked.
In any case, he says, The death cap has, however, widened considerably in recent years as a result of increased mortality among working-age Americans.
This rise in mortality has, in turn, been largely a result of rising deaths of despair, drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol.
The rise in these deaths has led to declining overall life expectancy for the past few years.
But then he analyzes the states, and what he finds is the divergence among states is striking.
He says, I looked at states that voted for Donald Trump versus states that voted for Clinton in 2016 and calculated average life expectancy weighted by their 2016 population.
In 1990, today's red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy.
Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries compared with almost no gain in Trump country.
At this point, blue state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red state counterparts.
Okay, what he's trying to do is point the arrow the wrong way.
And this is a very obvious statistical trick that he's playing, right?
He is suggesting At the states that are red in 2016, if you go back to 1990, they were pretty equal in life expectancy, but now there's been this big divergent gap.
There is only one problem.
If you look at the 1992 presidential election, not the 2016 presidential election, you'll be including states that have been hit extremely hard by the opioid epidemic, and the states that have been hit hard by suicide and by economic stagnation.
States like Ohio and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan, right?
Those states have been increasingly cutting in a Trump direction since 1992.
So in other words, it was not red state governance that preceded the problem.
It was the problem that preceded red state governance.
It was the problem that preceded red state voting.
Those problems made people vote more Republican.
Why?
Because they were looking for a rebuilding of a social fabric, as we'll explain.
Paul Krugman's entire column is directed toward the idea that it's not rising secularism, it's not social liberalism, it is just that red states haven't expanded Medicaid or something.
But of course, that's not the case.
That doesn't explain things like suicide and the opioid epidemic, because Medicaid doesn't do anything about suicide.
Increasing Medicaid has no correlation with the rates of suicide in a particular community.
And in fact, nobody even knows really why suicide happens or how to chart suicide.
I mean, there have been fairly significant studies done on significant racial differences in suicide if it were simply a case of despair or being victimized by the American system.
Or cultural values, then suicide patterns make no sense.
I mean, like, take for example racial suicide statistics.
Black folks in the United States do not commit suicide.
White folks in the United States absolutely commit suicide at an exorbitant rate.
So what is that about?
Nobody really knows the answer to any of that.
But Paul Krugman basically just chalks all of this up to Republican politics.
And then I love this.
He sort of sidelines the one factor that is pretty obvious.
He says, there's been a striking divergence in behavior and lifestyle that must be affecting mortality.
For example, the prevalence of obesity has soared across all America since 1990, but obesity rates are significantly higher in red states.
Okay, so is the suggestion that conservatism leads to being fat?
Because you're going to have to explain that one.
But, says Krugman, really what this is, it shows that William Barr, the Attorney General, is not telling the truth when he talks about the evil machinations of militant secularists, because people who are conservative have suggested that the big problem in the United States with regard to lowered life expectancy and increased mortality rate, that that is largely due to secularizing values.
And Krugman says, well, if that's true, then why exactly are these rates rising in red states?
And the answer is, because these policies are actually disproportionately affecting people in red states, because people in red states are disproportionately not in the major growing metropolitan areas.
Hey, that's the actual answer to this question.
Yes, economics is tied to social policy, but liberal social policy combined with a weaker economy leads to deaths of despair.
It leads to social stagnation.
It leads to a lack of social networking that allows people to rise from poverty.
So these two phenomenon in the end are tied together because they are indeed broad national trends.
So I'm not talking about city policy in New York.
I'm talking about overall policy in the United States.
Now we can talk about the economic policy in the United States, whether it is good or bad, that has led to this increasing divergence between sort of the what people have termed the IQ economy and the manufacturing economy.
In other words, the Intellectual capital economy, the San Jose's and the Silicon Valley's of the world and the New York finance capital of the world kind of stuff and the manufacturing base.
We can talk about trade policy, whether we ever should have cut a deal with China in order to open up trading.
Again, I think statistics show that it was good for the United States.
I think the best case for cutting off trade with China is actually to damage China, not to help the United States.
Free trade generally benefits both parties, but that does not mean they're not certain areas that are left behind.
But with that said, if we are talking about the impact of social policy, social policy does not trickle down evenly.
Social policy does not trickle down evenly.
People who are economically successful can afford more mistakes than people who are economically non-successful.
Areas that are more economically benefited are areas that are going to be able to survive social liberal policy better, but also those tend to be areas where people don't actually live the way they preach.
And that is the really deep point here, is that the blue areas, many blue areas in the United States, the fact is that children out of wedlock in those areas, in many cases, is actually lower than in many red state areas where people are supposedly more religious.
I'll explain in just one second, because Charles Murray has done some heavy research on this sort of stuff, and we'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so again, Paul Krugman is attempting to make the argument over the New York Times that because suicide rates and opioid epidemic rates are rising in red states, that it is red state policy responsible for that, not social liberalism, not the liberalizing of social attitudes.
But this is not, in fact, true.
That is incredibly simplistic.
The reason it's so simplistic is because it ignores the fact that this divergence has been going on for years and is not merely a red state, blue state thing.
It's actually an urban, rural thing in many cases.
Charles Murray has been writing about this for years.
He wrote a great book called Coming Apart back in 2012.
And he had a piece in the Wall Street Journal specifically talking about all of this.
Back in 2012, right?
I mean, this is almost a decade ago now.
He said, people are starting to notice the great divide.
The Tea Party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line.
The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets.
Each is right about an aspect of the problem.
That problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality.
What we face now is a problem of cultural inequality.
He says, our common civic culture has unraveled.
We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations often obtained at elite schools sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America.
At the same time, we have developed a new lower class characterized not by poverty, but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
And Charles Murray puts together this model that he uses in his book, Coming Apart.
Two fictional neighborhoods.
He labels one Belmont, after an archetypical upper middle class suburb near Boston, and Fishtown, after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the revolution.
For purposes of clarity, Murray just did this research on white Americans, right?
So he couldn't be accused of any sort of racial bias in his research.
To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases that he drew from must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor, or content producer in media.
In other words, members of this IQ economy.
To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high school diploma.
If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.
People who qualify for the Belmont constituency are about 20% of the white population in the U.S.
as of 2012, age 30 to 49.
People who qualified for the Fishtown constituency were about 30% of the white population of the United States, age 30 to 49.
So here is what happened with a variety of factors leading up to between 1960 and 2010, right?
These are the broad social trends that I've been talking about.
These are the broad social trends that matter and they help explain the divergence in culture that's been happening in the United States They help explain the fact that there are a lot of red states that have been economically falling behind because they're not high-tech centers, for example, or because they're old manufacturing towns, and why their falling apart is only partially economic and cannot be solved simply by government interventionism top-down in blue-state areas, in a blue-state way.
So, here's what Charles Murray found.
On marriage, in 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married.
94% in Belmont.
Remember, Belmont is just a stand-in for sort of high-income, highly educated white folks in the United States.
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.
Okay, that is a massive, massive divergence in terms of marriage.
So, is that due to economics?
So some people like Tucker Carlson actually would argue yes, that is due to economics.
He would argue that because people lost manufacturing jobs and because women want men who earn more than they do, that women stops getting married to men and therefore marriage rates decline and so we have to somehow subsidize these manufacturing jobs to come back and that's going to fix the entire problem.
The problem is that that actually does not explain the statistical The facts is that the income among the so-called fishtowners here, the income is about the same in 2010 as it was in 1960.
So it really is not about that.
Charles Murray said, it's not that white working class males can no longer make a family wage that enables them to marry.
The average male employed in a working class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960.
And it's not that a bad job market led discouraged men to drop out of the labor force.
Labor force dropout increased just as fast during the boom years of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s as it did during bad years.
Instead...
According to Charles Murray, the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration and the divide between Belmont and Fishtown.
So to go back to that divide, and this is, again, the important divide that's happening in the United States, it explains a lot of the political divisions in the United States, the ripping away of core common values that have disproportionately affected areas that were reliant on those common values.
The fact is that if my synagogue disappeared in my community, the people who would be disproportionately affected in terms of their daily life are the people who are reliant on the social net that exists at my synagogue.
High-income earners would feel it in terms of not seeing people on Shabbat, but in terms of receiving charity, needing a handout, being able to reach out to other people, they would not feel it at all.
The people who would be hurt the most by the disappearance of the shul would be the people who are reliant on the shul for that social fabric.
There's a lot of ersatz social fabric that exists for high-income people, highly educated people, they associate with people from the office and from their colleges, but if you're living in an area where that social fabric does not exist, and then social liberalism undercuts all of the other institutions, the bottom falls out.
This is why Paul Krugman, he says, well, you haven't seen opioid epidemics and suicide rates increasing in Europe.
Yes, because people haven't been reliant on church for the last 70 years in Europe.
Okay, the decline in churchgoing in Europe has been going on for decades.
It is not a brand new thing in Europe.
In the United States, it is a fairly recent phenomenon, and as the bottom falls out, you are seeing people who are falling into a morass.
In just a second, I'm going to analyze a little bit more what Charles Murray talks about, the actual cultural divides that are undergirding the problem of unequal life expectancy decreases in the United States.
We'll get to all that in just one second.
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So talking about the gaps between sort of red state and blue state, which is mirrored in the Charles Murray gap between Belmont and Fishtown.
Belmont, of course, being those high income areas and Fishtown being sort of low income areas, less educated areas, manufacturing based areas.
We He's already talked about the marriage gap, which emerged in the 1980s and has completely diverged these two populations.
There's a massive single-parenthood gap.
Another aspect of marriage, the percentage of children born to unmarried women, showed just as great a divergence, said Charles Murray.
This is back as of 2012.
Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, non-marital births are problematic.
On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families.
In 1960, Just 2% of all white births were non-marital.
When we first started recording the education levels of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high school education, women with the Fishtown education, were out of wedlock.
By 2008, 44% were non-marital.
Among college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.
So that means that there is now a 38 point discrepancy between people who are high school educated, working those manufacturing jobs in Fishtown as opposed to white workers in Belmont.
But it's those people in Belmont who are preaching the social liberalism that has bled down to the lower levels and pushed the social policy that has actually incentivized that sort of behavior and that has had disproportionate impact.
This is also true of industriousness, according to Charles Murray.
The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same.
Healthy men are supposed to work.
In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere.
In Fishtown, the change has been drastic.
And just to clarify the data, the data that he's been using so far has been 1960 to 2010.
He cut off this data on work in March 2008 before the recession so that he was not comparing apples to oranges.
Charles Murray says, the primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness in the working class is the increase of prime age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work.
They're out of the labor force.
That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008.
12% may not sound like much until you think about the men we're talking about, men aged 30 to 49, when everybody is basically supposed to be working.
Of the men in Fishtown who had jobs, 10% worked fewer than 40 hours a week in 1960, a figure that grew to 20% by 2008.
In Belmont, the number rose from 9% in 1960 to 12% in 2008.
In other words, a lot of people are working a lot less in lower income areas.
Also, there's been a surge in crime in a lot of areas that are poorer.
Also in religiosity, right?
This is the big one, I think.
The decline in religiosity, again, contra Paul Krugman, the decline in religiosity has actually not affected people in upper income blue areas as much as it has people in lower income red areas.
This, by the way, was mirrored by data that suggested that Trump voters in red areas were actually less likely to go to church on a weekly basis than typical Republicans who were hesitant about Trump in 2016.
In other words, there was a lot of talk about religiosity going into the 2016 election, but the fact is, there were a lot of people who sort of overtly identified as religious but weren't spending an awful lot of time in church who voted for President Trump in 2016, which makes a lot of sense.
Again, these are people who feel like the social The social values that undergirded their lived experience were crumbling.
Their lives were falling apart before them because a lot of the institutions under assault by the left were being destroyed, and they were the people who felt it disproportionately.
If you went to church and you continued to go to church before Trump and after Trump, well, then Trump's presence in the White House made you feel more comfortable, but it didn't fundamentally change your life.
If, however, you were in an area that was dying, jobs were leaving, your church had fallen apart, and Trump came in promising to restore all of that, that was a huge deal.
Hey, when it comes to religiosity, you see the gap.
So here is what Charles Murray says.
He says, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S.
as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960.
It is especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont.
And again, this runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion.
But evidence from the General Social Survey and the most widely used databases on American attitudes and values does not leave much room for argument.
For example, suppose we define de facto secular as someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year.
For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 29% of Belmonts, again that's the upper income people, and 38% of Fishtown fell into that category.
Over the next three decades, secularization did indeed grow in Belmont from 29% in the 1970s to 40% in the GSS surveys taken from 2006 to 2010.
But a group even more in Fishtown, these low-income areas, from 38% to almost 60%.
Almost 60%.
This has led to wide variances in culture.
It's led to people eating different things.
It's led to people associating in different ways.
It's led to people vacationing in different places.
So Charles Murray points out that basically the two Americas narrative is very true and it's been increased over time by the destruction of exactly the social institutions that William Barr is worried about being destroyed.
So when Paul Krugman says, well, why are things so bad in the red states?
It's because In effect, nationalized policy across the United States, which has forced secularization and incentivized personally irresponsible behavior, has had a deeper impact in the areas that are less economically successful than in the areas that are economically successful, which is exactly what you would expect.
That is exactly what you would expect.
So, in the end, does it come down to policy?
At least in part, yes.
It comes down to social policy, and it also comes down to broad-based economic policies that disincentivize strong personal behavior.
Ross Douthat has a really good piece over at the New York Times today talking about the leftist view of marriage, the liberal view on marriage right now.
And it should be noted that Ross Douthat is much more of a government interventionist than I am.
He tends to believe the idea that if we just shore up those manufacturing wages that somehow marriage will increase in a lot of these red state areas.
I have a lot more doubt about that.
I think that the social change that has been wrought is not Fixable simply by putting more cash in people's pockets.
I think that it's actually the other way around.
I think if you make good marital decisions, you're more likely to be wealthy.
You're more likely to succeed in life.
So again, I think that the arrow is reversed.
The arrow of causality is being reversed here.
But here's the part of Ross Douthat's column that's really interesting.
He says, To be extremely impressionistic, I would divide the modern progressive approach to marriage into three distinct phases.
In the first phase, which covers the 1960s through the 1980s, there was a clear liberal-led attack on the institutional form of marriage as it existed then, on the legal and cultural structure that privileged heterosexual wedlock, pushed couples towards its rules and rituals, and then constrained them from divorce.
This assault was undertaken in a spirit of social optimism, in the name of personal empowerment, and eventually, female equality, and infused with the confidence that the old legal and moral structures were simply oppressive.
The second phase I'd call the period of reconsideration, in which liberals continue to believe that the core legal and social changes from the 60s and 70s had been necessary and just, but increasingly acknowledged that the larger cultural revolution had incurred significant costs.
Liberals in this period continue to support no-fault divorce and legal abortion, continue to regard sexual fulfillment as an essential good, and premarital chastity as an unrealistic ideal.
But from the Dan Quayle was right arguments of the early 1990s onward, they also conceded that marriage is probably generally better for kids, and maybe especially boys, that monogamy is often preferable to promiscuity, and divorce is often undesirable, that welfare policy shouldn't discourage wedlock, and should maybe even encourage it, and that the declines of marriage at least contributed to the post-1960s struggles of the working class.
He says, says Douthat, he says, I think that this liberalism of nuance had pretty serious limits.
In particularly, it's favored models of marriage as a capstone on long periods of professional development and sexual exploration, rather than as a foundation for adulthood and a home for adult sexuality, was linked inextricably to the educated class's privilege and ambitious self-control and didn't work as well outside the precincts of the meritocracy.
In other words, Douthat is saying that your rejiggered version of marriage does not work for people who are living in Fishtown.
But, says Douthat, notwithstanding its blind spots, this liberal worldview was and is essentially pro-marriage in the sense of believing it's good for society to have a single normative destination to which most couples arrive.
Over the last 10 years, however, and again, I acknowledge this is impressionistic, says Douthat, I think we've reached a third phase in liberal attitudes towards marriage, a new outworking of cultural individualism that may eventually render the nuanced liberalism that my colleagues describe obsolete.
This new phase is incomplete and contested.
It includes elements in MeToo feminism, especially, whose ultimate valence could theoretically be congenial to cultural conservatives, but in general, The emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism, but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside of a bureaucratically supervised definition of consent.
In other words, there is no norm that dictates toward marriage or heterosexual monogamy or having children in the confines of marriage.
Douthat says, This new view of marriage is disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many.
One script to play with or abandon.
One way of being whose decline should not necessarily be mourned.
And whose still outsized cultural power probably requires further deconstruction to be anything more than a patriarchal holdover, a prison, and a trap.
He says, it does not feel like a coincidence this new phase tracks with the recent decline in childbearing.
If the new liberal hostility to marriage as normative institution is not one of the ideological causes of our latest post-familial ratchet, it is at least a post-facto ideological excuse in which the frequent prestige media pitches for polyamory or open marriages or escaping gender norms entirely are there to reassure people who might otherwise desire a little more normativity and a few more children in their lives and that it's all cool because they're in the vanguard of a revolution.
Okay, Douthat is entirely correct about all of this.
He's entirely correct about all of this.
And so if you wonder why the culture wars matter so much, this is why the culture wars matter so much.
And I present to you as exhibit A in the pitch that the left is making.
This article from yesterday in the New York Times by an associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, by Bradley Onishi, saying, could I be my own soulmate?
Are you your own soulmate?
The article describes Emily Watson, the actress, and Lizzo, the rapper and flautist, Who are both saying that they are their own one, that they are self-coupling.
This religion professor, Onishi, he says, for most people, the idea of self-coupling may be jarring, but a closer look might reveal it to be more of an endpoint of a trend.
Marriage rates have been declining steadily since the 1970s.
Many of us are dating more, but somehow going on fewer dates.
Sex is safer and less burdened with shame than in the past, and seemingly more available, but we're having less of it than we were a generation ago.
Despite all these mixed signals, most of us are still looking for the one.
He says, according to Stephanie Kuntz, author of the 2005 book Marriage A History, finding the one used to be about completion.
In the 19th century, the rise of the market economy divided the sexes, men into the world of breadwinning work and women into that of unpaid domestic labor.
When these two spheres were brought together in marriage, Ms.
Kuntz wrote, they produced a perfect, well-rounded whole.
That's ignoring, you know, the several thousand years before that, where marriage was actually a pretty congenial relationship.
This approach to partnership, wherein two members of opposite sex complete each other, was essentially religious in origin, complementarianism for the theologians out there, a well-known example being the biblical adage that two shall become one.
It also recalls Plato's Symposium, one of the earliest purveyors of the social mate myth, where the comic poet Aristophanes explains that humans were once united in pairs, but then were split into unhappy halves by Zeus.
The ideal of completion harkens to a time when women were economically and socially dependent on men, and marriage was reserved for heterosexual couples today.
Says this columnist, instead of a life-defining relationship, many of us now see a partnership as one part of a puzzle that includes a career, family, a social life, personal wellness, volunteer work, and creative or recreational outlets.
A relationship is not the foundation of selfhood, but only a piece.
This is exactly what Douthat is talking about.
The redefinition of marriage into one choice among many, just something that you do if you feel like it.
The problem is, That that may work for a very, I would say very, very limited coterie of people who read the New York Times.
It does not work broadly across the United States, but our cultural institutions are all nationalized.
Hollywood is nationalized.
Netflix is nationalized.
The New York Times is nationalized.
Facebook is nationalized.
And that means that the social bleed over effect, the social trickle down effect of leftist social policy, which by the way is not even engaged in by people at the upper echelons in places like New York and California.
One of the peculiar things you will find about Hollywood It's the same people who are routinely preaching the virtues of bleeding edge social leftism.
Get rid of marriage, have any relationship you want, open marriages, polyamory.
Those same people tend to get married at higher rates than a lot of people who are actually not living in those areas.
And they tend not to have kids out of wedlock, particularly a lot.
And if they do have kids out of wedlock they can afford it because they're very wealthy.
Okay, so those social messages do not apply equally to everyone.
In other words, just as with every other policy in human life, not all policies affect everybody equally.
The fact that folks on the left seem to think that policies undertaken by liberal elites over at the New York Times or in Hollywood, that those policies affect people in downtrodden economic areas the same way that they do in upper elite establishments that discarded religion as a social fabric decades ago, just demonstrates a tremendous level of ignorance.
So trying to reshift these definitions of fundamental institutions, that is indeed creating a A phenomenon in which the United States is dividing.
So these two phenomena, income inequality, the changes in the economy, and the bleed over of social liberalism, this is leading to a toxic brew.
Now, there are people on the right and the left who think that the way to fix this is to fix the economic side.
The way you're going to do this is with redistributionism.
You've got Andrew Yang proposing universal basic income on the Democratic side, or you have people like, as I've said, Tucker Carlson, talking about regulating out of existence, self-driving cars, stopping economic progress, limiting trade, bringing back all these jobs to manufacturing areas, as though that's ever really going to happen.
I have serious doubts about that, considering that technology has basically put a lot of these jobs out of commission.
And then there is the stuff that is actually in the control of the people who are living today.
And that is making the next right decision.
That is making the right decision.
The fact is that there are certain factors in your life that are fundamentally going to guarantee that you have a better shot at life.
Finishing high school, not having kids out of wedlock, getting married.
These things actually change your life in ways for the better.
And the fact that our culture is so focused in on a sort of Marxist materialism in which if we solve your economic circumstance that this will solve all of your other problems.
This is not right.
This is not right.
Solving the problem of making right and moral decisions that better your life, that is how your life gets better.
And that means taking seriously the fundamental social institutions that have been broken by the left since the 1960s, focusing on restoring those, because those are things you can do, not things that you have to wait for some government savior to do.
And by the way, those government saviors, they ain't showing up.
Again, income inequality is breaking out in major blue cities, where they've gotten rid of the social institutions, and where the ladder to success doesn't exist even for the underclass in those cities themselves.
Forget about red areas versus blue areas, in the cities themselves.
You need a restoration of personal responsibility in order to lead to a restoration of the ladder to success that does exist for people who make the best possible decisions.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
So things that I like today.
So I know there's a lot of heavy material.
Here's some light material.
There's a, as you know, I love baseball books.
There's a good baseball book by Kevin Reedy and Ryan Spader.
It's a lot of fun called Incredible Baseball Stats.
Great, great bathroom book.
The coolest, strangest stats and facts in baseball history.
And it summarizes sort of most interesting stats for every baseball team.
So if you're a baseball fan, check it out.
Incredible Baseball Stats by Kevin Reavy and Ryan Spader.
If you're not a baseball fan, well, deal with it.
I'll have a different thing I like tomorrow.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so I'm very friendly with Tucker Carlson.
I think Tucker is a really good guy.
I've had Tucker on the Sunday special.
Something that Tucker keeps saying, and it's driving me a little bit up a wall, and I just have to point this out.
Tucker keeps saying on his show that we should side with Russia against Ukraine.
I don't...
Understand why he is saying this.
Russia is in fact a tyrannical state run by a KGB operative who would like to see the restoration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine for all of its corruption and all of its problems is not that.
It is a country that is attempting to westernize And as a country that is attempting to be integrated into the European Union, the idea that we should side with Russia as it makes territorial incursions into surrounding areas is a bizarre one.
This is the second time in like two weeks that Tucker has sort of suggested this thing.
The first time he walked it back a little bit and said he was joking.
This time he did not.
Here is Tucker suggesting that Vladimir Putin, for all his faults, doesn't hate the U.S.
the way that some in the media do.
That is highly questionable considering, again, that Vladimir Putin has suggested that he'd like to go back to the days of the Cold War in which The USSR was directly pitted against the power of the United States.
Chuck Todd and the rest of the dummies, Vladimir Putin isn't a real person with actual ideas and priorities in a country and beliefs.
No, he stopped being that long ago.
He's a metaphor, a living metaphor.
He's the boogeyman.
Step out of line and you're a traitor in the league with Vladimir Putin.
Let's put his picture on the screen.
Can we get his picture on the screen?
Yeah, please.
The irony, of course, is that Putin, for all his faults, does not hate America as much as many of these people do.
Okay, mmm, yeah.
I mean, that last line, I'm gonna go no on that.
Again, that was a member of the KGB.
And then Tucker, on the same show, urged the United States to take sides with Russia over Ukraine while talking with Representative Jim Jordan.
Here was that.
I loved your monologue.
I think you nailed it exactly right.
I mean, I should say, for the record, I'm totally opposed to these sanctions.
And I don't think that we should be at war with Russia.
And I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.
That is my view.
But even if you disagree with that, tell me why.
My point is, it can't be both.
I mean, so look, you got this president.
Okay, so again, the context for this discussion is the discussion about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and all the rest of it, but you don't have to side with Russia in order to point out that Ukrainian interference from the Ukrainian embassy to Alexander Chalupa with regard to the DNC, that that was a bad thing.
Two things can be true at once.
Ukraine trying to militate in favor of Hillary Clinton was a bad thing, was a bad thing.
Also, Russia is an extraordinarily nefarious force in today's world.
They are incredibly aggressive.
They have an economy that is collapsing in on itself right now, which means that Vladimir Putin has to get more aggressive.
They have a serious demographic crisis because they just didn't have babies for years, and now they have this heavy state burden that is not being borne by anybody, which means, typically, that they're gonna have to get aggressive on the extraterritorial front.
They're going to have to endanger NATO allies.
Siding with Russia over Ukraine, I mean, that's some pretty wild stuff right there from Tucker.
And again, I appreciate what Tucker does.
I think that Tucker is a great fighter against the hardcore left, but that is... I have nothing to say there except that that is a horrible idea.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today for two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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