Governor Mitch Daniels and Charles Murray, the F.A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute discuss the changing landscape of achievement in America, the widening gap between classes, and the interplay of liberty, responsibility, and self-respect.
Governor Mitch Daniels and Charles Murray, the F.A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute discuss the changing landscape of achievement in America, the widening gap between classes, and the interplay of liberty, responsibility, and self-respect.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:17):
Greetings to all within earshot, and welcome to the latest, and to me the most exciting to date, edition of the Future of Liberty podcasts. Our guest today is someone from whom I have learned so much, someone I have admired greatly, and someone from whom society has benefited as much as any social scientist I can name. He is, I believe, our premier practitioner in that discipline. No one I know has been more broadly inquisitive or more effective in shaping not just opinion but actual public policy. I struggle to think of anyone with similar impact, perhaps James Q. Wilson before him, but in our day, on questions of poverty, cultural capital, education, liberty, and the meaning of libertarianism, he stands alone. We are so privileged to be joined today by the inimitable Charles Murray. Charles, thank you for being with us.
Charles Murray (01:25):
Mitch, you are more than kind. That's extraordinary. Thank you so much.
Mitch Daniels (01:30):
I should have gone on longer. So you found yourself at Harvard University, but you didn't get there in what was certainly not then a conventional way. You came from the thriving cosmopolitan metropolis of Newton, Iowa.
Charles Murray (01:45):
That's right.
Mitch Daniels (01:46):
How does a boy from Newton wind up at Harvard?
Charles Murray (01:52):
I was an example of what was going on all over the country, even though I didn't realize it. If I'd grown up 20 years earlier, it would've never crossed my mind, I would've gone to Iowa State or Iowa University. By the time of the mid-50s, there were articles about Harvard that a guy like me in Newton would read about and I said, "That sounds really great." And so I applied out of nowhere. My parents were kind of startled because both my older sisters had gone to Iowa State, but they were supportive. I got a high SAT score, and I'd been a high school debater who'd won some awards, and so I got in.
Mitch Daniels (02:35):
I noticed that in moments of candor, first of all, you admitted to being a somewhat rebellious youth, which may not have found its way into your Harvard application, but apparently, didn't keep you out.
Charles Murray (02:48):
I looked good on paper in terms of my suitability for Harvard.
Mitch Daniels (02:54):
The SAT was an interesting side note. I had read at one point you attributed your admittance to Harvard to that merit-based test, it's a very topical thing these days. Later on, I saw that you expressed doubts about it because of the way that some more fortunate young people have been able to be trained or somehow game the system. It's a very current topic today when a lot of schools went away from it and now are rediscovering it. What do you think these days?
Charles Murray (03:35):
Well, the test was always good. The test was terrific and it was created exactly for kids in Newton, Iowa. We didn't go to Andover or Exeter, we didn't have any influential parents or other kinds of people who would get us in, that test score was to let Harvard, Yale, and Princeton know, "Hey, I'm pretty smart." It served that function and continued to serve it. What happened, Mitch, by the 2000s, is it had become so much of an emblem of who you are, that it was kind of a flaunting of your SAT score if you got a high one. At that point, I said, "You know what? I want to try to get rid of the glamour associated with the SAT." It turns out that if you just gave achievement tests, if I'd taken the equivalent of advanced placement course tests in high school in Newton, Iowa, I would've done pretty well even though the education wasn't that great because I'd done so much reading on my own. So later in life, I said, "Let's substitute achievement tests for the SAT just because of the optics of the situation."
Mitch Daniels (04:51):
Yeah, and I was curious, having spent a decade at a university, we never went away from the SAT, but it was a lonely position for a while. We kept looking at the data, which was very clear that it was a necessary factor in predicting eventual success of a student. It's been interesting to see many of the schools who retreated from it, now, as I say, rediscovering it.
Charles Murray (05:16):
Well, could I just add something here? You know who is really hurt by getting rid of the SAT? It’s the kids who truly couldn’t hack it at Purdue. If they get admitted and then discover they are the least prepared in the class and can’t keep up, that is not a good experience. It is an incredibly destructive one. And the SAT is a useful way of helping to prevent that.
Mitch Daniels (05:40):
Charles, I suppose most people first came to know your groundbreaking work, now a few decades old, on poverty. There has been both progress and regress on that subject, I might add. Your book Losing Ground actually led, in a way that not many such works, whatever their scholarly merit, do to very tangible and major changes in policy. That must have been a source of some satisfaction to you, at least while it lasted. Did you expect that sort of impact?
Charles Murray (06:27):
Okay, it's time for a little candor here, and that is that even though people like to give me credit for something like the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, what they did wasn't what I considered to be the important thing, I was in favor of some of the things they did, and the work requirements, those were all good, but what really happened with social policy that I was criticizing in Losing Ground was that we had taken away a lot of the stuff of life from young people, poor young people, poor communities, low income communities. We had taken a part of the population that had previously been considered kind of the spine of America, working class America, that was the heart of the country. In 1960, if you were a man who was holding down a job supporting a wife and a couple of kids, putting a roof over their heads, you could be working at a menial job and you had standing in your community, you had respect.
(07:52):
People would say, "Well, we may not have much money, but we've never taken a penny of welfare from anybody." That was a source of enormous pride. The real problem with social policy was that it destroyed that whole world.
Mitch Daniels (08:10):
No, you have said this very eloquently in many ways. One of the most striking lines was from In Pursuit of Happiness: government social insurance has led to incalculable human suffering. That is a remarkable statement, especially when its proponents claim it is meant to do exactly the opposite.
Charles Murray (08:37):
Well, and the most obvious example of that comes with family formation, and here's where I think people just don't want to face reality, most people agree now that a two-parent family is a big deal for raising kids. It's an important thing, it's an extremely valuable thing. Kids need that father in the house as well as the mother. That's a good thing. Then you have to ask yourself, how is it that in the United States, from the founding until the 1960s, that the overwhelming majority of children were born to two parents, and two parents who stayed married. How come it stopped happening? The truth is that you have a couple of things going on. One is that for males, getting married and taking care of your kids was how you proved you were a man.
(09:36):
And if you didn't do that, your parents, your siblings, and your male friends considered you a bum, if you didn't do that. For the women, and here's where people really hate it, the sticks were huge. You got pregnant without a husband, and social stigma, economic hardship, you name it, it was extremely painful. We lifted a lot of the pain from women who got in that situation, and we also took away a culture that applauded men who did their job. The combination of the two, which was fostered by the social welfare system, has produced enormous suffering among America's children.
Mitch Daniels (10:24):
Let’s practice a little amateur psychology. In your case, it will not be amateurish. I am fascinated by the people who, in the face of what you just described, now thoroughly documented, continue to resist the implications. I have often said that the evidence about two parent families is the single most emphatically proven contention in the world of social science, across the spectrum, including even recently from some left leaning scholars. People keep finding exactly what you just said. And yet work requirements, for instance, were undone as soon as different people came to power. You wrote, I thought, very interestingly, that one problem in getting this right is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever actually been poor.
Charles Murray (11:25):
Mitch, I don't know about your family history, but I think I'm the first in my line of Murray men who doesn't know how to farm. My father wasn't a farmer, but he grew up in a farm family, and he knew how to farm, and he grew up in what would today be considered poverty. So did my mother. I'm sure that there are Daniels's in your line who were pretty poor pretty recently. So you knew what that was like, and you knew it's not the end of the world as long as you have your dignity and you're able to put together an okay material existence.
(12:03):
But if you've never experienced that, if your parents and your grandparents have all been upper middle class, poverty is really scary. It's also a mysterious land, worst of all, it has people who you are likely to look down on. Now, I will be candid here too, if they're white, you are likely to look down on them. If they're poor Blacks and you are on the left, you are likely to be secretly condescending toward them, not expect from them what you would expect ordinarily from a white person. These are facts of the way that we have perceived poverty that I think are too seldom said explicitly.
Mitch Daniels (13:03):
That bridges directly to another topic, another phenomenon which you identified, as far as I'm concerned, ahead of almost anyone else, we've come to describe it as tribalism, but the separation, the emergence of a new aristocracy, the very people you just described. Let me ask you about a couple of things you've said about this new class, one was that, "Today's privileged enjoy one relationship with the government, while the peasants endure another." That's a provocative line, but embroider on that a little bit.
Charles Murray (13:49):
You and I, we get irritated at the government because, in my case, I was trying to repair the dam in a little pond we have in our backyard, and I had to go through the regulatory state and it cost 10 times as much as it should have been, 10 times as long, but I've got the resources to deal with that. If you are a guy who's running a plumbing business and you have to jump through all these hoops all the time that make it very difficult for you, you have a very different relationship, it's much more oppressive to you than it is to the others. Basically, those in the new upper class, as I call them, can shield themselves from a lot of the nonsense of the government. The less money you have, the less education you have, the harder it is.
Mitch Daniels (14:41):
Another line, and I don't recall which of your books it appears in, but it stuck with me from the moment I read it, you wrote somewhere that, "It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot understand the life and difficulties of a Harvard professor, it is a problem if a Harvard professor can't understand the problems of a truck driver."
Charles Murray (15:08):
Yeah, because the Harvard professor, if he is in the social sciences and giving advice to Democratic senators, is making up policies and rules without the slightest idea of what the indirect effects might be. You can directly link that ignorance about what ordinary life is like for ordinary Americans to some really unwise things the government has done. I would say, for example, that gutting the work requirements for receiving welfare as soon as they could is one of those cases. When I said a few minutes ago that there is something really important about being able to say, “We may be poor, but we have never taken a penny from anyone,” I don’t think the Harvard professor understands what that means for a person’s sense of self-worth.
Mitch Daniels (16:07):
No, a lot of people finally learned to use the vocabulary of dignity and association with work, but their policies haven't stopped frustrating and impeding it.
Charles Murray (16:24):
Because they do not want to face the fact that dignity cannot be conferred on anyone, it must be earned. There's no choice, you can perhaps have self-esteem if enough people tell you what a wonderful governor you were, and if enough people tell me what wonderful books I've written, I could feel good about that. Self-respect absolutely depends on having earned that, and that internal voice knows the difference.
Mitch Daniels (16:58):
Our friend, Arthur Brooks, has done a lot of work, of course, on what leads to happiness, the happiness the government should enable us to pursue but cannot deliver to us, as you frequently pointed out, and earned success is his two-word formula.
Charles Murray (17:21):
I think Arthur would acknowledge that In Pursuit, is maybe where he got that earned success, and then he took it, ran with it, and developed it, and has made it a very powerful shorthand way of talking about what I said in a much more elliptical way.
Mitch Daniels (17:43):
He's one of many of us who consciously or subconsciously employ Murrayisms in what we do and how we think. Quickly, in your lecture in '09, the Kristol lecture, the most prestigious one that American Enterprise Institute sponsors, you made the statement that the center of society is okay, it's the top and the bottom that are the problem. How do you feel about the center today?
Charles Murray (18:23):
I am hesitating here because we have problems in 2024 that we did not have in 2009. The degree to which you have had what you referred to as tribalism take over in the last decade plus, maybe the last 15 years, has led to a kind of alienation in this country between what I was referring to as the center and the upper class, an alienation far greater than I would have imagined possible in 2009. Now, the empirical answer to your question about how the center is doing is that it is not doing so well. You have many of the same problems with family formation in the middle class that you see in the working class. You have problems with men not being in the labor force. You can run through a lot of indicators showing that the center is not doing nearly as well now as it was then. The question that preoccupies me now is where we go from here over the next half dozen years. I think that, again, I am hesitating because I do not want to sound like a catastrophist, but I am extremely worried about where things are heading.
Mitch Daniels (19:59):
Well, maybe we can come back to that in a sort of more temporal way toward the end. Before we leave this subject, I wanted to ask you, you made an interesting speculation, loosely speaking, where you were talking about many of the baby boom generation, all the good breaks that people my age have had. You speculated that late in life, they might feel a sense of embarrassment or even shame about that and it might lead them to having a slightly different view of public policy than the one they grew up with back when they thought we had fixed the environment, solved civil rights, and invented sex. Do you see any evidence now of second thoughts like that, or was that just wishful thinking?
Charles Murray (20:53):
The baby boomers and the affluent baby boomers are the new upper class, the weird thing is that in the way they behave, they seem to have learned their lesson. So the same kids who were saying, "Don't trust anybody over 30," in the 1960s have to a large degree, gotten married, stayed married, maybe it's the second marriage that they stuck instead of the first one, as in my case, but they've been married now happily for a long time, and they have spent a lot of time with their kids, and they've done everything right, they've worked hard, and they won't preach it, they won't say out loud, "You know what? I have learned that a satisfying life consists of engagement with family, community, and faith," and I really think that more people need to adopt this way of looking at the world. They don't say that, they refuse to say something as simple publicly as, "You know, you should get married before you have kids."
Mitch Daniels (22:01):
Yeah. Well, that would be judgmental.
Charles Murray (22:05):
That would be judgmental.
Mitch Daniels (22:06):
We can't be judgmental except about those we deem judgmental. Yeah.
Charles Murray (22:11):
Yeah. You can't be judgmental of anybody except right-wingers.
Mitch Daniels (22:23):
We just mentioned kids and their education, a small book you wrote, which I treasure, and maybe fewer people have seen than some of the others. I think it's called Real Education, but in any event, you simply laid out four simple maxims that I'd just like you to review with the audience here. And the first was that, "Ability varies." Now, there's a stunning statement, come on, Maria, defend that.
Charles Murray (22:58):
Told you it was simple. It's very difficult to get anybody involved in education to say that. Whereas, you cannot be a teacher and have taught more than two days in any classroom, before you know the kids in that room have widely varying abilities. You also know that there's not that much you can do to change the abilities. You can do your best to teach each kid, but you aren't going to change the abilities. Everybody knows this, nobody will say it. Again, when I say nobody, in education now, we have this fiction, this romantic fiction that any kid can be anything he wants to be if he puts his mind to it. Well, sorry, intellectually, that's not true, and it is punishing to say that to kids.
Mitch Daniels (23:54):
Yeah. During my last full-time stint, I banned the use of the word passion, it's a very misleading word. If you just care enough about something, the world's your oyster, and that can lead people to some real disappointments.
Charles Murray (24:12):
One of the problems with too many in the new upper class, whom I blame for quite a lot, is that they are pretty smart intellectually. And the problem is that they may have gone all the way through to their PhD without ever taking a class that forced them to say to themselves, “I am not smart enough to pass this course.” I did, because I was foolish enough to take some advanced math at MIT, and I had to drop out halfway through but that was very good for me. Everyone ought to understand that they have limits. Then they also have to understand that, yes, maybe you did not hit your limits until you tried to take a graduate math course. But a lot of kids hit those limits in grade school, and even more hit them in middle school and high school. We have to understand that it is appropriate to try to help each child get everything they can out of their various strengths, but you do not set them a task they are doomed to fail at.
Mitch Daniels (25:31):
Your second rule, which may be a corollary or maybe you're saying something slightly different, was, once again, a rather shocking assertion, "Half the children are below average." Now, this won't go down well in Lake Wobegon, but what were you saying?
Charles Murray (25:54):
I was basically saying what I was saying a little bit earlier, half the kids are below average, and that's true of any human quality. If you were a little boy and were below average in sports ability, as I was, you learn that in second grade when they're choosing teams and you get chosen last, and you deal with that. Well, the same thing applies intellectually. Our educational system has to understand that half the kids are below average and be structured accordingly, and it is not.
Mitch Daniels (26:33):
The third thing you said, and I think is very unusual, back when you wrote the book, was, "Too many kids are going to college."
Charles Murray (26:46):
Way too many, yes. You're right, there is one thing that we have seen a sea of change in is people's attitude toward that. I'm so happy to see it, but I don't want to be misunderstood, I think if you're talking about STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, that for careers in those, you need certain kinds of education that you're probably not going to get except at a good school with the right facilities and with really good teachers, and you need that, and you better go get that. I'm also in favor of a classic liberal education for those who want that, which means you have to read some really difficult books in the humanities and the social sciences and so forth, but that's a fairly limited number of people too. There are a lot of people who can get what they need out of post high school education in all sorts of much more flexible ways than a four-year residential college program. The good news is I think that's an idea whose time has come.
Mitch Daniels (27:57):
Well, I think it came about the time you wrote the book, and it's tragic that only now young people and their parents are waking up to this and looking at other alternatives. We have 40 million Americans out there who started college and didn't finish. It's where a huge part of the whole NASH of the student debt issue resides. Many of those people would've been much better served by choosing another path, but at the time, everybody in society was telling them, "No, no, no four-year degree."
Charles Murray (28:32):
The fact is that for a long time, it was thought that a BA was sort of a passport to being a respectable citizen. That's a recent phenomenon because back at the early part of the 20th century, you only had about 4 or 5% of the population that had BAs but by the early 2000s, that had become a necessity. And once again, we may be going in the right direction on this issue.
Mitch Daniels (29:01):
The last maxim was, I won't say everything but, "So much of societal and national success depends on how we prepare the truly gifted."
Charles Murray (29:16):
Yes, I can say a couple of things about that. First, let's be clear about the importance of that group. So let's take, for example, science, physics, and chemistry, the really hard sciences, and let's take a school like Caltech, which has gone wobbly in recent years, but formally, what Caltech did was it just admitted from the top down based on evidence of intellectual ability, we did not do holistic admissions. I've talked to people who've gone to Caltech, who have made an important point to me. They said, "Look, there are lots of guys who can become really good engineers, who will do great at Iowa State or Purdue, and it's also true that they shouldn't go to Caltech because there, you're dealing with a very rarefied level of talent." But then if you look at where the great advances have come from, in chemistry, physics, and biology, it has come from some extremely gifted individuals.
(30:31):
So it may not be fair they didn't earn this vast intellectual ability they have, but our obligation is to say, "These people are really important to our future, we need to hold their feet to the fire, we need to get all out of them that they can, and we need to do our very best to educate them to be good human beings." We have a few things that we need to do with the gifted, one, we need to identify them, we need to push them to their limits, but we also need to restore a function that elite universities used to take for granted, that they were supposed to be an important moral character influence on their kids, and that has been pretty much ignored in recent years.
Mitch Daniels (31:25):
So maybe it's not a good idea to abolish gifted and talented classes in our high schools?
Charles Murray (31:34):
I say, I don't mind if they get rid of them for the social sciences and the humanities, because a lot of these kids really do need to hang out with people who aren't as smart as they are. There's a lot to be said for if you're going to be in the policy sciences, you better know that truck driver but if you're talking STEM, that's where the gifted and talented are important.
Mitch Daniels (32:01):
Assuming, hopefully, that artificial intelligence is taking us in a positive direction as predecessor technologies have, I've asked people at the very front edge of that, now two or three times, and have always gotten the same answer. How many people in the world actually understand what you're doing and that you are creating these advances? Nobody, in the world, has ever given me a number beyond three digits.
Charles Murray (32:30):
Yes. It's not unlike the situation with quantum mechanics, where the famous statement is, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't.” There are other statistics which we've known for many years, which is that if you take a look at any scientific literature, an incredibly small proportion of the people in that field have contributed an incredibly large amount to the world.
Mitch Daniels (33:00):
You wrote a little book about libertarianism, which is maybe the guiding principle of the organization that you're gracing us with this conversation today here at the Liberty Fund. You summed it up, in a few simple words, you said, "Every human owns his own life." And rereading that, I asked myself, If I went out on the street I don't think too many people would disagree with that statement. But my question is, have we forgotten how to live that way or to insist that that's the case? What do you think?
Charles Murray (33:45):
Well, I'm going to invoke another statement that I like from that book, which is that, “Responsibility for the consequences of your actions is not the price of liberty, it's one of its rewards.” You own your own life, yes, and you should be allowed to live your life as you see fit. You are also obligated to take on all the responsibility for what you choose to do. If those two conditions apply, Mitch, you end up with the kind of community that we would all like to live in. Not one in which people are in isolated households, never talk to each other, you end up in a community that is vibrant, in which people are interacting with each other. They're also taking care of problems if the government hasn't already taken over all those functions for itself.
Mitch Daniels (34:44):
Agreed. Since this is all ultimately about the pursuit of happiness, we now know that people who don't enjoy that sort of interaction, don't enjoy that sense of community. Those people are distinctly unhappy. Everything I have seen and learned about in this eruption of depression, angst, and a sense of isolation all traces back to the loss of those qualities.
Charles Murray (35:18):
And In Pursuit, which is the book we were talking indirectly about earlier when we were talking about earned success,in that book, which I published in 1988, I talked about community, family, vocation, and I left out faith. At that time, I was aware that faith was very important to a lot of people, I was very secular, and I said, "Well, this is a book about policy, so I'm just going to leave out faith." I've since come to think of that as the fourth. Arthur Brooks emphasizes this now too, and I think he's right to do so, you add faith to that set. And it's not necessary to be happy and engaged in all four of those. There are happy atheists and there are happy single people and so forth, but I think you need to be engaged with at least three of them.
(36:19):
So where I think we have a problem among many people in the new upper class is that vocation has become too important, and they live in communities where people stay in their separate households and do not really interact much. I think you were correct in saying that there is an internal sense that they may be missing out on something, even if it is not articulated. I will add this: I lived in big cities throughout my adult life until 1989, when my wife and I moved to a place with 150 people. I cannot overemphasize how much richer it is to be embedded in a community like that than to live in an anonymous neighborhood in a big city.
Mitch Daniels (37:15):
You mentioned faith and religiosity. This is one of the values or virtues you examined in your really stunning work Coming Apart a few years ago, which had an enormous effect on so many of us. You looked at marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Now, with the perspective of a dozen years or so, is there anything to feel positive about? Every poll I see suggests that we have had a very precipitous drop in religiosity, for instance.
Charles Murray (37:58):
It's kind of strange, in my own life, my wife has been a very active Quaker for a long time and I have been tagged along in her wake, and religion has become much more important to me. I think about the organization I work for, which formerly had a president who was a devout Catholic, it now has a couple of other senior scholars who are devoutly religious. When I think of other examples where I say something strange may be going on among this new upper class I refer to, I think I would like to see a breakdown on the degree to which you have a resurgence of religiosity in one stratum, and possibly, an elite stratum, but what I'm afraid of is that you are getting that huge drop off down in the working class and the middle class.
(39:01):
And it is extremely worrisome because an awful lot follows from this. From a practical standpoint, this is what the founders recognized. They were deists, most of them children of the Enlightenment, and Benjamin Franklin, for example, did not go to church every Sunday. But they were extremely aware that you cannot have a free society or a limited government unless you have people who can govern themselves. Governing themselves requires morality, and it is greatly helped by a belief in religion. So you had Thomas Jefferson, who did go to church when he was president, and when asked about it, he said that it was his duty, that part of being a good president was to express support for that. And if we do not have that, well, take a look at Europe. I think we are watching what happens to a society that becomes highly secular.
Mitch Daniels (40:15):
Well, you've just anticipated what I still intend to be our wrap-up questions here, but right before we get there, this one may be off base, so feel free to label and dismiss it, but you spent six years in the Peace Corps, I think they were all in Thailand.
Charles Murray (40:36):
Yes, I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand, and I stayed in Thailand for another four years working on other jobs.
Mitch Daniels (40:41):
Oh, a very long stay. When I look at the character traits, the virtues whose decline you cataloged in Coming Apart, once again, marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity, is it superficial or facile to look at some Asian cultures and see that they may be stronger in those areas than we are presently? Is there something we can learn? Is this a reason to imagine them being stronger competitors?
Charles Murray (41:23):
Well, a couple of points, because I'm going to profess ignorance of others. One point is that you have systems of ethics in East Asia that produce basically the same kind of virtuous behavior that you get from Aristotelian ethics in the West. I'm thinking of Confucianism, Buddhist tradition, the Taoist tradition, and this is a case where they are stronger than Christianity in emphasizing obligations to family. There's a price to be paid for that in terms of achievement, because a lot of the achievements that have gone on in the West have been obstreperous young people saying, "I don't care what my parents want, I'm going to go out and fulfill my destiny in life." And in Asia, that has not happened so much.
(42:28):
But if you have a society which has produced very strong families and then you give them exposure to an American phenomenon of celebrating individual accomplishment, you just may get the best of both worlds, whereby you have people who have grown up in strong families, but who are now able to go out and achieve in the world by that ethic. If you take a look at the senior leadership in Silicon Valley, to take just one example, and how many South Asians and East Asians you have in the most senior positions in those companies, you have to say-
Mitch Daniels (43:11):
Something's working.
Charles Murray (43:12):
... they have a tool set, a skill set, or a social context that, in many ways, is stronger now than ours appears to be.
Mitch Daniels (43:24):
It also strikes me, to a degree that it's probably under-reported, Christianity has been spreading in much of Asia, in some cases, it's not new. I believe I'm correct, there are more Korean Presbyterians than there are those of us who are still left in the US.
Charles Murray (43:43):
Yes. And I would be interested to know how this all breaks down. This is the social scientist in me saying, “I would like to know what is going on here,” because I sense that we have passed a turning point. I am coming back to faith now, which in many ways I have been focusing on recently. We had a long period in the 20th century when you went to college and one of the first things you learned about religion was that smart people do not believe that stuff anymore. That is what I heard when I went to college, and I bought into it, and so did my wife. But I think there is more of a sense now that an awful lot of smart people do believe that stuff, and maybe we need to listen to the reasons they believe it. I think that is gaining ground, at least in a limited way.
Mitch Daniels (44:42):
Well, it's the great unanswerable question, is it true or not? As you pointed out a minute ago, and maybe we can bring this marvelous conversation to a close on this point, Ben Franklin, who you just mentioned, wrote that, “Only virtuous people are capable of freedom.” We have to ask ourselves if certain necessary virtues have eroded, we've had revivals, we've had religious revivals, where might a revival of these virtues which have frayed particularly in the places where we need them most, industriousness, honesty, and so forth, marriage, how might they come back?
Charles Murray (45:35):
Okay, let me first make an optimistic observation, which it's very hard to get me to do, but it's possible. It's easy to live in an America that is a lot like the one that Tocqueville describes in Democracy in America. All you have to do is get out of the big city and go to a small town or a small city in America, for example, in my specific case, I'm in a small town, the city down the road, which is now up to about 50 or 60,000 people, is Frederick, Maryland. That community is just vibrant with Tocquevillian voluntary organizations and people taking care of problems on their own. It’s small town America, you walk down the street and everybody smiles at you and greets you, you get a flat tire in an awful lot of America and somebody stops to help you out and fix the tire, not necessarily on the Los Angeles freeway, but they'll do it on the roads around Burkittsville, Maryland. You just have a lot of traditional American virtues that are still out there.
(46:56):
So that exhausts my optimistic part but then I say, "But look what's going on with the country now." And this terrible polarization, this terrible tendency to demonize the other side, and which I cannot find much difference between the left and the right in their willingness to demonize the other side. How do we get that to go away? You've got me, if you have any bright ideas, I would sure like to hear them. It does not look good right now.
Mitch Daniels (47:36):
No, one hopes that it won't take a cataclysm of some kind to reshuffle the deck, although that's happened often in history, and sometimes, with a lot of casualties along the way, produce something better. So I'd like to end these discussions, Charles, with this question, invite your optimism or not, but in 2050, will America and Americans be more or less free in their pursuit of happiness?
Charles Murray (48:07):
Based on the way things have gone over the last 20 to 30 years, I think you are probably going to have an educated class, what Dick Herrnstein and I called the cognitive elite, who will be doing just fine. They will still be getting married, raising kids, having fulfilling careers, and so on. And I think they will be increasingly accompanied by a working class and, essentially, an underclass who exist at the margins of America, in which large numbers of men are not working, large numbers of single-parent families prevail, and those numbers have probably grown. You will also have something else going on, Mitch, and I think it is important to introduce it: what we call games. Gaming has evolved from Pong and simple things in the 1990s to extremely virtual-reality-oriented alternatives.
(49:31):
And by 2050, I think basically, you'll be able to put on a headset and experience what it's like to be a rock star, or an astronaut, or whatever you feel like being, and there will be a lot of people who are simply escaping from an otherwise unfulfilling life to do that. So I'm sorry, that's just the way I look at technology, and as I look at the eco social and economic trends, that's the way it seems to go.
Mitch Daniels (50:03):
Well, you should never apologize for an honest and well-informed, and I'm sad to say, reasonably persuasive projection, you've been giving them to us for a long, long time, Charles. For those of us who think the scenario you just depicted is less than optimal, all I can say is please keep studying, please keep writing, and please keep teaching and guiding the rest of us, as you have been doing without parallel now for so very long. On behalf of Liberty Fund, thank you for all you've meant to the liberties we still enjoy.
Charles Murray (50:36):
I want to say one more thing, Mitch, because I'm not going to let you get away without me saying this to anybody who's watching, that it's an incredible honor for me to have had this conversation with the political figure that I’ve admired most in the last 30 years.
Mitch Daniels (50:52):
Well, you've said some kind things before, and I've always said there's absolutely no one whose esteem I value more highly. So thank you, and once again, thank you for so graciously spending this time with us. We all look forward to, I hope, a steady stream of further learning from your hand. Thank you, Charles Murray.
Charles Murray (51:13):
Thank you, Mitch.
Mitch Daniels (51:15):
Thanks to each of you for joining us today. You can find this and the previous programs in the future of Liberty series at libertyfund.org/podcast, the Future of Liberty. Thank you once again. See you at the next show.
Outro (51:29):
The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.