Morals and Money

Paul Krugman is not pleased.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist and regular New York Times op-ed columnist is intensely irritated by all the attention accorded by the press and the punditocracy to Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart (Crown Forum, 2012).

Today, Krugman pushed back against Murray in a column whose title, “Money and Morals,” I have adapted for mine.

Murray’s controversial thesis, you will recall, is that the widening income inequality in America is the result of an even more yawning gap in moral values between managerial-class and working-class Americans.

Murray’s new book is a stunning synthesis of studies showing that poorly educated, low-income, white Americans have fallen into a social pathology consisting of falling educational levels, declining marriage rates, sky-high illegitimacy rates, waxing criminality, waning industriousness,  and—to cap it all—rapid secularization.

Their upper- and middle-class counterparts have avoided most of these plagues, or else—as in the case of the divorce rate—fallen prey to them to a lesser degree.

In other words, Murray demonstrates a robust statistical correlation between a morality gap and the better-known income gap in the lives of large numbers of our fellow citizens. Then, he goes on to infer that the former is an important cause of the latter.

Krugman does not dispute the statistical correlation. He can’t. What he does instead is reverse the arrow of causation.

In a nutshell: For Murray, morals drive money; for Krugman, money drives morals.

Who is right?

Krugman accuses Murray of blaming the victim. Here is how he puts it, in the conclusion to today’s column:

. . . we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe—and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

If Krugman is defending the honor of America’s lower classes before the jury of public opinion, this is a curious summation.

First, he concedes Murray’s point about the declining moral values of the underclass—again, how can he do otherwise?—only to dismiss it as irrelevant.

Earlier in the piece, he had already said this:

Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

But then, in the previous quote—with the sneer about the unimportance of those uptight, unhip, traditional families still on his lip—he reverses course and says that bad morals are the result of growing income inequality, not the cause.

Krugman can’t have it both ways. If traditional bourgeois moral values don’t matter, then there is no need to justify their demise among working-class Americans by pointing to income inequality. And if he admits that the “social changes”—as he so nonjudgmentally puts it—that are overtaking our society are the result of growing income inequality, then it sounds like bourgeois morals do matter, after all.

In truth, Krugman is not much concerned with the quality of the lives of the people whose cause he claims to champion. Who in his right mind really believes that the kind of social breakdown demonstrated by Murray is a good thing? Who would choose voluntarily to live in such deplorable conditions? Not Krugman himself, you may be sure.

However, Krugman is undoubtedly right about one thing: The de-moralization of the lower classes has been driven partly by the demoralization of chronically unemployed men, and that chronic employment has been caused largely by deindustrialization.

But Murray is also correct that secular-liberal ideology has had a lot to do with it. People don’t stop going to church and start having babies right and left out of wedlock just because a factory closes.

Rather, in the old days, when a factory closed the psychological pressures on unemployed men were assuaged by an abiding faith and a deep-rooted belief that a man provides for his family before all else. Back then, most men would have gladly flipped burgers or gutted chickens before letting their families starve or abandoning them.

What has changed is that now women and men alike have been convinced by the secular-liberal line spouted 24/7 by the media that God is dead and the only point to life is partying. But getting high and getting laid are not what lead to happiness. Even those with plenty of money to do these things come to a bad end.

Moreover, Murray is surely right, in part, about the arrow of causation running from morals-to-money. On this point, his and Krugman’s views are not mutually exclusive.

The reason is that the old industrial jobs are gone for good, and the moral devastation their departure left in its wake makes it nearly impossible nowadays for the unemployed to reinvent themselves for the new economy.

In a free-market economy, what employer in his right mind would want to hire the sort of people described in the studies Murray cites?

Men who can barely read and write, who have no sense of responsibility to provide for their families, no sense of honor towards the women they impregnate, no sense of duty to their communities or to God—such men do not make attractive job candidates in a high-tech, global economy.

However, the point upon which Krugman appears even more deaf and blind is the larger one about what makes for a happy human life. Murray understands that human beings living in the way he describes are living indecent, degraded, and for that very reason unhappy lives.

Like all good secular liberals, Krugman’s paramount concern is not the quality of human lives, but equality of incomes.

That is because he does not believe there is any other objective standard of right or wrong, or better or worse behavior, than that provided by the measure of disposable income. Krugman is doubly handicapped in this view, in being not only a liberal, but an economist.

By giving such precedence to money over morals, it’s as if Krugman wants to rewrite Freud’s famous dictum that only two things matter for human happiness: love and work.

He seems to believe Freud really meant to say that the only two things that matter are sex and money.

But Freud knew what he was talking about (at least, on this point), and said just what he meant.

The whole secret to happiness in life consists in understanding the difference.