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" Occasionally, Moral Hazard, the Irish setter belonging to David Brooks, goes wandering out of the clubroom of the Young Fogies Club and down the hall into the library. It is more peaceful there. Nobody is quoting Edmund Burke. Nobody is throwing together their Guys We Wish Would Run For President fantasy teams. (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll bid $150 for Mitch Daniels!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Trade you Bobby Jindal for half of Chris Christie!&amp;quot;) Moral Hazard finds it a more peaceful place. He even gets a little reading done from time to time. A few years back, in his wanderings, he came upon a book called The Bell Curve. It was co-written by a fellow named Charles Murray. Moral Hazard read three pages, licked his nuts in careful contemplation, and realized that the whole thing was an academic gloss on the notion that black people are inherently inferior to white people. Jesus, thought Moral Hazard, who only that morning had been thinking how much he&amp;#039;d rather be a bomb-squad dog in L.A., my life could be a lot worse. I could belong to this guy. Then he walked back to the club room. This morning, Moral Hazard thought back sadly about that day. Murray has written another book and Master has written another column. This was already a terrible day, thought Moral Hazard, who looked around at floor level for a pair of Weejuns to which he could do the most horrible things. And then this: I&amp;#039;ll be shocked if there&amp;#039;s another book this year as important as Charles Murray&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Coming Apart.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ll be shocked if there&amp;#039;s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.  (I&amp;#039;ll be shocked if Brooks cites the actual title of the book, because it&amp;#039;s sort of what the poker players call a &amp;quot;tell.&amp;quot; Oh, he doesn&amp;#039;t? Okay, I will. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Arrooogah, arroooogah!) More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage. The rates were similar, upper class and lower class. (Which did not prevent the David Brooksies of the day from complaining throughout the 1950&amp;#039;s and the 1960&amp;#039;s that things were going to hell in a handbasket because of Commies in the schools, comic books at the drugstores, girls in tight sweaters, and Jerry Lee Lewis. This makes Brooks \u2014 and Murray \u2014 the latest in a long line of scolds. And if the only metric you cite for &amp;quot;behavior&amp;quot; is white kids born on the other side of the blanket, you really should stop thinking so much about how many people are fucking out there without your permission. However, that 98 percent of men working sounds like it must have been a good thing. Maybe we should enact some policies to get back to having 98 percent of the workforce employed, rather than worrying about people fucking. Oh, hell, why do I bother?)  Since then, America has polarized. The word &amp;quot;class&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#039;t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them. (Indeed, you might say that, if you were David Brooks, and the economic catastrophe wrought upon the country by the people who pay for your dinners and your honorariums pretty much demolished your earlier, funnier work in which we were all living in our suburban nirvanas, slouched on our patios, cooking our burgers and buying cheap Chinese-made crap by the carload, and the only people who were fucking without your permission were the black people, who didn&amp;#039;t really count. Indeed, you might say that, if you&amp;#039;d spent your entire career treating your fellow citizens as if we all lived in petri dishes for you to examine. Or, occasionally, for you to pretend to examine.) Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he&amp;#039;s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don&amp;#039;t come into play.  (Of course, the author has dismissed black people as fundamentally uneducable in his previous work. So why should he \u2014 or we \u2014 care about them at all? What an important thinker.) Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad. People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese. (Is it possible that there might be some other factor beyond being part of a tribe that makes people fat? That makes them less likely to obtain information about birth control? That keeps them out of the labor force, &amp;quot;in good times and in bad&amp;quot;? That keeps them at home watching TV excessively rather than going out to the opera? Is it possible that money is involved in any of this?) (Of course, not. You know what&amp;#039;s coming.) It&amp;#039;s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It&amp;#039;s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites. The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.  (Mmm, word salad. &amp;quot;Postmodern neighborhoods&amp;quot;? Do you know what some of those elites &amp;quot;worked arduously&amp;quot; at in the first decade of the 21st century? Devising complicated financial instruments by which they could steal most of the money from the rest of the country and get away with it. They haven&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;returned to 1950&amp;#039;s traditionalist values and practices.&amp;quot; Too many of their wives are working and taking the pill, which is covered by the gold-plated health-care plans The Firm offers to its most valued employees. I&amp;#039;d like to see data on how well they&amp;#039;re &amp;quot;regulating&amp;quot; their kids, too, and find another verb, fool. Kids are not water heaters. David Brooks is impressed that Charles Murray, career hack, has found some white people he can treat like black people, and just in time, too. Save me, Racist Data Man!) I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.  (Wonderful. The David Brooks No Poor People Fucking Camp. Sign me up. The members of the upper tribe will teach the members of the lower tribe how better to control their... well... members. As a reward, the members of the upper tribe will then teach the members of the lower tribe how to design a credit-default swap.) Moral Hazard could read no further. He fell dead asleep, and he was soon dreaming of chasing a perp down Sepulveda while the cops behind him defused the Semtex the perp had left in a trash can. Yeah, he thought. That would be cool. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12538/david-brooks-charles-murray-6649112/>