The Manhattan Institute tries to revive Charles Murray but why was his reputation in the gutter?
Recently the Manhattan Institute’s in house magazine published a piece about Charles Murray and his career. It’s not surprising that the Manhattan institute would try and boost Murray. However I thought the article is worth engaging with because it tries to take stock of Murray’s overall legacy including admitting how lots of his ideas have fallen out of favor with the passage of time. In this post I want to detail my own views in response answering these questions. Why does Charles Murray have a bad reputation? How will he be remembered? And how should we view his ideas?
The best explanation for why Murray has a bad reputation and is even shunned in some circles is a simple one. He wrote a book straightforwardly advocating for eugenic policies. Eugenics is rightly seen as a taboo and beyond the pale in our society even as the media wants to cash in on racially motivated controversy. Sympathizers always try and dance around this simple point.
The objections are that in Murrays book The Bell Curve only the final chapters are about race most of the book is merely a treatise on IQ. You can also throw in that Murray has an open mind about whether IQ is determined by environment or genetics. These are silly objections. It’s clear from reading the book that the propositions in the main chapters are designed to lead to the pro eugenics position in the final chapter. The purpose of a book should not be judged by what content makes up the bulk of its pages but by how the different parts work in concert to create meaningful conclusions. That’s just a matter of basic reading comprehension. Furthermore, it’s clear from reading the final chapter that it is a straightforward advocacy for eugenic policies. It’s also clear what Murray really thinks about race and IQ. He has a remarkably closed mind about the possibility any of his core ideas could be wrong.
As the Manhattan Institute article points out the greatest impact Murrays work had was in contributing to the political climate in which bill Clintons 1996 welfare reform legislation was passed. Along with other conservatives such as Lawrence Mead, Murray was able to promote a radical review of how the welfare state was understood. By the 1990s almost all developed countries had established a cash welfare system to provide for those without incomes including poor families with children. The United States is almost unique in that having established its welfare system it effectively abolished cash welfare in many states along the lines of the new ideological consensus promoted by the likes of Mead and Murray.
Mead has described how state officials would be willing to throw men into prison to enforce workfare requirements but would resist plans to cut welfare for mothers with dependent children. This highlights how harsh the 1996 welfare reform policy was to literally take food from the mouths of babes. The obvious question is why was the United States such an outlier among its comparable peers in adopting such a harsh policy?
Here the big factor which cannot be ignored is race. The debate about welfare was from the start highly racialized. Ronald Reagan was a key political entrepreneur in politicizing welfare along racial lines. The call to cut welfare and impose work requirements was most popular in southern states which were becoming more conservative during this time period. What makes Charles Murray unique is that his work focuses on the twin issues of race and the welfare system. By combining the issues of race and welfare he put his finger on the real hot button of the welfare reform debate.
When the bell curve was published in 1994 about half of Americans answered the question by gallop polling “Do you approve or disapprove of marriage between black and white people” with approval. Today ninety four percent approve. While defining and measuring racism is complicated, I believe this polling question is about the best proxy measurement of racism that we are likely to get. The polling shows that America was a much more racist country in the 1990’s than it is today. The decline in racism has been a slow but steady one. Indeed, based on this data no specific events stand out as a turning point.
While policy entrepreneurs such as Murray and Mead were effective it’s unlikely the harsh welfare reform would have happened without the politicization of the welfare system in a racial context and the high levels of racism that existed at this time. Murray’s greatest public policy impact then was simply the result of racism that was prevalent at the time. I believe when history books are written in fifty or one hundred years’ time this is how The Bell Curve and Clintons welfare reform will be understood.
Since the 1990’s the elite discourse about the welfare system in America has completely changed. The consensus that work requirements and harsh workfare style measures are a good thing is finally cracking up. The deaths of despair phenomenon identified by Angus Deaton and Anna Case has underlined how badly social outcomes in America have diverged from the country’s continuing economic success. The most important of these social outcomes is that children in the United States are much more likely to grow up in poverty then in comparable countries directly as a result of welfare reform. Other research has shown that parents forced to work provide less nurturing care to their children which has negative effects for brain development. This is despite those parents spending the same amount of time with their children.
Welfare reform was a racist policy failure that needlessly consigned millions of American children to deep poverty. In order to attach himself forever to this racist failure Charles Murray tried to revive one of the most reviled ideas in history — eugenics — from the ash heap of history. That is the true legacy of Charles Murray.