What I’d like to do today is something you would likely never expect if you are familiar with my views on things. I’d like to quote David Frum from his review of a new book called “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray:
You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today’s money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He’s working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.
Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you’ll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That’s not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren’t married, and you don’t go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.
What David is doing here is providing the basis for an alternative reason to why white people in America would be experiencing more social ills presently, as opposed to the degradation in morality proposed by the author. David goes on to identify the ties to economics and disparity in wealth with societal social problems. I agree with him, and would go further. In my study of history, I see a lot of parallels between the US today and Victorian England. Back then Thomas Malthus tried to tie all the socials ills to the morals of people (particularly the poor). They also had a record number of people in prisons, and tried to address their social problems by toughening penalties and making more things a crime. They were facing fundamental changes to their economy through industrialisation.
But after the fact, what proved to be true then remains – most all crime has an economic basis, and the similar can be said for most social problems. Peoples morality and ethical makeup don’t change much after they reach adulthood, or thereabouts, in my experience. But when the economic conditions of someone who is basically honest get bad enough, they can at some point begin to rationalise their ethics and perhaps result in lawbreaking to get by. Certainly they will seek escape from reality and choose to make higher use of alcohol or drugs. But they rarely turn into violent criminals.
The circumstances of the record populations of the prisons in the US, support this thesis. Prisons have been swollen in the last thirty years with non-violent drug offenders and the economically underprivileged. The US does not have a morality problem, but instead a bog standard economic problem just like they had 1900 in England. It would be nice to see leaders world wide (I’m looking at you Europe) spend more time trying to address the micro and macro economic problems that affect peoples lives universally rather than trying to paint everything as a morality play.