.. and spring is coming and we will be flat wall street again

in the wall street better look out. thanks very much for coming. [applause] in his book coming apart author charles murray says that white americans classified has grown to a level that's isolated upper income earners and created a separation that may formant class warfare among an ever-growing lower class. he discusses his book at the american enterprise institute here in washington for about an hour and 15 minutes. >> good afternoon. good afternoon. my name is carl and i am a senior fellow at the american enterprise institute and i would like to welcome all of you and our c-span audience to charles murray bradley lecture entitled

alternative futures for a fractured american culture. for 23 years, the bradley foundation in milwaukee wisconsin has generously funded the bradley lecture series, and we are very grateful for their support. our next lecture in the series will be given on march 13th by walter russell meade. arthur brooks, the president, has been out of the country and i know how much he regrets he's unable to attend tonight for charles that had a profound impact on arthur's intellectual odyssey. are there was a french horn professor in florida in the middle of the 1990's and he tells the story of finding a book by charles and a bookstore there and after reading it decided to pursue a career that eventually led to a ph.d. in economics, to a career in public policy and to the presidency of aei. i know i speak for my colleagues at aei when i say that charles has had enormous influence on all of us. he is a cherished and all you'd

call week. we are in all of his ability to excavate and digest obscure social science data and to write clearly and compellingly about them. he's tolerant of even the most far-fetched ideas as when i suggested to him he needed to start watching the tv show "jersey shore" to understand the lower class. he started watching and became a fan of "the situation." [laughter] charnel has given many important talks at aei. in 2000 when he received the institute's irving kristol ward. this is his for the bradley lecture. his first, delivered in 1994, a few years after he joined aei in 1990, looked at the arguments that they had made on the bell curve. the second explores the themes in his book human accomplishment, his elegant overview and our progress in the sciences. his 2008 lecture look at the mess our educational system has become and asks fundamental

questions about what education is for. last year he gave a preview of coming apart as he was writing it providing some intriguing clues about how america is coming apart among class lines and the consequences of the separation. there are many echoes in the new book of the 1984 book, losing ground pitting it was published in september, 1984, in an early 1985 "the new york times" attacked it in an editorial. while the editorial page of "the new york times" is yet to be in on coming apart, "the new york times" today ran a very generally positive piece about charles, and last tuesday "new york times" columnist david brooks wrote about the book and here in quoting directly from david i will be shocked if there's another book this year as important as charles murray coming apart. i will be shocked if there is another book that so compellingly describes the most important trend in american society. coming apart is the culmination of a lifetime of work devoted to

research and explaining changes in the culture and the institutions. the framework that allows people to pursue happiness, family, work, friendship and community and the constructive and destructive tendencies of government in this regard. these have made charles murray the preeminent social thinker of our times. please welcome charles murray. [applause] think you very much. karlyn is not only a colleague, she is a good friend. good news out of tonight's lecture is that it has nothing whatsoever to the current politics. there's nothing about mitt, newt, rick or rom -- sons like a

1950's music group -- there's nothing about obama, nothing about the deficit or anything that's happened since november of 2008 or january 28, 2009. instead i will be talking about the issues coming apart and those issues did not start with the financial meltdown or the election of barack obama, and they are not going to be much affected by the result of this fall's election. the thesis of the book is simple to get over the last half century, the united states has seen a widening cultural and equality, not income inequality. that's not my point tonight. but cultural inequality. we have developed a new will work less and a new upper class that are different in kind from any thing america has ever known. the second contingent of the book is that the divergence of america into a separate class is if it continues well into the american project. it is an interpretation what may specify i am not forecasting

america's decline as a world power. number why argue that america was ever a classless society. it is not the existence of the class's that is new, but the emergence of class's that diverge on the core beavers and values. i'm looking around to see if there are more chairs. there's one seat up front, there's one over there and i am sorry that we can't accommodate all of you better. what i call the american project that is in danger of ending was not about maximizing national wealth or international power. the american project consists of the continuing effort begun with the founding to demonstrate that human beings could be left free as individuals and families to live lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to sell off their problems. based on that idea led to the civic culture that was seen as exceptional while the world.

that culture was so widely shared among the americans that it amounted to a civil religion. that culture is unraveling. last april i delivered a bradley lecture that opened with the same book pieces and then spent almost the rest of the lecture on the nature of the problem, getting just a few minutes to why the problem matters and what future a hold. tonight i'm going to reverse those priorities. so those of you that attended last april's lecture are going to get a little or petition but not much. i want to begin with a really, really quick overview of the problem. first of the cultural coming apart over the last half century of the upper middle class and the working class. as the device for thinking about what happened, i give you to fictional neighborhoods called belmont. the real bill mog is an actual suburb of boston that was chosen as the name because it was the home of my beloved kuhl offer of the bell curve.

the real fishkind is a neighborhood in philadelphia that has been a white working-class neighborhood since the revolution. in the database is the line using, mostly the population's survey the senses and the general social survey i assign people to my fictional belmont if and only if they have at least a bachelor's degree and orie manager of architect, and were content producer in the media. or are married to such a person. to be assigned to fish town, people must have no more than a high school diploma in terms of education and if they work it must be a blue-collar job, low-skilled jobs such as cashier or low-skilled white-collar job such as will clark. people who qualify for belmont constitute about -- i'm sorry, 20% of the population of white

americans come in on latino whites ages 40 to 49. people who qualify for the town constitute about 40% of the white population of the u.s. ages 40 to 49. i specify white, meaning non-latino white come as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the united states has become. cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. i specify ages 30 to 49, but i will call prime age adults come to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the age of marriage or retirement. in belmont and this town, here is what happened to america's common culture between 1960 to 2010. the four key institutions. marriage, industrial and honesty and religionocity. marriage. in 1960, just about everybody

was married. and bill mott is about 94% in this town that was about 84%, but it was the overwhelming norman would cases, and almost all children in both, well over 90%, were born to unmarried parents. in belmont, both of those statements remain true. there's been little deterioration during the 1970's and into the early 80's but a lot of the mid-80's it stabilized and so since the mid 80's we've been about 84% of this population ages 30 to 49. and fish town, plummeted. in 2010, white ages 30 to 49 in fishtown, 48% married. about one-third of all males in that age group have never been married. it is a fundamental change in the central social institution. in terms of children born to unmarried women, which may remains about the same as

belmont, and fishtown, on the of the 45 to 50% of all children are now born out of wedlock. those recent data that i have for 2008 and by this time i'm pretty sure it's over 50%. in 1960 almost all adult males in belmont and fishtown were either working or were looking for work living in 2008, before the onset of the great recession, almost one out of eight fishtown mails was not working or even looking for work. nothing much had changed in belmont when 97% of the males still were working or looking for work. by the way, the rise and the drop-off in the labour force and fish town has nothing to do with the booming years with the recession years. in the book i have a plot of the percentage of the labor force alongside the plot of the unemployment rate high and during the long period of groome

dropout from the labour force is as deeply as it does in the less prosperous years. the surge in crime that began in the 1960's and continued through the 1980's left belmont almost untouched. there was never that much crime and the suburban united states. in downtown new york, you could get mugged in fairly good neighborhoods, but aside from that, crime never really hit belmont. in fishtown, the crime rate even after the reductions in the crime that we've seen since the 1990's you are still looking at the prime rate in fishtown about six times -- excuse me, but more than four times what it was in 1960, 4.7 to be exact. religionocity. this was stunning at least to me because we have a prevailing narrative of the eletes versus the working class clinging to religion along with its guns, but the evidence from the general social survey which is the most widely used database on

american attitudes and values doesn't leave a whole lot of room for argument. for example, suppose we define the religious core of the community as people who tend church regularly and also have a strong affiliation with their religion. belmont is in that group from about 30% in the 1970's to about 25% now. but fishtown is now down to 12% of adults institute of religious core. such a small figure that is no longer a substantial minority large enough to be a major force in the community. increasingly, religious people and fishtown are seen as the set of oddballs. it may be said without hyperbole that these divergences put belmont and fishtown into different cultures. the deterioration that has affected fishtown has produced a growing new middle class that is no longer participating in the core institutions of american life. just as briefly, let me

recapitulate my argument about the formation of the new upper class. in 1960, members of the american elite, the people who occupied the most important positions in the politics and the economy and the cultural cities nationally had their success in common, but not much else. they did not have a distinctive culture. most of them are high school graduates. even those who have college degrees were typically the first generation of their families to leave the working class or the middle class. they lived in bigger houses and drove a fancy automobiles and those of were not members of the elite and spend more on their food and clothes and vacations that they did not share distinctive tastes and preferences in common. now they do. they watch hardly any television at all. by the way, since most of you in this audience are some of the people in talking about ask me, tell me if you think i've got it really long when i describe what's going on here.

don't watch much television at all? some of you probably brad you don't have a tv anymore or if you only wanted for old masterpiece theatre's. [laughter] the average american watches about 45 hours of television a week. the distinctive reading habits, the new upper class does, drinking habits and diets. they differ from mainstream america in the age at which a married, married and have children. you don't believe that, go to the parents' night at the national cathedral some time, okay? [laughter] geriatric parents are all over the place. hardly anybody in their 20s. they differ from mainstream america. also in the books they read, the humor they enjoy, the way they take care of their bodies and tikrit their homes and their leisure activities, the work environment and their child raising practices. together these practices have engendered cultural separation. the new upper class is detached

from the majority of americans not just by their preferences any more either but spatially as well. the members of increasingly sort of themselves as the hyper wealthy and heiberg elite is it codes that i call super zips. in 1980 the united states of the cable body of super zips such as the upper east side of new york or philadelphia's main line of the north shore of chicago of beverly hills. but despite the prestige, the people in them or not particularly -- i'm sorry, were not uniformly affluent or even well-educated. 14 of the most elite places to live in 1960 the median family income was a close to affluence, it was just $84,000 in today's purchasing power. only one of the four adults in those communities had a college degree. let me repeat, only one in four in places like the north shore,

the beverly hills. by 2000 that diversity is dwindled. the median family income has doubled in those 14 elite areas to the 163,000. the percentage of adults a rose to 67%. it's not just also that they became more homogeneous and educated, they also form the larger and larger clusters. we are now in one of the largest of those clusters moving from here now west. you've got a couple hundred thousand people living in the contiguous super zips. but not only the super zips of the 15 or so zip codes in this direction from where we are all but three of them are in the top half of the top centile on the index of the education and in comes. the isolation is only going to get worse because increasingly

the people who run the country were born into the world. unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960 they had never known anything but the new upper-class culture. many of them had gone through kate weld, graduate school and into their career without ever living in a zip code. so those are the problems. i've got rhythm really quickly i want to emphasize as you are saying he really hasn't made his case these points in the book to to wondered 31 pages. now, to the main topics of the lecture why do these problems never come in and what happens next? the first reason that these changes matter has to do with social couple, social science terms for the hundreds of types of the volunteering to maturity and savitt for this edition, religious participation connectivity in the workplace and simple in former activities in the community.

america's history in this regard has been unique and not only americans thought so. all observers agree the community life in the united states was unlike the community life anywhere else. the first imperiled aspect of the american community life was the extent of its neighborhood. many cultures have the traditions of generous hospitality to strangers and guests. but widespread voluntary mutual assistance among other related people would happen to live alongside each other has been rare. in the united states, it's been standard operating procedure. the second and parallel the aspect of the american community life has been vibrant, exuberant super engagement in solving local problems through the voluntary associations that americans hysterically form that the job of a hat. the decline of marriage, industriousness, honesty and religionocity and fishtown has been associated with a near collapse of social capital and

fishtown as well. the case for the ongoing collapse of american social capital was first made a decade ago by harvard political science robert putnam and his best-selling book malling alone in which he presented a dozen of indicators of social capital almost all of which had a steep decline starting in the 1960's. the same measures that often been rising until then. the mobile your -- and driving from the presentation here -- the mobile year for the beginning of the decline among the indicators was 1964 at the dawn of the great society i find this significant. professor putnam does not. bowling alone did not export class divisions. but we know that social couple had to decline precipitously just by knowing the extent of the collapsing marriage and religionocity. this is obviously marriage.

some large proportion that the web of engagement in ordinary community life or spun because of the environment parents are trying to foster for their children. unmarried fathers are seldom amount to participate in these crevice. single mothers are usually doing double duty already trying to be the breadwinner with a parent at the same time, and they don't have much energy or time to spare for community activities. of course social capital declined in fishtown. rolph following religionocity is as much as great. one of the startling findings at a bowling alone was that in the words of robert putnam, "as a rule of the men were evidence shows that nearly half of all the memberships are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in the religious context. that is not just fact. religious believers are also much more likely than secular

people to contribute to them on religious forms of social capital. so of course, social capital declined in fishtown as a percentage of those that were in their churches declined to 12%. in the book, i document that decline in terms of specific forms of social capital, but like think that these data don't involve those specific kinds of capital but instead the collapse of central trust and fishtown. social trust is the raw material that makes rich social capital possible. not trust in a particular neighbor that happens to be your friend, but a generalized expectation that the people around you will do the right thing take that away, and even the possibility of the community disappears. in fishtown, the number of people that agree with the statements people generally try to be fair. people are generally helpful, and people can be generally trusted have all dropped by more

than half since the early 1970's, and probably a lot more than that since the beginning of the 1960's. only about 20% of them now agree people can be generally trusted. i know that this discussion of the social capital and community leaders be open to an accusation in america that was never as rosy as i implied. it is also the fact many people in the middle class to not particularly care about it any way. they are happy with their professional associations and their networks of friends that were scattered all over the metropolitan area in these communities. i grant both of those objections , but if we are talking about the daily life for most americans, you don't go to places like northwest washington. the social capital makes an important difference in the quality-of-life, and. a neighborhood with the social

capital is more vulnerable to crime. if you have high social capital, you can in fact leave your kids to play in the street because neighbors are looking out for you. if you have high social capital you can leave your door unlocked because people know when strangers are coming in the neighborhood and take care of business. we are not making this up. this happens in the working-class communities in the united states. a neighborhood with the weak social capital must tickets problems to the police or the social welfare bureaucracies because local resources are dealing with these problemsc'c'' dried out.c' in ac' neighborhood with a weak' social capital, a small daily pleasures of daily interchange with neighbors and school teachers atrophy. the sum is people living in weak capital lead less satisfying and lives than people that live with high social capital. they are less happy. and that brings me to the next reason why america's cultural

and equality matters. i first wrote about the nature of happiness as it relates to social policy in a book called in pursuit in 1998 to get the idea that i developed in that book had been a subtext for almost a for i had written since. boiled down to the essentials, here is my position. happiness does not consist of passing the time from birth to death as pleasantly as possible. rather a life is happy to the extent that the person living that life can take a lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole. the definition is borrowed from aristotle but it also very broadly fits the western understanding of happiness and for that matter it is with definitions of happiness and serious intellectual tradition justified satisfaction with life as a whole.

happiness is almost exclusively process. someone in his 20s or 30s doesn't look back and satisfying. he's engaged in the activities. the older one gets, the more happiness does exist in part of looking back and saving along with continuing satisfaction doing the things you enjoy doing. not many activities produced the last week justified satisfaction with life as a whole. my claim is i've never had anybody challenge it so maybe this audience will be the first. there are four deutsch means with which lasting and justified satisfactions occur. arthur brooks called them institutions of meaning. the phrase if he's under the impression that i invented but i will now continue to use a threat or more, i do have those institutions with meaning of family, location, a community

and faith. i have a couple of providers, they can increase people better strap scattered. location can improve education for houses and for the war isn't necessarily for any individual to accuse all of the institutions of meaning. there are happy theus and single people and have people who are not part of the community. merely assert that those are the only for of the institutions that lasting and justified satisfaction felker. the stuff of life occurs within the four domains gereed soon in this light america is falling away from the marriage, industriousness, religionocity and community to take on important. we are watching today in all of the institutions and. the evidence i find most convincing for the statement hasn't come from the quantitative measures how ps. but the empirical and ship in

the demand is worth noting. again, working with the general social survey which asks people and has been asking them since the late 1970's how happy you are, and i am talking about the percentage of people that answer very happy. the first point is that the four institutions of meaning or all important -- importantly related individual to the probability of the person responds that he or she is very happy. again, 40 to 49, a married person is twice as likely to respond than someone that is not. people that are satisfied with their work are two likely say they are happy with life as a whole and those that are moderately, they are for heinz's likely to severe how these people who are dissatisfied. people who attend church weekly or more are twice as likely to report they are free.

they try to report people better happy and score low on the test lead what's engage in a little social science and friends. given the relationships and given what's happened to the marriage, industriousness, religionocity since 1960 where do you expect it to look like from belmont? the answer is we should decline both in the 1960's and 1970's until things stabilize in the 1980's, and then we will see stabilization and prevented people to sit there for a happy but in fishtown it is going to be downhill all the way since the 1960s to the present, and that is exactly what happened. again based on the general social survey. the report and not pinnace deutsch from 53% to 18% in the most recent surveys.

that is a very large drop in some things as basic as being able to say mitt romney is very well. i want to repeat i do not have my hat on in the can't take it measures of happiness in a book by the long chapter of that report on the quality of story of what happened to the lives of real people in fishtown and it is a depressing story indeed. but whether the data are quantitative or narrative, the bottom line is the same: the data i describe, marriage, the most honestly religionocity community or not merely showing changes. they were saying this about the deterioration of life in fishtown with the level of human happiness and that is one of the ultimate reasons why the growing cultural and equality matters.u; the of your ultimate reason is the survival of the american project as i've been calling at.

the thomas jefferson in his first inaugural had a wonderful summary of what the american project was. what he said to that, some of the good government is one that shall remain them from injuring one another and leaves them otherwise free to regulate their own%. more and more people including academics and leadership to the democratic party and some large proportion of the electorate believe that human history is already taken the conception. they are attracted by the idea of the large benevolent state that moves over the rough patches in people's lives and the state manager help people interact. more than ever in history we have a major political push for the transformed america that in holistically limits the american project. what happens next?

i promise not to talk about the politics and i want but here are the longer terms. one is pessimistic and one is optimistic. we will start with the pessimistic. the first alternative is that the new upper class is in just as much trouble as the new law work was albeit in different ways, and the american project is doomed. that is the pessimistic scenario. [laughter] in the mid-20th century, it identified 26 civilizations but there was a map on the grand scale. in the times of terrie explained dhaka. i knew it was considered now but i thought i'd never canceled a source rich in material other than that so i even to the beach

a chapter entitled schism in the soul and i had experienced a shock of recognition. in that chapter they took up the process that lead to the disintegration of the civilization. his argument went like this and using some of his language year the growth phase of civilization is led by a creative minority that has a strong self-confidence and a style for a purpose. the and created majority follows along. then at some plants in every civil position journey, the creative minority degenerates into a dominant minority. the numbers still run the show that they are no longer confident and no longer see the exhibit. among other reactions are the rejection of the publication of the citizenship and the vulgarization of the matters and the language of that war left to appear first in the ranks and to

the dominant minority which usually succumbs to the sickness of the proletarian as asian. the recognition i experienced in 2001 came because of the adoption by the middle class and the upper middle class behavior's that used to be distinctly lower class. when tipper gore of vice president al gore had she had been so scolded by many of her social and political peers? why were four-letter words the were formerly considered by the upper middle class appearing in the upscale magazines? how had the hooker and look become a fashion trend among nice girls in suburbs? how have tattoos which those remind what is the absolute certain sure you remember of the middle class unless it was a military when we were growing up

how does that become cheap? he would have shrugged and said that's what happens, it's all downhill. the degenerated into the minority and we are witnessing the universal next step the proletarian dominant minority. there are many reasons and characterization some of which i agree with the signs america's upper middle class suffered the collapse of self-confidence are hard to ignore. there is for example the collapse of confidence in the coda of honorable behavior. codes of behavior exist in every nook of society and they are powerful determinants of the social order. doctors and copps have a code, teenagers have a code, prisoners, the difference between the elite and the others is the bet of its influence or its potential influence.

as bertrand has told us the history of england in the last half of the 19th century can be seen as a victory in elite success propagandizing the entire british population into accepting its code. keeping with its space tradition, america did not have different codes for different socioeconomic class is. to be a decent person in the united states was to adhere to the code that applied to all rich and poor alike. if you want to know what that was, go to google books and read stories from their leaders then you can find there and there were used to teach america's children of all socioeconomic class is from the mid 1850's to the early 20th century. in today's new upper class, the code that has taken its place is a set of injunctions to be nice. call with the code of nice

children are supposed to share their tollways, not hit each other come to terms, to be nice, but not to be judgmental. that's what i mean by loss of self-confidence. the code of the minorities of was to set the standard the ecumenical niceness explicitly rejects that responsibility. the new upper class still does a good job of practicing the virtues. it hasn't lost self confidence in the right values in the numbers of the new upper class will not preach with the practice. the collapse of the security code come ecumenical niceness is not sturdy also means certain concepts lose their power to the country behavior. one of them is the random house dictionary defines unseemly as not keeping of the established standards of the proper forum

and becoming indecorous in speech conduct etc., inappropriate for the time or place. the ultimate source the oxford language dictionaries more concise and its three words to define unseemly, and becoming come on fitting, in decent. some examples, well, unseemly mrs. television producer aaron spelling building a house at 56,500 square feet and 123 rooms. unseen leanness is the ceo of pfizer getting a 99 million-dollar pension after a tenure on the share price plunge. they did nothing illegal. you know, pfizer paid according to the contract and aaron spelling of the permission to build his 56,000 square foot house but the outcomes were

inappropriate for the time or place not send to the circumstances. they were unbecoming and on fitting and they were unseemly. a great deal that lies behind the occupied movement lies in the unwillingness of the upper class to enforce the code of seem leanness. from the capitalism it is much less often a matter of illegalities them of unseemly mess. a great deal of the wall street behavior that contributed to the meltdown reflects not the the legal use of unseemly and if you really want some of reach as examples of unseemly this, you have no further to look again a 5-mile radius than where we sit tonight. it's not to come the crafting of the legislation by congress has always been like making sausage but the growth in the size better now available means that hundreds of billions of dollars are up for grabs and they never know the right people and the

german can't insert the clauson will decision to commence the rich to give a true democrat to the ruling in the on certainly or secure the right apartment. washington is in the gilded age of influencing that force and anything that has come before. unseemly and this is a symptom of the collapse of the code of behavior that depend not on legislation but upon the shared understanding regarding the fitness of things and upon but he allegiance to be paid in accordance with those shared understandings. unseemly in this is another symptom of hollowness at the core. yet the case i just made for the hollow elite is completely correct them all was lost. taking to the situation in 24, 25 assuming the trend as i describe continue the united states at that point is stuck with a large and growing lower class that is able to care for itself only sporadically and

inconsistently and its concentration puts more and more pressure on the remaining families who are trying to hold the line be read the upper class is continued to prosper because the value of the talent they bring to the economy has continued to grow and the concentration of the upper class has increased commensurately. the proportion of the upper-class in the second or third generation of their class has increased and with that increase has come increasing ignorance in the world outside their bubble. bill law and regulations have steadily increased and america's governing regime as soon indistinguishable from that and advance the european welfare state. let's now try to be a little more optimistic about the future. the alternative is a chance to the extent that the predictions about the future are actually borne out. first, we in america will be watching what happens in europe, and will not be pretty.

second, science will underline that the pen names of the welfare state. there, it will become increasingly obvious that there is a simple and affordable way to replace the entire apparatus of the welfare state. and fourth, the persistence of americans in allegiance to the american project will turn out to be far greater than my argument if accomplished so far. let's go to the first of those. the simple way that the advanced welfare state was the attractiveness of the bankruptcy of the welfare state is inevitable. it's inevitable partly because the self-destructive nature of the welfare state has publicly financed the benefits go surfing the populations that find that they need them. that is simply true everywhere. always has been paid in europe you have an additional problem which is you have to tell the rates in greece and spain and portugal are only the beginning.

the united states will have a chance to watch these events unfold before the situation and they are taken to avoid going down. the underpinnings of the welfare state is a very complicated topic that i want to elaborate as i state my position. the premise that human nature is malleable is built into the moral justification of the welfare state and the rational for saying the welfare state can't work at all. the first application of the premise is that the welfare state can be designed in ways that would not lead people to take effect of the incentives the welfare state sets up. but simple, the unemployment benefits would not importantly the fact how hard people try to keep old jobs or how hard they look for new ones. the second implication of the press is that a properly designed government intervention could change human behavior on a broad scale, social engineering

as possible. during the next few decades, i believe the biological science will discredit these needs as fertile the as economics has discredited the economic planning. what are the genesis and the narrow scientists finding so far? nothing surprising and that is precisely the point. for a simple science is proving beyond a shadow of doubt that males and females respond differently to babies. [laughter] for that reasons to do nothing better raised. it's not a finding that this surprising but it's the belief they will finding for carrying an -- we are the beginning of a very steep learning curve. my proposition is this: the more we learn about how human beings work of the deepest genetic and

neurological levels, the more than in the age old ways of thinking about this will be vindicated. the institutions around and manage, location, candian fate will be found to be the critical resource through which human beings we'd satisfying lives. it will be found about these institutions deutsch. in the welfare state for reasons that are intrinsic to the nature of the welfare state. it will be found that these institutions are the richest and most robust in states that allow people to work out their lives on their own, simply and cooperative lee. my third is an alternative to the welfare state will become increasingly obvious. in a sense take all the money we currently spend on this first and use it to finance a and come for all adults tearing down the regulatory apparatus in the welfare state. now, i know all of the objections that were springing into some of your minds because after i wrote the book i heard every single one of them, and i

also tried to work through them in the book as well. will the politicians supplement the guaranteed income? i submit those objections have the answers and i try to spell that out, but that's not my main point for the purpose tonight. rather at some point over the next decade or two to everyone. to some of us it was all pretty ridiculous when i wrote in our hands. the united states is one of the ridges on earth, they won't make enough for themselves there would disappear and yet we're spending $2 trillion a year and still half a million people in need. that's when me and my ridiculous. , that some budgetary figure which we all rapidly approached and and would become ridiculous

to everyone that the spending of trillions of dollars from using the armies of bureaucrats to do that, we spend a lot on themselves and then give back a lot of educated people that don't do it and remain with the favoritism. my flat prediction is that really prediction but is the hope. the united states has a history of confronting pessimists that i take very seriously. from ever the american prejudiced england did blow or has taken a wrong turn that looked as if it might be fatal yeah. can't happen again? is it could. i don't have a politically practical. this wasn't a practical plan but the first step is a recognition

among americans of all classis that a problem of the cultural inequality exists and something can be done about it. in that first step it can happen. gutzman my experience as well as french in the book that i got a really positive response, and that's not determined by the political ideology where they will become hothouse flowers. they are aware of the danger. i think that both the problems of the new upper class and the new middle class are in a sense problem whose time has come. the something that has to be done then i have in mind cannot consist of. i can't think. even if i tried to stop being a libertarian and the policies the

what do some good i won't come up with any. acting in their own interest in the interest of all our children. doing that requires support from outside. i want it to be clear i am not thinking of fishtown as a community with troubles. there are lots and lots of families in the united states who are doing everything right, holding the line, maintaining standards. the need help from outside but not in the form of government assistance. to reinforce that it's to drop its condescending nonjudgmental the sun. for working hard and being married and raising your children you have to think of

these work for us shouldn't hesitate to voice their approval of those that define. when it comes to america and the work ethic, the new upper class does have to start reaching. the change in the enclaves of the upper class requires members of the upper class rethink their priorities. here are some propositions. first, life sequestered from anybody and not like yourself is self lamenting. second, places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. florida, america out slaves the enclave of the class is still a wonderful place. so with smart, interesting and entertaining people, if you are

not coming you strip yourself of what makes a being an american special. such priorities can be expressed in any number. the neighborhood you buy your next home, what to tell your children about the value physically or and whether you become an active member of the religious congregation, whether you became involved in your community of a more level fenech attended a charity balls. i'm not asking that the new upper class become social workers were move their families. they just need to think about tweaking their decisions and stop this excess of search to be around others at the top of the socio-economic wetter. everyone in the new upper class as the monetary resources to make a wide variety of decisions that determine whether they engage themselves and their children and the rest of america or whether they isolate

themselves from it. the only question is what they prefer to do. [applause] >> we met. that was in the end. i said that's it with a question. if you'll bear with me i will finish up very quickly. [laughter] won applause is enough. you don't have to do it again. so that's it. we are supposed to trust that large numbers of parents will spontaneously voluntarily make the right choice for their country by making the right choice for themselves and their children to? yeah, we are. but if i'm right that these local one whose time has come i don't think that is my leave. there are just too many instances in american history where the culture has turned very rapidly on what americans

recognize. it's not a sure thing. i have given you a few reasons for optimism but the reality is that america is nearing the divide and things could easily go the wrong way. i am a particularly worried about the second generations of belmont. born into effluence, conscious of and guilty about the ignorance the of the vibrancy and of the you do not have to know it firsthand. many of the second third generation members of bald increasingly don't get america. in their heart of hearts, they don't understand why america is special. but the second and feared generation of belmont remains a strong faction of all americans. elsewhere i hope and believe from sea to shining sea, they're remains a broadly shared

understanding that america isn't just another state. if that is true as i believe it to be among the mainstream democrats and republicans alike we should be argue about how to legislate for health care what the other ceiling and still be able to agree. we have had something wonderful going on in america. we mustn't lose it. america is fundamentally unlike england or germany or france or sweden or for that matter unlike japan or china. the american project must once again be seen for what it is to a different way for people who live together, unique elimination's and precious. that's it. [laughter] [applause] >> thank you for the marvelous

lecture and now we'll return to your questions and after that adjourn to the recession in the lobby. is the mature. i would just recognize them. and we give people -- >> microphones. right there. >> i would just like to ask about the possible influence of the social media on us going forward because although all these separations took place before facebook, we now have facebook and other ways people interact. what do you see happening? >> it can be fostered by the internet are absolutely fascinating. and i discussed them in the book to read and i'm talking about social capital traditionally whereby through the social media in our immediate family we have a case where the crisis with the two majors and four were recognized by their online friends and mobilized the intervention.

we have online resources now that have a traditional capital taking a castle to your neighbor that is sick or something. there is a site called lots of helping hands of, whereby again in the keys and elving our immediate family friend suffering from cancer was able to have her friend organize a couple of months' worth of meals through this restores, so there are lots of ways in which social capital can be undermined by the internet, but it can also be reinforced. all of these wonderful new forms of social capital on the middle class at least of all white people in fishtown. savitt is the rich getting richer in social capital and i'm not optimistic it will do much for fishtown. right here, for growth.

>> can we return short-term this are not without going back to our religious rights of the religion is, the routes that will put of the founding of the country? >> well, self disclosure ayman agnostic's want to be the leader but i have to say that the founders were very explicit about religionocity being a necessary for the self-governing society that and refer to self-governing meaning of the individual level and the fact is the jury is still out on whether these ladies can exist for a long time. europe is experimenting with that right now much more than we are coming and we will know the answer. i have two thoughts. one is -- i think it's really

important -- i think that the role of the traditional religion in a free society is crucial for its long-term health and survival, and i also think we are on the cusp of the revitalization of the spiritual dimension in life among the new upper class and belmont in general. i've said this before and i will say it very briefly here i look upon the 20th century as the adolescence were we decided that our parents had been wrong about ?ó??ókk