Intro (00:02):

Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels,

Mitch Daniels (00:17)

Greetings to all within earshot, and welcome to the latest and to me the most exciting to date edition of the Future Liberty Podcast. Our guest today is someone from whom I have learned so much, someone I have admired so much, and someone from whom society has benefited as much as any social scientist I can name. He, I believe, is our premier practitioner in that discipline, no one I know has been more broadly inquisitive, certainly more effective in shaping not just opinion, but actual public policy. I struggle to think who has had a similar impact and maybe James Q. Wilson before him, but in our day, our most persuasive scholar on poverty, on cultural capital, and issues of that on education, on liberty and the meaning of libertarianism. We are so privileged to be joined today by the inimitable Charles Murray. Charles, thank you for being with us.

Charles Murray (01:25):

Mitch, you are more than kind. That’s extraordinary. Thank you so much.

Mitch Daniels (01:29):

I should have gone on longer. So you found yourself at Harvard University, but you didn’t get there in what was certainly not then a conventional way. You came from the thriving cosmopolitan metropolis of Newton, Iowa.

Charles Murray (01:45):

That’s right. Yeah.

Mitch Daniels (01:45):

How does a boy from Newton wind up at Harvard?

Charles Murray (01:51):

I was an example of what was going on all over the country, even though I didn’t realize it. If I’d grown up 20 years earlier, it would’ve never crossed my mind. I would’ve gone to Iowa State or Iowa University. By the time of the mid-fifties. There were articles about Harvard that a guy like me in Newton, Iowa would read about, and I said, that sounds really great. And so I applied out of nowhere. My parents were kind of startled because both my older sisters had gone to Iowa State, but they were supportive and I got a high SAT score and I’d been a high school debater who’d won some awards, and so I got in.

Mitch Daniels (02:35):

No, I noticed that in moments of candor, first of all, you admitted to being a somewhat rebellious youth, which may not have found its way into your Harvard application, but apparently didn’t keep you out.

Charles Murray (02:48):

Yeah, I looked good on paper in terms of my suitability for Harvard.

Mitch Daniels (02:55):

Yeah, the SAT was an interesting side note. Just to take a second, I had read at one point you attributed, you were being noticed and admitted to Harvard to that merit-based test. It’s a very topical thing these days. Later on, I saw that you expressed doubts about it because of the way that some more fortunate young people have been able to be trained or somehow game the system. It’s a very current topic today when a lot of schools went away from it and now are rediscovering it. What do you think these days?

Charles Murray (03:34):

Well, the test was always good. The test was a terrific, and it was created exactly for kids in Newton, Iowa because we didn’t go to Andover or Exeter. We didn’t have any influential parents or other kinds of people who would get us in that test score to let Harvard and Yale and Princeton know, Hey, I’m pretty smart. And it served that function and continued to serve it. But what happened, Mitch, by the 2000’s it had become so much an emblem of who you are that it was kind of a flaunting of your SAT score if you got a high one. And at that point I’m saying, you know what? I want to try to get rid of the glamor associated with the SAT. And it turns out that if you just gave achievement tests, if I’d taken the equivalent of advanced placement course tests in high school in Newton, Iowa, I would’ve done well even though the education wasn’t that great because I’d done so much reading on my own. And so later in life I said, let’s substitute achievement tests for the SAT just because of the optics of the situation.

Mitch Daniels (04:51):

Yeah, I was curious, having spent a decade at a university, we never went away from the SAT, but it was a lonely position for a while. But we kept looking at the data, which was very clear that it was a necessary factor in predicting eventual success of a student. And it’s been interesting to see many of the schools who retreated from it now, as I say, rediscovering it.

Charles Murray (05:16):

Well, could I just throw in there? Who has [been] served badly by getting rid of the SAT are kids who really couldn’t hack it at Purdue, but if they’ve gotten admitted, this is not a great experience to go to where you’re the dumbest person in the class and you can’t pass. And so that is an incredibly destructive experience and the SAT test is a good way sign stepping that

Mitch Daniels (05:40):

Charles the world first. I suppose most people first came to know your work, groundbreaking work now a few decades ago on poverty, and there’ve been a lot of progress/regress on that subject too. I could suggest your book Losing Ground actually led in a way that not many such works, whatever their scholarly merit do to very tangible major changes in policy, that must’ve been a source of some satisfaction to you at least while it lasted. Did you expect that sort of impact?

Charles Murray (06:27):

Okay, it’s time for a little candor here and that is that even though people like to give me credit for something like the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, what they did wasn’t what I considered to be really the important thing. I was in favor of some of the things they did and the work requirements that those were all good. But what really happened with social policy that I was criticizing in Losing Ground was that we had taken away a lot of the stuff of life from young people, poor young people, poor communities, low-income communities. We had taken a part of the population that had previously been considered kind of the spine of America, working class America. That was the heart of the country, and we converted them from, well, let me put it this way, in 1960, if you were a man who was holding down a job supporting a wife and a couple of kids putting a roof over the head, you could be working at a menial job and you had standing in your community, you had respect. People would say, well, we may not have much money, but we’ve never taken a penny of welfare from anybody. And that was a source of enormous pride. And the real problem with social policy was it that it destroyed that whole world?

Mitch Daniels (08:10):

No, you’ve said this very eloquently in many ways. One of the most, I thought, striking lines were that I guess it’s been in pursuit of happiness that government social insurance has led to incalculable human suffering. That’s a pretty bold statement when its proponents alleged that it’s meant to do exactly the opposite.

Charles Murray (08:37):

Well, and the most obvious example of that comes with family formation. Because, and here’s where I think people just don’t want to face reality. Everybody agrees. No, not everybody. Most people agree now that a two-parent family is a big deal for raising kids. It’s an important thing. It’s an extremely valuable thing that kids need that father in the house as well as the mother. Okay, that’s a good thing. Then you have to ask yourself, how is it that in the United States from the founding until the 1960s that the overwhelming majority of children were born to two parents and two parents who stayed married? And how come it is that it stopped happening? And the truth is that you have a couple of things going on. One is that for males, getting married and taking care of your kids was how you proved you were a man. And if you didn’t do that, your parents, your siblings and your male friends considered you a bum if you didn’t do that. And for the woman, and here’s where people really hate it, the sticks were huge. You got pregnant without a husband and social stigma, economic hardship, you name it, it was extremely painful. We lifted a lot of the pain from women who got in that situation, and we also took away a culture that applauded men who did their job. And the combination of the two, which was fostered by the social welfare system, has produced enormous suffering among America’s children.

Mitch Daniels (10:21):

Yeah, let’s practice a little amateur psychology. In your case, it won’t be amateurish. I’m fascinated by the people who in the face of, as you just said, the now thoroughly documented. I have often said the evidence about two parent families is the single most emphatically proven contention in the world of social science across the spectrum, including even recently from some left-leaning scholars. People keep finding the exact same thing that you just said, and yet work requirements for instance, got undone as fast as the people who different people came to power. You wrote, I thought very interestingly that one problem about getting this all right is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever actually been poor.

Charles Murray (11:25):

Mitch, I don’t know about your family history, but I think I’m the first in my line of Murray men who doesn’t know how to farm in history because my father wasn’t a farmer, but he grew up in a farm family and he knew how to farm and he grew up in what would today be considered poverty. So did my mother. I’m sure that there are, Daniels’s in your line who were pretty poor pretty recently, and so you knew what that was like and you knew it’s not the end of the world as long as you have your dignity and you’re able to put together an okay material existence. But if you’ve never experienced that, if your parents and your grandparents have all been upper middle class, poverty is really scary, but it’s also a mysterious land. Worst of all, it has people who you are likely to look down on now will be candid here too. If they’re white, you are likely to look down on them. If they’re poor blacks and you are on the left, you are likely to be secretly condescending toward them, not expect from them what you would expect ordinarily from a white person. And these are facts of the way that we have perceived poverty that I think are two seldom said explicitly.

Mitch Daniels (13:03):

That bridges directly to another topic, another phenomenon which you identified as far as I am concerned ahead of almost anyone else we’ve come to describe it as tribalism, but the separation, the emergence of a new aristocracy, the very people you just described. And let me ask you about a couple things you’ve said about this new class. One was that today’s privileged enjoy one relationship with government while the peasants endure another. That’s a provocative line, but embroider on that a little bit.

Charles Murray (13:48):

Yes, you and I, we get irritated to the government because we were, in my case, I was trying to repair the dam in a little pond we have in our backyard, and I had to go through the regulatory state and it cost 10 times as much as it should have been, took 10 times as long, but I’ve got the resources to deal with that. If you are a guy who’s running a plumbing business and you have to jump through all these hoops all the time that make it very difficult for you, you have a very different relationship. It’s much more oppressive to you than it is to the others. And basically those in the new upper class, as I call them, can shield themselves from a lot of the nonsense of government. The less money you have, the less education you have, the harder it is.

Mitch Daniels (14:41):

Another line, and I don’t recall which of your books it appears in, but it stuck with me from the moment I read it. You wrote somewhere that it is not a problem if truck drivers cannot understand the life and difficulties of a Harvard professor. It is a problem if a Harvard professor can’t understand the problems of a truck driver.

Charles Murray (15:08):

Yeah. Because the Harvard professor, if he’s in the social sciences and giving advice to Democratic senators, is making up policies and rules without the slightest idea of what the indirect effects of those might be. And you can directly link that ignorance about what ordinary life is like for ordinary Americans to some really stupid things that have been done by the government. And I would say for example, gutting the work requirements as soon as they could for getting welfare is one of those examples. Because when I said a few minutes ago that there is something really important about being able to say, we may be poor, but we’ve never taken a penny from anyone. I don’t think the Harvard professor understands what that means to a person’s sense of

Mitch Daniels (16:07):

Yeah, no. A lot of people finally learned, I guess to use the vocabulary of dignity and association with [Edmund] Burke, but their policies haven’t stopped frustrating and impeding it.

Charles Murray (16:23):

And because they do not want to face the fact that dignity cannot be conferred on anyone, it must be earned. There’s no choice You can perhaps have self-esteem without, because if enough people tell you what a wonderful governor you were, and if enough people tell me what wonderful books I’ve written, I couldn’t feel good about that. But self-respect absolutely depends on having earned that and that internal voice knows the difference. Yeah,

Mitch Daniels (17:00):

Now, our friend Arthur Brooks has done a lot of work, of course on what leads to happiness. The happiness government should enable us to pursue but cannot deliver to us, as you frequently pointed out and earn success is his two word formula.

Charles Murray (17:21):

I think Arthur would acknowledge that In Pursuit [Of Happiness and Good Government] is maybe where he got that earned success and then he took it and he took it and ran with it and developed it and has made it a very powerful shorthand way of talking about what I said in a much more elliptical way.

Mitch Daniels (17:43):

He’s one of many of us who consciously or subconsciously employing memes in what we do and how we think. Quickly in your lecture in ‘09, the Kristol Lecture, the most prestigious one that American Enterprise Institute sponsors, you made the statement that the center of society’s okay, it’s the top and the bottom that are the problem. How do you feel about the center today?

Charles Murray (18:23):

I’m hesitating here because we have problems in 2024 that we did not have in 2009. The degree to which you have had what you referred to as tribalism take over in the last decade. Plus, 15 years, has led to a kind of alienation in this country between what I was referring to, the scent as the center and the upper class, an alienation that’s far greater than I would’ve imagined possible in 2009. Now, the empirical answer to your question about how the center is doing is not so well because you do have lots of problems with family formation in the middle class. Now along with the working class, you do have problems with males not being in the labor force. You can run through a lot of indicators saying the center is not doing nearly as well now as it was then. The question that preoccupies me now is where we go from here over the next half dozen. I think that, again, I’m hesitating because I don’t want to be a catastrophists, but I’m extremely worried about where things are going.

Mitch Daniels (19:59):

Well, maybe we can come back to that in a sort of more temporal way toward the end. But before we leave this subject, I wanted to ask you, you made an interesting, I’ll call it a speculation somewhere that loosely speaking, you were talking about many of the baby boom generation, all the good breaks that people my age have had. You speculated that late in life, they might feel a sense of embarrassment or even shame about that and might lead them to have a slightly different view of public policy than the one they grew up with back when they thought we had fixed the environment, solve civil rights and invented sex. Do you see any evidence now of second thoughts like that or was that just wishful thinking?

Charles Murray (20:53):

The baby boomers and the affluent baby boomers, the new upper class, the weird thing is that in the way they behave, they seem to have learned their lesson.

So the same kids who were saying Don’t trust anybody over 30 in the 1960s have to a large degree gotten married, stayed married. Maybe it’s the second marriage that they stuck instead of the first one, as in my case. But they’ve been married now happily for a long time, and they have spent a lot of time with their kids and they’ve done everything right, they’ve worked hard, and they won’t preach it. They won’t say out loud. You know what? I have learned that a satisfying life consists of engagement with family and community and faith, and I really think that more people ought to adopt this way of looking at the world. They don’t say that they refuse. They refuse to say something as simple publicly as you ought to get married before you have kids. They it.

Mitch Daniels (22:03):

Well, that would be judgmental.

Charles Murray (22:05):

That would be judgmental.

Mitch Daniels (22:06):

We can’t be judgmental except about those we deem judgmental.

Charles Murray (22:12):

Yeah, you can’t be judgmental of anybody except right winners. So judgmental of it.

Mitch Daniels (22:23):

We just mentioned kids and their education, a book, a small book you wrote, which I treasured, which maybe fewer people have seen than some of the others was called, I think it’s called Real Education. But in any event, you simply, you laid out, simply laid out for simple maxims that I’d just like you to review with the audience here. And the first was that ability varies. Now there’s a stunning statement, come on, Murray, defend that.

Charles Murray (22:58):

Told you it was simple. It is very difficult to get anybody involved in education to say that.

Whereas you cannot be a teacher and have taught more than two days in the class, any classroom before. The kids in that room have widely varying abilities. And you also know that there’s not that much you can do to change the abilities. You can do your best to teach each kid, but we aren’t going to change the abilities. Everybody knows this. Nobody will say it again when I say nobody in education, now we have this fiction, this romantic fiction that any kid can be anything he wants to be if he puts his mind to it.

Mitch Daniels (23:44):

Well…

Charles Murray (23:44):

Sorry. Intellectually that’s not true and it is punishing to say that to kids.

Mitch Daniels (23:55):

During my last full-time stint, I banned the use of the word passion. It is a very misleading word if you just care enough about something the world’s oyster, and that can lead people to some real disappointments.

Charles Murray (24:14):

And one of the problems with too many of the new upper class who I blame for so much is that they’re pretty smart intellectually. And the problem is that they may have gone all the way through to their PhD and never taken a class where they had to say to themselves, I’m not smart enough to pass this course.

Now I did it because I was foolish enough to take some advanced math at MIT and I had to drop out of the course halfway in. But that was very good for me. Everybody ought to understand that they have limits and then they have to understand that you didn’t hit your limits until you tried to take a math course and graduate school. A lot of kids hit those limits in grade school even more hit them in middle school and high school. And we have to understand that it’s appropriate to try to get each child to get all that they can out of the various strengths, but you don’t try to set them a task that they are doomed to fail at.

Mitch Daniels (25:31):

Yeah. Your second rule, which maybe a corollary or maybe you’re saying something slightly different was once again, rather shocking assertion, half the children are below average. Now this won’t go down well in Lake Wobegon, but what were you saying?

Charles Murray (25:54):

I was saying they’re basically what I was saying a little bit earlier, you take half the kids are below average and that’s true of any human quality. And if you were a little boy and you are below average in sports ability as I was, you learn that in second grade when they’re choosing up teams and you get chosen last and you deal with that. Well, the same thing applies intellectually. Our educational system has to understand that half the kids are below average and be structured accordingly. And it is not.

Mitch Daniels (26:33):

Third thing you said, this was I think very unusual contention back when you wrote the book, much less so. You said too many kids are going to college.

Charles Murray (26:46):

Way too many. Yeah, and you’re right. There is one thing that we’ve seen a sea change in people’s attitude toward that. I’m so happy to see it, but I don’t want to be misunderstood. I think that there are, if you’re talking about STEM science, technology, engineering and mathematics, that for careers in those, you need certain kinds of education that you’re probably not going to get except at a good school with the right facilities and with really good teachers. And you need that and you better go get that. I’m also in favor of a classic liberal education for those who want that, which means you have to read some really difficult books in the humanities and the social sciences and so forth. But that’s a fairly limited number of people too. There are great many people who can get what they need out of post high school education in all sorts of much more flexible ways than the four year residential college. And that too, the good news is I think that’s an idea whose time has come?

Mitch Daniels (27:56):

Well, I think it came about the time you wrote the book, and it’s tragic that people only recently have and young people and their parents are waking up to this and looking at other alternatives. We got 40 million Americans out there who started college and didn’t finish. It’s where a huge part of the whole mess of the student debt issue resides. And many of those people would’ve been much better served by choosing some other path. But at the time everybody in society was telling them, no, no, no four year degree.

Charles Murray (28:31):

Well, the fact is that for a long time it was thought that a BA was sort of being a passport to being a respectable citizen. And that’s a recent phenomenon because back at the early part of the 20th century, you only had about four or 5% of the population that, but by the early 2000s, that had become kind of a necessity. And once again, we may be going the right direction on this issue.

Mitch Daniels (29:01):

And how about the last one, the last maxim was that, I won’t say everything, but so much of societal and national success depends on how we prepare the truly gifted,

Charles Murray (29:16):

Which is a couple of things about that. First, let’s be clear about the importance of that group.

So let’s take for example, something like science, physics, chemistry, the really hard sciences. And let’s take a school like Caltech, which has gone wobbly in recent years, but formerly what Caltech did was it just admitted from the top down based on evidence of intellectual ability, did not do holistic admissions. I’ve talked to people at Caltech who, who’ve gone to Caltech who have made an important point to me. They say, look, there are lots of guys who can become really good engineers, who will do great at Iowa State, do great at Purdue, and it’s also true that they shouldn’t go to Caltech because they’re dealing with a very rarefied level of talent. But then if you look at where the great advances have come from in chemistry and physics and biology and the rest of that, it has come from some extremely gifted individuals.

So it may not be fair they didn’t earn this vast intellectual ability they have, but our obligation is to say, these people are really important to our future. We need to hold their feet to the fire. We need to get all out of them that they can, and we need to do our very best to educate them to be good human beings. And we have two things that we need to do with a gifted one. Identify, well, we need three or four things, but we need to identify them. We need to push them to their limits, but we also need to restore a function that elite universities used to take for granted that they were supposed to be an important moral character influence on their kids. And that has been pretty much ignored in recent years.

Mitch Daniels (31:24):

So maybe it’s not a good idea to abolish gifted and talented classes in our high schools.

Charles Murray (31:34):

And I say, I don’t mind if they get rid of them for the social sciences and the humanities because a lot of these kids really do need to hang out with people who aren’t as smart as they are. There’s a lot to be said for if you’re going to be in the policy sciences, you better know that truck driver. But if you’re talking to STEM, that’s where the gifted and talented is important.

Mitch Daniels (32:01):

Yeah, no, I mean assuming hopefully that artificial intelligence is taking us in a positive direction as predecessor technologies have, I’ve asked people at the very front edge of that and now two or three times and always gotten the same answer, how many people in the world actually understand what you’re doing and are creating these advances? And nobody has ever given me a number beyond three digits in the world.

Charles Murray (32:30):

Yes. It’s not unlike the situation with quantum mechanics where the famous statement is if you think you understand quantum mechanics, that’s proof that you don’t. There are things, well, and there’s the other statistics which we’ve known for many years, which is if you take a look at any scientific literature and incredibly small proportion of the people in that field have contributed an incredibly large in the war.

Mitch Daniels (33:00):

He wrote a little book called about libertarianism, which is maybe the guiding principle of the organization that you’re gracing with this conversation today here at the Liberty Fund. You summed it up as you want to do in a few words and simple words. You said, Every human owns his own life and rereading that. I asked myself, I don’t think too many people if I went out on the street would disagree with that statement. But my question is, have we forgotten how to live that way or to insist that that’s the case? What do you think?

Charles Murray (33:45):

Well, I’m going to invoke another statement that I like from that book, which is that responsibility for the consequences of your actions is not the price of liberty. It’s one of its rewards. And so you own your own life. Yes. And you ought to be allowed to live your life as you see fit. You also are obligated to take on all the responsibility for what you choose to do. And that if those two conditions apply, I think Mitch, you end up with the kind of community that we would all like to live in. Not one in which people are on isolated households, never talk to each other. You end up in a community which is vibrant in which people are interacting each other, but in which they’re taking care of problems if the government hasn’t already taken over all those functions for itself.

Mitch Daniels (34:46):

And since this is all ultimately about the pursuit of happiness, we now know that people who don’t enjoy that sort of interaction don’t enjoy that sort of sense of community are distinctly unhappy. Everything I have seen and learned, I think learned about this eruption of a depression and angst and a sense of isolation traces back to the loss of those qualities.

Charles Murray (35:18):

And In Pursuit, which is the book we were talking indirectly about earlier when we were talking about earned success, that was when in that book, which I published in 1988, I talked about community, family and vocation as the three. And I left out faith. And at that time, I was aware that faith was very important to a lot of people. I was very secular, and I said, well, this is a book about policy, so I’m just going to leave out faith. I’ve since come to think that the four, and these are the four that Arthur Brooks emphasizes now too, and I think he’s right to do so. You add faith to that set and it’s not necessary to be happy to be engaged in all four of those because you can, there are happy atheists and there are happy single people and so forth, but I think you need to be engaged at least three of them. So what I think we have as a problem among a lot of the people in the new upper class is vocation is too important that they do live in a community in which people are in their separate households and they don’t really interact that much. And I think you were correct in saying that there is this kind of internal sense that maybe they’re missing out on something that doesn’t get articulated. I’ll just throw it as a add-on here. I lived in big cities in my adult life until 1989 when my wife and I moved out to a place of 150 people. And I cannot overemphasize the degree to which being embedded in a community like this is much richer than being in an anonymous neighborhood in a big city.

Mitch Daniels (37:15):

Yeah. So you mentioned faith, religiosity. This is one of the values or virtues that you examined in your really stunning work Coming Apart a few years ago had enormous effect on so many of us. So you mentioned marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity. Now with the perspective of a dozen years or so, anything to feel positive about? Every poll I see suggests that we’ve had a very precipitous drop in religiosity. F

Charles Murray (37:58):

For instance, it’s kind of strange In my own life, I have found first place, my wife has been a very active Quaker for a long time and I have been tagged along in our wake and religion has become much more important to me. But also I think about the organization I worked for, which formerly had a president who was a devout Catholic. It now has a couple of other senior scholars who are devoutly religious. And I think of other examples where I say something strange may be going on among this new upper class I refer to, I think I would like to see a breakdown on the degree to which you have a resurgence of religiosity in one stratum and possibly an elite stratum. But what I’m afraid of is that you are getting that huge drop off down in the working class in the middle class. And it’s extremely worrisome because an awful lot. Well, from a practical standpoint, and this is what the founders recognize because the founders,

Benjamin Franklin did not go to church every Sunday. And he voiced, they were deists, most of them were deists, they were children of the Enlightenment. But they were also extremely aware that you cannot have a free society, a limited government unless you have people who can govern themselves and governing themselves requires morality. And it also is really helped out by a belief in religion. And so you had Thomas Jefferson who did go to church when he was president, and when asked about it, he said that this was his duty, that it was part of being a good president was to express support for that. And if we don’t have that, well take a look at Europe. I think we’re watching what happens with a society that becomes highly secular.

Mitch Daniels (40:15):

Well, you’ve just anticipated what I still intend to be our wrap up questions here, but right before we get there, and this one may be off base, so feel free to so label and dismiss it. But you spent six years in the Peace Corps. I think they were all in Thailand anyway, in Asia.

Charles Murray (40:36):

I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand, and I stayed in Thailand for another four years working on other jobs, yeah.

Mitch Daniels (40:40):

Oh, okay. But anyway, a very long stay. And when I look at the character traits, the virtues that whose decline you cataloged in coming apart once again, marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity, is it superficial or facile to look at some Asian cultures and see that they may be stronger in those areas than we are presently? Is there something we can learn? Is this a reason to imagine them being a stronger competitors?

Charles Murray (41:25):

Well, a couple of points because I’m going to profess ignorance on others. But one point is that you have systems of ethics in East Asia that are produced basically the same kind of virtuous behavior that you get from Aristotelian ethics in the so that you have, I’m thinking of Confucianism, I’m thinking of the Buddhist tradition, the Daoist tradition. And this is a case where they are stronger than Christianity in emphasizing family obligations to family.

And there is a price to be paid for that in terms of achievement because a lot of the achievement that has gone on in the west has been obstreperous young people saying, I don’t care what my parents want. I’m going to go out and fulfill my destiny in life. And an Asia that has not happened so much, but if you have a society which has produced very strong families and then you give them exposure to an American phenomenon of celebrating individual accomplishment, you just may get the best of both worlds whereby you have people who have grown up in strong families, but who are now able to go out and achieve in the world by that ethic. And if you take a look at the senior leadership in Silicon Valley to take just one example and how many South Asians and East Asians you have in the most senior positions in those companies, you have to say, something’s working.

Mitch Daniels (43:11):

Something’s working.

Charles Murray (43:12):

They have a tool set, a skill set, or a social context that in many ways is stronger now than ours appears to be.

Mitch Daniels (43:24):

No, it strikes me also by the way, that to a degree that it’s probably under-reported Christianity has been spreading in much of Asia in some cases it’s not new. I believe I’m correct. There are more Korean Presbyterians than there now are those of us who are still left in the U.S.

Charles Murray (43:45):

Yes, and I would be interested again to know how this all breaks. This is the social scientist in me saying, I’d like to know what’s going on here because I sense that we have passed the point. I’m turning it back to faith now as which in many ways I’ve been focusing on recently, we had a period in the 20th century went on for a long time when you went to college and one of the first things you learned about religion was that smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. And that’s what I heard when I went to college and I bought into it and so did my wife and the rest of it. I think there is more of a sense now that you know what an awful lot of smart people do believe that stuff, and maybe we have to listen to the reasons that they believe that stuff. I think that is gaining ground in the limited area.

Mitch Daniels (44:42):

Well, it is the great unanswerable question. Is it true or isn’t it? But as you pointed out a minute ago, and maybe we can bring this marvelous conversation to a close on this point, Ben Franklin, who you just mentioned, wrote that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. And so we have to ask ourselves if certain necessary virtues have eroded, are they capable of, we’ve had revivals, we’ve had religious revivals, where might a revival of these virtues which have afraid particularly in the places where we need them most industriousness, honesty and so forth marriage, how might they come back?

Charles Murray (45:35):

Okay, let me first make an optimistic observation, which it’s very hard to get me to do, but it’s possible. It’s easy to live in an America that is a lot like the one that Tocqueville describes in democracy in America. And all you have to do is get out of the big city and go to small town and small city America. So that for example, on my specific case, I’m in a small town, the city down the road, which is now up to about I guess 50, 60,000 people is Frederick Maryland. That community is just vibrant with to villian voluntary organizations and people taking care of problems on their own. And the small town America, you walk down the street and everybody smiles at you and greets, you get a flat tire in an awful lot of America and somebody stops to help you out and fix the tire, not necessarily on the Los Angeles freeway, but they’ll do it on the roads around Burkittsville, Maryland. And you just have a lot of traditional American virtues that are still out there.

So that Mitch exhausts my optimistic part and then can say, but look what’s going on with the country now and this terrible polarization, this terrible tendency to demonize the other side, and which I cannot find much difference between the left and the right in their willingness to demonize the other side. And how do we get that to go away? You’ve got me, if you have any bright ideas, I would sure like to hear ’em. It does not look good right now.

Mitch Daniels (47:36):

No one hopes that it won’t take a cataclysm of some kind to reshuffle the deck, although that’s happened often in history and sometimes after with a lot of casualties along the way, produce something better. So I’d like to end these discussions, Charles, with the question, invite your optimism or not, but in 2050, will America and Americans be more or less free in the pursuit of their pursuit of happiness

Charles Murray (48:10):

Based on the way things have gone now for the last 20, 30 years? I think that you are probably going to have an educated class, but what Dick Ernstein and I call the cognitive elite that is doing just fine and they will still be getting married and raising kids and having fulfilling careers and the rest of that. And I think they will be increasingly accompanied by a working class and basically an underclass who are existing at the margins of America in which large numbers of men are not working, which large numbers of single families prevail and probably have gotten larger. And where you will also have something else going on, Mitch, that I think it’s important to introduce what we call games gaming and that sort of thing has gone from pong and from very simple things back in the 1990s to extremely virtual reality oriented alternatives. And by 2050, I think basically you’ll be able to put on a headset and experience what it’s like to be a rock star or an astronaut or whatever you feel like being. And there will be a lot of people who are simply escaping from an otherwise unfulfilling life to do that. So I am sorry, that’s just the way as I look at technology and as I look at the eco social and economic trends, that’s the way it seems to go.

Mitch Daniels (50:03):

Well, you should never apologize for an honest then and well-informed, I’m sad to say reasonably persuasive projection. You’ve been giving them to us for a long, long time. Charles, for those of us who think the scenario you just depicted is less than optimal, all I can say is please keep studying, please keep writing, and please keep teaching and guiding the rest of as you have really without parallel now for so very long on behalf of Liberty Fund, thank you for all you’ve meant to the liberties we still enjoy.

Charles Murray (50:36):

I want to say one more thing, Mitch, because I’m not going to let you get away without me saying this to anybody who’s watching. That is an incredible honor for me to have had this conversation with the political figure I admire most in the last 30 years.

Mitch Daniels (50:52):

Well, you’ve said some kind things before, and I’ve always said there’s absolutely no one, there is no one who’s esteem I value more highly. So thank you and once again, thank you for so graciously spending this time with us. We all look forward to, I hope a steady stream of further learning from your hand. Thank you, Charles Murray.

Charles Murray (51:13):

Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Daniels (51:15):

Thanks to each of you for joining us today. You can find this and the previous programs in The Future of Liberty Series at libertyfund.org/podcasts/future-of-liberty/. Thank you once again. See you at the next show.

Outro

The future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.