Now Comes Charles Murray

Upper Class Dept: Now comes Charles Murray to lob a grenade into this progressive wishful thinking. His new book, Coming Apart , to be released next week, argues that the most important gap between the upper class and what we used to call the working class is no longer economic or social. It s cultural, according to Globe and Mail. The differences go far deeper than a taste for Chablis versus two-fours. They extend to such basic matters as how you raise your kids and what it means to be a man and we can all clap for that I guess. Inequality has soared, and that should worry everyone. The trouble is, solutions are hard to come by. Raising taxes on the rich might be a good thing, but it won t narrow the gap. So what will? Some people want massive investment in early childhood education for disadvantaged kids. Some want massive job-creation programs, or a massive increase in training for the unskilled. Such solutions would need vast amounts of public money, but maybe they d be worth it. As recently as the 1960s, he writes, people were united by a common understanding of American values. Just about everyone believed in marriage, two-parent families and hard work. But now, class values have dramatically diverged. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America, he writes in The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America s core cultural institutions. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.