Coming Apart

Charles Murray explores the formation of new American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites to drive home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity. Drawing on five decades of research, Coming Apart demonstrates that the new upper and lower classes have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—a divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad. The two classes live in increasingly different cultures, with the powerful upper class surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. The evidence is about white America. The message is about all of America.