Paul Krugman tears Charles Murray a new one!

[LongTomH]

Charles Murray has made a career of cherry-picking data to tell the elites exactly what they want to hear. In Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980, he tried to say that money spent on welfare was actually hurting the people it was intended to help; in his most famous book: The Bell Curve he tried to prove, among other things, that social classes were inevitable because poor people had lower IQ's. His latest book: Coming Apart turns on the white working class that has formed the backbone of the Republican constituency since Nixon's southern strategy of 1968. Murray claims that the working class is suffering from a moral breakdown and that is what's causing their economic hardships.

He's getting (and deserving) a lot of flack for his conclusions, one of the best smackdown's of Murray's psuedoscience comes from Professor Paul Krugman. Prof. Krugman has devoted a number of posts in his NY Times blog to refuting Murray.

Prof. Krugman begins in Blaming the Victims of Inequality to take Murray apart:

All the talk on the intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) right seems to be about Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart: The State of White America, which asserts that the problem with blue-collar whites is … declining family values.

<snip>

From an analytical point of view, this would seem to be a very odd time to focus on the alleged moral decline of the lower classes. During the 60s, it was at least somewhat reasonable to ask why social ills were rising despite a booming economy producing widely shared gains (although as William Julius Wilson pointed out, work was disappearing in the inner cities, and this helped explain rising social problems among those trapped in those inner cities). But now we have an economy that has left blue-collar workers behind; why invoke social values to explain their plight?

And to the extent that social decay is a reality among, say, the bottom third of the income distribution among whites, doesn’t this say that Wilson was right, that lack of economic opportunity is what breeds social disruption?

Of course, the sudden fuss about values makes perfect sense from a political point of view, as a distraction from the issue of soaring incomes at the top.

In Wages and Values, Krugman takes on Murray's and others for bemoaning the "deteriorating values of working-class Americans:"

Should we really be surprised that young men, confronting the reality that they won’t earn anything near as much in real terms as their fathers did — and that they will be even further from having what society sees as an adequate income, because even Adam Smith acknowledged the importance of social norms in defining prosperity — don’t marry and raise families the way the previous generation did?

His last post on this, to date, is Different slopes for Different Folks, where he takes on Murray's insistence that lowered wages should not lead to a lowered incentive to work:

So Murray is suggesting that a lower wage should not lead to any decline in work effort, and maybe even to an increase, since it takes more hours to achieve a given standard of living. In effect, he’s saying that the supply curve for labor, instead of sloping upward, slopes downward — or at any rate that it should.

This is not a crazy position: “backward-bending” labor supply is a staple of economics textbooks, because income effects work against substitution effects. Raise my wage rate, and the payoff to working more increases; but I also get richer; and one of the things people consume more of when they get richer, other things equal, is leisure. So a higher wage could lead either to a rise or fall in labor supply, and a lower wage similarly could work in either direction.

So far so good — although it’s one thing to assert this as a possibility, another to just assume it so that you can skip all the economic data and go straight to condemning moral values.

As Prof. Krugman says on another thread:

The key reason we can’t have a polite debate is that one side keeps putting out the old discredited arguments, again and again. Inequality hasn’t really increased, never mind the IRS data; we have huge social mobility, never mind the actual evidence; tax rates on the rich have gone up because they pay more taxes, never mind their soaring incomes; taxing the rich even slightly more has devastating effects on economic growth, never mind the Clinton boom and the Bush not-boom.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

1. Krugman is great.

[qb]

2. Murray has a profitable niche, and I'm sure he's laughing all the way to the bank.

There are plenty of gullible consumers eager to buy his line of crap.

I, too, appreciate Prof. Krugman for responding with reason & intelligence.

[Johonny]

3. Read Stephen Jay Gould's book "The Mismeasure of man"

a great smack down of the Bell Curve and the concept of "IQ" testing in general. You won't think about the concept of IQ the same again.

[cthulu2016]

4. It doesn't help to counter crap with crap

The Mismeasure of man is as politicized and dishonest as The Bell Curve, just in the other direction.

Throw them both in the trash.

[LongTomH]

6. Thanks for posting this!

I meant to include some links about the number of times that Murray has been refuted, The Mismeasure of Man is an excellent example (despite the next posters comments). He received generally excellent reviews from his scientific colleagues.

By the way, I note that the reviews on Amazon are sharply divided by ideology. That happens every time there's a new book out by someone with progressive views; they did the same thing with The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Always Do Better.

[Johonny]

7. Gould is a highly respected scientist

who wrote a book outside his field. However much like Krugman he's had excellent understanding of statistics and very easily guides the reader through how it is used or misused in intelligence testing in general and people like Murray specifically.

[Scuba]

5. Good to see Murray getting slapped around....

Recently noted was the fact that those who don't want to pay you a living wage are more than willing to lend you money.

Thanks for posting.