Murrary's argument is that this is a cultural development and not a product of genetics, it's in addition to his previous work, not a replacement.
From Niall "Tool" Ferguson's review:
Murray meticulously chronicles and measures the emergence of two wholly distinct classes: a new upper class, first identified in The Bell Curve as "the cognitive elite," and a new "lower class," which he is too polite to give a name. And he vividly localizes his argument by imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one college degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any. (Read: Tonyville and Trashtown.)
The key point is that the four great social trends of the past half-century--the decline of marriage, of the work ethic, of respect for the law and of religious observance--have affected Fishtown much more than Belmont. As a consequence,
the traditional bonds of civil society have atrophied in Fishtown. And that, Murray concludes, is why people there are so very unhappy--and dysfunctional.
What can be done to reunite these two classes? Murray is dismissive of the standard liberal prescription of higher taxes on the rich and higher spending on the poor. As he points out, there could hardly be a worse moment to try to import the European welfare state, just as that system suffers fiscal collapse in its continent of origin.
What the country needs is not an even larger federal government but a kind of civic Great Awakening--
a return to the republic's original foundations of family, vocation, community, and faith.
http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332992417&sr=8-1As Stephen Colbert noted in his interview, this is a book in which there are no Black people. Murray's basically arguing that the myriad civil rights movements of the last few decades produced a cultural shift that took poor white people away from "the traditional bonds of civil society" and toward a sinful existence. It's Social Darwinism but in application and not in cause, that's what the Bell Curve pretended to be about. This is honestly an even more overt attempt at white washing the history of this country.
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