In the coming weeks, you're going to hear a lot about Charles Murray's new book, In Our Hands. Murray, you'll remember, is the crackpot conservative responsible for The Bell Curve, the racist, IQ-obsessed tract from the mid-90's that turned out to be little more than the thinking man's eugenicism. He was, as Jason DeParle once described him, a social science pornographer: the Larry Flynt for a new breed of smut that that legitimized his audience’s most poisonous suspicions about race, class, and sex by wrapping them in a veneer of sober scientism.
The question has always been why folks take his ideas seriously. The best I can come up with is the Murray discovered and skillfully exploited a fairly foundational flaw among journalists -- their generalist nature. Most commentators are not wonks, and they're definitely not statisticians. Therefore, when faced with one of Murray's opuses, they're dazzled by the array of statistics, multivariate regression analyses, and other impressive techniques he uses, the flaws of which the reviewers are often ill-equipped to assess. Murray incapacitates them by talking over them, and few writers want to risk a humiliating display of ignorance by engaging his dense substance. So there's a lot of ambivalence as to his conclusions, but much enthusiasm for his boldness and intellectual courage, virtues that self-important commentators feel well-equipped to identify.
Murray's newest is a grandiose plan to liquidate the welfare state -- Medicare, Social Security, welfare, everything -- and plow the savings into $10,000 checks for every adult American. This will, he argues, solve all our problems, from the purely economic dangers that loom on the Congressional Budget Office's projected horizons to the existential angst that afflicts our souls and hollows out our communities. I'm not kidding, as you'll see if you read my review of Murray in the latest New Republic (which I'm writing this post in large part to plug).
I do, however, want to use my blog's blissfully unlimited space to go into some added detail on Murray's policy mistakes. The base assumption of his plan is that he can halt the growth of health spending -- the primary driver of budgetary inflation -- by restoring all power to the individual, who will then bargain with private insurers and demand better care, lower cost, and snappier service. His basic premise is that given the trillions floating around our government, the concept that we have any problems at all is absurd, and it must mean that government waste is subverting America's abundance.