Charles Murray, as far as I can make out, has dropped racism in favour of old-school reactionary elitism. It’s not that other races are inferior, any more, it’s that the race, in general, is inferior. I understand this to mean he’s realised that Gang A are no closer to the White House than they were in 2008, and a strategy that doesn’t require popularity is therefore career enhancing. And then there’s this.
And as for that prat Charles Murray…. "having a job and earning your way is "part of being a man"." WTF?
— Frances Coppola (@Frances_Coppola) February 8, 2014
Murray has, without knowing it, created a novel theory of the business cycle. Fluctuations in manliness drive boom and recession. We are thrown around by the Cockdratiev wave. Now this could actually give you a fairly sophisticated understanding of the macroeconomy.
The transition through Minsky’s stages, from hedge finance to speculation and eventually to Ponzi schemes, might be ascribed to manly competitiveness and status seeking. Austrians might see something similar at the root of malinvestment. Joseph Schumpeter might have pointed out that capitalism overinvests in the boom, but that’s the point – without the fundamentally irrational drive of entrepreneurship, we would miss out on all kinds of innovations. That said, if you identified this with testosterone, you’d be wrong.
But that’s not Murray’s point. It’s not a fundamentally masculine hunt for risk on the part of entrepreneurs that’s doing the work, but rather, that workers are all girly and out of work, or something.
The Keynesian critique would be that, if manhood is socially defined as Murray requires, then the opportunities to live up to it are defined by the market for labour. Demand determines income, and therefore it determines the opportunities young people have to live up to the expectations of society. After all, the era of the Great Compression, the Keynesian years, is also known as the baby boom.
The enduring radical punch of Keynes is simply that he accepted that causality might point the other way.