Murray Vs. Murray

Earlier this month Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, gave this year's Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Most of it reads like an Ayn Rand objectivist diatribe against socialist democratic states using"Europe" as the code word for all that is wrong with the world. Apparently that sort of thing is popular again. While Murray, to a certain extent, is playing on the political mood, his logic is extraordinarily flawed. Here he is railing against what he calls the equality premise:

The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last forty years, this premise has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation that has reached into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase "politically correct" eventually comes back to the equality premise. Every form of affirmative action derives from it.

While Murray is clearly conflating equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes, what's most interesting, and entirely hypocritical, is that he later goes on to mourn how equality of opportunity is diminishing:

Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers--and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn't gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There's nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.

In other words, the focus on equality is a bad thing, Murray says, and it's wrong because we've gotten more unequal over the last half century. Huh?