Coming Apart by {author}: summary and why it matters

What it argues

Murray limits the data to white Americans to show that the divide is not simply a matter of race. He invents two communities, Belmont, a prosperous suburb of college-educated professionals, and Fishtown, a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood, and uses national data to compare the groups.

Since 1960, he finds, the two have diverged. In Fishtown, marriage has declined, fewer men work full time, more children are raised by one parent, and church attendance and civic participation have fallen. In Belmont, family and religious practice stayed relatively strong. The elite has also become more isolated, living in superzips where its members rarely meet people from other classes.

Murray attributes the problem to a fading of the founding virtues of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion, and calls on the upper class to practice what it preaches, which he calls preaching what they practice.

Why it matters

The book is influential in discussions of class and culture on the right, and it is a source for later commentary on the white working class. Readers who disagree with Murray's emphasis on culture over economics will find his data a useful basis for argument.

About the author

The book draws on data from the Current Population Survey and General Social Survey, and the author followed it with a book on civil society called By the People. Murray described Coming Apart as the book in which he returned to the themes of Losing Ground with the benefit of an additional generation of data. The paperback edition of 2013 added a new afterword.

Who should read it

Readers interested in family, class and social trends.