From the Archives: Revisiting a libertarian classic - Charles Murray's 'In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on June 23, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Revisiting a libertarian classic - Charles Murray's 'In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government'
June 23, 2010 9:41 PM MST

Question: If money can’t buy happiness, what can?

Answer: Read Charles Murray’s 1988 book, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. It may not provide the definitive answers to this question, but it certainly focuses the argument.

Preceding by a few years Murray’s What It Means to Be a Libertarian, this follow-up to his successful critique of Great Society social policy, Losing Ground, demonstrates that Murray is probably the most lucid and readable writer on questions of social policy since Jane Jacobs.

Accessible Writing
Unlike so many “scholarly” texts on this and related topics, Murray makes accessible to any interested reader the issue of the role government may have in enabling individuals to pursue happiness. And since the questions he addresses are those that have badgered us since the beginning of speech -- What is the ultimate meaning of life? What is virtuous behavior? Where do we go from here? -- it seems few readers could be uninterested.

Murray points out that simply giving money (or food stamps, or housing vouchers) to poor people will not break the cycle of poverty. Nor can it make people happy. Money is just one of a number of “enabling conditions” that allow people to put-sue happiness in their own fashions. The proper role of government, Murray argues, is to build the base for these conditions and then stand out of the way.

Murray draws on the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow for his categories of “enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness, which is to say, if all of them were met, it is difficult to see how a person could claim that he was prevented by external conditions from pursuing happiness.” These conditions are: material resources or physiological needs (food, water, shelter, sex), safety (predictability, order, protection from physical harm), intimacy (friendship, relations with spouse or children). self-respect or self esteem, and self-actualization or, in Murray’s terms, “enjoyment.”

Government as Obstacle
In Murray’s argument, government is more likely to stand in the way after these enabling conditions are laid down, impeding the pursuit of happiness rather than facilitating it. The basic difficulty is that we deal with social problems in a fashion that either leads to no solution or to making the problem worse.

Murray cites sociologist Peter Rossi, who has formulated the Iron Law of Evaluation and the Stainless Steel Law, which say, respectively, “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero,” and “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.” In other words, social planners are like dogs chasing their tails. They run and run and bark and bark, but they don’t get anywhere and they don’t catch anything.

Drawing examples from the real world -- the 55-mph speed limit and the task of attracting good teachers to public schools, for instance -- Murray demonstrates that conventional ways of thinking are wholly inadequate for the issues we confront. New questions must be asked, he says, questions that do not necessarily have quantifiable answers.

Individuals Alone
Much of what comprises “happiness” and the “pursuit of happiness” cannot be expressed in terms of dollars, gallons, or percentiles. The metaphor for their work used by social planners should be changed from engineering to healing. As a result, Murray says, “the world would not be perfect; it would just be better.”

The essence of Murray’s message is that individuals alone can best determine their own destinies and can best decide how they shall pursue happiness.

From the Archives: Author Charles Murray argues same-sex marriage is ‘not a big deal’

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on February 22, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Author Charles Murray argues same-sex marriage is ‘not a big deal’
February 22, 2012 8:15 PM MST

Appearing February 22 on “The Schilling Show,” a Charlottesville talk-radio program, conservative social scientist Charles Murray stated that the advocacy of gay marriage is “not a big deal” with regard to the general decline of marriage in American society. Murray also explained how his own attitude toward same-sex marriage has changed over time.

Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington is the author of What It Means to Be a Libertarian and the current release, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which was the focus of the discussion with talk-show host Rob Schilling.


Collapse of an institution

In their on-air conversation, Murray noted that in 1960, for the age cohort from 30 to 49, the “white working class was married at well over 80 percent and the white upper-middle class was married at very high rates.” Fifty years later, however, among the white upper-middle class, “84 percent of those ages 30 to 49 are still married in 2010. In the white working class, that had dropped to 48 percent."

That, he said, is “essentially the collapse of a major social institution.”

Because married men and women are better able to participate in civil society – being Little League coaches, attending PTA meetings, running charity drives – Murray explained that “a breakdown of marriage” essentially becomes “a breakdown of community, and it’s focused on working class.”

Schilling asked Murray about the effect of the current debate over the definition of marriage, which differs from the cultural environment in 1960.

‘Not a big deal’

Murray replied that “the advent of the gay marriage movement and the rest of that, I’m inclined to think, is not a big deal.”

He pointed out that, “for one thing, a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the advocacy for gay marriage has been that here are people who want to make a solemn commitment to each other. Writers like Jonathan Rauch and others have made very compelling cases for [how] gays want to engage in this very important social institution.”

A person, he said, does not “have to agree with that to think that, in a way, the visibility of marriage has been raised by that movement, not necessarily denigrated.”

Calling in to “The Schilling Show,” the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner posed a question to Murray about a recent appearance he made on the Charlie Rose television show. In that TV interview, Murray had said how his own opinion about same-sex marriage had changed.

Midway during the interview with Charlie Rose, he explained, the host asked him about that issue.


‘Loving, faithful relationships’

“I have never,” he said, “made a public statement about that before, but the fact is this: My wife and I have maybe half a dozen friends who are gay and are in couples. I mean they’re marriage-like situations. Some of them are guys and some of them are gals. In all of those cases, they’re acting like married people. They appear to have loving, faithful relationships that they take very seriously.”

More than that, he added, “a couple of them have kids that they are as attentive [to] and loving of as any other parents, and so I say to myself, I still have real problems with using the word marriage for anything except a union which has as its main purpose child-bearing and so forth.”

Still, he explained, “on the other hand, it’s really made me rethink the nature of my opposition, because let’s face it: Heterosexuals have made a mess out of marriage in the last couple of decades -- the last half-century, actually -- in ways which leave us in a weak position to suddenly say, ‘Oh, this wonderful institution that we’ve done so well with, you’re trying to interfere with.’”

As a result, Murray said, “I have backed off from leading the fight against gay marriage or even participating in it, and I’m willing to say that this is one instance in which [a new idea is] working out better than I would have expected it to, as I see it.”