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Pursuing Happiness--Too Easily
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15783 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
3,430 Words |
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Jeremy Rabkin
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IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS AND GOOD GOVERNMENT
Charles Murray
New York: Simon & Shuster 1988
341 pp., $19.95
Charles Murray is becoming more ambitious. And that makes him very ambitious indeed, both intellectually and politically.
Murray's first book, Losing Ground (1981), was widely celebrated--and perhaps more widely denounced--as the intellectual inspiration for the social policies of the Reagan administration. The book offered much hard evidence that life in America's inner cities had deteriorated sharply in the 1960s and '70s, the very years when government was most intent on expanding welfare and antidiscrimination programs to deal with the problems of the ghetto. Murray insisted in Losing Ground that the two trends were directly related. The inner cities, he argued, would actually be less riven by crime and broken families, by declining educational attainments and rising unemployment, if government had done less to "help."
In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government extends and generalizes this line of argument to a more comprehensive attack on contemporary social policy. Unlike his earlier work, however, this new book devotes little effort to documenting particular policy failures. It is not even very concerned with advancing particular policy proposals. It finally gets down to its one detailed policy prescription--a plea for a modified educational voucher system--only after an extended argument ranging from Aristotle and Locke to modern psychology and contemporary social statistics. The central aim of In Pursuit of Happiness is to revive the moral persuasiveness of Murray's general perspective on public policy, the perspective that views misdirected government programs as the problem in public policy and a sharp reduction in government as the solution.
It is, in fact, an earnest, imaginative, and admirably nonpoliemical effort. And it certainly succeeds in reminding us why policy debate can never entirely escape the sort of fundamental philosophic questions it usually obscures or tries to assume away. Even critics on the left may find intriguing suggestions and seductive or gratifying formulations in this book. For conservatives, In Pursuit of Happiness will have special charms, for it offers new and imaginative rationales for the traditional political prejudices of American conservatives. But if conservatives may be most vulnerable to the charms of this work, they might do well to approach it with special caution. For all its insight, In Pursuit of Happiness finally seems to rest on a remarkably optimistic and simple view of human nature. It is a view that Murray tries throughout to associate with the framers of the American Constitution, but also one that the wisest of the American founders could never have endorsed as unreservedly as Murray does.
A View of the Good Life
Still, In Pursuit of Happiness makes a genuine contribution in pushing policy debate toward the right sorts of questions. Murray insists that social policy is too caught up in statistical data that does not capture our most fundamental concerns. In this, his argument seems at one level quite parallel to the arguments of George Gilder and other advocates of supply-side economics, who
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