<html><body><P>American Enterprise Institute</P> <P>April 22, 2008</P> <P>[Edited transcript from audio tapes]</P> <P><BR> <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>8:15 a.m. </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration and Breakfast</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>8:30  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Welcome</EM>:  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Christopher DeMuth, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Introduction</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Peter Schuck, Yale Law School</DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>James Q. Wilson, AEI and Pepperdine University</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>9:15  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><STRONG>Panel I</STRONG></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Presenters</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Martha Bayles, Boston College</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Orlando Patterson, Harvard University </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Linda Waite, University of Chicago</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Discussant</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Michael Novak, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Moderator</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>James Q. Wilson, AEI and Pepperdine University</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>11:00  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><STRONG>Panel II</STRONG></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Presenters</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Arthur C. Brooks, AEI and Syracuse University </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>James Q. Wilson, AEI and Pepperdine University</DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Discussant</EM>: </DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Christopher DeMuth, AEI</DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Moderator</EM>: </DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Peter Schuck, Yale Law School</DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>12:30 p.m.</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment</DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></P> <P> </P> <P>Proceedings:</P> <P>Christopher DeMuth:  -- that America is exceptional among nations is a very old idea.  We find it first with the pilgrims themselves and specifically in John Winthrop s formulation of America as a city upon a hill.  It was central to the thinking of the American national founders and constitutional framers 150 years later, and we find it in the words and actions of many of our greatest presidents, most conspicuously Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.  And right down to the present where it is a staple of the campaign oratory of Senator Obama.  </P> <P>The idea is not just a political theme but also the subject of a study, beginning most famously with Alexis de Tocqueville in 1931 in his book Democracy in America based on his tour of that year, and also down to the present in important pieces of scholarship, such as the 1996 by Seymour Martin Lipset American Exceptionalism: A Double Edged Sword.  </P> <P>But no effort to understand American exceptionalism has been as ambitious and far-reaching as that of Professors Schuck and Wilson and 22 other scholars who have come together to provide this detailed portrait of America s political, economic and social institutions, culture and demographics, and public policies.  Americans are more individualistic, religious, self-reliant, anti-status, and ethnically and racially diverse than those of any other advanced prosperous nation.  They work harder, are more philanthropic.  They are more inclined to participate in voluntary associations and they produce more children, admit more immigrants and commit more murders than those than those in any other nation.  </P> <P>In government, in commerce and in finance, power is much more widely dispersed and decentralized in America and the public policies of our nation, from policing to schooling to health care, are also highly distinctive.  In these and other areas, the authors of the chapters in this book not only detail American exceptionalism, but ask whether it is likely to continue and what difference it makes to us and to the rest of the world.  </P> <P>But this book is not a triumphalist celebration of American exceptionalism.  It is primarily an effort to understand and to explain what is essential about this nation that is so loved and feared and admired and loathed and puzzled over, and whose future prospects, for better or worse, are of significant interest and importance to everyone.  </P> <P>We will begin with an overview of the volume, first by Jim Wilson and then by Peter Schuck, and then we will turn to our panelists including the authors of many of the book s chapters.  Jim Wilson, please?</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Thank you very much.  We all remember not only Tocqueville and Lincoln and the other celebrators of American exceptionalism.  We often think back to the time of the founding when people such as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur appeared to ride on behalf of French people how remarkable the United States was.  We sometimes forget that de Crevecoeur, although born in France, had lived in the United States most of his life and was married to an American woman.  And so perhaps his overseas testimony was a little bit more prejudiced than historians have regarded it.  </P> <P>We can best perhaps understand the differences between the United States and much of Europe and other parts of the world by looking at poll data to see how people feel about it.  Let me then proceed as if these poll data were, so to speak, the dependent variables.  The Pew research study of values around the world recently compiled and published by Andrew Kohut contains an interesting account of these matters.  According to the surveys, most of which were done in the early 1980s, three quarters of all Americans feel proud of their country but only one third of all Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Japanese are proud of their own countries.  </P> <P>Over half of all Americans believe that freedom is more important than having a government safety net, but less than one-third of Europeans agree with that view.  Two-thirds of all Americans think that success in life is a result chiefly of their own efforts, but only one-third of all Europeans agree with that view.  In this country, to continue the analysis of where life s success comes from, the only group that you can discover that by and large feels its success in life is a result of forces of which they have no control are juvenile delinquents.  This does not mean that Europeans are delinquents, but it does mean they live in a culture which is less supportive of the idea of individual work and individual effort.</P> <P>Over half of all Americans, but less than a third of all Europeans, think belief in God is essential to morality.  Over half of all Americans think economic competition is good but only a third of the French and Spaniards agree that economic competition is good.  Sixty percent of all Americans, but only twenty percent of all Germans, think children should be taught to value of hard work.  There are only, indeed, two countries in the world where in the last 10 years opinion of America has risen, and those two countries are India and Russia.  </P> <P>The current state of U.S.-European relations as measured by these polls has obviously been affected by the war in Iraq, by the unpopularity in many quarters of President George W. Bush but it actually has a much longer history.  If you go back to the time when Tocqueville was writing, or before that, Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, you discover that the European criticism of America was quite profound.  De Pauw from Prussia argued that dogs lose the ability to bark in America and everything in America is degenerate or monstrous.   </P> <P>The Abb� Raynal in France said that, America will be unable to produce a poet or a mathematician.   Gulbanel [phonetic], the notorious German racist, said, America will allow Aryans to degenerate.   Friedrich Nietzsche said, America produces spiritual emptiness.   Heidegger, to come closer to the present time, said, The creation of America was the creation of a catastrophe.   And Sigmund Freud, shortly after having given his lectures at Clark University, which made him an icon in American thought and helped found the psychoanalytic movement in this country, said, America is a great mistake.   </P> <P>This anti-Americanism was at that time an elite view.  Today, however, anti-Americanism has spread deeper down in the country and affects, with certain important national exceptions, everyone.  The elite view, of course, has been adopted by those who believe that 9/11, the attack on the World Trade Center, was the result of our mistake.  Best-selling books account for the fact that the FBI or the CIA or the Jewish Mossad was responsible for this.  The widespread view that we are morally equivalent to the old USSR has taken hold, and in many thoughtful people the whole idea of the Enlightenment of which the United States is currently the most conspicuous representation was a bad idea.  </P> <P>But these elite views not only have spread down to the public; among the American people we find comparable elites.  If you look at the reaction to 9/11, among Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Eric Foner, you discover that even if we did not actually commit the crime ourselves, it was good for America to have 3,000 innocent people destroyed.  </P> <P>Why has this view about America spread to so many ordinary people?  I think the answer probably differs by country.  In this country it may be as a result of the rise of post-modernist views and anti-free speech attitudes and kind of restlessness with America, especially, a restlessness that is intensified by having in office a governor from a state that no elite likes, except me, since all of my family happens to come from Texas.  There, people are thought to be devoted to praying, hunting, and executing.  I recall enough of my youth to know that there was a lot of praying and hunting; I did not realize there were quite so much executing.  </P> <P>These views, it seemed to me, set the refrain for this book:  In what important empirical ways is the United States different from other democracies in the world?  Peter Schuck in a moment is going to describe some cross-cutting themes in the book, but let me emphasize at the outset that the authors of these chapters were not selected because they had political views that agreed with ours.  Even though Peter and I do not have the same political views, it would be difficult to find those in agreement.  And they were certainly not asked to write about public policy, to advocate course A or course B.  They were asked, instead, to explain what it is that is distinctive about the United States, how it compares with other countries, and to indicate all of the ways, good and bad, that that exceptionalism exists.  And now to explain a bit of an overview of that exceptionalism, my friend and former student Peter Schuck.</P> <P>Peter Schuck:  Well, thank you first to AEI, Chris, and Henry Olsen and the wonderful staff here for organizing this event.  I m delighted also to be engaged in a collaboration with my former professor Jim Wilson.  I thought I would tell you a little bit about the way in which the book arose and was conceived of, and then talk a little bit about some of the substantive themes that the book seems to evoke and illustrate.  I say, seems to because, as Jim just mentioned, each of the authors has a different view.  We do not seek in any way to homogenize this effort.  </P> <P>What we did want to do however was to achieve two purposes. The first was to provide in a single volume a more or less comprehensive view of what the state of the United States is today based upon the best social science, the most recent analysis of that data, and very reflective consideration of what the data suggest for the future and what our current challenges are.  The second was to cast a new light on American exceptionalism.  When I say a new light , I really mean that I think this book does what no other book has done, which is to look at exceptionalism at a micro level.  That is to say, we asked each of our authors to focus on not merely describing the United States and analyzing the data that bear on its performance and challenges, but also to compare to Western European democracies each of these areas.  </P> <P>So we think after reading each of these chapters and immersing oneself in the comparisons that each of our authors presented, one would be in a position that one has never been in before to truly understand the nature of American exceptionalism in the small as well as in the large thematic way that it has generally been discussed in the past.  </P> <P>So we asked how specifically is the United States exceptional.  The assumptions that guided the book were very simple.  First of all, that what the United States is and does matters; that we are the 800-pound gorilla in every room in the world; that when we itch the rest of the world scratches; when we get a cold, the rest of the world sneezes.  These clich�s all suggest the extent to which the better understanding of the United States is very, very consequential, not simply to us in our self-absorption but to the rest of the world.  </P> <P>We also were very conscious of what Jim suggested in his survey evidence, which is that the rest of the world seems very puzzled to the extent that they think about us and they are obliged to because of the consequential actions; think of us with immense bewilderment, loathing, and ignorance.  And we hope to cast some light on the suppositions that guide much of that ignorance or loathing.  We think that no such book exists or has ever existed, an effort to catch the United States in all of its complexity over such a wide range of institutional and policy areas, as well as cultural analyses as well.  </P> <P>We have several chapters based on a very close investigation of popular culture.  Martha Bayles will be discussing that later on - political culture.  And also a wonderful chapter by Josef Joffe, a very preeminent German journalist who teaches in the United States and is perhaps the leading commentator on the United States and has published a book recently called �berpower about the United States.  We did not include any discussion of foreign policy or national security policy.  We do have a chapter on the military by Eliot Cohen, but we thought the job was large enough without that and so we have tried to cover domestic life of the United States as comprehensively as possible.  </P> <P>I just have a few minutes left.  What I would like to do is identify some of the overarching themes that we found could be gleaned from each of the chapters, and they showed actually a remarkable commonality in that respect - the areas and the ways in which America is exceptional, though manifest in such a wide variety of areas, tend to reflect some common patterns.  And I thought I would just mention those and perhaps allude very briefly to some of the chapters that illustrate these themes.</P> <P>First of all, and most comprehensively, the United States really is different, I mean really is much more different than what we had imagined.  Indeed, it is more different from other modern democracies than they are from each other.  One has to do with culture.  One aspect has to do with culture - the culture of patriotism, of individualism, of religiosity, and of enterprise.  And a number of the chapters call attention to the specific ways in which these particular attributes of our social life are manifested.  </P> <P>Secondly, constitutionalism.  Of course, the United States is not the only democracy with a constitution, but it is preeminently the constitutional democracy that emphasizes individual rights above social rights.  It is a constitutional tradition which emphasized decentralization far more than almost any other constitutional democracy in the world.  There are some other great federal systems like Germany and Canada, but in many other respects the United States is even more decentralized than those countries.  And then, of course, the suspicion of government which pervades every area of American life; suspicion, indeed, of authority more generally.  </P> <P>A third theme, in addition to the cultural patterns I mentioned and constitutionalism has to do with the economy.  And as Ben Friedman who was supposed to be here but, unfortunately, had an accident - not a serious accident but one that disabled him sufficiently that he could not come - in his chapter on the economy emphasizes the extent to which the economy is competitive, is decentralized, and has generated a very high standard of living for a very long time, even as it is now generating greater inequality than it has in the past, and he discusses some of the reasons for that in a very sophisticated way.</P> <P>A fourth cross-cutting theme is diversity.  That diversity is largely a result of immigration but it was true from the very beginning.  Indeed, I cite in my chapter on immigration an observation by Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian, to the effect that the number of languages spoken in New York City in 1790 actually exceeded the number of languages that are spoken today in New York City.  This diversity is a striking feature of American life.  It is not the case that the United States accepts more immigrants per capita than other countries; Canada has that distinction.  But it certainly admits far more immigrants than any other country.  It has done so for a very, very long time and, indeed, as I emphasize in my chapter on immigration, this openness to immigration - indeed, this thirst for immigration - has transcended periods of boom, of bust, and of supposed hostility to immigration.  There is a one-way ratchet I believe, that keeps our immigration system rising regardless of the opposition that is sometimes mounted to it.  </P> <P>The fifth cross-cutting theme has to do with civil society.  Arthur Brooks will discuss philanthropy as an important element of this but he also has in his chapter an analysis of the nonprofit sector, which shows the extent to which there is really no other country in the world that allocates as much responsibility for social policy and for social service to the nonprofit sector.  The extraordinary diversity and richness of our voluntary sector is unique to a remarkable extent.  </P> <P>The welfare state, the next to the last theme that I want to mention, is of course distinctive.  The United States is often described and invariably denounced as a welfare laggard.  The chapter on social policy and inequality make that assessment a bit simplistic.  Much of what is done in the name of social policy in the United States is done through private and nonprofit organizations and, also, state budgets.  When you put those together with the federal budget, we are still a welfare laggard if that is the appropriate term but not nearly to the same extent as is ordinarily described.</P> <P>And finally, demography.  We have Linda Waite here who is a sociologist of family life and demography from the University of Chicago, who is going to discuss the extraordinary exceptionalism of American life in terms of fertility and other dimensions of demography.  As is well understood, the United States fertility rate is unique in Western democracies.  The implications of this for our future and for the future of our less fertile democratic colleagues are simply immense.  Demography, as many have said, is destiny and in many respects the American destiny will be tied to these sorts of developments.</P> <P>So with that, let me stop and we will begin with the program.  Thank you.  </P> <P>Christopher DeMuth:  Thank you very much.  If the members of the first panel, Martha Bayles, Orlando Patterson, and Linda Waite, would like to come up and join me at the table -- and they can take turns making their presentations.  While they are taking their seats, let me tell you how pleased we are to have these extraordinarily competent thinkers on this group.  Many Europeans, when they think of America, believe we are some mindless combination of Paris Hilton, Pat Robertson, and the robber barons and, indeed, we have all of those three traditions; not only Paris Hilton but Britney Spears, and out where I live in West Los Angeles, countless other wannabes.  No doubt there is Pat Robertson and many other people who are both good and bad theologians, and religion is a deep part of our life.  And yes, we have had robber barons.  </P> <P>But it seems that somehow we have overcome these dubious origins and this bleak destiny to do something remarkable, and here we are going to talk a little bit about it, leading off with Martha Bayles.  Martha Bayles was once the cultural critic for the Wall Street Journal and now teaches at Boston College.  The first book of hers that I read was Hole in our Soul, which is the most remarkable account I have ever read of the origin and nature of modern music.  By modern music, I mean rock and roll and hip-hop and the related aspects of the contemporary culture, and shows how it developed from origins and how it departed from certain origins.  </P> <P>She is now at work on a new book on what many people call public diplomacy.  At my age, during the Second World War we called it Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America.  That [audio glitch] issue why we have lost the ability to communicate the essence of America as effectively as we might like.  Martha s chapter in our book is on popular culture.  It covers a wide variety of subjects.  I look forward to see how Martha is going to boil it down to 20 minutes.  Go ahead.</P> <P>Martha Bayles:  Okay, I can hear myself.  I know it is on.  Thanks to AEI, to Peter and Jim and Chris DeMuth, and everyone else who organized this event.  It is nice to be back in this room on either side of the table.  I m going to focus on a certain aspect of American popular culture, but first let me make a couple of -- I will tell you what I m going to talk about; basically, four topics.  First I m going to say a couple of things about the exceptional tradition of our popular culture; why it is an unusual phenomenon - indeed, an exceptional phenomenon - in the world.  </P> <P>And then I m going to talk about how the system of our popular culture in terms of its self-restraint of content, exercised by the privately owned media that produce popular culture -- why that self-restraint?  How that self-restraint has broken down.  </P> <P>And then third, I m going to talk about the fact that simultaneous with the breakdown of any kind of self-control or self-constraint on the part of our media and popular culture, it has also gone global.  It has always been global in some sense, in the sense of penetrating jazz and movies penetrated very early to the rest of the world.  But now American popular culture is unbelievably ubiquitous in places that would surprise even those who know that it is widespread.  </P> <P>And then, I m going to talk about the fact that this spread of popular culture around the world has been greatly aided by the U.S. government.  There is a long history of that in war time and in peace time; opening foreign markets to our films in particular but now to all of our entertainment products.  We do that very aggressively; we have always done it very aggressively on the theory that it is both good business and good diplomacy.  I m going to raise the question of whether or not it is still good diplomacy.  It is clearly still good business.  </P> <P>And then, finally I m going to try to make a couple of remarks about why the question of whether it is good diplomacy is rarely asked seriously in debates over public diplomacy.  I m very familiar with the debates over public diplomacy; I have been following them for a while.  And almost never does the subject of popular culture come up, and yet it is truly the 800-pound gorilla in America s image overseas among ordinary people. Perhaps not among elites but, certainly, among ordinary people their chief source of information about the U.S. are our television programs, our films, and to a lesser degree, our popular music.  </P> <P>So let me start quickly with what is exceptional about American popular culture.  Well, many things but what I would like to highlight is the fact that it is a tradition of commercialized entertainment that has been capable of developing a mass market for itself among an extremely diverse population, while at the same time restraining itself in terms of rather conservative, indeed, puritanical, public morality so that it is able to develop a mass audience without bringing down the government upon its head in terms of government and state intervention and censorship.  This is a very interesting history.  </P> <P>It actually starts before the age of the electronic media.  It starts in the old days of vaudeville.  When the first vaudeville theaters opened in New York and Boston, one of the impresarios in Boston was a person named B.F. Keith, and I have here: He offered his patrons a fixed policy of cleanliness and order in the theaters and avoidance of vulgarity, suggestiveness in words, action, and costume.   He was attempting to attract the patronage of middle-class people, women, and children; indeed, families.  It was a family-values orientation in vaudeville and on that basis vaudeville became a national form of entertainment.  </P> <P>The acts were booked in New York and they were sent on a circuit of theaters all around the country.  The theaters were grand theaters decorated like palaces; some of them are now movie theaters.  And it was a national entertainment business before the advent of electronic media, and as the old Vaudeville saying went - and this is a saying I want you to keep in mind - I m cleaning up my act and taking it on the road.   First you have to clean up the act, and then you take it on the road.</P> <P>So this continued through the electronic media.  The Motion Picture Association was formed in the 1920s and the 1930s in reaction to extreme public outcry against shocking material in the movies, which would not shock us, I might add.  The Motion Picture Association developed its own self-censorship body, the Production Code Administration, which enforced the production code.  The production code was actually written by a Jesuit priest, Joseph Breen, and it was extremely sophisticated, I think, in terms of public morality and what should be shown in the screen and what should not.  I m not suggesting we could go back to it, by the way, but it is often mocked and ridiculed but it is not unreasonable in my opinion.  Anyway, that was instituted in 1937.  </P> <P>Among broadcasters, of course, broadcast media, radio, and then television were regulated by the government, have always been regulated by the government since the 20s in terms of licensing of stations and control of frequencies and so forth.  But censorship has largely been left up to the broadcasters.  The radio networks, and later the television networks had their own departments of standards and practices and they censored themselves.  And they censored themselves so the government would not censor them.  The FCC, of course, has stepped in at times, taken away somebody s license, raised its eyebrow, or otherwise huffed and puffed.  But, generally speaking, even in broadcast media we have a tradition of privately owned media who, in terms of content, censor and restrain and control themselves.</P> <P>Well, you do not probably need me to tell you that this system has more or less broken down; it has certainly eroded to the point of unrecognizability.  This is both due to cultural changes and technological changes.  The cultural changes beginning in the 50s with a number of court cases, going into the 60s with the cultural upheavals of the 1960s; the sort of elite adversary culture described by Lionel Trilling and others went mainstream in the 60s as the so-called counterculture and became commercialized very quickly.  So popular culture during that period became a kind of commercialized counterculture. </P> <P>Now there are many good qualities to it, many good things about this; I m not completely condemning it by any means.  But it has led to a license among the producers of popular culture to pretty much do what they want.  The production code was eliminated in 1968 by the Motion Pictures Association and replaced by the rating system that we know and love today, which, of course, in terms of modern technology is completely dysfunctional.  It was actually opposed by Jack Valenti and the Motion Picture Association on the grounds that it was going to allow much too outrageous films to be made as classified for adults and, of course, they were right.  Now they are classified for adults but everybody watches them.  </P> <P>One of the things I want to highlight in terms of the themes that Peter and Jim were just mentioning, that I have just come back from a trip around the world interviewing people about their perceptions of the U.S. through our popular culture.  I found many things but just very quickly, one thing I wish to highlight - and this is not -- apart from the usual sex and violence stuff.  What people see through our popular culture is really quite a striking distortion of American life.  And that is they see a heightened portrayal of the individual and a heightened sense of individual and personal freedom, quite free from the trappings of family, tradition, community, religion, and the American associational life - our civil society, all the institutions and the organizations that Americans are madly participating in at all times, are really air-brushed into the background.  </P> <P>If you reflect upon our entertainment, I think you will agree and if you can think of some notable exceptions I would like to hear about them.  But I heard it said to me over and over again: Americans in movies and TV shows, they are always alone or there are always just a few people.  They do not seem to have families.   We do have our family shows and sitcoms but not as much as we used to.  And we are often portrayed as single people, people on their own, mavericks, renegades, people with no particular ties to any kind of community.  </P> <P>Now that is -- we adjust for that in America.  We see that.  We understand that that it is a kind of convention of our culture and our entertainment.  But I think it is a severe distortion to people overseas.  And where is the evidence for this?  You will look in vain in opinion surveys and poll data for these kinds of questions.  Pew does not ask these questions.  </P> <P>The latest 47-nation survey of Pew asked what people thought of American movies, TV and popular music, and found the usual pattern of rather very low opinions - in fact, dropping opinions - in the Arab and Muslim world and not as particularly high as used to be in other parts of the world.  But where you find this reaction is among international visitors who come to the United States and there is a mountain of anecdotal evidence of people coming to the United States and being astonished by a number of things about what we really are like.  And one of the things this associational and civic life; it is not projected by popular culture.  </P> <P>Let me just read to you the -- kind of skip ahead here.  Okay, I guess I will not skip ahead.  I m jumping around too much.  How big is the export of popular culture?  It is quite enormous.  The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports between 1968 and 2005, the sales of services to foreign persons by the motion picture and video industries went from $1.9 billion to $10.4 billion in constant dollars.  Foreign box office revenue is growing faster than domestic.  It is more than 2:1 now ratio.  And as Dan Glickman the head of the Motion Picture Association recently said, Alone among all the sectors of the U.S. economy, our industry is the only one that generates a positive balance of trade in every country in which it does business.   </P> <P>And in terms of cultural impact and penetration of American popular culture, these figures are all based on legitimate sales.  As many of you, I m sure, know the piracy and the illegal copying and downloading of American movies and TV shows is absolutely rampant.  A recent report that was done for the Motion Picture Association reports that the motion pictures studios lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide.  I have talked to the man who did that study and he assures me that the figures are not inflated.  In fact, he said he did it with a conservative estimate.  And he is a Boston College graduate, so I believe him.  </P> <P>Eighty percent of this piracy occurs overseas.  As I say, it is rather difficult to measure the impact of this, partly because the poll data does not ask these kinds of questions.  But I do have a quote from one of the few studies that had been done of the international visitor program.  It is a follow-up study of visitors from Mexico who came to the United States for either a year or a semester or a term; a variety of people.  It was done by a man named Gerald Keelson [phonetic] who is very experienced in the field of international visitor programs.  He interviewed 60 Mexicans in-depth, who had been participants in an international visitor s program to the U.S., and he wrote a very interesting report and here is one paragraph from the report:</P> <P>  People who watch U.S. television shows, attend Hollywood movies, and listen to pop music cannot help but believe that we are a nation in which we have sex with strangers regularly, where we wander the streets well-armed and prepare to shoot our neighbors at any provocation, and where the lifestyle to which we aspire is one of rich cocaine-snorting decadent sybarites.  This is not an accurate description of the U.S. nor is it attractive to many people around the world.  The Mexican visitors were very clear that their images of America shaped by commercial media were inaccurate and distorted and gave them a negative perception of the United States.   I cannot say it any better myself.</P> <P>So the next question is Washington has helped the export of popular culture over the years.  Going back to 1915, or 1917 rather, the entry of U.S. into World War I, President Wilson s Committee on Public Information enlisted the aid of the studios to make really heavy-handed propaganda films, basically, to persuade the American people to go into the war.  In World War II, as I m sure many of you know, the Office of War Information worked very closely with the Hollywood studios to produce all kinds of films from training films and the famous Why We Fight series by Frank Capra, to feature films of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent, that in one way or another supported the United States cause.  </P> <P>Among these were a number of highly pro-Soviet films, I might add, such as Mission to Moscow, which was a film intended to foment more friendship among the Americans for the Soviet Union, which was later called on the carpet before the HUAC hearings, although it was made with the supervision and help of the Office of War Information.  In fact, FDR took a personal interest in that film. </P> <P>So we have had a hand-in-glove relationship.  It continued after the war.  Marshall Plan aid was tied to opening those countries to American films and eliminating any import quotas they might have.  American films were used very, very deliberately, very, very consciously as a way of spreading American influence around the world.  </P> <P>I will read you another quote from a memo in 1944 from the State Department to the Motion Pictures Association: In the post-war period, the Department desires to cooperate fully in the protection of American motion pictures abroad.   You will note the polite euphemism protection.   It expects in return that the industry will cooperate wholeheartedly with the government with a view to ensuring that the pictures distributed abroad will reflect credit on the good name and reputation of this country and its institutions.   </P> <P>Now this was not a binding contract signed by Hollywood but it was understood for most of this history that Hollywood would keep up its end of the deal.  Washington s end of the deal:  We help you open the foreign markets.  We do all we can.  We are as aggressive as we can possibly be in our trade negotiations to make sure those markets are open to you.   Hollywood s end of the deal: You were going to make films, and this is not a straight, you know, We are going to make propaganda films directly for the government.  It is just an understanding that our films are going to reflect somehow well on the country.   This has never been a narrow conception; it has been a broad conception and Hollywood has made all sorts of films over the years.  </P> <P>But there has been a kind of tacit understanding, and I would suggest to you that that is gone.  It went away during Vietnam, in the aftermath of the HUAC hearings and the Blacklist.  It went away in the 60s, and it went away with the end of the Production Code and the rise of the countercultural sensibility in Hollywood.  I m not suggesting that we can necessarily bring it back but I think it is a question worth asking in terms of American image in the world and in terms of America s reputation, and in terms of the impact of our popular culture.  </P> <P>There is no political will in this country either in the government or among the American people to engage in any kind of censorship.  In fact, Pew did a survey in April 2005; over 60 percent of the American people were deeply concerned about what was in movies and TV and what their children were seeing.  Ninety percent were opposed to any sort of censorship, including self-censorship on the part of the industry, which is what we used to have.  So there is no will toward censorship, and I m not an advocate of censorship but I would not mind a little bit of soul-searching on the part of the entertainment industry.  </P> <P>I think in order to do that the question has to be raised.  It is difficult to raise these questions without being accused of advocating censorship, which is one reason why people do not raise the question.  But I think the question does need to be raised and that is what I m working on.  </P> <P>I do not -- do I have any -- how am I doing for time?</P> <P>Male Voice:  [Speaks away from microphone] </P> <P>Martha Bayles:  Okay.  I have some reasons why it is not talked about, which I can mention later if you like.  Thank you.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Thank you very much Martha.  Martha s chapter is really wonderful.  She gave you a few of the highlights but there is so much more in it.  Let me add that after our next two speakers finish, Michael Novak, seated on my left, will make some comments and raise some questions.  And then we will have an opportunity to entertain questions and comments from the audience.  </P> <P>Our next speaker is a person very important to me.  Almost all of the persons we were able to recruit for writing chapters in this book are intellectual heroes of mine, but Orlando Patterson stands out in my mind because of his remarkable accomplishments.  A professor of sociology at Harvard University, he is from the West Indies and he has devoted his life to studying racial and ethnic relations in this country and around the world.  And he has also written a remarkable book about the rise of freedom in the West.  He is going to make a few comments about his chapter on the book, which is about Blacks in the United States.  Orlando?</P> <P>Orlando Patterson:  Thank you very much.  I appreciate it and I appreciate the opportunity to briefly review the main points made in my chapter.  Race in America, the condition of black Americans in particular, is a paradoxical one and it has been so historically, beginning with the contradiction, a paradox of a constitution that celebrated equality of all human beings but, in fact, condoned slavery and excluded, of course, half of the nation, including women, from participation.  But the paradox persists today and it is very puzzling, I think, for outsiders, non-Americans, to understand race in America.  </P> <P>And there is usually great confusion, especially among Latin American friends, who have distinctly different conceptions of race and often misunderstand what is happening.  The misunderstanding is understandable because of the very complexity, because of the relative inclusiveness of our elites and compared with any other industrial country.  This is quite extraordinary that if you look at, well, those countries which do have diverse populations - Britain, all of Latin America, including Brazil, which has about well over four to five percent of its population as black - you would not believe this.  </P> <P>And President Bush can almost be forgiven for one of his most famous gaffes when he said to the President of Brazil, You have them there, too, meaning black Brazilians.  I mean, can be forgiven, because if you look around Washington at the diplomatic core or if you look at the officer corps of the Brazilian Army or if you look at the top executives, even starting at fairly mid-sized companies in Brazil up, you would in fact be forgiven for thinking that this is an Aryan nation or people who are populated from Sweden.  </P> <P>The contrast with America is striking and we have a long way to go in terms of claiming integration of our elites, but the role of Blacks and other minorities in our political life has no parallel elsewhere.  And as Fortune Magazine each year reminds us, there has been significant penetration at the elite levels in our businesses and so on, which finds no parallel elsewhere.  </P> <P>So inclusion at the top but, in fact, quite significant exclusion at the middle and bottom sector.  Legal equality, and cultural, they know as cultural influence.  And coming after Martha, I think I have got to be careful what I say here.  But one of the really extraordinary aspects of America is the unusual cultural influence of African Americans, especially in the popular culture but, also, areas of high culture in popular music, in dance, in fashion, in film.  Now Martha may think that this is all for the bad but -- or not as -- that it has its problems.  I am to think so, too, but I think the positive influence is unusual.  </P> <P>It is hard to find another country or another civilization, in which such a small minority has had such a powerful impact on the broader popular culture.  Yet, at the same time, if you look at the creators of this culture, we find a large-scale social exclusion.  So these are the paradoxes which I explored and which puzzles outsiders because, as Martha pointed out, if you are a foreigner you would think that America is at least 50 percent black if you are exposed mainly to its popular culture. </P> <P>And that is, by the way -- I mean surveys have indicated that even within America most Americans seem to think that America is about 30 percent black.  They just judge on the influence which they are exposed to.  And, therefore, it comes often as a shock to foreigners coming to the United States observing the social realities of black and white.  Not only are they a small minority but a largely segregated one.  </P> <P>I made a few points about the demographic situation, a few myths, which I think have now become almost established facts.  One of them is what I call a Latino myth.  As you know after the last census, the fact was trumpeted that now the single largest ethnic group in America are Latinos and Blacks are no longer the largest group.  And very often, elites who generate these facts then act on them in a self-fulfilling way so that it is now taken as true.  </P> <P>In fact, as I pointed out, this assertion is of dubious factual basis.  What is called Latinos is, in fact, a collection of very disparate groups.  The difference between Puerto Ricans and people from Argentina is enormous.  The difference between Mexican farm workers and Cubans - largely from the Cuban elite - is great.  My favorite way of putting this is that when we speak of Latinos, I mean what exactly are we talking about?  We are talking about a group who came from a part of the world, a continent, which was colonized by Spain.  They speak a common language and, although to a decreasing degree, have a common religion - Catholicism.  </P> <P>Using those same criteria, English Americans, English immigrants, West Indians, and Ghanaians ought to be considered a single ethnic group because they were colonized by the British; they speak a common language and are often Protestants.  So there is no sociological foundation.  It is a myth, which of course has acquired political potency because Latino elites find it useful. </P> <P>Related to this is what I call the Declining White Myth, which we hear a lot about.  The white population is declining substantially and that by the -- there s false projections by the middle of this century, we will be a nation of minorities.  Hogwash.  This is partly generated by the first myth.  The dubious assumption is that this thing we have constructed -- we speak of non-Hispanic whites implying that Hispanic whites are somehow of a different order.  It is not quite clear what the implication is, but it is rather unsavory.  </P> <P>The truth of the matter is, of course, a substantial proportion of the Latino population is white.  They descended from Europeans, unless you choose to exclude the Spaniards, the Spanish from the European community and, indeed, in terms of their intermarriage patterns tend to marry into the white population here.  And just looking at that simple fact and the fact that they have their fertility rates are substantially greater than the native population, the white population as far as it is will be a substantial majority well over 74 percent until the end of this century.  What comes afterwards?  I do not know.  </P> <P>The myth of black homogeneity and the myth of persisting racism, as well as the opposing myth that the end of racism myth - they are all things which confound foreigners.  The point is that there is persistent racism in this country, but there has been extraordinary change in white attitudes in this regard.  And if you are not aware of making [indiscernible] important comparison.  I m just viewing it at a given moment in time; it is easier to get the wrong impression but equally a false set [sounds like] of various announcements of the end of racism which is also largely mythical.  </P> <P>So with these very widespread myths around, it is easy to understand how an outsider would simply just be totally confounded by the racial situation here.  Well, I looked at the historical part and America has been unique in terms of race from the very beginning.  The fact that it is the only Western nation which had large-scale of slavery within its midst -- now as you know, the British were the ones who introduced slavery around the world.  Eric Williams the great West Indian historian liked to say that, The British celebrate the fact that they abolished slavery so much that you would think they introduced slavery simply to be able to abolish it.   </P> <P>But important thing is Spain, Britain, France -- all of the great slave-trading nations had their slavery elsewhere thousands of miles away.  The U.S. is the only large modern Western nation which had slavery within its midst, and it accounts for major differences.  The fact that this society was constructed in which half of it was slavery and having come to terms with that fact.  It is a slave system which reproduced itself.  It is a slave system which is unusual in rejecting manumission, which in all other great slave systems manumission is used as a power incentive scheme for maintaining the system of slavery.  That was what happened in Latin America for example, and in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome and in Islamic slave systems.  </P> <P>America is very unusual in this regard and in this hostility to miscegenation.  Inter-marriage between -- or inter-mixture of holders and slaves is common, again, in the Islamic world and Latin America.  The emergence of the one drop rule, which constituted a very distinct pattern of race -- as you know, if you are the black, blackness is described as the proverbial one drop of white blood, which, again, is a very unique phenomenon.  </P> <P>The general tendency in most societies is for a continuum and that is the pattern that exists largely in Latin America, which creates problems for Latin Americans understanding the situation here.  It is often hard for a Latin American to understand.  Even someone who looks like Obama would define himself as black, since in Brazil and in Cuba and elsewhere, he would be called something else with another term.  </P> <P>Finally, the paradoxical emergence which is best described by a colleague of Peter Morgan the historian of democracy and slavery within the South; the fact that the region of the South which first generated genuine democracy, Virginia, was also a large-scale slave society.  It is one of the great paradoxes of [indiscernible] society and how that influenced our notion of democracy and of freedom is an extraordinary story, which very few foreigners find comprehensible.  </P> <P>For whites and for the society at large, this history has been one of, of course, pervasive racism and it influenced freedom in very complex ways, which I have explored elsewhere.  The price we paid for this is a pattern of distrust and violence in the society among both whites and Blacks.  As you know most measures of trust indicate that Americans have low levels of trust.  My colleague, partner, made much of this, but it is greatest among black Americans.  </P> <P>The welfare cost -- one of the distinctive features of our society, the absence of European pattern towards offering greater welfare in societies is, I think, partly attributable to the presence of blacks and of race in America, and the deliberate playing-off [sounds like] of race to divide whites and blacks and the very high price which the white poor paid for this.  For blacks, of course, discrimination and exclusion and a point, which is only recently being emphasized - limited property accumulation.  </P> <P>Fact that one of the most obvious aspects of slavery which is not been sufficiently emphasized until recently is the fact that for over two and a half centuries Blacks could not accumulate properties.  And, you know, came out of it -- that Indians got the 40 acres and a mule.  And the asset difference between Whites and Blacks is partly, as Shapiro and his colleagues have pointed out, has got to be seen as what you call the sedimentation of that long period in which there is zero accumulation of property.</P> <P>But there is also not just the property losses of the history but the social and cultural capital which sociologists increasingly emphasize.  By social capital, I mean those who you know.  It is almost as important whom you know in your contacts as what you know for success in society.  Social capital networks are important and social exclusion means exclusion from important networks.  And this is one of the major causes of segregation.  </P> <P>But there is also cultural capital.  When you interact with people, when you marry into a group, you are not just -- the dowry you get is not just fine China; the dowry is both the capital as well as the culture - what you know, what you come to know about the values, the ways in which you succeed, how do you start a business, and so on.  Blacks are very much excluded from this.  And finally, of course, they paid a high price in terms of social disorganization - the destruction of the father role and the consequences.  </P> <P>But the achievements, then, of the Civil Rights revolution are really truly extraordinary.  Citizenship and public inclusion - the second Abolition as I like to call it - legal equality, the cultural embrace as I mentioned earlier, the extraordinary change in whites attitudes over the past forty years from one in which the great majority of whites considered blacks inferior to one in which the great majority of whites accept racial equality today.</P> <P>And here, by the way, there is an important generational difference and it partly explains much of the current political allegiances.  For white Americans under 35, one can assume that they are easily the most open and liberal group on race of any groups of whites anywhere in the world.  There has also been a top-down economic change and, of course, a major impact has been the growth of the celebrated middle class, but it is a mixed record.  As these figures show, there is a still an enormous asset gap which I had mentioned earlier that the typical white American family has assets of $79,400 as opposed to $7,500 which is the typical asset of black Americans - more than 7 times.  </P> <P>So if you look at income, the figure looks much better.  If you look at assets -- and even the graph shows the income gains.  As you can see, even among the elites [indiscernible] it is only 68.5 percent of the top quintile.  So there is a fragile middle class and this has been brought home last year by the Pew -- a startling finding of the Pew Research group that there is rampant downward mobility from the black middle class.  This came as a shock to many people and explaining it is still a problem.  But it is related to this very fragile nature of the middle class; it is not reproducing itself.</P> <P>The segregation is perhaps one of the -- I see as the major failure over the last forty years in the midst of this enormous success.  Why does the segregation persist?  We can understand why, perhaps, in terms of economic class differences.  What becomes somewhat more problematic is the fact that the black middle class is still greatly segregated from the white middle class.  In this respect, they are different from all other ethnic groups, from all the Asian ethnic groups, from the Latin groups and so on and all of the immigrant groups who quickly integrate in terms of special integration.  </P> <P>There are lots of explanations for this, which I have gone through in the book, in the chapter, the Tipping Point Theory. But tipping point theory has some problems in terms of empirical support.  And the question is whether this is a model [sounds like] group difference, whether this is identity.  To what extent are blacks themselves now keeping themselves away because of identity, because of the need to cherish their own views and so on?  To what extent is persisting exclusion?  Well, how do you reconcile this exclusion with the extraordinary acceptance of blacks in the political system?  </P> <P>Let me look a little bit -- Obama phenomenon is merely one aspect of this, and the extraordinary acceptance of black cultural creations.  Most of the consumers of black culture are, in fact, white youth.  And so, it is one of the puzzles, something that a foreigner will find simply bewildering.</P> <P>Persistent poverty you know about.  Half of black children are still in poverty, which is a problem.  One of the things which I emphasize is the youth crisis of America because in many ways, the other problems here -- the horrendous incarceration rates.  America has the highest in the world not only for blacks but also for whites.  But it is quite an extraordinary list and if this were true of the white population, it would have created a scandal.  But with one in three black men and their third is having a prison record, something is wrong, clearly wrong.  And this is one of the major problems facing the nation in this regard now.</P> <P>It is, of course, partly rooted in the familial crisis of black Americans, which goes back to the past as well as interaction with current problems.  Although I mentioned the rehabilitation of Moynihan -- Moynihan as you know has been the bete noire of policy people for the past forty years after the celebrated or infamous report, which attributed many of the problems of blacks to familial crisis.  I say the rehabilitation because there was an unusual conference which Jim and I attended a few months ago on Moynihan in which among the more very liberal social scientists attended and suggesting that, perhaps, he was on to something, to put it mildly.  </P> <P>The health crisis of black Americans is often not emphasized but should be because of -- reflected in lower rates of life expectancy, high disease rates, and death from AIDS, which is more than seven times that of white.</P> <P>In many ways, many of these problems sort of has a demographic dimension because they focus a lot on black youth and they are concentrated among black youth, who, in a sense, reflect the paradox I started with more than any other group in that their influence culturally is quite extraordinary.  But they are in the grips of a terrible crisis with this high rate of incarceration, the drug use, high rates of delinquency, high drop-out rates and half of all drop-outs are likely to end up in prisons.  I call this the Dionysian trap because trying to solve the puzzle of their cultural creativity and their enormous problems in trying to tease out or trying to figure out how the two relate to each other is one of the big puzzles which face foreigners trying to understand this society.  How could this group which they see on their television screens almost dominate certain sports and so on?  </P> <P>Nonetheless, half these problems -- once you go beyond the heroes [sounds like] and you go to the inner cities, you find this horrendous problem.  It is something we have to understand more, be focused more on.  So the racial [indiscernible] lingers in many ways in the present.  One way in which sociologists tend to explain this is to speak of racism without races, meaning that the institutional constraints which may persist and interact with current factors is a puzzle.  </P> <P>So that, for example, the pride of blacks is in part due to their familial problems; those problems are in part the product of the past interacting with current problems.  So understanding it is not a simple matter of attributing it to behavioral issues, but to understand how those behavioral problems, those familial structures came about.  </P> <P>And there is no understanding of it without understanding the past.  Social science tends to reject cultural, historical explanations but this is something which they have to come to terms with sooner or later.  So in conclusion, then, the paradox of black Americans is this extraordinary record of public inclusion in the political life and the cultural life, and private exclusion and withdrawal, if you like, because there is no doubt that to some extent, black Americans are also simply saying, After all these centuries of exclusion, who wants you?   The cultural embrace, along with the social segregation, the growing integration at the top and some of the middle section but the persisting massive exclusion.  </P> <P>And here -- this is one of the biggest puzzles of people from Latin America because just the opposite exists in Latin America.  In Latin America, the lower down the scale you go, the more integration you get.  Now, if you go in the slums of the favelas of Brazil, or the low income areas of Cuba and Puerto Rico, you find total integration.  The higher-up you go, the less integration until you get to a certain point where there is an absolute ceiling and the elites in Latin America are almost exclusively white, far whiter than they are here.  </P> <P>Whereas in America, it is just the opposite; the higher up you go, the more open the system is.  This is the result of our top-down system; at least there is motion whereas in Latin America, one may doubt whether that is the case.  So this is where we are at right now and I forgive anyone, even an American, trying to understand the situation, to make sense of it -- it is easy to see why a foreigner can get it all wrong as Europeans very often do.  But it is for us to get it right and that, I assume, is what we are trying to do here.  </P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Thank you very much, Orlando.  It was a wonderful presentation.  You mentioned demography and that leads naturally into our third and final speaker for this session, Linda Waite.  Linda Waite is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, the world s greatest university in my opinion.  She was once president of the Population Association in the United States and she is the co-author, with Maggie Gallagher, of a remarkable book about the benefits in terms of health, well being, longevity, et cetera, of marriage.  </P> <P>And so compelling is the book that you wonder why any man and woman of the appropriate age does not get married immediately.  Well, that is akin to liking and to explaining obesity.  Everybody knows remaining slender is in your long-term interest but then somebody puts fudge in front of you or a chocolate cake and you cannot resist the immediate temptation.  To dwell on not only family matters but the general demographic situation in the United States, I call on Linda Waite.</P> <P> Linda Waite:  Thank you, Jim, and thank you and Peter for giving us this opportunity mostly to think seriously about the issues.  We were posed a series of questions, some of which I really was not working on but spent a lot of time on for this book chapter.  And at the end, in spite of all the hard work, I was really glad that I had done it.  And I appreciate the opportunity.</P> <P>I am going to talk about the American family and I want to start with a quick definition.  Traditionally, the social scientists use the definition of the family, which focuses on biological links and legally and socially recognized ties.  And in this conception, this definition of the family, the married couple is the core, married couple being socially and legally recognized couple.  They are the site for socially-accepted and legally-recognized child-bearing and child-rearing; they offer joint support to each other and to members of the larger family.  And they do a lot of other things but, especially, transmit both values and assets, assets being very broadly defined to include social and cultural capital, education, property access.  </P> <P>Now, in many societies over the last, at least, 50 or 60 years, there are challenges to this traditional conceptualization of the family.  And in order, sort of, of how pervasive these are, I would put divorce or the dissolution of family.  Traditionally and historically, marital ties in many societies were permanent; you could not rend them even if you really hated each other.  And that is no longer the case in, certainly, any of the countries we are focusing on in this book.  But, in addition, for a while when divorce became fairly common, and even in many places and among many groups, people who divorced simply remarried.  So it was not really a retreat from marriage, it was just a retreat from this particular marriage.   </P> <P>But what we are seeing more in some societies and, certainly, in the U.S. is a retreat from marriage at all.  And I mentioned to Orlando, I wish he had said more about his work on race differences in the U.S. in family and gender.  I have heard him speak upon this and it is very compelling but there are huge differences between black Americans and white Americans and within Hispanic groups in how these changes have been manifest.  And I want to point out I think we do not think enough about changes in family law.  And since the family is legally recognized when the law about whose family, what s [sounds like] family changes, this fundamentally changes the family.  </P> <P>We also see in the U.S. and some but not all the European societies a weakened linked between marriage and child-bearing.  You probably all know that in the U.S. every year for at least the last 10 or 15 years, one third of all births were paid for by Medicaid.  They took place to women who were not married.  Some of them were cohabiting; many of them were not.  That also differs by ethnicity.  But one of the things that has happened is people do not need to be married to have children.</P> <P>Now the other thing that has happened in the U.S. and in many societies - many of the societies we are comparing - is that there has been a rise in what I am calling alternative family forms; the most common, of course, is single-parent families.  The statistic I just mentioned suggests that many of these are created when a woman who is not married has a child, but many of them are created also by dissolution, by divorce or by the dissolution of cohabiting families where people who are not married but are living together, have a child, and then their relationship ends.  </P> <P>As you probably did not see because Orlando moved this chart past pretty quickly but there are huge relationships between the proportion of groups in poverty and the proportion that are in single-parent families.  And the vast majority of single-parent families are female-headed families.  There are some single-father families but it s a very small proportion.  Black single-parent families are especially disadvantaged; I think the proportion for it is nearly 50 percent.  </P> <P>We hear a lot and need to talk about gay and lesbian families.  There has been a surge in research on gay and lesbian families as an alternative family form.  The two things I want to point out are that all the researches suggest that these are fairly small in number; culturally very important but small in number and that there is very little research done on these family forms.  </P> <P>Cohabiting families, on the other hand, are pretty common in the United States as the figure on out-of-wedlock child-bearing would suggest.  But in the U.S. - and this is one way that the U.S. is unusual and even exceptional -- in many countries in Europe, the Nordic countries, certainly, Britain, cohabiting couple families are fairly long-lived and may be a permanent alternative to marriage.  </P> <P>When cohabitation arose on the social scene, scholars who studied the family thought that maybe we would go in the direction of the Nordic countries with cohabitation becoming an alternative to marriage; it has not happened.  Cohabitations in the U.S. tend to be short-lived; they either break up or transition to marriage within three to five years, approximately.  And they are, as unions, much less stable than married-couple families.  This is also the case in the Nordic countries, by the way.  </P> <P>And what is interesting and a challenge for us focused on society and as social scientists studying the family is children in them tend to do less well.  Scholars are trying to figure out to what extent that is because it is a different institution and to what extent there are different people who choose it.</P> <P>So one of the things that I wanted to talk about today -- my main assignment was to talk about how and why, perhaps, American society is unique, almost, in the number of children that it is producing.  So I thought I would give you the numbers - demographers love numbers -and just a really quick lesson in demography.  The fertility rate that people talk about -- what they mostly mean is the total fertility rate.  The total fertility rate is a construct; you can measure it but it is not true in any real sense.  It is based on a series of assumptions.  So very quickly, the total fertility rate is the number of children a woman would have over her lifetime were she subjected over her entire child-bearing period to the age-specific fertility rates that are in affect today.  </P> <P>What demographers do to calculate the total fertility rate is they say Okay, if you have a thousand woman, 15 to 19, and they are having babies at a particular rate today, this year, you have woman, 20 to 24; they are having babies at a particular rate today.  And so on until age 51, child-bearing ends.   And you say, Okay, if we hypothetically took a woman and stepped her through her whole life, if these rates never changed, then how many children does that imply that she would have over her lifetime?   Okay, so in that sense, it does not ever apply to real people because things change.  But it tells us something that we can compare about what the situation is now.  So it is just important to keep that in mind.</P> <P>What you see when you do this exercise is that the fertility rates now in effect imply that if nothing changed, that a woman who is either started -- entered child-bearing ages this year would have, by the time she was 50, 2.1 children on average.  The demographers calculate that you need something over two per woman to ultimately replace population; one for her, one for the man that are not having children.  You need something over two because some women are not going to live through the child-bearing period; that is not very important in developed societies today.  And replacement means replacement in the very long run.  </P> <P>And now there are very few -- even developed societies with very low fertility where deaths this year exceed births this year.  In the U.S., the crude [sounds like] birth and death rates imply that we are adding just from an excess [sounds like] of births over deaths, something like eight people per thousand per year.  So were the countries that have low fertility.  But in the very long run, 50 years, these things matter absolutely.</P> <P>Oh, and I wanted to say that I just looked at these.  The CIA has a very nice website where they estimate total fertility rates for 2008 - in case you are interested, you can Google - total fertility rates, U.S., in this Website pops right up.  New Zealand has a total fertility rate that is virtually identical to the U.S.  France has a total fertility rate that is just a little bit lower.  This is fairly recent but what you can see is the other countries to which we compare ourselves have substantially lower total fertility rates.  These imply, in the long run, any total fertility rate much below two, absent immigration, implies, in the long run, fertility decline; that is what the replacement rate means.  </P> <P>So Hong Kong is in real trouble, as you can see and it is going to happen pretty quickly.  Japan - and they know it - is in real trouble.  But what is interesting is so is Spain, so is Italy, so is Greece, so is Russia.  In fact, this is just fertility but in some of these countries, particularly Russia, mortality is high and a combination of low fertility and high mortality means in 40 or 50 years, the Russian population is going to start, or probably is already in, a downward spiral from which demographically there is no escape.  Immigration -- basically, somebody else is going to live where Russia is now.</P> <P>So the question that we were asked in this chapter to address, and which we tried to address by looking at the pieces is:  Why, how are we managing to have as many children as we are having, and for which we should all be grateful?  It is really not that people in the U.S. intend to have more children than people in other countries.  Fertility intensions are pretty low, but they are similar in many countries.  So if you ask women - and nobody ever bothers to ask men - how many children they intend to have or how many they would like to have over their lifetimes, they say about 2.4.  </P> <P>So about half of them say two and about half of them say three, and almost nobody says zero or one.  That is really how it comes out.  That is virtually identical in Finland, France, Ireland, the U.K.  It is a little bit lower but not a lot lower in - I ll just pick some examples - Greece, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands.  But what is interesting is in contemporary societies, intentions are substantially higher than actual fertility.  So there is a slip here.  People would like in some sense to have more children than they are having.  </P> <P>One of the reasons that demographers point to is that in many countries, people have delayed child-bearing often quite substantially.  They are getting an MBA; they can t find the right person to marry; they have other things to do; the men around are not very attractive.  People give a lot of different explanations but it is a demographic maxim that fertility delayed is fertility foregone.  Things happen, people become infertile, they just run out of time.  And in addition, desires may change.  </P> <P>So American exceptional fertility does not seem to be that American women want lots more children than women in other developed countries, other advanced industrial societies.  But they are -- I am sorry, something happened here.  I am missing a slide.  But one of the -- in the United States, there are fairly substantial differences between racial and ethnic groups in fertility.  And so in a sense, I argue in the paper that American exceptionalism, certainly, infertility is really Hispanic exceptionalism.  </P> <P>So this is the total fertility rate in the U.S. for racial and ethnic groups.  I absolutely agree with Orlando that these are Census Bureau definitions and in a minute, I will show you a little bit more.  I will make one of the points he was making before.  But you can see in the U.S. that if total fertility is 2.1, for Hispanics, it is 2.8, whereas everybody else falls into line at 2 or lower.  Black Americans have a fertility rate of 2.0; Asian and Pacific Islanders - again, big diversity in this group - 1.0; white, 1.85.  If we rely on the white population for replacing itself, we would be in a negative.  And what is interesting is American Indians have quite low fertility and I did not notice until I looked at this paper.  </P> <P>And here is the point Orlando was making - Hispanic is not Hispanic is not Hispanic.  You can see here that although Hispanics, as a Census Bureau-defined group, have a total fertility of 2.8, Mexican-Americans have a total fertility of 3.0.  Other Hispanics - think Guatemala and Nicaragua, Central and South America - have a total fertility rate of 2.6; Puerto Ricans, 2.0 and Cubans, 1.7.  So, really, if anybody is doing us a demographic favor if they are 2.0 or over it is Puerto Ricans are neutral, maybe a little to the positive; Cubans are negative, and we are really only going to get a demographic boost from Mexican-American and other Hispanic.</P> <P>Now, I do not have a slide on this but the immigrant groups tend to come into the country with values and cultural practices from the country they came from.  So immigrant groups coming from fairly high-fertility countries tend to have high fertility for a while and then they tend to become more like everybody else in all sorts of things, and fertility is just one of them.  So much of this higher fertility of Hispanic immigrants is due to the higher fertility and family orientation of fairly recent immigrants.  It is really a flow of your immigrants into this country, not the fact that there are people who were born some place else and moved here when they were infants.</P> <P>So what we argue in the paper and I feel fairly strongly about is that society benefits from healthy children.  And in societies like the United States, there are a lot of other things you can do with your time and money.  And in the consumer market, parenthood really has not done very well.  There are a lot of competing choices - getting that MBA, travel, saving for retirement, training your dog - and lots of people are picking those.  Having and raising children is enormously expensive.  We know it costs a lot of money but the time and effort, as anybody who has ever had a young child knows, is just enormous.  And it comes at cost to these other things that American society values, like personal achievement and accumulating things.  </P> <P>So you can argue - and we do argue - that, in a sense, this American exceptionalism is free-riding on the fertility of immigrants, on their labor, on their values and on their time.  And that is especially true for Mexican-American immigrants.  </P> <P>It seems to us to be both good policy and only fair to support the child-bearing efforts - and good for society in the long run - of anybody who chooses to have children.  There are a lot of ways to do this, but child allowances which are very common in Europe are -- I guess they have not worked very well but are very common.  Canada has child allowances; many countries in Europe have child allowances.  </P> <P>Anything we can do to make it easier to have a family and work -- but the U.S. is actually pretty good on this.  But one thing that is virtually never talked about but could have demographically a huge effect would be to encourage women to start families earlier.  There are some demographers who have argued that, especially in Europe, one solution to the demographic problem would be to or -- something that could contribute to a solution would be to compress education so people get the same amount of information and the same credentials but do it by -- so they were done with that MBA by their early 20s because if you shift child-bearing from age 35 and average to 25 and average, that actually increases the fertility rate.  And if anybody wants that lesson in a few minutes, I will give to you.  But all else equal, populations grow much more quickly if women have children at 20 than if they have them at 35 or 40.  Thank you.  And if there are any questions, I am happy to --</P> <P> James Q. Wilson:  Thank you very much, Linda.  Michael Novak, a resident fellow at AEI, has been asked to make some comments and ask a few questions.  When he is finished, we will give any member of the panel who needs to respond an opportunity to do so and then we will ask for comments and questions from the audience.  Michael?</P> <P>Michael Novak:  Thank you.  My job is an impossible one, as you can tell from the outlines there, what you have just seen.  A general comment:  I think all of these papers and each of them are a very good reflection on the editors.  They reflect, each of them, a generosity of spirit and a wide range and diversity of considerations; historical vision, a comparative vision.  And they are all so even-tempered and unstrident and unpartisan; it is really a quite marvelous series.  Just say a few words about each of them because I think that is the only right thing to do.  </P> <P>Martha, we had a conference here a decade ago, which left a point in my mind that I would like to bring up to you.  It was on the theme talking about popular culture but, especially, movies and television.  And one of the participants -- I do not remember who it was but it was a Hollywood producer, I believe, who said that despite the disgust, overseas, especially, with the sexual preoccupation, with the violence, with the lack of moral seriousness and the lack of family and so forth in American films, that was, at least, partly offset by the Americans storyline; that is, the one point that is quite distinctive about American film is the lone individual who, perhaps, breaks from family, breaks from expectations, breaks from habits and viewpoints [indiscernible] faces great difficulties and that somehow is indicated, at this sense, that your destiny is in your own hand is a very powerful message of American culture.  I want to know if you agree with that.  </P> <P>And I do think your point about television and film preferring singles is very true.  But one other thing:  They really overlooked religion.  You would never guess from film and television that the American people are as religious as they are.  But above all, what religion does in their lives, including strengthen this vision that individual responsibility and individual destiny and including the possibility of teaching, the possibility of awakening.  Whatever your course of action until now, you can change and renew yourself and I think that is very important to America as a whole.  </P> <P>And then I think, above all, a role [sounds like]of how to cope with suffering and setback.  I know Professor Waite makes the point that -- I forget exactly how you put this, but religious couples are somewhat less afflicted with divorce and seem to learn somehow a patience or whatever; you did not really speculate on what that is but there was something.  And then also on aspiration; I think religion has the capacity to instruct a very large part of the population to aspire to be better than they are, what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.  And I think that television and movies particularly do this far less often than they ought to.</P> <P>I do want to commend you on your historical view, though, which reinforces a point that Dr. Patterson makes about the movement from folk culture to the higher arts; I mean the creativity which begins at the local setting and develops into higher art forms, as in jazz, is just quite remarkable; I had not thought of it that way.  I heard from French commentators once -- I was riding in a taxi cab in Paris and they were describing the poverty of American culture but they did concede in an outburst of generosity that the Americans have invented this wonderful form of musical comedy.  </P> <P>And they thought we were being extraordinary.  Of course, they started taking it back immediately by going back into French opera and so forth and pointing out that it had its origins.  But I like that historical view of your paper very much.</P> <P>Professor Patterson, this is an odd point to begin with.  Well, let me start here.  I just was really struck with admiration by the historical depth of your paper, its range and above all, the narrative mind.  Let me put it in terms that are more familiar to me, maybe, but sin, betrayal and injustice and then also achievement and then, also, unfinished tasks.  I mean I just thought it was a wonderful presentation of the struggles of America.</P> <P>I want to begin with this very small point because it really was piercing.  You described - and I think Professor Waite did, too - the loneliness of blacks with respect to the much lower proportion of numbers who are married, especially after 50 or 60.  And then, also, one of the effects of the social segregation on poor families and so forth.  That is a really stunning point, I think, and it hits in a place that most discussions do not go.  </P> <P>I thought you also did a very subtle job of raising questions about the very categories of race and ethnicity; they do not quite do the work, which we would like to impose on them.  Just as you did for Hispanics showing that, really, it is a political name; very disparate cultures with different behaviors and so forth.  </P> <P>I have always thought that that is a very good thing to do with respect to the black population.  The trajectory, for example, which you allude to but do not make very much of here is the trajectory of West Indian blacks is so conspicuously different.  And I also think I am right to say, but I do not know how much work is done on this, about blacks from different parts of Africa.  I mean some of those cultural traditions -- first of all, cultural traditions are usually transmitted silently and tacitly, but they do live on.  I have a habit in Washington of guessing when someone I meet is Ethiopian and I would say out of a hundreds tries I have missed maybe three -- or Eritrean.  But, anyway, I think this does something to personalize people, given our rooted history.</P> <P>Finally -- not quite finally; two more points.  You make all the right points but I would have been inclined maybe a little bit like Moynihan here to move the question of marital life and having children in marriage before the poverty and equality figure and the incarceration of it because I think it does help to shed more light.  But I can see reasons for not doing that as well.  And I wish there had been a little bit more on the success of married blacks.  </P> <P>One of the points I find most surprising to Europeans is running through some of those figures.  That is an extraordinary success tale and that was really brought out I mean in terms of rapidity of moving into higher education.  I mean, if you do it particularly from the migration of South into the North about the time the immigrants of Eastern Europe and others came, the success of a significant portion of blacks is quite remarkable; entered into the professions, into politics, even, and so forth.  </P> <P>And then another comparison I would like to see more done of is instead of comparing the black poverty rates and equality rates with all whites, I would enjoy seeing it done -- I mean, I think I would benefit by seeing it done, for example, with Slavic-Americans, about the same proportion of the population; persons who also lived mostly in serfdom - at least those who came here - until just about the time of slavery so had a very little asset accumulation when they came here.  And well, I think -- but anyway I am not sure how it would come out but I think it would be highly interesting to do that.</P> <P>Finally, the tremendous overview that Professor Waite gave us is really a bit breathtaking.  It is awfully complete that it is hard to think of things that are not there.  It has such a very open attitude and a fiery [sounds like] attitude.  I also thought the clarity of the presentation of data was extraordinary clear.  I mean you have so many numbers in that paper that it is a bit staggering but just reading its English, it moves rather well.  And I thought that Professor Patterson s charts had the same effect; they are just brilliant.  They bring that out for you very easily.</P> <P>I want to bring up this question and I thought that it was hidden behind your numbers.  I often like to say to people, and I maybe very wrong, that 66 percent of Americans who promised to marry one another until death do them part, do so; they stay married.  If it is true, it is a fantastic percentage and I think what is usually missing in the figures is the fact that the number of divorces is about an action but not about persons.  I like to use the example of my parents who when they died, had almost come to their 60th anniversary; they counted once.  But those that remarried counted nine times if they had nine divorces, and that the number of divorces is greater than the number of persons is what I would say.  </P> <P>And I think there is a figure which lists the number of American adults who have been divorced and when I last looked at it, it was under 20 percent.  I think it is an important figure because the way it is usually presented, it hurts the morale of younger people.  They think they have lower chances of -- and especially if you consider that in the year 1800, let us say, the average age of death was for the oppressor sex, 24, and for the oppressed sex, about 29.  I mean, in those years there was not much riding on divorce.  When you promise to marry until death did you part, it was really no big deal.  </P> <P>Of course, that is just by the numbers because they count so many childhood and deaths and so forth.  But still, I think in one sense it is very good news and a very difficult vocation.  I should be successful as -- it would be a tremendous batting average in baseball [inaudible] or even a winning percentage for any team in sports.</P> <P>Well, here, too, I would like to have seen a little bit more -- you have some of it but I would to see a little bit more of the religious influences here on marriage, family and demography.  For example, the figures on France suggest to me a very high proportion of five or six children lives in [sounds like] families and there are very secular families are having really low.  More difficult for me to cope with is Spain and Italy.  These are Catholic countries from which you would expect rather larger families than they are having.</P> <P>Martha Bayles:  These people are married.</P> <P>Michael Novak:  Yeah.</P> <P>Martha Bayles:  But they are not [inaudible]?</P> <P>Michael Novak:  But they are not -- that has happened so suddenly in the last forty years in Italy, particularly, which I know really well.  And it is very hard for me to think of Italian families 10 years from now and 20 years from now with no uncles, no aunts, no brothers, no sisters.  I mean the total social loneliness of people in a very short period of time is going to be cataclysmic, I think, for the Italian sensibility and sense of -- well, anyway thank you [indiscernible], you know, when you feel like sort of a mosquito on a fat [indiscernible].</P> <P> James Q. Wilson:  Thank you, Michael.  Before I ask each of the panelists to make whatever remark they would like, I would be remiss in my duties as co-editor of this book if I did not point out that should any of this discussion arouse your interest, copies of the book are for sale on the lobby at no discount.  Martha?</P> <P> Martha Bayles:  Okay, thank you Michael.  Your first point about freedom -- that is a very important thing.  When I was in China, I talked to two film scholars, one an older man and the other a younger man who had been a participant in the Tiananmen Square protest.  And the older man told me that in 1980, the Chinese government permitted the U.S. film Convoy to be shown in theaters widely in China.  Most of you probably do not remember this Kris Kristofferson vehicle in which he plays a truck driver who leads a revolt of truck drivers against a crooked sheriff.  And at the end, when he has an opportunity to go into politics, having led this mass movement of truck drivers, he cuts out for the wilderness with a pretty girl and just does not want any part of having any actual political influence.  </P> <P>And the older man -- it is really -- it is not a very good movie.  The older man told me that the Chinese government had chosen to show this film in 1980 because they wanted the Chinese people to understand that Hollywood movies were really not that good anyway and you were not missing very much.  He is a film scholar at Peking University and I am taking him at his word; I think he knows what he was talking about.  The Chinese government has done this a number of times with American films.  The younger man on the other hand saw this film as a young boy and he launched into this passionate description of how much that film meant to him.  </P> <P>This guy could not only -- when he met the authorities who were trying to block his way, he simply fought his way past them and he hit out for the territory.  He could do whatever he wanted and no one could stand in his way and he was able to achieve this kind of anarchic freedom, which was extremely inspiring to this young man and made a big impression on him.  So you have two very different understandings of one very mediocre Hollywood film, so it is enormously complicated.  </P> <P>I would say that the American idea of freedom is often portrayed in a very positive light in our popular culture but it also has gone in recent years very much toward a kind of libertinism of freedom, kind of a freedom without any sense of responsibility.  I hate to sound like Mrs. Grundy but we know that this is true.  I think there is a mismatch when American officials are overseas and they talk about freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom in their public addresses and the message of entertainment media to a lot of people is libertinism, libertinism, libertinism.  </P> <P>Foreigners do not understand, sometimes, the distinction.  They do not understand the American concept of political liberty or of the connection between political liberty and self-governance, both of the individual self-governance and the self-governance of a republican, democratic form of government.  So that is a real place in which the popular culture, I think, distorts a precious American value but also conveys it.  I mean there is no denying that it does both.</P> <P>In terms of the omission of religion, I could not agree more.  But that is, again, a function of the demise of the Production Code very much.  The most influential overseas markets for American entertainment products are Western Europe and Japan and I think highlighting American religiosity in those markets is not a big item.  It might even be a less of an item than it is in this country and there is a real reluctance to put things into movies that are not going to sell overseas in those particular markets.  Needless to say, in the other markets -- in the Muslim world, the Islamic world and in other parts of the world where religion is still very important, this omission does create a distortion.  And people again -- visitors who come here are struck by the religiosity of Americans, usually in a favorable way.</P> <P>Now, one more thing I want to say about what Orlando calls the cultural embrace of African-American culture.  This is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about and I just want to say a couple of things.  That cultural embrace has had a very positive side in the development of many forms of African-American expression from dance to music - predominantly, music - oral tradition, language, you name it.  Many, many aspects of African-American culture have become America s high culture.  I mean, people call jazz America s classical music, which it is; it is one of America s classical music.  And that process by which something from a humble origin becomes a high form of art is an aspect of our exceptionalism that is very distinctive.  </P> <P>I also think we do not project that very well into the rest of the world.  The GMI-Anholt Nation Brands Index for the last several years has asked people in many, many different countries to judge a whole variety of nations on a number of standards.  One of the standards is cultural heritage.  Does this country have a high culture?  Does it have a tradition of a distinguished high culture?  The United States in the last few years has been ranked dead last.  </P> <P>And I think the neglect of American high culture and the neglect of the African-American contribution to high culture and, certainly, in the perception of people overseas, with the exception of all the jazz-loving Europeans, is a very severe problem.  It is true that jazz is an international music now; it is played by all sorts of people.  But oftentimes people do not understand its origins very well.  And we do a very poor job of projecting the fact that we are both a democratic society and a civilized society.  And that our forms of art and civilization and expression are highly distinctive.  We used to do a much better job of projecting that than we do now.</P> <P>On the other hand, we do project a cultural embrace of African-American culture - and I suspect Orlando agrees with me about this - of a certain, I think, very degraded aspect of African-American culture.  And I am referring to not all of hip-hop, not all rap, but the two more outlandish and debased forms.  I would say gangster-rap, certainly, that celebrates the criminal sub-culture and also the whole -- what has really replaced it in the market which is a broadly-construed cult -- either southern rap or party rap, which is basically the culture of the strip club.  And it is just all boobs and all rear ends all the time.  I am not exaggerating.  </P> <P>And this stuff is projected overseas and, again, what does not get projected overseas is the debate within the United States.  Essence Magazine had a big forum, an online forum, about the portrayal of black women in a lot of rap videos, prompted by a protest that occurred at Spelman College.  And they received emails from all over the world and one of the editors of Essence told me that they got a lot of emails from Africa, and she quoted one of them to me:  You African-Americans must be out of your minds in terms of how you are depicting yourselves in this type of material.   </P> <P>The State Department recently sent a hip-hop artist by the name of Toni Blackman to Senegal and to some other countries in Africa in order, partly, to offset this idea of the portrayal of African-Americans that is in certain kinds of highly commercialized hip-hop.  And I read to you a quote; she was interviewed on NPR and she said this: It was shocking to me to see such a huge corps of the press, - this was in Senegal, in Dakar - I am just one little hip-hop artist from the States and they start to ask me all these intense questions.  For example, what is your responsibility as a woman of African descent to the continent of Africa?  And what are you going to do about the negative messages that Snoop Dog is putting out there?   </P> <P>So this is a positive hip-hop artist, someone who is really trying to deal with hip-hop more in the tradition of African-American music and culture and not in this grotesque commercialized form.  And she is flocked with questions and in the continent of Africa, in Senegal, about this commercialized vision of African-Americans.  </P> <P>One more point.  The one form of popular culture that I did not mention which I should have mentioned was minstrelsy.  It was the most popular form of popular culture in the United States, black face minstrelsy performed largely by whites before the Civil War and by blacks after the Civil War.  And maybe some of you are familiar with minstrelsy.  It is not talked about very much anymore, but in a film that he made a few years ago - a very bad film I might add, by Spike Lee - it actually had some good points.  </P> <P>It is about a minstrel show that goes on TV.  It is like a remake of The Producers; it was intended to flop.  So he puts a minstrel show on TV and, of course, it is a huge success.  Americans love this revamp of a minstrel show with the black face and all that stuff.  And in an interview about that film, Spike Lee said that he thought gangster rap and other forms of rap were the modern-day minstrel show.  And that speaks, I think, to what is the nature of the cultural embrace.  Are we, you know, the white mainstream and foreign audiences embracing a very grotesque version of African-American life for entertainment purposes in a kind of voyeuristic way?  </P> <P>And I know there are a great many people in the black community, from religious leaders to activists to academics to young people, who object very strongly to this depiction and feel that it is a kind of juggernaut that has great commercial success that is riding roughshod over who they are, and it is being projected overseas.  And it addresses all the questions of family, gender-relations and the dysfunction of social organization among blacks.  It glorifies them; it turns them into a form of entertainment and then we export it around the world.  So I think this contributes to misunderstanding in this society.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Thank you.  Orlando?</P> <P>Orlando Patterson:  Thanks, Michael, for those comments.  Decades ago, we used to go to all the countries around, debating on various issues that -- </P> <P>Michael Novak:  [Inaudible]</P> <P>Orlando Patterson:  It is good to be back on the [audio glitch] again.  Just very briefly, the heterogeneity of the black population -- we are used to thinking of black Americans as a single group, I mean, the way in which we do not think of Euro-Americans.  We immediately think of the men in different Slavic group, Irish-Americans and so on.  One of the interesting things that has been happening is, perhaps, that is beginning to break down, this perception, partly due to immigration, the presence of significant number of blacks, normally from the West Indies, from the Caribbean, but also from Latin America.  </P> <P>And the census is having problems adjusting to this reality, and also increasingly from Africa, who constitute a distinct ethnic group within the rank [sounds like] population and often with the same trajectories that white ethnic groups had in terms of mobility and so on.  The fact they are a selected population -- I think the African population in America has one if it is not the highest proportion of PhDs in the country.</P> <P>The very interesting question of Slavic group who came from societies not far removed from serfdom, which in the case of Russia came close to slavery by the 1860s, is an interesting one which actually has been addressed.  My colleague, Stan Levenson in his book, A Bigger Piece of the Pie, did exactly that.  You see how the comparison matches up.  And it is true they did not bring many physical assets with them but they brought cultural assets and they did not have their families destroyed.  And as Jim has pointed out in his book, that may be as important an asset as any other, and they held close to each other.  And the family was a haven and in the way in which this was destroyed for African-Americans. </P> <P> And that plus the fact that there were some advantages in asset building.  One of the bad aspects of our government was that between the 30s and the immediate post-war era, you did have a government intervening in a significant way to help people create assets.  The GI bill and the sort of benefits to -- the American government virtually created the suburbs in its real estate policies.  And that those activities which were greatly beneficial to the immigrant groups who came in the early 1900 -- black Americans were almost universally excluded for various reasons.</P> <P>But there is also heterogeneity within the black population which is worth knowing.  One of the interesting points I have pointed out is that there has been a reverse of the great migration.  You are all acquainted with the great migration of blacks from the South to North and to urban regions.  One of the startling results or findings of the census data is that this migration pattern has reversed.  Black Americans are now moving back South, and, especially, to the new cities of the South, in significant numbers and it is the larger [sounds like] middle class migration.</P> <P>But there is also heterogeneity in class terms.  Black Americans have the highest rate of inequality.  And that is saying a lot, given the fact that inequality among white Americans is very, very high.  So there is class division, regional division and it is time people became aware of this factor.  But that sort of point that you made and we can talk more about it in the discussion.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Linda?</P> <P>Linda Waite:  I just wanted to say, Michael, thank you very much for the insight that demographers almost never talk about - divorce as an individual phenomenon.  I would have to look up those figures or calculate them because I think that is an extremely important point.  What I would like to do with any remaining time I might have is to see if anybody has any questions.  This is sort of a University of Chicago tradition that it is supposed to be a dialogue between -- yes?</P> <P>Jean Montgomery [phonetic]:  Excuse me, Jean Montgomery.  I will have to confess to a momentary pang of horror at the thought that the demography would increase the population, given the pressures that we are under for resources in the world.  And I notice you did not include China or India in your total fertility rates there, but it seems also to me -- I'm guessing, that the fertility rates are reflecting the education of the female; that is, the more education you have, the lower the fertility rate, which is probably why the Cuban-American rates are relatively low and the Mexican rates are high.  Coming from a background of criminal justice, I have to wonder about whether we really want to encourage people to have children when they are not educated and economically capable of taking care of them.  So I'm assuming that is what the numbers are reflecting [background noise] education level, the mother?</P> <P>Linda Waite:  Not at all, or not exclusively.  China, you probably know, has a very low fertility rate and that is entirely policy.  The Chinese One-Child policy caused the Chinese fertility rate to drop extremely rapidly very quickly, and one of the consequences -- and this is true in Japan, too. After World War II, fertility in Japan dropped extremely quickly.  The medium-run demographic consequence of a rapid shift from a high fertility to a low fertility population is very rapid population aging.  Both Japan and China are going to fall off this demographic cliff in 30 or 40 years, Japan much sooner than that.  </P> <P>I'm stepping outside my demographic area of expertise, but many groups came to the U.S. with low levels of human capital but high levels of personal ambition and had children who did much, much better.  And one of the things about U.S. immigration policy which keeps most people from entering the country legally and creates very high barriers, both legal and physical, is that it selects people who are extremely ambitious and very persistent, which is in a lot of ways exactly what we want.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  I think that since we have opened the floor for questions, we shall take questions from everyone.  The gentleman on the back, on the right, yes?  Henry?</P> <P>Henry Olsen:  I have a question for Martha.  I was wondering if, compared to current state of popular culture to a past state, I was wondering how much of that change is due to the change in the type of person who is consuming the culture.  In the 30s and the 40s, we were a poorer nation and adults were the ones who consumed music and movies.  Today, a richer nation; teenagers and single people have a higher absolute income and certainly a higher amount of disposable income as opposed to income already committed to obligations.  And not surprisingly, they have turned into being the significant consumers of those cultures.  How much does their idiosyncratic interest as younger, more unattached people have to do with the change in the portrayal of America?</P> <P>And then a similar question about television which is that, well, that is still consumed by adults.  It is increasingly consumed by female Americans.  The quest to get a man over the age of thirty in front of a television set has preoccupied a great number of television executives.  And has that changed a portrayal of the American family over the last fifteen years as that has become the dominant trend of television viewership?</P> <P>Martha Bayles:  Well, I can probably give you a better answer to the first part of the question.  The focus on what we call a youth culture, obviously, is an artifact of the post-war ability of teenagers to spend money which had a lot to do with the rise of rock and roll.  I might say first of all, though, that it is not a question of which is the chicken and which is the egg; I mean some people go at it that way and then sink into despair.  But the fact that there is a certain cultural change in the society that creates that demand and a possibility, and then there is a cultural production, some kind of expression that happens to intercept with that and then there is the incentive to keep it going because it is making money is a delicate kind of dance.</P> <P>And it is hard to say whether the popular cultural products influence changes in the culture or vice versa.  I think of it as a kind of dance they do together.  They tend to reinforce each other and over time, if there is still money to be made, they reinforce each other and they tend to carry it into a very, very deep groove that is very deeply etched and very hard to get out of.  And I think that is a very good description of youth culture in the United States.  It began as an epiphenomenon of the recording industry and now it is just deeply, deeply entrenched in the thinking of everyone in the entertainment industry.  And it has a very marked effect overseas because the great concern that you see among people overseas is that they are worried about their youth.  They are worried about the impact of this material on their youth.  </P> <P>And the fact of the matter is our generation gap that we make so much of and that we think of as a fact of nature exists with far less force overseas in many societies.  And American culture is seen as feeding it and pushing it and not in a positive sense that it is drawing young people away and corrupting the usual concern of religious people and conservative people in foreign societies and our own.</P> <P>I think the youth culture has reached a kind of pathological state, really, and, certainly, the film industry caters to young men.  Maybe television is comparing itself to the film industry but certainly most movies -- not most.  Well, yes, most movies, the majority of films are catering to a certain teenage demographic male, the ones who buy popcorn, the ones who decide what movie they are going to go to, and the ones who see movies over and over again.  And this leads to all sorts of grotesque emphases in culture, I think, particularly an emphasis on violence which has been carried to such a pathological extreme.  Even in mainstream films, it caters very much to that demographic.</P> <P>But about the desire of TV executives to reach that demographic, I do not think I have much to say except perhaps I think they are comparing themselves to the film industry.  They want to add to their female audience.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Was there a hand -- yes, Ma am?</P> <P>Female Voice:  A question for Linda Waite.  I was struck by a comment you had made, a rather ominous comment in the middle of your presentation.  I think you said if these demographic trends continue for long, it ll go into a negative spiral from which it is impossible to reverse.  But I, for years, in thinking about this problem, have thought that when things get bad enough, in fact, there will be a dramatic shift in cultural attitudes as is typically the case in democracies; there is not a move towards changing things until things do get bad enough.  Perhaps that is going on now in Europe.  </P> <P>Obviously the way out is for women to have larger families.  And was your comment based on a historical thinking about the problem, or just a sense that it would be impossible to do that?</P> <P>Linda Waite:  No, it is just strictly demographic.  If you think about one of the things that low fertility does, especially if it has happened, if it is consistent for a couple of decades, is it leaves you with very few women to have large families.  So, for example, the Russian female population, 14 to 30, maybe, who could be having babies, maybe 35, in the next 10 years or 20 years is tiny.  So even if they had four - and now they are having 1.4 - it is very difficult for them to have enough.  You would need such an enormous change from now to then that it is very unlikely.  And then, also, as the population of children and young people get smaller because fertility is low, the burden of the aged increases.  So socially it is hard to devote a lot of effort to children.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Well, I have a couple more people.  First is [audio glitch] and then this gentleman.  Chris, you get in here please and then the gentleman over here.</P> <P>Christina Marin:  I m Christina Marin.  I just want to add a real-life anecdote to Martha s, perhaps, extremely large bank of anecdotes. 1996 or 1997, Eastern Europe, Romania:  An IT company borrowed $2 million from a U.S. investment fund in Romania.  The board of directors decided to visit that company and what better occasion than a working breakfast.  As a former Voice of America reporter, I have a very suspicious mind when I am in Central and Eastern Europe.  So I visited -- I went to the room arranged for the working breakfast.</P> <P>And what did I see there?  I saw, of course, coffee, water, cookies and the largest assortment of ABC liquor that I could ever imagine; it was 8:30 in the morning.  For a second, I was speechless; it did not happen very often to me.  The next second, the liquor disappeared and then I asked the CEO of that IT company, What possessed you to bring scotch and vodka and all that at 8:30 in the morning to a board of directors meeting?   And he looked at me and said, Well, you are Americans.  Did you not see Dallas?  J.R. and Sue Ellen were always drinking at any time of day.   And we are talking about seemingly intelligent people but this was the perception what American life was - booze from morning until night.  Thank you.  </P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Thank you very much.  This gentleman over here on my right, please, and then the gentleman behind him.</P> <P>Male Voice:  Thanks.  If you do not mind, I would like to follow up a little bit more on the demography question because, Professor Waite, as you were presenting the fertility figures, you mentioned in passing the phrase demographic problem.   And I got the impression from your discussion of the data that in some sense, the social norm or the social goal should be to replace the current level of populations.  I guess my question is, is that accurate?  And if not, what is or should be society s goal with regard to population?  Thanks very much.</P> <P>Linda Waite:  I'm going to go back to Moynihan here.  Moynihan - at least, this quote is attributed to Moynihan - once said, Demographers do not care what you do as long as you let them count it.   The choice to focus on American exceptionalism and fertility was really of the editors of the book.  I'm completely morally neutral.  </P> <P>I think from a social standpoint, something that is happening in Europe, in Italy, Greece, Spain is probably an outcome that the societies themselves do not want because there is, I think, a difference between moderate population decline that is fairly controlled and what we are seeing in those countries which will be -- I mean, in some of them, population free-fall.  So my guess is that Russia as a society does not want the outcome of no Russians in a hundred years.   So it is only that.</P> <P>Male Voice:  I just wanted to ask you if the following generalization holds true:  Can you say that the more religious a society is, the more religious the United States is, therefore, the higher the fertility rate?</P> <P>Linda Waite:  No.  The countries in Europe that have very low fertility - I think Michael made this point - are countries where marriage and child-bearing are very strongly linked but for a number of reasons, marriage has been delayed, even very delayed.  Some people point to the very high unemployment in countries in Europe - in Italy - or housing problems that make it very hard for young people to get their own place and the very low rates of unmarried child-bearing.  And one argument is that fertility in the United States is as high as it is is because more unmarried women are willing to have children here than in Italy, Spain and France.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  The lady in the front row and this will have to be our last question if we are to end on time.  Thank you.</P> <P>Juliana Pilon:  I'm Juliana Pilon with the Institute of World Politics.  A question for any and all of you.  The movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, which I recently saw, has been remarkably successful and also very positive.  I wonder if you would comment, first of all, on its potential for conveying a positive image of the United States and, also, for that matter, marriage, indirectly, and of race, obviously; individualism in [audio glitch] and if there are any data as to whether, in fact, it has been seen [audio glitch].</P> <P>Orlando Patterson:  Well, I saw it.  I mean -- but it raises very uncomfortable issues for me.  I do not know if it is the role of artists and filmmakers to be designing films to pursue social policy.  Maybe when they do things that you want, it is one thing.  If they do things you do not want, then you begin to get worried.  So I do not -- remember the Nazis used films in a way which we find abhorrent.  So because we have no control in what direction they go in, we have a problem so that -- anyway, that film also was somewhat unrealistic, if you ask me.  And this raises this question of how far do you go.  The idea of a black father who in that film was highly idealized -- I mean [indiscernible] the norm was like that and so one could say, Okay, the film is projecting what should be, that it should be.   </P> <P>But should that be the role of filmmakers or novelists or whatever?  Is it not more their role to depict the realities if they have a role at all, other than an artistic one?  I did not especially like that movie, to tell you the truth.  I don t think it was especially good but it does pose -- I you re your question poses some uncomfortable issues about what their role should be.</P> <P>The rap artists, they are defenders -- and by the way, I share your real concern about where gangster rappers have gone and so on, as do many other people.  But one of their defenses is that they are merely reflecting the grim realities of their lives.  Well, one may wonder whether depicting women in that way is reflecting grim realities.  And that seems to be an extreme case, suggesting that the artist s role is mere reflection and should not be concerned about their responsibilities.  </P> <P>But it is a delicate balance and my sense is that the American position is about right on this.  I mean, there is no censorship.  This expression of concern when it becomes out of hand -- sort of the celebration of violence and the misogyny is obviously one of those.  But I find the situation here not as disturbing as you think, Martha, and I would be really concerned if Hollywood saw its role as an arm of the State Department; it begins to get very fuzzy.  </P> <P>And let me say one final thing.  To many people in the liberal community, television and the cinema is seen as projecting a very American, a more establishment view of things because we do -- you mentioned the better-known films that celebrate the isolated individual and so on but I do not know if that is a typical film.  Is it a typical television show?  I may be wrong.  You know more about this than I do.  But as someone growing up in the Caribbean, what I saw were the Hollywood movies, the B-grade movies, which did have a -- actually, quite a fascinating effect on people.  </P> <P>But I also saw an awful lot of Doris Day.  And my bewilderment growing up is, I mean, is that really the typical America?  I mean, where are all the intelligent, educated women?  Things have changed, as you said, but I suspect that there is still a lot of that, balancing the negative films, as you said.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Before I let Martha make what will be absolutely the final response, I want to remind Orlando Patterson of Oscar Levant s famous phrase, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin. </P> <P>Martha Bayles:  That was my final response.  Well, look. Again, this goes to Mrs. Grundy who is hovering over me and I wish to banish her from the area.  There are many positive things -- the biggest American influence export in terms of films are the blockbusters.  Spiderman is the biggest selling U.S. film in India.  It is not easy to sell U.S. films in India because they have something called Bollywood in India.  But Spiderman penetrated the Indian market, as we say, with some success.  Blockbuster films with special effects are by far the most popular films.  You look at any list of global box office, they are all up there.  </P> <P>Pursuit of Happyness I do not think is very high on the list in the global market.  It made its way to Western Europe but the global market loves the special effects blockbusters and somebody should write a book about the mingled complexity of what blockbusters say about the United States or what they say about modernity.  It is a fascinating subject and a complex one.</P> <P>Just a general comment.  I do not think it is the artist s duty to foment positive social values.  The Arab media, the Russian media, the Iranian media, the Turkish media, the Chinese media are all trying to do that.  But the ones who are really successful, like India, do something that is more like our tradition.  They cater to social values because they want a mass audience and they understand that the mass audience tends to have rather conservative social values; it is just a market decision.  They push the envelope where they can, but they restrain themselves because they understand they are not going to please most of the people most of the time if they go too far down the path of perversity and debasement and debased images of human nature.  Most audiences in the world do not like that.</P> <P>The American audience has developed a particular taste for it.  And I agree with you, Orlando - I would not like to see Hollywood become Washington s handmaiden and make films that are on message with the State Department, and I hope you do not think I'm advocating that.  I would much rather see Hollywood the way it is now than see it do that.</P> <P>But one final thought is that we do not export a sense of debate and discussion and understanding and processing of our own popular culture very well.  A lot of the people in the world think that Americans are passive recipients of this, that we are manipulated by it, that it is a direct reflection of our lives.  That filtering that we do and the place that it occupies for us and the debates that we have over it, rap being a very prominent example, does not export.  </P> <P>And in my experience, foreigners are extremely interested in those debates when they hear about them because those things are part of their own reaction to this material.  And they are very fascinated to hear what Americans have to say about it and it dawns on them that perhaps Americans also have a critical and a distanced reaction to this.  But we really do a lousy job of exporting our own relationship to our popular culture.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  Thank you, everybody.  We will now mobilize the second panel.</P> <P> </P> <P>Panel II</P> <P>Peter Schuck:  All right, I think we are going to get underway and, hopefully, have enough time for comments and questions at the conclusion of the presentations.</P> <P>Our first panelist is James Q. Wilson.  Again, he is in part on his own, and in part he is filling in for the injured Ben Friedman who wrote a wonderful chapter on the economy.  Jim is going to discuss some of the political dimensions of the economy.</P> <P>Arthur Brooks is a wonderful addition to the book.  I was delighted to make his acquaintance as part of the editorial process.  I had not known him before his work but Jim put me on to his work.  The first book that came to my attention, Who Really Cares, is a remarkable piece of work, which really transforms our understanding of both the philanthropic propensities of Americans and also the effective religion and family structure on our giving practices.  Indeed, I am struck by the extent to which the distinctiveness of American religiosity pervades almost every chapter in one way or another.</P> <P>And Linda Waite was asked in the last panel whether religion translates into higher fertility and she said there is little evidence of that.  But there is some evidence that -- Arthur s new book, which was just out yesterday, he tells me, Gross National Happiness makes the point that religiosity is correlated with optimism.  And optimism one suspects has some positive effect on fertility.  </P> <P>In any event, it is the case that American religiosity, which as Martha told us is hardly mentioned in discussions abroad except in negative terms, does influence so many of the dimensions of American life that are under discussion here, including the economy, as Jim Wilson will mention.</P> <P>So we will follow the same pattern as before - the speakers will speak, the discussant will discuss.  Chris DeMuth whom you no doubt know, who is stepping down or has stepped down as the head of -- okay, as of today -- but many of us are very, very distressed about this, but he has his reasons I suppose.  And then we will take questions and comments from you.</P> <P>James Q. Wilson:  It is a testimony to my legendary influence that as I rise to speak, the C-SPAN cameras have disappeared.  They are going off to film something having to do with tractor poles or other important subjects.  I'm going to fill in for Nelson Polsby who died shortly after he wrote this chapter for us and who was, for Peter and me, a very close and dear friend.  And I'm going to say a word about the thoughts of Martha Derthick on federalism and Don Kettl on bureaucracy because they all are part of the constitutional system which I think helps in an important way explain why of all the world s democracies, the United States democracy is distinctive.  </P> <P>And then I will put on a body cast to imitate Ben Friedman who sprained three vertebrae while playing a vigorous game of squash at Harvard.  He is well; he will be back in action shortly but wearing a body cast.  He did not think he could come up and give his remarks although he sent me responses that I can deliver to any questions that are likely to be asked about his chapter.</P> <P>Nelson s chapter on politics makes the central point familiar to everyone that the United States constitution is a remarkable document and has profoundly affected the way the political system works.  The separation of powers has created in the United States the world s most powerful legislature; powerful but, indeed, constrained.  Powerful in the sense that the legislature can act without fear of bringing down the government because the legislature has an independent term of office.  And if the president does not like what it is doing, tough for the president.  And that is true even when the president and the Congress are controlled by the same political party.  They are rivals and the legislature is remarkably powerful.  </P> <P>But it is also constrained.  It is constrained in the sense that the president can veto its actions, the Supreme Court can overturn its actions on constitutional grounds, and the legislature is divided between not only two houses, but among the various committees in each house and the proliferating number of subcommittees in each house.</P> <P>This means that we have a system which is slow to take new action and, hence, we were slow to embrace the welfare state.  We were slow to do many things as compared to our European cousins.  But once we have done these things, it is hard to correct them.  We once were impressed, or depressed, depending on your political views, about how vigorously Sweden and Scandinavia had embraced the welfare state long before we did.  Now, again, depending on your political views, you may be depressed by the fact that Sweden has revised its pension system and has put in place a privatized system of accounts.  And Denmark has embraced vouchers in charter schools on a large scale, things that are politically extremely difficult to do in this country.</P> <P>The independent judiciary we have here empowers people not only to take action and empowers interest groups not only to challenge one another, but it also gives to the American people a strong sense of rights.  The Declaration of Independence is not part of the constitution.  Every legal scholar will tell you that the Declaration of Independence is simply a document and the Constitution itself does not embody that document but that is not what the American people believe.  </P> <P>They believe the Constitution, with its commitment to the Bill of Rights and to independent judicial review, does in effect embody the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.  And hence we have this rights orientation among the American public, which leads us to do many bold things and many foolish things simultaneously in pursuit of our own interests.  </P> <P>Martha Derthick in her chapter on federalism expands on Nelson s views by pointing out that in this country, states have meaningful powers.  There are many federal countries - Australia, India, Germany, Canada - where local governments are significant but in none of these countries do the states or provinces, as they are often called abroad, have the kind of power that states have in this nation.  Not only do the states control certain decisions with very powerful authority - that is to say, they control law enforcement, they control land use, they control public education even though the federal government has begun to eat into their sovereignty in these areas - there is no doubt that what the states do is vastly more important than what the federal government does.  </P> <P>Even in other countries which have a nominally federalist system, many key decisions are still made by centrally appointed authorities.  For example, Canada and Australia have powerful provincial governments but criminal justice is still pursued by prosecutors appointed by the central government.  In this country, prosecutors are elected by the voters in each of the 3,000 counties in the United States.  And when criminal justice matters are to be decided, they are not decided by the president of the United States or by Congress but by countless mayors, police chiefs, governors, parole boards and the like, all of which are selected at the local level.</P> <P>But perhaps the most important significance of our powerful system of state government is that it empowers people by decentralizing decisions.  People do not like to tilt at windmills.  Unlike Don Quixote, most people think they should try to take action that have some prospect of successful outcome.  In a centralized country, such as we find in England and most of Western Europe, you have to be Don Quixote because your capacity to alter the direction of the central government, the only government that makes any significant difference in those countries, is profoundly limited by your weakness and its power.  </P> <P>In this country, you can alter the direction of government by becoming influential before your city council, your local school board, agitating measures before the state legislature, using the local courts to sue, and in many states, including California, voting on various propositions which for better or for worse will often profoundly alter the direction of public power.</P> <P>The decentralization of authority means that political participation meaningfully measured not in terms of what proportion of the people vote in elections - an important figure and a figure where we clearly do not do as well as most European countries - but meaningful political participation.  Taking action that has a reasonable prospect of altering the public behavior or the government s behavior is much easier here.  </P> <P>And in those surveys beginning with Sid [indiscernible] survey back in 1962 and, I think, continuing down to the present, if you ask people Have you engaged in meaningful political action and the surveys define what meaningful action is, you discover that the level of involvement in this country is much greater because the costs are lower and the potential benefits are higher.</P> <P>Don Kettl at the University of Pennsylvania has written a chapter on bureaucracy and I think the simplest way to summarize this chapter is to put it in the following way.  The great British television series, Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister could not have been filmed in this country.  When the minister and, later, the prime minister are completely baffled by the manipulations of the permanent secretary of the department or the cabinet secretary in London, these are things that do not happen here.  And they do not happen here for one very fundamental reason: the bureaucracy in this country is controlled by two different branches of the government; three, if you count the judiciary.  </P> <P>The president appoints bureaucrats; the topmost must be confirmed by the Senate but Congress, through its appropriation and authorization procedures, has a profound effect about what the bureaucracy is allowed to do.  And it means that the president and Congress, since they vie for control of the bureaucracy, are vying for control of an entity, all of these appointed officials who are nervous from any given moment to the next about who really runs them.  And the notion that they would treat the Secretary of Agriculture or the Secretary of Veteran s Affairs, to say nothing of the Secretary of State, with the kind of contempt that a permanent secretary might bring to his or her superiors in Whitehall is simply a false illusion.  It cannot happen here.</P> <P>Moreover, the United States government engages in what Don Kettl calls government by proxy.  Government by proxy means that whenever the federal government wants to do things, it often must do things via state governments.  And so the federal bureaucracy, which is relatively small in size, other than the consulting firms that are hired in ever growing number, has not grown much over the last several decades, must deal with the rapidly growing and extremely powerful state bureaucracies.  So when we spend money on welfare or highways or air pollution control or anything else, we have to have governments in Washington acting as proxies for their compatriots at the state level.</P> <P>There have been various efforts to deal with this.  Some presidents have come along and said, We must do something that the Founding Fathers have never done.  We must change the fact that the Constitution is almost entirely silent on the division of substantive responsibilities between the national government and the state governments.   In short, we must pass statutes that will tell the states what they do and tell the federal government what it will do so that we can have a neat division of authority.  Richard Nixon played around with that; Ronald Reagan played around with that and it went absolutely nowhere.  </P> <P>As the old political scientist Morton Grodzins put it, federalism in the United States is not a layer cake; it is a marble cake.  Federal government decisions are mixed in with state decisions at every level; it is impossible to segregate their functions.  Now, the states at the time that Nixon and Reagan played around with a reallocation of functions were quite willing to participate in the conversation, provided it meant that the federal government would take on much more of the financial burden of running the government, would pay for everything, leaving states much more freedom to make decisions that did not cost them any money.  That deal did not commend itself to Presidents Nixon or Reagan and so any arrangements fell through.</P> <P>Now, the results of all these forms of action, a constitutional system that so powerfully separates the government, a federal system that requires so many of the decision to be made at uncoordinated local locations, a bureaucracy that is weak to control, means that we legislate slowly in this country.  It is so easy to block change that sometimes you wonder how change occurs.  </P> <P>And, indeed, in the United States meaningful change often occurs only when there is a crisis.  We think that social security is approaching a crisis but we are convinced, especially here at AEI, that Medicare is in a crisis now.  We notice no significant action to deal with these things because our definition of crisis, namely a big problem, an under-funded liability, the fact that we will run out of money, is not a crisis in Washington terms.  </P> <P>A crisis in Washington terms is when people actually run out of money, when Social Security recipients and beneficiaries of Medicare and Medicaid are standing in the street corners with empty pockets, weakened from disease and with untreated broken legs.  That is a crisis and then that is when, ordinarily, we act.</P> <P>This is quite different.  England nationalized many of its main industries after the Second World War.  And then when a new government came in power, it de-nationalized.  And when Margaret Thatcher came into power, many of the organizations owned by the government were sold to private enterprise, all literally with the stroke of a pen.  As long as the Prime Minister had a stable majority in the House of Commons, there was very little that the Prime Minister could not do and survive.  </P> <P>And as I said earlier, Sweden, the bastion of social democracy, has gone about changing the welfare system so that they have a private pension plan that is very similar to what George W. Bush recommended in this country, which got absolutely nowhere.</P> <P>The result of all of this, it seems to me, is that it creates a large arena for private action.  Absent government activity, private ventures are important.  If things are to happen, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in 1835, you do not find government leaders proposing the action; you look for volunteers and private associations to perform these actions.   And in a moment, when Arthur Brooks takes the platform he will talk about one extremely important source of that private action, which is individual philanthropy and religious convictions.</P> <P>Jack Citrin at Berkeley has talked about our political culture.  And in a chapter that matches rather well with Martha Bayles chapter on popular culture, he points out that in a profound sense liberalism has won in this country.  By liberalism, I mean a commitment to freedom and individualism, not liberalism as it has been redefined to mean policies that favor a growth in the size of the national government.  But liberalism has won in a way that has eliminated the hyphenation from much of American politics.  Almost all ethnic groups insist upon being called Americans even though their fathers were born in Italy or Russia or China or England or wherever.</P> <P>It is ironic to me that the phrase African-Americans has been created.  It seems to me it is a profound misstatement of the American spirit.  Whites do not call themselves European-Americans; why should Blacks call themselves African-Americans?  Well, there may be good cultural and rhetorical reasons for making this statement, but it seems to me that it leans against the general tradition in this country that Americans like to de-hyphenate themselves.  </P> <P>The price, of course, we pay for this complete absorption of individuals into the traditional liberal or freedom-loving conception of American life is that people will rebel against it; people have rebelled against it.  Post-modernism and multiculturalism are efforts to say we must establish significance for groups rather than for individuals because unless all groups are treated the same, then individuals will not be treated the same.  </P> <P>This is an argument, which in my view - I have no data - has not made a lot of progress with the average American.  The average American does not think of themselves as being members of groups that must be treated equally if they as individuals are to be treated equally.  But it is the challenge that the academic left has levied against the country.  Some recent scholar, whose name I cannot recall but he is from Europe, remarked that American higher education is now a liberal sheep dip into which people must be immersed briefly on their way to an MBA.</P> <P>We also have distrust in government as was mentioned earlier today.  Americans do not like government.  They do not have much of a high opinion of the president; they certainly do not like Congress; their trust in the Supreme Court has declined.  Indeed, every aspect of American life, but one, has suffered a loss in esteem.  The one institution in American public life that has grown dramatically in status, according to polls, is the United States Army.  </P> <P>But this distrust in government does not mean a distrust in the constitutional order.  Americans love the country.  As I said in my introduction to this morning s panel, based on all of the available cross-national data, Americans have much higher regard for their country, are much more patriotic, are much more devoted to it, than you will find true in virtually any other industrialized democracy.  </P> <P>Equality here has become a rival to liberty but despite the increased income inequality in this country, a matter on which one of our chapters dwells, although the authors of that chapter are not making a presentation today, it is astonishingly the case that the level of inequality in this country is among most people widely accepted.  The fact that Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet, or Michael Jordan earn sums of money that most people cannot count because they do not know how to put that many zeroes after the 1 to indicate $100 billion does not disturb Americans the way it profoundly disturbs many Europeans.</P> <P>Sidney Verba, about 15 years ago with some colleagues, published a book on equality, doing a study of people in Sweden, Japan, and the United States in which he interviewed only elites, that is to say, people who headed or represented important groups, conservative and liberal political parties in all these three countries.  He discovered that when they were asked the question, What should be the ratio between the income of the highest paid executive in the firm and the lowest paid executive in the firm, the Swedes would say something like four to one.  </P> <P>The most liberal American elites would say something like 100 to 1, which meant that liberal American elites were in a sense more conservative, that is to say, more willing to accept income inequality than the most conservative Swedes and the like.  So all of this political freedom creates an opportunity for action about which Arthur will talk in a moment.  </P> <P>Now, I want to put on my body cast and pretend for a moment I m Ben Friedman.  I hope he won the squash match in which he was playing but I do not know that.  The mystery he sets before us in his chapter on the economy can easily be summarized.  Many countries have ample physical resources; Argentina and Russia are two countries that come to mind.  There are many others.  But only America has created out of these resources so high a standard of living.  For the last quarter century, he points out, we have had only two economic recessions.   He wrote this before the present time, and we may be edging into a recession now but it has not been officially declared to be so by the NBER, so we can say right now, we are not under recession.  </P> <P>But each of these recessions was modest and lasted only eight months.  It is really extraordinary what this means.  It means that since the Great Depression of the 1930s, which had a devastating effect on America, and the Great Depressions in the 19th century, which were equally troublesome, we have managed to manage the economy and to stimulate economic growth in a way that has made recessions, though something to worry about, not catastrophes.  The reasons he gives for this are the following:  Flexible and fluid arrangements that enable labor and capital easily to be reallocated.  </P> <P>These flexible and fluid arrangements include low unemployment benefits.  In America, for example, if you are unemployed, you get 50 percent of your wages for six months.  If you are unemployed in Germany, you get 63 percent of your wages for four years.  Lower tax rates, so that money can flow more easily from one place to the other.  The existence of certain kinds of retirement plans, which vest in the individual and can be transported from one location to the other.  This is not true of all retirement plans but of some, and the number of people enrolling in them has been growing.  </P> <P>OECD, the Office for Economic Control and Development, did a study of the restrictiveness of controls on labor markets and evaluated all of the countries that belong to the OECD; put the United States at 1, as having the least restriction, England at 7, France at 14, Germany at 15.  So these flexible and fluid arrangements enabling labor and capital to be reallocated means that we can keep up with entrepreneurial demands and innovation in a way that makes everyone better off.  </P> <P>Secondly, he said the regulatory and monetary system does not go out of its way to discourage innovation.  There are regulatory and monetary problems we have, but that these problems are much less severe here than they are abroad.  Third, he said Americans work longer hours.  The average American worker puts in 170 more hours; that is to say, over five weeks of work per year, longer than does the average worker in any of the nations in the G7.  </P> <P>Why do we do this?  We are afraid of starving?  We are nervous about being fired?  Well, possible explanations but only if they are plausible.  Americans work harder because they like to work harder and because they get something for it, and also, perhaps, because if they work harder they will minimize the risk of unemployment, which is an unattractive alternative in this country.  </P> <P>Finally, he says that we make a greater use of information technology than does the rest of the industrialized world.  I cannot cite exactly the way in which he makes this calculation, but I will tell you the conclusion.  He says that compared to other nations in the G7, we are twice as likely to make advances in information technology an important part of each workplace.  This does not mean we are free of problems; quite the contrary.  We rely heavily on foreigners for investment.  We have a very low savings rate.  Calculating the savings rate is a difficult matter but in the calculations, Ben makes our savings rate, under the best of circumstances, might be 13 percent.  Whereas in Japan it is 26 percent; in Canada it is 24 percent.  And that these things make an important difference.  </P> <P>In summary, the political system creates a large area for individual action.  The government is slow to tell other people what to do.  The economy responds to this by creating economic opportunities and sustaining them by a process of regulation and benign indifference that encourages economic activity.  So, what we want to know now, I suppose, is how do we take advantage of this and what do we do with those opportunities?  For that, we will turn to Arthur Brooks.</P> <P> Peter Schuck:  Before we turn to Arthur, I wanted to cast a slightly different light on something that Jim said with regard to political participation and voter turnout.  It is one of the fascinating facts that I learned in this exercise that the way in which we calculate voter turnout is different in this country than in Europe. </P> <P>So I want to read very briefly from Jack Citrin s chapter on political culture because it is really quite fascinating.  The main reasons for this large difference in electoral participation between the U.S. and other democracies are institutional, not cultural.  Technical differences in how official turnout rates are calculated lower American turnout figures relative to those in other countries.  The denominator for calculating the turnout rate in the United States is the voting age population.  This includes people ineligible to vote, such as felons, people confined to mental institutions, and a growing number of non-citizens.  </P> <P>In contrast, other countries use the number of registered voters as their denominator.  This practice is sensible since voting is automatic in most of the world.  In the United States, however, registration is the responsibility of the individual.   Then he goes on.  He says, American turnout expresses a proportion of those registered who vote hovers above 70 percent, a figure comparable to turnout in a number of European democracies.   </P> <P>And then he goes on.  And this is a good segue, I think, into Arthur s remarks to say, Voting aside, Americans are more likely than Europeans to be politically active.  Surveys conducted by the European Social Survey in 2002 and Georgetown University in 2004 asked respondents whether they had done any of 10 different political activities in the past year.  The activities included contacting public officials, working in a political party organization, signing a petition, boycotting products, and participating in protest activities.  The average level of participation was significantly higher in the U.S. than in Europe, both among those under 35 and those older.  </P> <P>In the United States, the younger generations still was less politically active than those 35 or older.  When asked whether they were active in a voluntary organization rather than merely belonging in the sense of formal membership, Americans were, again, more likely to be involved than Europeans.  But this time, young people were as likely as the older generation to be active.   </P> <P>As I said, this is a very nice segue into Arthur Brooks remarks, who, in a wonderful chapter, discusses not only philanthropy but the organization and performance of the non-profit sector in the United States.  Thank you.</P> <P> Arthur C. Brooks:  Thank you, Peter.  It is an honor for me to be part of this volume, to work with Peter Schuck and Jim Wilson.  It was a joy to prepare a chapter and to implicitly be part of a community of authors that have established great reputations for really understanding the most important social trends and social patterns that characterize American life.  </P> <P>I love the title of the book, Understanding America.  I brought home my advanced copy when it came in the mail.  And my wife, who is an immigrant, said, Well, finally.   She noted that I had never been successful at explaining it to her.  So perhaps the book will do the trick.  I pointed out that I do have a chapter in the book.  But then, my chapter notwithstanding, it might help some people understand the country better.  And looking at the other chapters besides my own, I have to say that I learned a lot from it.  </P> <P>I want to talk to you today about what I believe is a salient characteristic of the United States that is often not considered to be one of the most important parts of American life.  I think you would probably share my experience if you talked to a lot of people in other countries around the world.  If you say, What characterizes America, they will say, Well, America is a land of profit.   </P> <P>Well, I think that is wrong.  I think there are other countries that, today, could more arguably be called lands of profit than America.  Or they will say that America is a land of consumerism.  I think that is exactly wrong, too, because I do believe that if virtually any country around the world had our level of prosperity they would consume enthusiastically every bit as much as we do.  </P> <P>The argument I make in what I write about a lot in my own research is that United States is really, characteristically, a non-profit nation.  That is what sets us apart in important ways.  It is not a profit, but rather non-profit.  The United States has, currently, about a million and a half registered charities, which is to say 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations.  That does not include at least a quarter million houses of worship that are not registered.  It is probably much higher than that.  </P> <P>And most scholars in the non-profit sector believe that there are about nine million grassroots organizations that exist that are not even required to register.  The most responsible estimates of American activity in the social sector suggests that the average American citizen has, on average, 30 substantial links to non-profit organizations in his or her life.  </P> <P>Now, what that suggests is that you just cannot get away from non-profit life in this country.  It also is important to point out that the way that we support the non-profit sector is not fundamentally all about the government.  On the contrary, one of the things that we find is that, particularly in religious non-profit organizations, the most substantial social support comes from us as American citizens.  The amount of support of non-profit organizations in this country is really staggering.  </P> <P>And I want to give you a quick rundown on some of the statistics.  In 2006, which is the latest year for which we have good data, Americans privately gave $295 billion to charity.  Three quarters of that came from individuals, that is to say, people like you and me writing checks to our favorite charities.  Only about a quarter of that came from bequests or foundations or from corporate philanthropy.  The rest is from us.  Two hundred and ninety-five billion dollars, incidentally, is more than the entire GDP of all but 30 countries in the world.  We give away more privately than the entire GDP of the Scandinavian countries, and we have for a very long time.  About half of Americans volunteer their time each year to formal or informal causes.  </P> <P>Now, three quarters of American households are giving about each year.  That suggests something that I think that Americans who believe that charity is a good thing, which is to say virtually everybody outside of elite academia, I think that we can be proud of that.  I think it is a great institution; I mean most people would agree that it is a great institution.  But still, it leaves something like 30 million American households, about 25 percent of the population, not giving.  And incidentally, these are the same people who do not volunteer or give blood or give in informal ways because it turns out the people who give one thing, according to the data, give it all.  </P> <P>So one of the questions that I have is what is the [audio glitch] between the givers and the non-givers in this country?  And, indeed, I think that is the question that we can answer that will tell us why do Americans give so much more than people around the world in other countries.  To illustrate that, as I was doing a little bit of research early on - now this is about three years ago - I was looking at a wonderful data set collected by Robert Putnam at Harvard on 41 communities nationwide, 30,000 American households; a data set called the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey that has rich data about people giving and volunteering, and about their social lives and who they are, and what they give.  </P> <P>Just to get kind of a lay of the land in looking at these data to try to answer the question about who gives and who does not and why, I put the communities in order alphabetically.  I was just going to look at how different communities are giving at different rates, just to get a kind of a feel for some of the differences.  And two communities came in alphabetically right next to each other in my investigation.  I m giving kind of an inside baseball look into how social science research gets done at the initial level; at least how it gets done in my office.  </P> <P>The two communities that were sitting right next to each other were South Dakota and San Francisco.  The first thing that jumped out at me was that they had virtually identical levels of average household private charitable giving; they were within $8 of each other on average.  That really struck me.  Now, can you think of two communities that are more different than South Dakota and San Francisco?  The one thing that is the same is, actually, they have the same population, but South Dakota has 1,500 times more landmass than San Francisco.  And that is only the beginning of the differences between these two places.  So isn t it funny that they give the same amount?  I guess Americans really do give at relatively uniform rates.  </P> <P>But, of course, that cognition lasted about 10 minutes because the first thing I realized, of course, is, well, they are actually not the same because cost of living is different and income levels are different.  And what we really need to look at is correcting for all of these influences on our economic lives.  How do San Francisco and South Dakota really compare?  And the answer is they do not.  When you correct for income levels, you find that the average South Dakotan family gives 75 percent more of its income to charity each year than the average San Franciscan family.  Not to mention the fact that every South Dakotan family is about 50 percent larger than the average San Franciscan family.  </P> <P>Now, it is really expensive to live in San Francisco so when you correct for the cost of living, you find that the difference falls to only 50 percent more.  The people in South Dakota give 50 percent more of their disposable income to charity each year than San Francisco.  So at this point I thought, I need to talk to some people about this.   As a social scientist, it took me about 10 years to learn that social sciences can really learn rather a lot from talking to other humans.  So I called up two foundation executives, one in South Dakota and one in San Francisco.  </P> <P>And first, I got the person in South Dakota who is very suspicious of me as some sort of East Coast academic.  She said, What do you want with us, sir?   I said, You are spectacular in your charitable giving.  It is just incredible.  What is your secret?   And she said, We were all taught to tithe here.   I said, Well, I got the data on your charitable giving and your religious observation.  Not everybody goes to church out there.   She said, Yes, but even the people who do not go to church, their parents did and taught them to give.   I said, Very well, thank you very much.   I hung up.  </P> <P>And I called the foundation executive in San Francisco, and asked the same question.  We had a much richer simpatico; it turns out we grew up in the same neighborhood in Seattle.  So we immediately hit it off and we were yacking it up.  And I said, You are a disaster out there.  What is going on?  You are not giving, you are not volunteering.  What is the deal in San Francisco?   And she said, The reason is because we are all just godless out here.   And I thought, Incredible.  I just heard the same story from South Dakota and San Francisco.  They told me the same story, just in reverse.   </P> <P>So I went to the data, and I said, Is it really true?   And sure enough, the data here show the percentage of people that are asecular, which is to say they attend a house of worship almost never or never or had no religion, and the percentage that are religious, which I define as people who attend a house of worship almost every week or more.  Now, there is a middle group in there that attend occasionally, and there is no sleight-of-hand here; there is nothing weird.  This just gives you a basic idea of the data.  </P> <P>And what you find is that in San Francisco, half of the people are completely secular and 14 percent attend a house of worship every week.  In South Dakota, 10 percent are secular and half attend a house of worship every week.  In fact, you cannot find two communities in the United States that are more symmetrically opposed when it comes to religion.  Maybe it is true what my friends in the phone told me from these two foundations.  </P> <P>So I turned to the data, and I asked how does faith in America affect American charity?  And then I m going to just briefly talk about why I think it matters for us, why we should care if we want to understand America.  </P> <P>Well, at the outset, one of the things that you find -- and there are many, many, many sources of data, and I m not going to trouble you with talking about the nuances of data analysis.  But they all tell the same story, which is to say that there is a fundamental link between charitable giving and religious observation.  For example, according to the data from Harvard that I told you about a little while ago, religious people who attend every week, 91 percent give money to charity each year versus 66 percent of secular people.  </P> <P>Sixty-seven percent of religious people volunteer their time versus 44 percent of secular people.  Religious people give, on average, three-and-a-half times more money away than secular people.  And, incidentally, the average household income difference between religious and secular Americans is within $200.  They make virtually exactly the same amount of household income.  This is not a question of religious people making more.  </P> <P>Furthermore, you find that it does not matter which religion you practice.  You find that practicing Protestants, 92 percent give each year; practicing Catholics, 91 percent; practicing Jews, 89 percent; other religions, 89 percent, and the list goes on and on.  It does not even matter how we define religious because I can just say, Okay, I m not going to talk about religious observation.  I m going to ask people about the depth of their religious beliefs, and I get the same story.  Actually, I get a stronger story if I asked you how seriously you take your religious convictions, and you say a lot, the chances are twice as high that you will give charitably as if you say you do not take your religious convictions very seriously.  In other words, that is a bigger predictor than just religious-house-of-worship observation. </P> <P>Now, you are probably thinking the same thing that I did at this point was, Yes, but religious people are probably just giving to churches and other houses of worship.   That is probably explaining it.  When I showed these data to academics, the first thing they say is, Yes, but if you throw in all that religious giving - which most academics consider to be something like country club dues - then there will not be any difference at all.  It will probably flip.  Probably, secular people will turn out to be giving more.   </P> <P>So what I want to do now is I want to throw out all of the religious giving and not just giving to houses of worship for sacramental reasons; I m going to throw out any religiously affiliated giving at all.  That is a lot of American giving because we have religious universities and religious hospitals and so forth.  It is all gone.  I m only going to look at purely secular giving.  What do we find?  </P> <P>Seventy-one percent of religious people give to non-religious causes; 61 percent of secular people do.  Religious people are 21 percentage points more likely to volunteer for a secular cause than are secular people.  In point of fact, if it were not for religious people in your community, the PTA would shut down.  All types of informal giving follow basically the same pattern.  As an economist, I compulsively collect data on anything I m doing research on.  So I have been very interested in collecting data on informal types of charities; it is very interesting.  So I have data on blood donations and sort of kind acts in society and basic acts of honesty.  </P> <P>And they all tell the same story.  Religious people are twice as likely as secular folks to give blood each year.  They are more likely to help a homeless person on the street.  They are more likely to give up their seat on the bus.  They are more likely to give you their place in line.  Next time you are really late for a flight and you have to jump in front of the security line, ask someone who looks religious.  You are more likely to be successful, a lot more likely, as a matter of fact.  </P> <P>Religious people are even more likely to give back change they mistakenly get from a cashier, suggesting that the charity gap follows something of an ethics gap.  You be the judge of that.  So it is all the same story.  In other words, it does not matter how we measure religion and it does not matter how we measure charity.  You find that religious people give more to all types of causes than secular people do.  </P> <P>Okay, now, the question is why does that matter in a public policy environment and, particularly, a political environment?  I want to show you some data that are related.  And I m going to tell you how I think the data is related to what I have been talking about here.  I would like you to look at the map on the right.  These are familiar-looking maps now.  I have some gray states and some white states.  I m trying to be sort of non-political, so it is not red and blue.  There you are, subtle.  </P> <P>The map on the top is a 2004 electoral map.  The states in white went for John F. Kerry; the states in gray went for George W. Bush.  The map on the bottom is a charity map, which looks at the percentage of income that people gave away.  The states in gray are above the national average; the states in white are below the national average, just 25 states and 25 states.  </P> <P>Now the reason that the maps look a little different, it turns out, is because as a presidential candidate, you do not have to win exactly 25 states.  But what we find is that for all intents and purposes, this is the same map.  As a matter of fact, of the 25 states in 2004 that gave an above-average percentage of their income to charity, 24 of them gave their electoral votes to George W. Bush.  </P> <P>Of the 25 states that gave below average, 17 of them gave their electoral votes to John F. Kerry.  Conservative families in America today give on average 30 percent more of their money to charity each year than liberal-headed households, despite earning about 9 percent less in income.  That is a trend that has continued over the past two decades.  But it is also true in every income bracket and in every education bracket this is the case.  </P> <P>Now this on its face provides for all kinds of controversial readings.  But I m going to tell you why it is actually not that controversial.  It relates back to religion because it turns out that religion absolutely provides the answer to why we find a political charity gap in this country.  Religious conservatives make up about 1 in 5 families in America today.  Religious liberal families are about 6 percent of American households.  In other words, there are about three-and-a-half times as many religious conservatives today as there are religious liberals.  </P> <P>If you look at the data that I have up here - and I realize it is a little hard to read - you will find that the percentage of religious conservative households is exactly the same that gave to charity as the percentage of religious liberal households.  Furthermore, the percentage giving to secular causes is the same and the amount of money they gave is the same.  What I m not showing you is they actually gave to virtually all the same causes.  Religious liberals and religious conservatives are a lot alike, it turns out, and it comes down not to their politics but rather to their religion.  </P> <P>The reason that conservatives look so good when it comes to charitable giving in this country today is because of faith, because in point of fact conservatives are a lot more likely to be religious.  As a matter of fact, one of the things that we find is the conservatives in this country are getting more religious.  The percentage of conservative households since 1974 that has actually become religious has increased by 50 percent.  At the same time, the percentage of liberal households that has become secular has also doubled.  In other words, the left is getting more non-religious and the right is getting more religious and that is what is pushing a charity gap in this country.  </P> <P>Now, there is one more trend, which is about fertility.  We heard a little bit about this in the last panel.  And I think that my data differ a little bit from what we heard about before because religious conservatives today, according to the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, are having 78 percent more children per family these days than are secular liberals - 78 percent more.  Roughly half of that difference is due to politics and about half of that difference is attributable to religion.  </P> <P>Now, when that is happening, when the left is getting more secular and having fewer kids and the right is getting more religious and having more kids, what is going to happen to the political differences and the charity landscape in this country?  The answer, in my view, is a growing charity gap that falls along religious and even political lines.  We will see in this country in the future more assaults from the left on charitable giving and less of an understanding of it, less understanding of the right, of the institutions, the secular institutions that the left favors that are largely having to do with government.  And my projection, which I regret at this point, is that in 20 years, unless something fundamentally changes, charity will be an artifact of conservative and religious life.  Thank you.</P> <P> Peter Schuck:  Now, we have discussion by Chris DeMuth.</P> <P> Christopher DeMuth:  Thank you, Peter.  When I read this book, and particularly the chapters that have just been presented, I thought that a good title, a better title than Understanding America would be Democracy in America.  Unfortunately, Tocqueville got there first, and I think that is why they took the other title.  But that really is the essence of the various arguments, the common strain that runs through them.  </P> <P>In America, the political system and the structure of government are uniquely fragmented and decentralized, porous, non-hierarchical, and open to outside influence.  This has three particular large consequences.  One result, emphasized in the chapters by Polsby, Kettl, and Derthick, is that our government policies, the policies that come out of the structure of government and the political system are partial, incomplete, complex, pluralistic, and highly diverse in their features across the continent.  </P> <P>For example, rather than having a unitary government healthcare system, ours is partially socialized, partially a private not-for-profit system, and partially a private for-profit system.  And even the socialized part - Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs - are divided among state and federal governments, and include many elements of private market competition.  One could say the same thing of our primary and secondary educational system, which features many of the very best and many of the very worst schools on the planet.  </P> <P>Jim Wilson s chapter on criminal justice, which we have not discussed, begins by pointing out that whereas Great Britain has 52 police departments, America has 17,000 police departments; we are a lot bigger than Great Britain, but we are not 327 times the size of Great Britain.  The second result, as Arthur Brooks emphasizes in his chapter and to an extent in his presentation this morning, is that politics and government leave lots of space for private initiative and action in the non-profit sector, in which Americans can practice their fabled proclivities for voluntary association and social improvement of all kinds.  </P> <P>In health, education and welfare, in other social services, in religious observance and organization, in the arts and sciences, in culture, private agencies that do not have a profit motive possess many distinctive advantages over government provision of those same services - advantages of efficiency, advantages of responsiveness to the problems they address, and adaptability over time.  </P> <P>As a proprietor of a think tank, I would even say that the growth of think tanks specialized in politics and policy is an example of privatization of some functions that used to be practiced by the government, those of the evaluation of programs and real deliberation of the kind the framers thought would be done in the halls of Congress among people of different interests and views.  </P> <P>And the third result - and this is the emphasis of the chapter on the economic system by Benjamin Friedman - is that our political and governmental fragmentation leaves a similarly ample, wide span for private for-profit organization of commerce, particularly, as Friedman emphasizes, in our critical labor markets and in financial markets.  As he puts it, We have a unique flexibility and fluidity in the allocation of labor and capital over time.   What this produces is continuous adaptability, which Friedman believes is a big reason - probably bigger than our abundant natural resources, coastlines, and so forth - that the United States has continued for a very long period of time to be the most prosperous nation on the planet.  </P> <P>The sum of all this, and why I call it Democracy in America, is that all of the key institutions of our society are more democratic in the sense of being more open to individual participation and leadership, and more susceptible to changing currents of popular opinion and the objective circumstances that presumably underlie changes in public opinion.  Our government may be slow and ponderous, as Jim Wilson points out, but we have many other institutions, which are quick and nimble and they have more space to operate in than in most nations.  </P> <P>But I think if I was really going to suggest a title for this book, at least as I understand it, it would be Democracy in America in the sense that I just explained followed by a question mark.  For there are also, in many of these chapters, suggestions that there have been important changes underfoot in our politics and in our structure of government that are leading to a much more regimented system of government and less social space for the other sectors of the society and economy, less social and economic space.  I want to emphasize three of these in particular.  </P> <P>The first is bureaucracy, the subject of the chapter by Professor Kettl.  Here I have to say I m going to depart a little bit from my teacher and colleague, Jim Wilson, because I think that we really have arrived at the era of, yes, minister in American government.  And I will invoke for my point of view Nelson Polsby, who cannot be here to disagree with me as he invariably did and point out that in his conclusion - and this is the most important thing to me as a denizen of Washington watching developments in our government - he says the most salient at his conclusion features of contemporary American political system are -- and he gives six.  </P> <P>Here are the first two:  A presidential branch increasingly separate and distinct from the executive.  And by the executive, he means the bureaucracy or the permanent government.  Two, competition between presidency and Congress for influence over the permanent government.  Notice, he did not say control over the permanent government; he said influence with the permanent government.  </P> <P>I believe that for reasons of technological change, which give administrative bodies much more flexibility than our political branches, which are, to some degree, and in Congress degree, pretty firmly pinned down by the structures of the Constitution, which are designed to make them cumbersome, slow moving, and inefficient, the bureaucracy has very self-consciously and confidently come to the fore.  It engages in traditional political functions of deliberation; it assembles interest groups; it mediates differences of interests and views among interest groups; it puts together policy positions, which are facts on the ground, which both the legislature and the president increasingly have to follow.  </P> <P>In fact, Washington is filled with Yes Minister stories, and not simply in the last year of an administration.  I heard a story the other day about a senior non-political appointee in an agency meeting with the president of the United States, who made a decision about this person s program and about the direction of a program that this person favored.  He said that Because of the actions of other agencies, Mr. President, your decision will be deleted before you get right back to the White House, and in fact, it was.  </P> <P>Currently, we have a great deal of speechifying on both sides of the climate change debate.  But, in fact, American policy on climate change is going to be formed by individuals working at the Environmental Protection Agency under a recent decision of the Supreme Court.  And because the active, elected, representative politicians cannot come close to any kind of an agreement that would involve undertaking significant steps to address climate change, it is simply going to be left to the Environmental Protection Agency.  What it comes up with will be mildly influenced by the results of the election in the fall, but not substantially.  </P> <P>It is well known that the conduct of the war in Iraq between 2003 and the end of 2006 was fundamentally crafted by disagreements between the state and defense and intelligence agencies, of which the commander-in-chief played a little role.  In December, our intelligence agencies now centralized in the director of national intelligence came up with a new national intelligence estimate on Iran, concluding that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003; we now know, a deeply flawed assessment.  In fact, the assessment was more in the press release on the top of the intelligence estimate, within the estimate itself, but which was known instantly would fundamentally change the course of American and European anti-nuclear proliferation initiatives directed at Iraq.  </P> <P>The intelligence agencies informed the White House in advance of this new intelligence estimate and they recommended that the White House release it.  The reason that they recommended that the White House release it was that if the White House did not, it was sure to leak and get into the newspapers independently.  That was a threat and the White House acceded to the threat and its policies on Iran were changed fundamentally.  So I do believe that the permanent government has acquired very, very strong autonomy and power over the direction of domestic policy that it has not had in the past.  </P> <P>The second is federalism.  Martha Derthick in her chapter documents how, first, the New Deal revolution in jurisprudence, and, secondly, the Civil Rights Revolution of the 60s and 70s in domestic legislation fundamentally altered the federalist structure from the one inherited and adopted in the Constitution, one that featured a very significant degree of true political autonomy among the states, real competition among the states for revenues, for voters, and for influence with the federal government to a new period of cooperative federalism, which does involve a continuing degree of state power but largely work among the state and federal bureaucracies to craft programs.  Medicaid would be one example that dispense with competition and diversity among the states.  </P> <P>Increasingly, our federalist system is resembling the hierarchical systems of administration of the continental nations.  I do not want to overstate it.  There are some degrees of diversity.  There is some degree of experimentation.  We saw this in the late 80s and early 90s in the development of new ideas and new information about approaches to welfare reform.  But there has certainly been a considerable dulling of the competitive space among the states.  </P> <P>At the same time, under a series of really extremely perverse Supreme Court decisions we now have the opposite situation of states being able, through product liability law, through prosecutions by state attorney generals, to restructure entire industries nationwide, something that the state AG s and the trial bar revel in.  So that our current system is one that features relatively less diversity and experimentation - not none, but much less - and, more and more, simply a system for governmental growth as the states cooperate with each other rather than compete.  And its individual states and political entrepreneurs have figured out the ability to make law nationwide where they can control policy outcomes affecting citizens that pay them no taxes and give them no votes.  </P> <P>Third, there have been important changes in our political system itself, and especially at the national level.  The traditional conventional political system features two wings or parties, with a small p - the liberal party and the conservative party.  The function of liberalism is to identify problems in the society, shortcomings, gaps, pain and suffering, opportunities to do better, and to propose solutions in the political realm, new government programs to address needs to correct injustices and inequalities.  </P> <P>The function of the conservative party is to remind us that we may not be perfect, but we are pretty good.  We have a pretty good inheritance.  Anytime we fuss with arrangements and, certainly, when we extend the power of the state, we raise opportunities for corruption, for perverse consequences; better to go slow, better to keep our powder dry.  </P> <P>In any political system, one finds a continuous tension between the liberal viewpoint and the conservative viewpoint in contending with the various problems, circumstances, and opportunities of the society.  For most of the last century up until the 1970s, each of our main political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, had a liberal wing and a conservative wing.  A lot of the great debates between the liberal instinct and the conservative instinct took place within each party.  </P> <P>This had, we now know in retrospect, certain advantages when it came to interparty competition; it was easier, for example, to form coalitions in the Congress across party lines than it is today.  </P> <P>Since the early 1970s when the McGovernites took over the Democratic Party, and the late 1970s when the Reaganites took over the Republican Party, our parties have become much more distinct.  The Democrats are the liberal party; the Republicans are the conservative party.  But we still had --and we had throughout the late 70s and early 80s a continuingly vigorous, though increasingly partisan debate between liberalism and conservatism in addressing national problems.  </P> <P>But more recently, there has been a further change.  And that is that since the end of the Gingrich era in the United States Congress and since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the conservative argument, at least on matters of governmental organization, spending, regulation, has pretty much dropped out of the picture entirely.  There are continuing very stark differences, of course, in foreign policy, and there are continuing important differences in matters of culture and social structure.  </P> <P>But on the traditional debates over the size and the scope of government and government programs, we essentially have two parties, both of which are devoted to the government s solving problems without paying much particular attention to traditional notions of federalism, decentralization, or limited government.  I believe this began in the Congress when the Republicans acquired a tentative majority, and decided to use government spending on a district-by-district basis in an effort to shore up the Republican lead and build what they then believed was a permanent inchoate Republican majority.  </P> <P>In the case of George W. Bush, it was quite explicit in his campaign for the presidency, where the term compassionate conservatism meant conservatism that favored many new government programs.  He was explicit about that, too; he wanted much more national intrusion, regulation spending in healthcare and in education, for example.  When he came to office, he realized those promises.  </P> <P>As Martha Derthick points out in her chapter, George Bush never said anything in particular, even though he had been a governor, about the virtues of federalism or decentralization.  It is hard to find anything in his oratory concerned with limited government or the virtues of going slow, or kind of the traditional, tight-fisted, penny-pinching scrutinizing of any new liberal scheme that had been the traditional staple of Republican rhetoric, notwithstanding the old fashioned idea that the Constitution simply imposes some limits on what the federal government may do.   </P> <P>So as a result, this old fashioned tension which I m positing is a healthy tension and one that has been important in the American tradition, as in others, between the liberal viewpoint and the conservative viewpoint as we address one after another domestic circumstances.  This tension has simply been relieved.  In the past eight years, we have had spending growth greater than at any time since the Great Society and the thumping [sounds like] Democratic majorities of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  </P> <P>One of my colleagues at AEI points out that although the Republicans have still maintained one element of the old- fashioned conservative view, which is low taxes, in fact, current deficits are now so high and the unfunded liabilities of our entitlement programs are so great that if we adopted a tax system that was roughly commensurate with the amount of money we are spending, we would have a tax structure that would look very much like that of France.  </P> <P>We have had major extensions of federal regulation, especially in one of the markets that Benjamin Friedman mentions: financial markets.  In the last couple of years, following a couple of scandals and collapses in some admittedly large and prominent corporations, we adopted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  The old-fashioned, limited-government conservative would have said, We got lots of laws.  We are going to throw all the miscreants in jail, and that is the solution.   Instead, Sarbanes is a Democrat, Oxley is a Republican; George Bush supported this vast extension of the federal government into areas that had previously been a matter of state law and of private contract, especially even the details of how our corporations are governed.  </P> <P>As a result, now that we face another momentary crisis in our economy, the decline of housing values, the reduction in availability of credit, we now have a pretty much one-sided debate.  I m not saying it is not partisan; in fact, I think the bitterness of our partisanship is in part a result of its becoming increasingly unprincipled.  We are going to nationalize either a little bit or a lot or all of the mortgage market.  </P> <P>We are going to enact major new controls over financial markets.  The only thing we are waiting for is a second Bear Stearns, just as Enron had to be followed by another crisis, MCI WorldCom, to stimulate the Congress into action.  There is no question that we will embrace measures such as those and more if there is another major financial collapse.  </P> <P>The presidential candidate, presumably, of the Republicans is a strong tax cutter as we have found out but, otherwise, differs with his Democratic rivals simply in a degree and not in fundamentals as to the size and scope of federal regulation in spending or enthusiasm for additional controls.  The change in the nature of the policy argument in our political system, the fundamental change -- I should say the very considerable change in the nature of our federalist structure and the emergence of a branch of government, the permanent government, with autonomous political force of its own, which will be directed as all bureaucracies direct themselves toward their own enhancement and growth suggests to me that our future holds a much more regimented style of government, less exceptional, more European, leaving much less social space for other social and economic institutions.  </P> <P>At the same time, I very much agree with the other chapters in this book as well, who emphasize that Americans remain uniquely freedom-loving, anti-statist, libertarian in many of their instincts.  I think that the most important drama in the American political saga of the next couple of years is going to be this now-very strong force, pretty much unopposed within the political system itself, for governmental growth on the one hand, with the heavy degree of skepticism and desire to preserve private space for themselves among the populace.  Peter, thank you very much.</P> <P> Peter Schuck:  Thanks, Chris, for that very magisterial review of our situation, dire or glorious as the case may be, as various people assess it.  Now, comments and questions from you.  Hands?  Does everybody want lunch?  Yes?</P> <P> Female Voice:  What is your take on the observation that has been made frequently that the bulk of the giving goes to liberal causes?  Maybe that is just referring to large foundation giving, but do you have any comment on that?  It seems paradoxical, based on what you put up [sounds like].</P> <P> Arthur C. Brooks:  There are actually two issues on that.  The value of foundation philanthropy or the value of the assets of foundations that have what some argue to be a left- of-center bias, or left-of-center orientation, is about 10 to 1 compared to those that have a right-of-center orientation, according to most philanthropy experts.  That is just the value of the assets.  But once again, foundation philanthropy is only worth about 7 percent of American philanthropy.  The bulk of the giving comes from us.  So the question is what about the causes to which we give?  </P> <P>There is a huge amount of diversity in the political orientation between causes in the United States.  But I think, more saliently, most of non-profit America is profoundly non-political.  It is really all about delivering services to people that have some sort of a need, whether that need be a homeless shelter to a clean environment, the arts and culture or higher education, not to mention the fact that even those that do have a political orientation are more service-oriented and more oriented toward providing good causes to which Americans can donate their valuable time and money.  </P> <P>Now, that being said, there is a couple of developing lines of research that ask whether people who work in non-profit organizations are disproportionately conservative or liberal.  What you find is in charities that provide relief services - and this is an interesting phenomenon, I think - you find that, overwhelmingly, the donors to these organizations like CARE International are overwhelmingly religious and conservative and that the staff at these organizations are overwhelmingly secular and liberal.  </P> <P>Now, the interesting thing about that is that what it suggests is a growing rift between the goals or I should say the worldviews, the values and culture of the people that are running the organizations and the way that they are actually talking to their donors.  So you will find, for example, CARE International -- their new pitch, their new fundraising approach is all about empowering women around the world.  Now, their donors are all about feeding hungry people.  Now, those things should be consistent with each other but in point of fact the way that we talk about them is going to be increasingly difficult because the staff does not understand the donors and the donors do not understand the staff.</P> <P> Peter Schuck:  Sir?</P> <P> Gary Mitchell [phonetic]:  Thanks.  Gary Mitchell from the Mitchell Report.  This is arguably not a question to ask of a book that has editors and multiple contributors but I want to just hazard and ask it anyway.  And that is in the course of writing and editing and thinking about this book, did it change your perspective about America or American exceptionalism?  Did it open some doors for you?  Was there some learning in this process that you moved as result of having engaged in this process and did not end up where you thought you did or would?</P> <P> Peter Schuck:  I ll start and be very brief.  As the passage I read from Jack Citrin s chapter suggests, there are a lot of facts and trends of which I had been only dimly aware or completely ignorant.  Now, of course, the two of us have spent our careers studying American institutions and public policies and steeping ourselves in data.  So we were rather well-versed in most of these fields, although not in the level of depth that these chapters present.  So I learned a great deal.  But my general view of the United States has not changed dramatically since undertaking this project; it more or less confirmed what I expected to find but that I did not know in many areas in as great detail as I now do.</P> <P> James Q. Wilson:  I will agree with Peter.  I think if he and I had not devoted, collectively, 70 years to studying American government and policies, we might well have been surprised.  And I expect people to whom I have sent the book who have not been doing this -- they will find many of these chapters absolutely eye-opening.  But other than experiencing greater knowledge in detail and debt, I don t think anything in the book surprised me.</P> <P> Peter Schuck:  Other questions?  Yes, sir?</P> <P> Ray DuBois:  Ray DuBois, CSIS.  I wondered if Arthur Brooks might comment, or any of the other panelists, on what has emerged in this presidential competition of late in terms of let s call it charitable giving where people have come to the fore, yes, through the Internet, but come to the fore to deliver in many cases small but increasingly larger contributions to the presidential candidates - certainly, Senator Obama - approaching $250 million plus in contributions to his campaign.  How would you interpret that?  </P> <P> Arthur C. Brooks:  I think it is a wonderful thing.  I realize this is a subversive view of politics that money and politics is a great thing.  I think that given the stakes in these elections, it is a great thing that people are getting some skin in the game, including average Americans.  But there is another element to it as well.  In a non-presidential election year, political giving never exceeds about one-and-a- half percent of total -- or compared to charitable giving in this country.  </P> <P>In other words, the vast bulk of giving is going to things like hospitals and universities and churches, and all the causes that we consider to be charitable or social organizations.  In a presidential election year, it is not more than 4 or 5 percent so it is still little compared to what people do for the churches and what people do for their alma maters and things like that.  And to the extent that it brings people who have not given in the past - young people - into the giving game who will bleed over into what the lion s share of giving in this country is, we all get stronger and we all get better.  In the meantime, we introduce ourselves to the charitable-giving economy in a way that profoundly expresses citizenship.  And I find that a great thing.</P> <P> Christopher DeMuth:  I have no objection to this kind of fundraising, but I am deeply troubled by the way it is spent.  At one time, if you gave money to politics you gave it to political parties.  And as we all know from having received calls at home at the middle of the dinner hour the political parties still call us.  But among the devastating consequences of the McCain-Feingold Act and other campaign reform measures, we have deprived the political parties of much access to money so that the parties now, nationally, are basically high-paid consulting firms running around trying to get together a few dollars so they can hire lawyers to help other people out of difficulties.  </P> <P>I think that it is a great mistake for all of the money to go to individual candidates.  I have no problem with giving money to politics; indeed, I would abolish all campaign finance laws and simply say that every contribution over $200 has to be reported within 24 hours on the Internet and any reporter can look at the Internet and find out who is giving what to whom.  But I do think that the weakness of political parties caused by - in part, but not wholly - financial instability is a dangerous precedent for the country.  </P> <P> Peter Schuck:  I agree with both of the last observations.  There are, however, people like Norm Ornstein here at AEI, who was in the room until very recently, who believe that the parties have actually been strengthened by recent changes.  I do not see how that could happen.  But he argues, as does Tom Mann of Brookings, the parties are actually in a stronger position today than they were before McCain-Feingold.  </P> <P>The other thing I would add is that one of the most interesting features of political giving is the extent to which it has been dominated in this cycle by small contributions.  That varies from candidate to candidate and from party to party but it is a very healthy manifestation of people s involvement in politics even though they do not have a great deal of money to throw around that they are, as Arthur put it, putting skin in the game.  Chris?  Okay, we are adjourned.  Thank you so much.</P> <P>[End of transcript]</P> <P> </P></body></html>