American Enterprise Institute

April 22, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

8:15 a.m.	Registration and Breakfast
8:30	Welcome:	Christopher DeMuth, AEI
	Introduction:	Peter Schuck, Yale Law School
		James Q. Wilson, AEI and Pepperdine University
9:15	Panel I
	Presenters:	Martha Bayles, Boston College
		Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
		Linda Waite, University of Chicago
	Discussant:	Michael Novak, AEI
	Moderator:	James Q. Wilson, AEI and Pepperdine University
11:00	Panel II
	Presenters:	Arthur C. Brooks, AEI and Syracuse University
		James Q. Wilson, AEI and Pepperdine University
	Discussant:	Christopher DeMuth, AEI
	Moderator:	Peter Schuck, Yale Law School
12:30 p.m.	Adjournment

Proceedings:

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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?

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.” 

The Abbé 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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 clichés 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. 

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. 

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 Überpower 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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

So with that, let me stop and we will begin with the program.  Thank you. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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:

 “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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

I do not -- do I have any -- how am I doing for time?

Male Voice:  [Speaks away from microphone]

Martha Bayles:  Okay.  I have some reasons why it is not talked about, which I can mention later if you like.  Thank you.

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. 

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?

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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? 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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? 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

 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.

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. 

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.  

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 --

 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?

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Martha Bayles:  These people are married.

Michael Novak:  Yeah.

Martha Bayles:  But they are not [inaudible]?

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].

 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?

 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.” 

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?” 

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. 

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. 

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? 

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.

James Q. Wilson:&n