Cover via Amazon
Like all good believers, the “Human Bio-Diversity” set has its “holy book”. It’s called The Bell Curve, authored by the late Richard Hernstien, of Harvard U, and Charles Murray, presently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. In that this post will be a discussion of The Bell Curve, and that I want as much participation on the matter as possible, the following comes from the widely accessible Wikipedia entry on the book:
“The Bell Curve is a best-selling but controversial 1994 book by the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray . Its central argument is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwanted pregnancy , and crime than parents’ socioeconomic status or education level. Also, the book argues that those with high intelligence, the ” cognitive elite “, are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence and that this is a dangerous social trend. Most of the controversy concerns Chapters 13 and 14, in which the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discuss the implications of those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic , and they did indeed write in chapter 13: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.” The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, “The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved.”
The book’s title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of IQ scores. The normal distribution is the limiting distribution of a random quantity which is the sum of smaller, independent random phenomena. The message in the title is that IQ scores are normally distributed because a person’s intelligence is the sum of many small random variations in genetic and environmental factors.
Shortly after publication, many people rallied both in criticism and defense of the book. Some critics denounced the book and its authors as supporting scientific racism . A number of critical texts, including The Bell Curve Debate , were written in response to the book.”
From the section “Content”, a discussion of what inspired the book:
“The Bell Curve contains 941 pages in the first printing and 879 in the revised paperback . Much of its material is technical and academic. The book’s statistical explanations are styled to appeal to a general audience. There are extensive notes, graphs, and tables. The Bell Curve is divided into four sections.
Part I argues that social stratification on the basis of intelligence has been increasing since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Part II presents original research showing significant correlations between intelligence and various social and economic outcomes. For instance, based on data as of 1989 this section shows that among non-Hispanic whites, intelligence level (cognitive class) is a better predictor of poverty than parents’ socioeconomic class.
Part III , by far the most controversial, examines what role IQ plays in contributing to social and economic differences between ethnic groups in the United States.
Part IV discusses the implications of the findings for education and social policy in the United States.
Herrnstein and Murray in many ways follow in the footsteps of UC Berkeley researcher Arthur Jensen , whose controversial article on the subject appeared in 1969 in the Harvard Educational Review . The Bell Curve argues that:
1. Intelligence exists and is accurately measurable across racial, language, and national boundaries.
2. Intelligence is one, if not the most, important correlative factor in economic, social, and overall success in the United States, and is becoming more important.
3. Intelligence is largely (40% to 80%) genetically heritable.
4. No one has so far been able to manipulate IQ long term to any significant degree through changes in environmental factors – except for child adoption – and in light of their failure such approaches are becoming less promising.
5. The USA has been in denial regarding these facts, and in light of these findings a better public understanding of the nature of intelligence and its social correlates is necessary to guide future policy decisions in America.”
In the section marked “Policy Recommendations” The Bell Curve is quoted as saying:
“Herrnstein and Murray recommended the elimination of welfare policies that encourage poor women to have babies:
We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. “If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility.” The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe. [ 1 ]
This claim spurred later research in economics and sexology , which considered that welfare programs for women had a doubly negative effect on aggregate IQ within the transfer group, by allowing the female partner to forgo a full consideration of the male’s ability to serve as a provider of familial resources, instead placing greater emphasis on desirable physical or social characteristics (presumed to be not as positively correlated with IQ). Neither of these claims, as originally embodied in text and the follow-on research, dealt with race as such, but rather demonstrated concern that large numbers of minorities were positioned as recipients, leading to a continual worsening of the measured divergence in intelligence. However, two years later, the 1996 U.S. welfare reform substantially cut these programs.
In a discussion of the future political outcomes of an intellectually stratified society, they stated that they “fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent – not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but ‘conservatism’ along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below” [ 2 ] . Moreover, they fear that increasing welfare will create a “custodial state” in “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population.” They also predict increasing totalitarianism : “It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states”.
There’s more to the Wiki entry on TBC, and I urge all those interested in this discussion to read it all for yourself here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
OK. A few quick comments:
I recall very well when TBC first came out, 16 years ago. As one might have guessed, it created quite a stir in certain sections of the Black community, for its implying that African Americans were in fact, genetically inferior to Whites and East Asians especially. Being a curious guy, I decided to see what all the hubbub was about and read the book for myself. What I found was quite different from all the hoopla.
For one thing, TBC, while it does mention African and Americans and Hispanics, doesn’t come right out and says, “they’re intractably dumber than everyone else”. What they say is that both groups seem to test lower than do Whites and Asians, but they don’t go into specifics as to why that is. Moreover, they say very little about Race and IQ; I think less than three chapters overall discuss the matter, out of a book that’s nearly 1,000 pages long(!). The book primarily deals with the prospect of an ever-widening society, bifurcated along IQ lines-what Hersnstein and Murray calls a “Cognitive Elite”-and everyone else, and what this can mean in social, economic and political terms. To that extent then, the book is quite interesting, because by definition-even now, some 16 years later-the country is majority White, and therefore, the book is dealing with IQ variations among the country’s dominant racial group-White Americans. The extreme focus of attention the few chapters on African Americans and Hispanics totally took the focus off this main point, in my view, and it seems that the HBDers are no different from the Liberals they love to excoriate in this regard, for they focus on the racial aspects of TBC just as much, if not much more, than do their Liberal arch-enemies. Either the HBDers haven’t read the book-a claim many of them level at the Libs-or, they have read it but largely misunderstood it, something else they accuse the Libs of doing.
I have several critiques of the book. One of them is the assumption on the part of TBC’s authors that IQ can explain everything worth explaining about human endeavor, and that if one encounters problems in life, it is due to their inherent *lack* of IQ, and not to any other factors. To conservative minds, this is a large and comforting point, one that confirms what they already think and believe, especially as it relates to what the HBD set derisively calls “NAMs”-Non-Asian Minorities. Basically, Black and Brown folks. Which again is ironic, given how little TBC actually focuses on People of Color in any event.
My second critique of TBC lies in the fact that they seem to discount out of hand Sir Francis Galton’s theory of Regression to the Mean, the idea that even if two verifiably smart people mate and have babies, their babies run the real risk of not being as smart as them, and as they grow and have kids of their own, the chances of said grandkids being as smart as their grandparents diminishes, and so on and so forth. TBC assumes that the “Cognitive Elite” will always be thus, NOT because they’re in a position to manipulate the levers of power and influence to assist their kids who may not be as smart or motivated as themselves, but simply because they can subvert Galton’s Law and keep on reproducing their high IQ selves. Interestingly enough, the HBD set rarely if ever takes up regression to the mean along these lines; they ONLY discuss it when it comes to what they deem as the rare instance of a smart Black couple; they then fret about the prospects of their kids “regressing to the Black mean”, and so forth. Talk about ignoring that which ain’t popular or comfortable, huh?
Finally, my third major critique of TBC, and definitely of the HBD community, is in their public policy “recommendation” areas. As noted above, TBC basically wants the US Gov’t to enter into a kind of Eugenics program, targeting who they deem as undesirables breeding as a result of gov’t largesse in the form of welfare payments and the like. As the Wiki article above clearly notes, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, under Bill Clinton, pretty much killed that idea before it could get off the ground, and Charles Murray has since gone on to other subjects. Nevertheless, the notion of eugenics remains very popular in HBD circles, almost always aimed at keeping the “undesirable” population down by either cutting them off welfare entirely, or, by making birth control a mandatory condition of getting welfare in the first place. That eugenics itself has been largely discredited doesn’t seem to deter these folks, nor does the fact that per their own reasoning (Rushton notably), IQ and fertility/fecundity is *negatively correlated*. This is noted in the cult film classic Idiocracy, where the smart people basically died out, because they spent all their time handwringing over whether the have kids or not, while the putatively lesser smart folk got on with the business of having kids. TBC talks about ways in which to help smart Women have kids, but as I point out in a number of posts along these lines earlier this year, so long as we live in a free society that affords smart White Women options other than popping out babies at a young age, they will take up those other options. Every single time out-and, barring a Chinese Communist style eugenics scheme, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot we can do about it. It is interesting that neither Murray, nor any prominent HBD blogging voice to date, has seriously tackled this end of the issue.
There’s more, but I’ll hold here so as to allow others to jump in on the discussion. Suffice it to say that I think TBC, while highly provocative, is also a greatly misunderstood book, one that raises many very interesting questions, but also has some very huge gaping holes in it and makes some seriously dangerous assumptions as well. If the authors of TBC wanted to spark a lively discussion surrounding intelligence and the role it can play in a postmodern industrialized society, I think it can be safely said that they’ve achieved that objective. And I think it is beyond ironic that the HBD crowd-one that is largely atheist and considers religious believers to be beneath them-clings to their deeply misguided “understanding” of TBC in the same way they accuse Christians of being beholden to the Bible.
OK, that’s it. Now, adjourn your asses…
The Obsidian
