The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence.
Murray has long been writing about the potential dangers and issues associated with a cognitive elite who tend, through IQ and beneficial behaviors, to dominate most facets of life and through assortative mating and peer affiliative networks, are become more and more distanced from the great majority of the population.
Murray focuses on IQ and Class. In the Bell Curve, he had a single chapter which dealt with IQ and race, pointing out the well established and frequently replicated findings that there are IQ differences among different human populations. It ignited a firestorm.
The problem was not that his data was wrong. It was correct and has been further replicated in the quarter century since since then. The problem is that some people see IQ ranking as the means by which to establish a racial hierarchy, ignoring the statistical reality that every attribute has a distribution curve, a bell curve. So even though a population may have a higher or lower IQ mean, there will always be high IQ members of the population as well as low IQ.
In addition, as is clear in the rest of the book, Murray is not a biological determinist. His focus is class and values and behaviors associated with class. He is fully cognizant, as most his critics appear not to be, that life outcomes are the result of an immense number of loosely coupled systems reflecting almost innumerable causal mechanisms.
High IQ does not compensate for poor decision-making. Alcoholism is perhaps as contributive to life outcomes as is IQ. And IQ itself is made up of different attributes which are differentially influential under various contexts.
Pointing out that IQ is very influential, that IQ is normally distributed and that IQ is demonstrably variable among population groups and social classes was too complex an argument for most left-leaning critics, ever attuned to a long sought after racism and ever willing to ignore the data in pursuit of an ideology.
All this is well known and documented. To this date, social justice and critical theory true believers are still obsessed with Bell Curve as a racist tome, still deny the repeatedly and widely replicated data and still refuse to focus on the real danger of a heritable meritocracy socially isolated from everyone else by class barriers.
They are the worst of the worst in the sense that they are still trying to wring racism out of a system which has pretty effectively wrung out all forms of racism and yet, through their unrelenting ideological conviction, refuse to focus on the source of much or most human misery today - class segregation.
For most non-ideological centrists, the obsession of critical theory and social justice people seeing Bell Curve as a racial argument is a pathetic joke. Hence Râmaru's sly catch. In a major book from a major publishing house, thoroughly edited, in the body of the text the authors somehow reference The Bell Curve (accurately titled in the footnotes) as a book titled "Race and IQ". Presumably that reflects how they think of the book. So blind they cannot read the actual words much less understand the actual argument.
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's famous 1994 book called "Race and IQ"https://t.co/Vi49Gm0qPD pic.twitter.com/9zS3N1glyK
— Ion Râmaru (@Ion_Ramaru) September 9, 2020
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