Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book)

In an age in which everything is dominated by intellectual work, the smarter people are doing better than the less smart. Surprise, and it looks like genes play a HUGE ROLE in how smart one is. The Nazi's would have used these results of this study to support their efforts to breed a master race. But, let us not forget that America in the 30's was sterilizing imbeciles to stop the breeding of idiots! Smart kids are identified early, given better training, and they end up with better education, better jobs, smarter spouses, bigger houses, and smarter kids. They have begun to self segregate and live away from the masses of 'dummies' that are experiencing all the drama we see nightly on the local news. There is not much one can do about it, except marry the smart person, raise smarter kids, train them, educate them and try hard to stay in the top percentiles of intelligence. This is an important book for understanding the society we see about us.

While the book does present facts, and is well written, I would like to voice a word of caution. The book is primarily written like a persuasive essay; that is the arguments are one sided and exagurated. There is no doubt that what is said is true, but the authors try to play down results that minimize their conclusions (though they do mention them) while hyping up results that exagurate their conclusions. I have no doubt about the large role that intelligence plays in daily life, and it's consequences on social policy, but certainly it is not as primal as this book would have you believe. For instance, the book uses statistics regarding "criminality" by measuring if someone has ever been interviewed with the police, or locked up, and comparing that with IQ. Those with lower IQ tend to have a higher frequency of such. But I don't think it is beyond reason to state that a mitigating circumstance could be the fact that people with higher IQs are more likely to plan criminal behavior that is less likely to be caught. They are more likely as well to be wealthier and able to "buy their way out" of certain things and so on. While I don't doubt the correlation that people with low IQs ARE in fact more likely to commit crime, I do regress and say that the statistics might exagurate this tendency. This is one example of many, I mean the authors try to measure such obscure things as "niceness" and do it through measured statistics. There is a lot of truth in the arguments, and I do believe most people will be able to relate the statistics to personal experiences in their own lives, but again, the arguments are exagurated. While intelligence does play a large role in all of these things, it is not the only factor. And we must always remember the authors are never dealing with personal experiences, only large groups of people, which can be more accurately defined by statistics (which the authors mention several times, but critics of the book seem to ignore).

The other odd thing about the book, is that it plays down white IQ trying to give average Asian IQ as 105, average Jewish IQ as 106, average white IQ as 100 and average black IQ as 85. I don't know why they did this, because I have read other material on the subject and all of their averages are accurate exept the white IQ which is around 103 and in places like Italy or Germany is around 106 (interestingly in East Europe is around 98). The reason being, that the original stadard WAS set as 100 on a group of White Anglo-Saxons. However, as is mentioned repeatedly in the book the Flynn effect has raised average IQs, placing the modern white average around 103. The authors do breifly mention some sources that state the white IQ as such, but then play it down, giving models in which the flynn effect is ommitted on solely the white scores and not the others, which artificially makes it look as if Asians and Jews have much higher scores than whites (in reality while the scores overal seem roughly equal Asians have higher math ability and Jews/whites have higher verbal, with Jews scoring slightl higher than other whites). I don't know if they tried to play this down in order to seem less "racist" or what. It does seem like they moderated a lot of their arguments in order to seem less extreme, which is mentioned in the afterward. However, Asians do have higher average incomes in America than whites, most likely due to their higher mathmatical ability on average.

I feel the book needs to be out there, because the media, acedemia, and even government has worked to suppress these facts and truths in favor of their egalitarian dream that all people are of equal character and ability, and any difference of socio-economic status is somehow one group repressing another. The soviet union already went down that road and it led to utter disaster, so the authors present another road: its called self responcibility. Nonetheless, while I support the views of this book, and can't argue with the facts, I still urge you to be aware that this book was written to convince you of their message, not to offer a balanced perspective. Most contrary views are presented only so that they can be torn apart by the authors. So I would recomend also perhaps reading a book that exposes a contrary viewpoint, though I must say, it is most likely that this book will have the stronger of the two arguments, and certainly the one more based on fact, and less based on egalitarian pipe dreams or modern social dogma.

I thought the documentation of such a controversial topic was thorough and verifiable even for those who will not believe it is anything but a contrived racist rant. I found the historical tracking of the IQ measuring trail to be very enlightening.

1st, because the book deserves it.

2nd, in order to do my part to offset the ludicrous PC rantings trying to trash this book. Most of them can't get off the subject of race, as though that were the focus of the book, rather than an aspect of the book's subject, which is the stratification of American social classes into IQ-based hierarchies, where people in different IQ tiers rarely come into contact with each other. The book discusses the consequences of this phenomenon, and the PC fanatics all over the review board provide elucidating illustrations of one of the more distressing ones.

Everyone should read this! Explains many of our current problems: Why affirmative action has not worked, Failure on attempts to increase minority reading levels,, High dropout rates for minority students. Apparent military discipline problems for minorities. Apparent increase in shooting incidents for black police officers. The Bell Curve would suggest all of these differences are not related to race, but are more properly related to cognitive ability.

Now I understand why the left hates this book more than any other. Over one hundred years of data suggest that different ethnic groups and races have genetically different IQs. Being smarter increases your probability of success in life and in just about any educational and work enviornment. All of or policies are based on everyone one being equal and we have diversity programs that recognize every social difference except natural intelligence.

The predictions of the authors (published 1993) are spot on concerning 2013 America. There has been no change of direction for our society and all of the problems predicted based upon historical data 1990 and prior have proven valid. As one that has followed the trends for more than 30 years I am both gratified and further concerned about the future as things continue at an increasing rate. Pray it is not too late to reverse course. JES

Politically correctness dictates that all races have the same average IQ. The book proves with dozens of studies and examples that is not the case. Just as all races don't have the same average height, the same average athletic ability, or other factors, not all races have the same average IQ. That does not imply that one race is superior to another. Perhaps the superior races are increasing in population compared to others. If that is the case, the white race, which has one of the highest average IQ, is inferior.

A classic well worth getting hold of. Ignore the nay-sayers: this is solidly backed up, documented and researched--and has vital implications for the future of civilization as the Third World encroaches into the First.

The book is well reasoned and the arguments are sound.

Basically, it boils down to some very unpleasant truths that nobody is willing to acknowledge.

The book may have some flaws (they aren't very evident to the casual reader), but the sad thing is that this dialog will simply never be allowed to take place because of the political realities of the United States today.

It is a shame that anybody attempting to discuss the issues in the book will be shouted down as a racist. The book is the furthest possible thing from that.

When I finally read this book I was very surprised at what I found. I'm not sure what I was really expecting, but given the level of hostility to the book I was thinking there must be some significant fault with it. I say "finally read" because I followed the controversy around this book when it was first published 15 years ago. Only recently did my courage and curiosity level become high enough to make me decide to give it a fair hearing. So if you are considering reading this book but not sure if you really should, I'd like to help put your mind at ease. When you do read the book what you will find is a surprisingly well written, scholarly and balanced view of intellegence.

I'll begin with the question which is most likely on the forefront of your mind; Is this book racist? Most of us have noted from our own experience that Jews and Asians for example are more numerous in high IQ professions than would be proportional to their overall numbers. Likewise many have noted that other ethnic minorities aren't found as often in such professions as would be expected. This book's greatest sin is to note in chapter 13 that the same pattern of differences has been found repeatedly by psychologists studying IQ. Many would call the authors racists simply for noting these observations. But if noting observed patterns makes one a racist, doesn't this make anyone who notes the different frequencies in high IQ professions racist as well? Others assert that the differences observed in IQ testing prove a priori that IQ tests are racially biased. The authors address this contention head on, and I found the methods psychometricians use to eliminate cultural bias so fascinating that this alone was worth the cost of the book. If after learning more you still feel IQ tests are biased, you still have to explain why the same differences are observed by every intellectually rigorous test ever created. This begs the question of how the SAT, the ACT, the LSAT, MCATs, all state Bar Exams, your 10th grade math final, etc all wind up with the same group differences observed in IQ testing. Some might argue that there is a conspiracy by Jews and Asians to make the rest of us look less intelligent, but I can't buy that.

However logic isn't all that applies when considering ourselves as members of a larger group. If you want to test this theory out, ask any married or dating couple if men or women are on average better drivers, more honest, more funny, more intelligent, etc. No matter how carefully you frame the question to pertain to the whole population of men and women (of which each individual counts for less than 1 in a Billion), without fail the discussion that follows will really be about which of the two of them is the better driver, etc. This holds true even if by their words they seem to be talking about men and women in general. So if you encounter someone who is unnaturally upset by this book, keep in mind that this is a perfectly natural response even though it isn't necessarily based in reason. No matter how logical we like to see ourselves, we are all subject to the whims of human psychology. So I plead with everyone to respond to such persons with the utmost restraint and compassion.

Because of the way these kinds of things are so naturally personalized, I think many intelligent people hesitate to read this book for fear of what is upon examination obviously impossible. But sometimes the obvious isn't so obvious when something hits us at an emotional level, so I'll state this just to be clear: Reading this book and understanding IQ won't make you or anyone else any more or less intelligent than you (or they) already are. So don't worry. Your extremely intelligent African American boss: she'll still be extremely intelligent! Same goes for your wonderful Asian friend of more average intelligence; he won't be any different. And of course, the same goes for you.

But why read this book if it has a potential to make some people uncomfortable? The selfish reason is to gain a clearer understanding of the world around you. However, there is an even more important reason. Millions of people today suffer for the fact that we generally haven't found adequate solutions to a whole host of social problems. Good intentions should be commended, but often private programs and government policy either have little benefit or end up actually harming the very people we are trying to help. One obvious example is education. Can we do a better job educating someone (of any race) who has an IQ in the 80s? Yes! Can this be achieved if we assume everyone has an IQ of 115 (as is implicit in most education policies today)? No. After you read the book you will notice countless other examples of how we are groping in the dark to solve problems that an understanding of the distribution of IQ would help illuminate. Certainly it isn't a magic bullet to solve all of our current social problems. But refusing to understand as much as we can about the dynamics of these problems won't help anyone, especially those who today suffer the most.

This book is very politically incorrect but explains much of what we see in the world. In our pesent culture Human identity is based on intelligence, that is to say differentiation between humans and other creatures. Therefore, we tend to assign "humanness" based on IQ. I think this leads to an unrealistic egalitarianism in regard to IQ. We have difficulty seeing lower IQ individuals as fully human. The old religious idea of mankind as a moral mirror image of God, rather than a material equivalent of God, might allow for a realistic discussion of our various talents and abilities.

The message that Herrnstein sends in this book is one we have ignored at our peril. Before i started this book i knew some of its principal messages. What i did not know that in 1971 our government passed a law against using intelligence tests for hiring purposes. Why do we wonder that our school systems often work poorly. Are we putting giving our children to second rate teachers?

I'm really perplex, one review of mine was retired. I really would like to
Know why!
If I were offensive against any people I'm sorry.
I've noticed that people only want to read good things about them as if the real world it
wasn't real at all. It's a pity because they fool themselves living as they were in a kind of
Disney Land, trying to push the dust under the carpet, and avoiding to face the truth.
About this book I affirm my conviction that It is a superb book, the best one about this
Subject ever written (intelligence), I'm sure all human beings should read It all around the globe to discover and learn more about our future in this planet since our future it depends directly from intelligence. I only have one more thing to say, I really don't believe the authors wrote this book with any racist purpose, It's just a scientific very well written book, when we avoid to face It we act like Catholic Church trying to force Galileo Galilee to admit the planet earth as the center of the universe (what was a complete absurd). When Black men say they can play basketball better than us, nobody has stood up to protest, and we never thought was important to protest indeed in this case. The fact that this book says White Caucasians Males and orientals like Chinese and Caucasian Indians are more intelligent people, and they are constructing a kind of "Superior Cognitive Ability Class"; it doesn't means that the others are dumb. If this book had something negative about White Males or Chinese for example, who would protect us from the reviews against us once there are no affirmative actions in our favor?
Buy this book, read it carefully and enjoy It, It's a very important book for everyone. What I have noticed is that people haven't understood the results of the "Bell Curve". This book is about averages, do you know what has been happening in Brazil nowadays? So I will tell you. They have the same racial structure United States have, Whites and Blacks.
The Whites came from Europe and the Blacks from Africa and a very few number of people from Asia. But there is a huge difference. There you have half people Whites and half people Blacks
with a high tendency of Blacks become the majority of population soon, and with the same opportunity to access University, and do you know what Black men are trying to force congress to do, to vote affirmative actions there too! Only because the other races have surpassed them in Colleges admittance exames.
The most prestigious Engineering College from all South America is in Brazil in the richest State from that country called Sao Paulo, is the "Polytechnic School of Engineering from Sao Paulo University" , there aren't Blacks studying, just only few ones, you will find only Whites mainly males, and Asians mostly Japanese and Chinese.
And I ask to you, Why?
This is one more argument in favor of what this book is about, in average the I.Q. of White males and Asians are higher. Even White females aren't in a good situation about their I.Q.'s. Take a look at Madonna and Spears for example, and the cheer-leaders.
Thank you very much.

After reading this book, it is understandable that it is so controversial. Reading reviews and reactions, though, you would assume that the entire book is based on racial differences. In actuality, the first ~10 chapters do not mention race at all and focus specifically on differences between whites. The overarching theme of this book is that intelligence is the most important predictor of success in American life, be it making the most money, staying out of prison, attaining prestigious occupations, having less illegitimate children, etc. At the same time, lack of intelligence is the greatest predictor of those social ills. They eventually apply this to race by showing that many sources have determined that IQs vary by race in America: Asian-Americans have the highest followed by whites, Hispanics, and blacks. The average IQ for blacks is about a standard deviation lower than the average IQ for whites; this difference shrinks by only about a third when controlling for socioeconomic status. This in and of itself is controversial, but Herrnstein and Murray go on further to examine the affirmative action policies of universities and how this has set many minority students up to fail.

I actually think Herrnstein and Murray do a great job of attacking a dicey issue, backing up just about essentially everything (except their hypotheses about society's future and their conjecture about the impacts of certain findings) with data and numbers. Throughout the whole work, they consistently compare intelligence and socioeconomic status by showing the results for a particular variable (like poverty, for example) by intelligence for a person of average socioeconomic background and then by socioeconomic background for a person of average intelligence.

I picked up this book specifically due to its controversial nature to sift through the soundbite BS that the media likes to feed us. I wanted to make up my own mind about this, and I thought it was very interesting. Read it with a critical eye (especially when Herrnstein and Murray begin to hypothesis about the future of society), but there is no shortage of information in here. This is the best discussion of the history of intelligence research that I've ever read, at the very least. It's probably worth it to read this book for that alone.

Excellent book in plain legible language that doesn't 'out literary' it's reader. Great writing with excellent sub headings that break down the areas of culture, educatation and economic status through the readings

Everyone in education should read this book. The fact it's not required reading in undergraduate education programs tells you college education undergraduate education programs are based on political correctness rather than science.

Excellent book in plain legible language that doesn't 'out literary' it's reader. Great writing with excellent sub headings that break down the areas of culture, educatation and economic status through the readings

Everyone in education should read this book. The fact it's not required reading in undergraduate education programs tells you college education undergraduate education programs are based on political correctness rather than science.

'There’s no such thing as bad publicity' – or so claims a famous adage of the marketing industry.

'The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in America' by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray is a case in point.

This dry and technical social scientific treatise, packed with statistical analyses, graphs and tables and totalling almost nine hundred pages, including copious endnotes and appendices, became an unlikely nonfiction bestseller in the mid-nineties on a wave of almost unanimously bad publicity in which the work was variously condemned as 'pseudoscientific', 'racist' and downright evil.

Readers eagerly anticipating an incendiary racialist polemic were, however, in for a disappointment. Indeed, one suspects that, along with the Bible and Stephen Hawkins’s 'A Brief History of Time', The Bell Curve became one of those bestsellers that everyone bought – but few managed to finish.

On the plus side, this means many second-hand copies, unread, in excellent condition, are available at reasonable prices.

However, it also means many misconceptions have emerged regarding the book’s contents that are quite contradicted when one actually reads it.

A Book About Race?
The first misconception is that 'The Bell Curve' is a book about race.

The controversy over 'The Bell Curve' thus begins with the very identification of its subject-matter. Whereas critics focused almost exclusively on the race issue, the surviving co-author Charles Murray insisted that the book’s primary focus was the emergence of a 'Cognitive Elite' in modern America.

However, while the first section of the book indeed focuses on the emergence of a 'Cognitive Elite', the overall theme seems to be broader. The second section of the book, for example, deals with the relationship between IQ and various perceived social pathologies (e.g. unemployment, crime, welfare dependency).

Instead, I would say the book is about intelligence and its economic and social correlates. It contends that intelligence differences are a strong predictor of various social outcomes – high intelligence with favourable outcomes; and low IQ with unfavourable ones.

However, the topic of race is not as peripheral as is sometimes implied.

It is widely claimed that only one chapter dealt with race. In fact, two chapters focus on race differences (chapters 13 and 14, entitled respectively 'Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability' and 'Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ'). Plus, a further two chapters, and one appendix, discuss the issue of 'affirmative action' and, although this policy has been used to favour women as well as racial minorities, Herrnstein and Murray’s concern is with the latter.

However, the chapters/appendices dealing with race represent only 142 of the book’s nearly 900 pages.

As that these chapters are concentrated towards the book’s end, certain reviewers saw these chapters as the conclusion towards which the preceding chapters were leading. However, they could just as easily be dismissed as an afterthought, included for completeness and to forestall the allegation that the authors were evading the 'elephant in the room'.

Thus, the authors discuss race differences only to determine whether group differences in IQ are capable of explaining differences in group outcomes in just the same way that individual differences in IQ correlate with individual outcomes.

Do Races Differ in Innate Ability?
However, before turning from the topic of race, there is another topic the reviewer must address – namely, what did the authors actually conclude with regard to race differences?

Outraged critics widely accused Herrnstein and Murray of arguing that black people were innately inferior to whites with respect to intellectual ability. Many racists apparently reached the same conclusion, enthusiastically citing book as support for their views.

However, Charles Murray (seemingly) denied having reached any such conclusion, insisting that he and Herrnstein remained “resolutely agnostic” on the extent to which genetic factors underlie the racial IQ gap.

However, while it is true that the authors declare themselves “resolutely agnostic” with regard to the relative contributions of heredity and environment to the test-score gap, they do conclude that genetics play some part in this difference, and it is only with respect to the relative size of this contribution that they remain agnostic.

This is clear from the very paragraph where they declare themselves “resolutely agnostic” as to the size of the genetic contribution, where they conclude:

“It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences [in IQ]” (p311)

Clearly then, Herrnstein and Murray are of the opinion that the black-white test score gap is, in part, genetic. This alone puts them outside the bounds of acceptable opinion in the early-twenty-first century, and indeed in the late-twentieth century when these words were penned, and is sufficient to explain, and, for some, to justify, the opprobrium heaped upon the book’s surviving co-author, Charles Murray, from that day onward.

Social Class and IQ
Whereas the claim that races differ in innate ability is plausible, the claim that social classes differ in average intelligence is positively compelling.

Thus, it seems likely that races which evolved independently on separate continents, and which differ in obvious (and not so obvious) physiological respects, would also have evolved to differ in intellectual capacity. However, it is surely possible, if unlikely, that they could, by chance, have evolved exactly equal levels of innate ability.

However, on theoretical grounds alone, it is inevitable that social classes will come to differ in IQ, if one accepts two premises, namely:
1) Increased intelligence is associated with upward social mobility; and
2) Intelligence is passed down in families.

This is, of course, the essence of the infamous syllogism formulated by Richard Herrnstein in the 70s (p10; p105).

Incidentally, this second premise does not depend on the strict biological heritability of IQ. Even if heritability of intelligence were zero, intelligence could still be passed down in families by environmental factors (e.g. the better parenting techniques of high IQ parents, or the better material conditions provided in wealthier families).

Thus, the existence of an association between social class and IQ ought to be uncontroversial. If there remains any disagreement, it is over the direction of causation – namely whether:
1) High IQ facilitates upward social mobility; or
2) A privileged upbringing is conducive to increased IQ.

Of course, these processes are not mutually exclusive. In fact, however, existing evidence supports only the former.

Thus, even among siblings from the same family, the sibling with the higher childhood IQ, despite an identical family home, will, on average, ultimately achieve a higher socioeconomic status as an adult than their duller sibling. Likewise, the socioeconomic status a person achieves as an adult correlates more strongly with their own IQ than with the socioeconomic status of their parents (see Straight Talk About Mental Tests: p195).

Indeed, twin, adoption and family studies have concurred in suggesting that the so-called 'shared family environment' (i.e. those aspects of the family environment shared by siblings from the same household, including social class) has surprisingly little effect on adult IQ. Children brought up in the same home, whether full- or half-siblings or adoptees, are, by the time they reach adulthood, no more similar to one another in IQ than children of the same degree of biological relatedness brought up in different homes (see The Nurture Assumption and The Limits of Family Influence).

At any rate, while the direction of causation may be disputed, the existence of an association between IQ and social class would not, one might think, attract controversy. Unfortunately, one would be wrong.

Thus, in Britain, if children from privileged backgrounds are more likely to be admitted to elite universities, this is taken as incontrovertible proof that the system is biased against such children.

When psychiatrist Bruce Charlton responded that “a simple fact has been missed: higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes”, he was widely condemned, with one headline (in an ostensibly 'right-wing' / 'conservative' paper) reading, “Higher Social Classes Have Significantly Higher IQs Than Working Class, claims Academic” – as if this were a controversial claim (Clark 2008).

When a professor at University College London made similar points regarding the admission of working-class students to medical schools, the then government Health Minister Ben Bradshaw even claimed "It is extraordinary to equate intellectual ability with social class" (Beckford 2008). Yet what is truly extraordinary is that a government minister should deny the existence of such a link.

Political figures such as former London mayor Boris Johnson and former British Chief Inspector of Schools Chris Woodhead have also got into trouble for alluding to the obvious association between IQ and social class.

Cognitive Stratification
Herrnstein’s syllogism leads to a related paradox – namely that, as environmental conditions are equalized, heritability increases.

Thus, as Western societies have become more meritocratic and large differences in the sorts of environmental conditions known to effect IQ (e.g. malnutrition) have been eliminated, such that today obesity is a greater health problem than starvation, even among the ostensible 'poor' (indeed, one suspects, especially among the so-called 'poor'), differences in income have come to increasingly reflect differences in innate ability.

Moreover, the more gifted children from deprived backgrounds who have been able to escape their humble origins, then, given the substantial heritability of IQ, the fewer such children remain among the working-class in future generations.

The result is what Herrnstein and Murray call the 'cognitive stratification' of society and the emergence of a 'cognitive elite’.

Thus, in feudal times, a man’s position in the societal hierarchy was determined largely 'accident of birth'. Legitimate offspring, especially first-born males, inherited the social standing of their father. Meanwhile, women’s status was determined largely by a combination of 'accident of birth' and, if you like, 'accident of marriage'.

In contrast, today, in modern technologically complex societies, a person’s social status is determined, Herrnstein and Murray contend, increasingly by IQ.

Of course, individuals are not allocated to a particular social class on the basis of IQ testing itself. On the contrary, the use of IQ tests by employers and educators has been largely outlawed on account of its 'disparate impact' with respect to different ethnic groups.

However, the skills and abilities increasingly demanded, and valued at a premium, in modern technologically advanced societies, mean that, through the operation of the education system and labour market, individuals are effectively sorted by IQ, even in the absence of anyone ever being tested.

In other words, society is becoming increasingly 'meritocratic' – and increasingly the form of ostensible 'merit' upon which attainment is based is intelligence.

However, whereas persons employed in cognitively demanding occupations are, almost by definition, of high intellectual ability, people employed in cognitively undemanding occupations can be of any cognitive ability. This is why the correlation between IQ and socioeconomic status remains, even today, imperfect.

'Cognitive stratification' and the emergence of a 'cognitive elite' are, for Herrnstein and Murray, a mixed blessing: “That the brightest are identified has its benefits,” they concede, but “that they become so isolated and inbred has its costs” (p25).

IQ and Job Performance
Sorting by IQ begins in the education system, but continues into a person’s adult career.

General intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is, they claim, the strongest predictor of occupational performance in virtually every occupation. Moreover, in general, the higher paid and higher status the job in question, the stronger the correlation between performance on the job and IQ.

However, IQ is, they claim, a strong predictor of occupational performance even in apparently cognitively undemanding occupations, and usually a better predictor of performance than tests of the more specific abilities actually involved in the job on a day-to-day basis.

However, employers are barred from employing tests of general cognitive ability in selecting candidates unless they can show that this test has 'manifest relationship' to the job in question, and the burden of proof is on the employer. Otherwise, given the 'disparate impact' of such tests (i.e. the lower average scores of some minority groups), testing has been deemed 'indirectly discriminatory'.

Given the need to show a 'manifest relationship', employers are compelled to test, not general ability, but rather the specific skills employed in the occupation in question.

However, since virtually all tests of specific abilities nevertheless tap into the general factor of intelligence, even tests of specific abilities have a 'disparate impact' with respect to minority groups. Indeed, it is difficult to design tests in which different ethnic groups do not perform differently.

In other words, if some groups perform worse than others, it is presumed a priori that this reflects test bias rather than differences in the aptitudes and abilities of different groups, unless the employer can show otherwise.

Thus, although the words “all men are created equal” are not, contrary to popular opinion, a part of the US constitution, nevertheless the Supreme Court has effectively declared, by legal fiat, that this is the case.

However, just as a law passed by Congress cannot repeal the Law of Gravity, so a legal presumption that groups are equal in ability cannot make this so.

Thus, as Herrnstein and Murray demonstrate, the bar on the use of IQ testing by most employers has not prevented society in general, and the job market in particular, from being increasingly stratified by cognitive ability, the precise thing measured by the outlawed tests.

Nevertheless, they estimate that the effective bar on the use of IQ testing by employers makes this process of selection less efficient, and cost the economy somewhere between 80 billion to 13 billion dollars in 1980.

'Conscientiousness' and Career Success
I am sceptical of Herrnstein and Murray’s conclusion that IQ is the strongest predictor of academic and career success. I have always suspected that a capacity for hard work and a high 'boredom threshold' is at least as important in even the most cognitively demanding of careers, and in schoolwork/academia.

Perhaps the reason is that a person’s capacity for hard work has not yet been discovered to be as highly correlated with earnings as IQ is because we have not yet developed a way of measuring a person’s capacity for hard-work as accurately as we measure their IQ.

Whereas intelligence is accurately captured by standardized testing, the closest psychometricians have come to measuring a person’s capacity for hard work is the personality factor referred to by psychologists as 'conscientiousness', one of the 'Big Five' personality factors under the widely accepted 'Five Factor Model' of personality.

Conscientiousness has indeed been found to correlate with success in education and at work (e.g. Barrick & Mount 1991). However, the correlation is lower than for IQ.

However, I suspect this may be because personality is less accurately captured by current psychometric methods than is IQ.

This is because personality tests rely on self-report. Rarely is actual behaviour observed directly.

Thus, to assess conscientiousness, questionnaires ask respondents whether they, for example, see themselves as organized, as able to follow an objective through to completion, as a reliable worker, etc.

This would be the equivalent of an IQ test that, instead of testing your ability to, say, recognise patterns or manipulate shapes, simply asked respondents how good they perceived themselves to be at recognising patterns, or manipulating shapes. Obviously, this would be a far less accurate measure of intelligence than one that actually directly tested a person’s ability to do these things, as in a conventional IQ test.

In a test relying of self-reports, a person can lie. They may also be genuinely deluded. We all know people who regard themselves as highly intelligent yet whom we ourselves regard as anything but. Ditto for conscientiousness. Other people, meanwhile, are falsely modest.

Indeed, according to the 'Dunning Kruger Effect', it is those most lacking in ability who most overestimate their ability because they lack the ability to accurately assess their ability (Kruger & Dunning 1999).

However, in an IQ test, a person may be able to pretend to be stupider than they are by deliberately getting questions wrong or simply not trying hard enough to get them right. However, they would be hard-pressed to pretend to be more intelligent than they are by getting more questions right for the simple reason that they would, by definition, not be intelligent enough to know what the correct answers are.

For this reason, personality tests are likely less reliable measures of personality than IQ tests are of intelligence. It is therefore no surprise that the personality trait of 'conscientiousness', as measured largely by self-report studies (and sometimes equally subjective reports by third-parties), is a weaker correlate of career and educational success than IQ, simply because personality tests represent less accurate measures of a person’s actual personality than IQ tests are of a person’s intelligence.

'Affirmative Action' and Test Bias
In chapters nineteen and twenty, respectively entitled 'Affirmative Action in Higher Education’ and 'Affirmative Action in the Workplace', the authors discuss so-called 'affirmative action', an American euphemism used to refer to systematic discrimination against white males.

[I suspect this term was coined, or popularised, precisely to avoid referring to discrimination against white males as what it is, namely discrimination against white males – 'a turd by any other name still smells as bad'. However, it continues to be employed uncritically even by opponents of the practice, including Herrnstein and Murray.]

It is well-documented that African-Americans, on average, earn less than white Americans. However, according to the data analysed by Herrnstein and Murray in their chapter on 'Affirmative Action in the Workplace', this difference not only disappears after one controls for IQ differences, but, after controlling for cognitive ability, blacks are actually somewhat overrepresented in professional and white collar occupations as compared to whites of the same level of intellectual ability.

This remarkable finding Herrnstein and Murray attribute to the effects of affirmative action policies.

However, this seems to contradict what the authors wrote in chapter thirteen ('Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ'), where they addressed the question of whether IQ tests are biased against black Americans (pp280-286).

There, they concluded that the charge of bias was unfounded, because, among other reasons, IQ tests were equally predictive of real-world outcomes (e.g. in education and employment) for both blacks and whites, and blacks do not perform any better in the workplace or in education than their IQs would predict.

Indeed, Jensen, on expert on test bias who published a whole book on the topic, goes further, suggesting that some tests may actually be biased in favour of African-Americans, since “when predictive bias is found to exist, it invariably favors the selection of blacks” (Straight Talk About Mental Tests: p144).

However, this is not entirely convincing evidence that IQ tests are not biased against African-Americans. It might simply suggest that society at large, including the education system and the workplace, are just as biased against African-Americans as are IQ tests. Thus, as Herrnstein and Murray acknowledge “the tests may be biased against disadvantaged groups, but the traces of bias are invisible because the bias permeates all areas of the group's performance” (p285).

Moreover, as Mackintosh observes, in one respect, IQ tests do indeed under-predict black performance, namely in predicting so-called 'adaptive behaviour' among the mentally subnormal – i.e. the ability to cope with day-to-day life (e.g. feed, dress, clean, interact with others in a 'normal' manner) . Blacks with IQs low enough to indicate mental retardation are generally much more functional with respect to such behaviours than are whites or Asians with similar scores (IQ and Human Intelligence: p356-7).

However, my point here is simply that Herrnstein and Murray seem to have contradicted themselves.

In their earlier discussion of alleged test bias, they claim that IQ tests are not biased against blacks because they do not under-predict the performance of blacks as compared to whites.

However, in their later chapter on 'affirmative action', Herrnstein and Murray claim that blacks are actually somewhat overrepresented among professional and 'white collar' occupations relative to their IQs.

However, if blacks are overrepresented among professional and 'white collar' occupations after controlling for IQ, this suggests that African-Americans do indeed do better in real-world outcomes than their test results would predict.

This might be taken to suggest that, by this measure, the tests are indeed biased against African-Americans.

Policy Implications?
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker has recently popularised the notion of 'Bell Curve Liberals' – i.e. the notion that recognizing the reality of innate differences between individuals and groups in traits such as intelligence does not necessarily lead to 'right-wing' political conclusions.

Instead, a leftist (or a 'liberal' in Pinker’s terminology) might accept the reality of innate differences in intelligence, but conclude that, far from justifying inequities, this is all the more reason to compensate the 'cognitively disadvantaged' for their innate deficiencies, which are, being innate, hardly something for which they can legitimately be blamed.

Although Herrnstein and Murray reject this conclusion, they acknowledge that this is a legitimate conclusion that can be drawn from the data they present. Indeed, in an afterword included in later editions, surviving co-author Charles Murray writes:

“If intelligence plays an important role in determining how well one does in life, and intelligence is conferred on a person through a combination of genetic and environmental factors over which that person has no control, the most obvious political implication is that we need a Rawlsian egalitarian state, compensating the less advantaged for the unfair allocation of intellectual gifts” (p554).

Indeed, in this context, it is worth noting that, while contemporary 'Cultural Marxists' deny the existence of individual differences in ability, the same does not seem to have been true of Marx himself.

On the contrary, Marx himself, in his famous (but plagiarized) aphorism “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need” implicitly recognised that individuals differ in their “ability”. Moreover, given that, in the communist utopia he envisaged, environmental conditions are ostensibly to be equalized, these differences must presumably have been conceived of as innate in origin.

However, an important distinction must be maintained here. While it is possible to justify redistributive policies on the grounds of compensating individuals for their innate intellectual deficiencies, it is not possible to justify policies such as 'affirmative action'.

Thus, one might well believe that the 'cognitively disadvantaged' should be compensated for their innate deficiencies through redistributive policies. Indeed, to some extent, this is something most modern liberal democratic polities already do, by providing welfare payments and state-funded, or state-subsidised, care to those whose cognitive impairment is sufficient to qualify as a serious mental disability.

However, we are unlikely to believe that such persons should be given entry to medical school with lower grades, such that they are one day liable to be responsible for performing heart surgery on us or misdiagnosing our medical conditions.

In short, socialist redistribution is defensible – but 'affirmative action' is not.

Reception and Readability
In many ways the reception accorded the publication of 'The Bell Curve' in 1994 echoed the reception accorded another mammoth yet highly controversial work published some twenty years previously, namely Edward O Wilson’s seminal Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.

Both were greeted with outrage among social scientists that spilled over into a mainstream media 'moral panic'.

Moreover, although in truth there are few commonalities between the subject-matters of the two works, both works were dismissed by critics with identical pejorative pseudo-intellectual soundbites (e.g. 'biological determinism', 'genetic determinism', 'reductionism', 'biology as destiny').

In addition, both were mammoth works, which, on account of their size, few people bothered to read in their entirety. As a result, many people only ever read the critiques, not the works themselves.

Yet, in both cases, the critiques presented a wholly inaccurate of the actual contents of the respective books, to such an extent that one suspects that those not bothering to read the books for themselves included most of those nevertheless taking it upon themselves to write about them.

As a result, both books became, as I put it in the title to this review, books 'Much Read About, But Rarely Actually Read'.

Moreover, in both cases, controversy centred almost exclusively on just a few chapters of each work – namely the last chapter of 'Sociobiology', that extended the purview of Wilson’s sociobiology to the human species, and the chapters in Bell Curve which dealt with race.

However, there is, I feel, a crucial difference between the two works.

'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis' was, of necessity, a mammoth work. The 'New Synthesis' alluded to in the subtitle was a reference to the so-called 'modern synthesis' of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics that laid the foundation of modern biology. Wilson sought nothing less than to re-construct the entire field of animal behaviour on a new basis, namely, that of sociobiology, then added the fields of the human social sciences (sociology, psychology, anthropology etc.) into this synthesis as something of an afterthought, and even proposing, in a few paragraphs, to provide a new basis for moral philosophy and perhaps epistemology too.

Indeed, one could even argue that, given its scope and ambitions, 'Sociobiology' was rather too succinct, especially with respect to Wilson’s speculations with regard to the human species, which always read as something of an afterthought, and indeed, he later sought expanded upon these speculations in subsequent works.

However, 'The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in America' is, for me at least, rather longer than was necessary.

After all, Herrnstein and Murray’s thesis was, in essence, rather simple – namely that cognitive ability, as captured by IQ testing, is a major correlate and determinant of all manner of important social outcomes in modern American society.

Yet, Herrnstein and Murray essentially reiterate this same point, in respect of different social outcomes, again and again.

I suspect that Herrnstein and Murray’s thesis would have been more effectively transmitted to the audience whom they presumably sought to reach had they been more succinct.

Had that been the case then perhaps rather more of the many people who purchased 'The Bell Curve', and helped make it into an unlikely nonfiction bestseller in 1994 on a wave of almost unanimously bad publicity, might actually have got around to reading it – and, in the process, they might even have been persuaded by its thesis.

In short, readers with only a passing interest in the subject-matter would be well-advised to skip 'The Bell Curve' and instead choose a lighter and more accessible popularization, such as Intelligence, Race, And Genetics: Conversations With Arthur R. Jensen or Jensen's own somewhat outdated but still excellent Straight Talk About Mental Tests.

References
Barrick & Mount 1991 'The big five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta-analysis' Personnel Psychology 44(1):1–26
Beckford 2008 ‘Working classes 'lack intelligence to be doctors', claims academic’, (London) Telegraph (04 Jun 2008)
Clark 2008 Higher social classes have significantly HIGHER IQs than working class, claims academic Daily Mail 22 May 2008.
Kruger & Dunning 1999 Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77(6):1121-34

Step by step, using the same scholarly methods so beloved by America's liberal universities, this book shatters the myth that all men, or at least all races of men, are created equal when it comes to intelligence. In so doing, it also exposes Affirmative Action as being nothing more than a Federally mandated quota system, used to place required percentages of minorities into schools and jobs at the expense of better qualified white and Asian candidates.

Wanted to see the arguments about intelligence and the role genetics play in that. Not totally convinced about the arguments and especially would question how suitable IQ tests are in judging an individual's intelligence. But an interesting read nonetheless.

Its an interesting read. It does have an intuitive dimension, since societies generally tend to be stratified and I.Q is certainly one of the reasons. Am not sure about the ethnic angle. I live in a very multicultural multiracial environment and I don't really see any preponderance of one group over any other. Environment I think plays a key role, however in the absence of intelligence, environment may not do much regardless of race. The book is certainly controversial, but it does allow one to have a different world view, regardless of whether we believe it or not.

This is an excellent review of psychological concepts/positions that have influenced American education over the past 50 years. It provides a foundation for understanding the goals and aims of education as effected by psychological principles and theories.
A real MUST READ for those seeking the roots of our American school system's commitment to youth.

The politically incorrect book that the Democrats tried to discredit and ban. This book is based on facts and research. This is why it was vehemently attacked by the Mainstream Media and Progressive Democrats. Anything that does not advance their narrative will be demonized.

This is a banned book in Massachusetts, not available in any libraries or any bookstores. I decided I wanted to read it, screw the liberals. Very scholarly dive into sociology and problems with various groups underperforming in the US. I'm glad I was able to buy it at the store. Great book, especially if you have a back ground in sociology, American Studies, Political Science, etc..

This book is not about race.
It's about intelligence, and how measured intelligence profoundly affects the lives of individuals in America.
More than socioeconomic background, parents' marital status or anything else, intelligence correlates with education, income, employment, criminal behavior, disability, likelihood of being in automobile accidents, and just about everything else.
And intelligence is largely genetic.
This has ominous implications for American society. The highly intelligent largely work and associate with other highly intelligent people. They marry each other, and have highly intelligent kids. Murry and Herrnstein argue that an intelligence-derived class system is developing in America.
Of course, it has even more ominous implications for people whose political credos rest upon the assumption that everything about an individual is socially conditioned and can therefore be improved by enlightened tinkering. These people, predictably, respond with wild accusations of "Nazi science!" This, of course, is a blatant and somewhat pathetic effort to taint the book so that no one will touch it.
Ignore the screamers. Read this book.

I had opened myself up to some revolutionary thinking when I started reading this book, but was sorely disappointed.
Although some of their points do make sense, there is lack of any substantial proof to substantiate the authors' hypothesis. Some of their views are downright outrageous, when they preach that the public systems of the United States (which as per them, is currently tailormade for the less intelligent) should become such that the genetically inferior should be naturally reduced, if not eliminated.

Ignoring the differences in IQ in the population is not the way to deal with the resulting social problems. First, we need to know where we stand. It was very refreshing to have an objective view of the truth.