Note: This post presents the main argument of “The Bell Curve” (1994) by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. My own opinion will come in a later post.
In the early 1900s America was ruled by rich white men, Wasps mostly. Some were highly intelligent, some not. Most people worked with their hands, especially on farms. You commonly found people of both low and high intelligence in all walks of life and in all neighbourhoods.
In the late 1900s America became technocratic. Now a university education mattered more than class, race, religion, ethnicity or even money.
More than half the chapters are spent proving that for white people IQ now matters more than class or even education in things like income, marriage, divorce, illegitimacy, crime, poverty, unemployment, parenting, civility, injury, having low birth weight babies and practising the middle-class values of staying in school, getting married and working hard.
It is a statistical argument: For any one person IQ might not be the most important thing, but when looking at large numbers of people in general, it is.
Since the 1950s high-IQ people have been rising to the top of society while low-IQ people have been sinking to the bottom.
Two new classes are arising out of this:
- The cognitive elite – the high-IQ people at the top who, in addition to the rich, run things. They went to top universities and have been filling the top ranks of society more and more. They live in nice neighbourhoods and have increasingly little to do with the rest of us.
- The underclass – the low-IQ people at the bottom. Because of their limited intelligence, they make poor choices in life, like dropping out of high school, having children out of wedlock, getting divorced – or never even getting married in the first place. They cause most of the crime and poverty in society.
Most blacks and Latinos, because of their low IQs, fall in the underclass. Since IQ is mostly inborn or genetic, there is little that can be done about it – short of having middle-class white people adopt black and Latino children in huge numbers and bring them up right in good homes. But even that would only raise their IQs by an average of six points.
Because low-IQ mothers have the most children, the underclass will grow and get worse, in time becoming an overall drain on society. The country will become increasingly poor and violent. Even racism might appear again among educated whites, as outlandish as that sounds.
Some policies that might help:
- Limit immigration. Most who come to America are just filling up the underclass.
- End affirmative action – it costs the country billions in lost efficiency. Besides, racism in hiring is slight (if you control for IQ).
- End welfare (the dole), but make sure the working poor can support themselves.
- Change laws to favour marriage.
- Change education policy: Cut money that helps those who do poorly at school (largely a waste) and use it instead to help students with high IQs.
See also:
- Charles Murray
- Madison Grant – made the same sort of arguments in the 1920s, where the cognitive elite was played by the Nordics and blacks and Latinos were played by Italians and Jews. This disappeared down the memory hole after The Third Enlargement of American Whiteness.
- opinion:
- The diseased host model of American society
- Steve Sailer
- IQ
- The Black illegitimacy argument
- black education achievement gap
- The clash of civilizations
Abagond 
“Since the 1950s high-IQ people have been rising to the top of society while low-IQ people have been sinking to the bottom.”
How about all of the dumb people with “high I.Q.” scores?
Two new classes are arising out this:
1) The cognitive elite
2) The underclass
Except that people are passing in and out of these two classes all of the time and generation by generation. Also, these classes have been historically restricted by ethnicity, gender, nationality, and religious affiliation.
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That really sounds like a rip-off of Brave New World
Oh well, it’s good to know that if people ends up being elite, it couldn’t be helped as they were mostly fit to become elite.
It’s so convenient.
And if people ends up being screwed.. oh well , it couldn’t be helped either.
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“Even racism might appear again among educated whites, as outlandish as that sounds.”
*laughing hysterically*
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How convenient that the “researchers” who wrote the Bell Curve basically write off any inequalities in society as being due to genetics and not the hierarchical systems that serve to keep most people in the underclass. As for limiting immigration, I wonder if they would have agreed with that if it would have involved keeping their ancestors out of the United States but what can you expect from research funded by the Pioneer Fund.
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Why all this Bell Curve stuff Abagond? It’s a theme you’re going with?
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I got one example which proves without any doubt that this whole thing is load of bull: George W. Bush. 😀
It will be nice to see how Bell curve/IQ apologists will explain that 😀
That guy must be one of dumbest americans I have ever seen and he became the president. Yeah yeah, he had all his helpers but according that fine fantasy book there: those with high IQ rise to the top and there is no higher top in US than the presidency. Right? 😀
Dan Quale anyone? That guy almost became president and he could not spell 😀
Or maybe these guys were just brilliant with supreme IQ’s?
Besides they have applied those policies in US during last couple decades and results are just the opposite: the whole nation is just getting dumber and dumber according to this theory. So which is wrong, the method or tests? WTF??? 😀
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@abagond
What’s behind all the race and IQ posts as of late?
@Sam
Here’s is an interesting analysis of Bush’s IQ based on his academic achievement: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=292960
Bush’s IQ appears to have been in the 120s range. Which isn’t high by presidential standards, but is high compared with the average Joe.
I think he had other factors that made him seem “dumb”, such as his stubborness, cowboy drawl and lack of knowledge about crucial things. But IQ wise, he wasn’t dumb.
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It must be “Bell Curve month” at the Abagond Blog. 🙂
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Re: George W Bush and his apparently high IQ…
It doesn’t surprise me that much that Dubya may have had an IQ in the 120s. It goes to show that IQ represents certain aspects of intellect, but hardly the whole story. I imagine he was very good at certain things – running a state and then a country still does require a certain level of intellectual competence, even if you do a mediocre job.
Dubya does seem ignorant about many things – he’s a mental midget compared to Obama when it comes to knowledge of the world outside the US, for example. Yet such knowledge would not necessarily be reflected on an IQ test.
More likely, he seems dumb on certain issues because, like Sarah Palin and like a lot of Americans, he never considered those issues important enough to spend time learning about.
I’ll also hazard a guess that Dubya’s problems with stringing coherent sentences together were not necessarily a reflection of dumbness, but probably made him seem dumber than he really was.
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Bush was clever, and he certainly knew which side his bread was buttered on, but he was shallow and incurious. This sheds an interesting light on the question of what IQ measures. Perhaps it is an admixture of several complementary traits, such as a certain amount of shrewdness, a generous amount of opportunism, a modicum of aggression, a lack of empathy, and above all a certain megalomania. Most of these traits, and especially the latter, are things that would be stimulated and encouraged in a child reared as a member of a dominant caste, especially an upper-level member of such caste.
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Listen up Abagond. I’m tired of this stupid Bell Curve you’re obsessng about. OK. OK. We get it. You don’t like it and neither I agree with those racist authors who wrote the book. Can you blog about something else now? Three straight consecutive columns about a stupid book 15 years ago?! Stop the madness!
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Abagond often speaks about the “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myth. We are often lead to believe rich white men got to where they are because of intelligence and hard work. In this country it takes money to make money. It’s that simple. Everyone from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett needed a substantial amount of money to start up their companies.
The Co-founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg attended two of the most expensive and prestigious schools in the country(Harvard,Phillips Exeter Academy). His success was due to his parents bank account and a bit a luck but had little to do with his intelligence and hard work.
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I’ve lived both sides of this coin. Grew up in a family (with high IQ’s) who became increasingly more comfortable due to my father’s (no college degree) long, stressful career working his way up the line. We had braces, nice Christmases and a detached home.
I later found myself raising my teenage sister due to my mom’s death. I know what it means to work 60+ hours a week, but make less than 30k a year and have debt pile because of no health insurance. Drove my sister aroundto her jobs for 5 years because we couldn’t afford a car for her.
After 7 long years (I’m still working 60 hours a week) I scraped my way up to middle class. I still miss all the holiday parties throughout the year because I’m always at my jobs.
Those below middle class don’t have any business having children because it’s a bad place for everyone to be. It needs to be controlled one way or the other. But for the love of god, give the low class a hand: public transportation, healthcare, work. At least give them a chance to have a fair quality of life! They are humans!
As for IQ, that’s an old argument. I know tons of bright nerds who make lots of money because they know how to talk to computers but can’t have a conversation with a person. I suspect this IQ talk is often used to devalue targeted groups…that’s probably one of things Abagond is getting at.
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“I suspect this IQ talk is often used to devalue targeted groups…that’s probably one of things Abagond is getting at.” (Ames)
———————————————————————
That’s it right there……and the target groups tend to always be Black. Everytime. I believe it is a major belief/talking point of both passive and aggressive racists.
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If IQ really determined who got to the top why is Paris Hilton so successful? (After all she runs a business right?) That dumb bitch doesn’t even have a GED!
If success really equaled merit then Hilton would be where she belonged: on a corner somewhere sucking dick for a crack rock.
But because she was BORN into a position of privilege she achieved a measure of success that she probably would not have otherwise if she was born into a working class family.
Does anyone think that if Paris had wanted to give the appearance of being smart she couldn’t have gotten a degree if she wanted? Money talks and bullshit walks. Paris knows that her money speaks for her.
Trust me, I see it all the time. Smart people who work hard are not the most successful people because America is not a meritocracy. The converse applies to people who are “not so smart” are not a drain on societies resources and don’t cause all of it’s social problems. Just like there was other factors at work for Paris, there are other factors at work for other people too.
That’s how it is with everyone. Take the average drug dealer born in the ghetto and put them into an upper middle class family all of the sudden they’ll become a fortune five hundred CEO.
The same type of person that has the personality and skills to run a criminal entrepreneurship can easily run a legal one, but many will never have the opportunity that will allow them to earn the credentials necessary to do so. Simply because of where they were born in life. This is not entirely due to the fault of individuals, society plays a large part as well.
I’m not arguing how much or how little society plays a part. But whenever people argue for getting rid of Affirmative Action those same people don’t say a damn thing, not a word of complaint about dumb ass legacies that buy degrees that other people have to earn!
They are all for merit when comes to those who are underprivileged and have fewer advantages, but when it comes to the privileged it’s suddenly okay for people to have things they don’t deserve and didn’t work for?
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I’m not saying you cannot gain access to opportunities but there is a reason why people born into a certain class stay in that class most of the time, it’s not just because of individuals but it is because of the society we have set up.
America likes to believe that it is more socially mobile than it actually is.The idea that poor people are intellectually inferior is bullshit . Degrees don’t mean shit! I’m sorry but they don’t!
As long as someone as stupid as George Bush can not only get into, but graduate having a degree from Yale means you belong to one of two groups of people:
1.You are really rich and powerful
2.Or you have a certain degree of intelligence and probability in your favor.
I’m not saying people who are rich are not also intelligent, but lets not pretend that intelligence is actually as determinant as people assume it is!
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I had promised to do this post and the one one Sowell’s months ago:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/the-bell-curve/#comment-59424
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I am going to do one more post on “The Bell Curve” – my own opinion – but then I promise I will give it a rest.
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calculator said:
“Three straight consecutive columns about a stupid book 15 years ago?! Stop the madness!”
Why write about “The Bell Curve”:
1. It keeps coming up on this blog. Avoiding the subject makes it seem like I am afraid of what the book says.
2. It is the best-known and most respectable piece of scientific racism written in my lifetime – so far.
3. Some of the ideas that underlie it – like that most blacks lack the intelligence and moral self-control to live as free persons in Western society – go back to slave times and are still with us. This book seeks to prove them as facts of science!
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Intellectually inferior people of rich backgrounds fuck up society more than poor people because they have more control over how society operates
Case and point: Starting unwinnable foreign wars in order to increase the value of their stocks and line their own pockets.
A poor dumb person can some damage to society,
But a rich dumb person can destroy an entire nation, so which one is more of a priority?
Case and point: America now.
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After the last president.
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Well done for continuing to explore in depth the Bell Curve arguments abagond. I am actually beginning to enjoy the comments deriving from these posts now!
If there was ever an example where clearer insight was needed…
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When you have a woman and a minority speaking recently favorably about the bell curve to a new generation, then it is time to bring out the discussions again. I think many don’t understand that suffrage and the civil rights struggle isn’t over.
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@ Jarhead
It’s also pretty good at making dummies think that they may be smart.
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I deleted Jarhead’s comments ecause he was a sock puppet.
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Eventually I got through 500+ pages.
It reads like a reasonably researched and thought out document but then again, “intelligent design” also does. The “belief” factor flares up on quite a few pages. Or should I say the I-want-to-believe-factor? As a whole it is complex enough to give its supporters the confidence to dismiss critics not understanding it or rejecting it solely on moral or political grounds. However each chapter on its own is superficial relative to the complexity each in-depth topic would normally involve. I can only repeat what I said before on one of Abagond’s previous posts, the book is a potpourri of different disciplines with a one-dimensional message that comes at you like a laser straight into your eye. What it definitely has is populist appeal.
As the book seems to be initially targeted to a US audience, the authors probably have sort of an easy home game when it comes to certain concepts for which no scientific, globally applicable evidence has been found, however assumed to be intuitive to their target audience. The crucial one is once again “race”. Even though they try to keep a credible appearance by somewhat admitting its arbitrary character and relativising some classifications – prime example “Hispanic” vs Latino who could have any kind of mixed background – they assume the reader to take the US concept of “race” as a universal given. That’s how they can continue being vague about it throughout the book.
Let this sink in for a minute.
Murray and Hernstein write a book whose central point is the classification of humans by intelligence and allegedly significant IQ differences between “races”. A book which claims to be accurate and have universal validity. They tacitly assume an innate genetic component in both “race” and “IQ” (without ever addressing its lack of scientific proof!) but themselves fail to deliver a precise, universal definition of the groupings they write about. Instead they juggle with irrelevancies such as terminology. It tells a lot about the credibility of the authors, the whole work in fact.
They are not stupid. They do know very well that the classifications they assume as given are not repeatable and applicable everywhere in the world. Most likely not even in the USA itself. They wriggle themselves out of the scientific responsibility to deliver every single definition they base their conclusions upon.
They don’t totally refute (since they can’t for credibility once again) but trivialise the influence of character, environment, nutrition and physiology by mentioning a few examples in no depth and selectively. The authors dedicate a mere 20 or so pages to the factors on cognitive abilities that biologists, medical doctors, psychologists, social scientists etc have spent decades of research on and produced countless pages of plausible documentation.
Now if this book was not written within scientific methodologies – as some supporters even admit – it should have the “For entertainment only” label on it.
The last chapter “A place for everyone” literally makes my skin crawl, not only because of its moralistic and reactionary dribble. It’s just pure politics. It basically suggests that we might as well stop making progress in further research for finding the true factors for all sorts of inequalities, injustice, conflicts, social problems etc and blindly accept them as a natural law, just like thermodynamics. The chapter suggests that the authors have found the ultimate, progressive explanation of “everything” and any other research can halt now. But then, at the same time, they take a nostalgic look backwards to philosophies of long gone centuries where the unwashed masses of dumb sheep are at the mercy of an elite. An elite who alone have the power to choose when they are generous and when they are punitive. Although the authors are trying so hard to be subtle and preserve the appearance of being unbiased all the way through, the last chapter is where they show their true colours and the true purpose of the book. Once again, it’s pure politics. Politics that would create new problems and not make the old ones disappear.
Finally, if, in an allegedly scientific context, authors go through the effort of making apologetic statements and/or adding praising reviews, they annihilate their own credibility. In no serious scientific publication which is work in progress or disputed you will find something like “so many non-believers were trying to discredit our work because they just don’t understand our “novelty ideas”, bla bla…”
Persuasive tactics for a manipulative goal.
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Wow. Well said and very well done, Femi!
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Your IQ posts have been excellent, Abagond. I’m looking forward to the next one.
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Nicely summarized. The Bell Curve was unfairly demonized at the time. Most of it is pretty much common sense –
1. Cognitive ability is significantly heritable (smart people tend to have smarter than average children)
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22333/
2. smarter people tend to do better on average (socio-economic outcomes).
3. Therefore over time in Western economies will become more stratified on the basis of inherited differences (as opposed to say, aristocratic differences).
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Alte said:
“Your IQ posts have been excellent, Abagond. I’m looking forward to the next one.”
Thank you. I am working on these posts:
– HBD
– Pioneer Fund
I have promised to do this one:
– my opinion of “The Bell Curve”
and it hard to imagine me not doing this one:
– Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study
I am off next week, so they will probably appear pretty soon.
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Does anyone know how to convert a bell curve to a sine wave? I do (lee guthrie) kendrickguthrie@earthlink.net
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@ Lee
^ what is the application? Are you designing/modifying audio amplitude?
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Hello Everyone!!
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I observed the effect 20yrs ago playing around with Mylar. I patented the process to make truss core pannels. Carbon fiber worked the bests. Now I have patented it for sine wave spring, energy asorbing barriers and recoil reductions systems. I am more of a mechinical guy but I know it could model electronics, optices, statitistic and others. I can send more info if anyone is instreted.
Lee
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Did you do this? I can’t find it.
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