Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
by Annalee Newitz · 3 Jun 2024 · 251pp · 68,713 words
about how stupidity would destroy America. Eugenics rebooted In 1994, Charles Murray was starting a promotional tour for what became one of the most widely discussed books of the 1990s: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. His co-author, Richard Herrnstein, had recently died, and that meant Murray had to promote the book on his
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worked so well because he smuggled an emotional appeal to racial and class bias inside a seemingly evidence-based analysis. As he flew to Colorado, Murray pulled out a laptop to show DeParle some data that fueled his analysis in The Bell Curve. There was a spreadsheet full of personal statistics on over twelve
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got a significant boost in income. He was talking about the idea at the heart of The Bell Curve, which is that intelligence is what determines people’s economic fate. And here’s the kicker: according to Murray and Herrnstein, Black people were statistically more likely to fall on the low end of the IQ spectrum
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government gave them. Welfare and affirmative action would destroy America, Murray and Herrnstein claimed, because such programs made it easier for the “dull” to survive. The authors concluded with what they considered a terrifying scenario. Poor people were breeding in enormous numbers, they wrote, thanks to unwed mothers. Soon, The Bell Curve warned, the nation would
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by experts, receiving a sharp rejoinder from the American Psychological Association7 and countless debunkings from political scientists,8 it nevertheless resonated with Americans. The Bell Curve sold two hundred thousand copies in its first month of publication.9 Charles Murray made the rounds on national TV and radio programs to discuss his ideas. Debates over the book
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Murray’s research. The Bell Curve was a gift to conservative policymakers, who used it to attack affirmative action programs. Pat Buchanan, a conservative adviser to Reagan who championed the idea of “culture war” in a 1992 speech, had been arguing against affirmative action programs since the 1970s by citing Herrnstein’s early research
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.11 Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who became one of Trump’s main allies in Silicon Valley, mentioned The Bell Curve in a 1996 commentary on why affirmative action had failed.12 Armed with Herrnstein and Murray’s research, these powerful men helped persuade Americans to gut affirmative action. In 1996, Californians voted to
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end affirmative action programs in governmental institutions including higher education, and Texas followed suit;13 in 2023, a Supreme Court ruling banned these programs nationwide. Even three decades after its publication, The Bell Curve is
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that this salvo in the culture wars benefited from techniques used for psychological war. First, The Bell Curve cast Black people as second-class “others” by proposing a Jim Crow law of intelligence. According to the experts, Murray and Herrnstein suggested, Black people’s struggles were caused not by systemic racism but instead by their
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of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.”17 The Bell Curve’s data about higher IQs being correlated with higher wages gave
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scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. The Bell Curve provided absolutely no evidence that high IQ causes wealth. This supposedly scientific book was a weapon, deploying the half-truths and outright fabulations of a psyop to argue that Black people and the poor were America’s true enemies. The seductions of
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Idiocracy, where Americans have become dim-witted slackers led by a Black president.18 To persuade their readers, Murray and Herrnstein swaddled these lies in false rationality, making their opinions look like facts. The Bell Curve’s premise depends on the existence of a reliable way to measure intelligence, but there is no such thing
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deeply flawed, they carried on using it to buttress their argument. Like a classic psyops product, The Bell Curve was intentionally misleading. It was designed to persuade Americans that eugenics was actually a pretty rational idea. Murray and Herrnstein pulled a lot of their scientific evidence from studies published in Mankind Quarterly, a journal founded
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in 1960 by a group of segregationists and bankrolled by the Pioneer Fund, a group known for funding proponents of eugenics.25 Perhaps not surprisingly, The Bell Curve begins with a celebration of
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would have been “complete outsiders,” Saini explained. The eugenicists who founded Mankind Quarterly “were criticized for the controversial things they said.” Herrnstein and Murray successfully revived race science with The Bell Curve. Since then, ideas borrowed from eugenics have gradually become acceptable again, especially among pundits. Former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson evoked it
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use against anyone who disagrees. On the internet, this weapon is often called tone policing. Eugenicists accuse critics of being emotional and irrational, especially if those critics come from one of the groups deemed inferior. The Bell Curve adds additional artillery to this psyop, since the entire point of the book is that Black
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his data was “social science pornography.”28 He wasn’t wrong. Like most pornography, The Bell Curve was long on feels and short on facts. And there was one particular fact that Murray and Herrnstein couldn’t handwave away. When they compared Black and white people with similar intelligence scores, the substantial difference in economic outcomes between the
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their first husbands. Murray and Herrnstein argued that “ethnic differences”31 in MCV scores explained why Black and Brown people did not succeed even if they had high IQs. (Amusingly, Murray himself had a low MCV score: he was married to his second wife at the time The Bell Curve came out, and his childhood friend described
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a dumbed-down future America. In The Bell Curve, “low intelligence” people can’t compete for jobs with their cognitive superiors. Instead of working, they languish in prisons, do drugs, and have children out of wedlock. Though they were describing the future of poor people generally, Murray and Herrnstein make sure to let readers know that
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nonfiction Brave New World misrepresented by its authors and their allies as disinterested scholarship.”35 It’s also a completely made-up story with a goal my PSYOP instructor Han Solo drummed into my head: it is intended to change Americans’ behavior. The Bell Curve concluded with a series of policy recommendations based
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more like themselves. “White supremacy is a psyop” UC Berkeley English professor emeritus Ishmael Reed, an Afrofuturist author and critic, told me what it was like in the mid-1990s when people discussed The Bell Curve as if it were some kind of scientific breakthrough. He felt like the only reasonable response was laughter
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today’s political terms, a “woke mind virus.” He also reminded his readers that pundits like Herrnstein and Murray were part of a whole industry devoted to swaying public opinion for money. In 1995, he snarked about The Bell Curve in the Washington Post, writing that “racism is . . . one of the fastest growth industries
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himself could occasionally land a great zinger in a national newspaper but rarely had the reach of a television pundit. The Bell Curve proposes what is essentially a Jim Crow law of the mind, and there is a long history of Black resistance to it. This psyop was most effective against white people, changing
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the warriors who produced it have the bully pulpit of the media and serve in Congress. The Bell Curve’s influence has continued to grow in the twenty-first century. Charles Murray published a sequel to The Bell Curve in 2020 called Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. He’s inspired a new generation of “race realists
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culture war: it enters a kind of rhetorical pipeline that carries it far from the public stage where The Bell Curve was launched. At the end of this pipeline, the psyop shapes interpersonal relationships at work and even at home. Many members of SFWA fell for the psyop, too. Maybe they didn’t agree
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people who looked to the Amazon princess for guidance, truth, and a sense of hope. The mental hygiene psyop has the same built-in defense against criticism that the bell curve psyop does. Anyone who argued against Wertham was, by definition, mentally unfit—and therefore not trustworthy to advance an argument. Culture wars often produce
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Iqbal, Saima S., “Louis Agassiz, under a Microscope,” Harvard Crimson, March 18, 2021. 3. Fraser, Steven, ed., The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (Basic Books, 2008; originally published 1995). 4. Lemann, Nicholas, “The Bell Curve Flattened,” Slate, January 18, 1997. 5. For more on how to access the NLS data, especially what
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marriage meant strictly heterosexual unions. 7. Rushton, J. P., “Race, IQ, and the APA Report on The Bell Curve,” American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997): 69–70. 8. See, for example, Jacoby, Russell, and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (Times Books, 1998); and Fraser, The Bell Curve Wars. 9. Samuelson, Robert J., “ ‘Bell Curve’ Ballistics,” Washington Post
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2022. 14. Siegel, Eric, “The Real Problem with Charles Murray and ‘The Bell Curve,’ ” Voices (blog), Scientific American Blog Network, April 12, 2017. 15. See, for example, the Bell Curve debunker video from filmmaker Shaun, which has nearly three million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo. 16. Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), 100. 17. This is quoted in
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Rise of the West (Penguin, 2014). 41. Coop, Graham, Michael B. Eisen, Rasmus Nielsen, Molly Przeworski, and Noah Rosenberg, letter to the editor, New York Times, August 8, 2014. 42. Yglesias, Matthew, “The Bell Curve Is about Policy. And It’s Wrong,” Vox, April 10, 2018. 43. El-Mohtar, Amal, “Calling for the Expulsion of
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Americans Korean War brainwashing resistance, 115–17 segregation and, 101 voter suppression, xix, 74, 82, 89 See also Black intelligence culture wars; enslavement; racism Blackhawk, Ned, 38 Black intelligence culture wars, 100–106, 110–14 affirmative action and, 102 American right wing and, 102, 103, 105 The Bell Curve release, 102–3 Brown v. Board of
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray · 28 Jan 2020 · 741pp · 199,502 words
a fascinated observer of developments in genetics and neuroscience for years. I’m also at a point in my career when I’m immune to many of the penalties that a younger scholar would risk. That career includes the firestorm that followed the publication of The Bell Curve more than a quarter of a
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twenty-first century with figures such as Raymond Cattell, Nathan Brody, Hans Eysenck, John Loehlin, David Geary, Diane Halpern, Thomas Bouchard, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow. I should add that Richard Herrnstein and I took the same position in The Bell Curve. This does not mean that everyone accepts that the question has been settled. A lively
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of the genetic lottery plus character, determination, hard work, and idiosyncratic circumstances. The sociological, economic, and psychometric evidence for it has been available since at least the 1980s and on some topics for longer. That’s why a quarter of a century ago, Richard Herrnstein and I were able to write a book of 800-plus
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pages with the subtitle “Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.”1 The book’s main title was The Bell Curve. In many ways, it documents the ways in which a segment
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the time Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve in 1994. At that time, we used a wide range for characterizing heritability, saying that it was somewhere between 40 percent and 80 percent. Since then, the state of knowledge has advanced. Here are two findings for which there was some evidence before the publication of The Bell Curve and that
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a substantial genetic component. It is time to confront the question directly: To what extent is professional and economic success in life a function of characteristics that have a substantial genetic component? Proposition #9 extrapolates from a famous syllogism that Richard Herrnstein published in 1973: 1. If differences in mental abilities are inherited
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operant conditioning.11 Skinner was also convinced that you often didn’t need to study humans to understand humans—pigeons and rats would do. Or as one of his former students, Richard Herrnstein, answered, deadpan, when I asked him why behaviorists used pigeons for research: “Given the right reinforcement schedule, pigeons are indistinguishable
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so. Murray’s Conjecture Analogies have been a popular way to describe the relative roles of genes and the environment for 50 years. Richard Lewontin started it in 1970 with one that Richard Herrnstein and I adapted for The Bell Curve: All of the kernels in a strain of hybrid seed corn are genetically identical. But if two
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. On the proper dependent variable for assessing public policy: In Pursuit, chapters 1, 2, and 8. On valued places and the four wellsprings for human flourishing: In Pursuit, chapter 12; The Bell Curve, chapter 22; In Our Hands, chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11; Coming Apart, chapter 15. On the forces creating the new upper class
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: The Bell Curve, chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4; Coming Apart, chapters 1 and 2. On the segregation of the new upper class: The Bell Curve
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life difficult for ordinary Americans: Losing Ground, chapters 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 14; In Pursuit, chapters 5 and 12; The Bell Curve, chapters 21 and 22; Real Education, chapters 3 and 5; Coming
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culture, significantly cut off from mainstream American society. It is the same group, no longer emergent but having come to power, that Richard Herrnstein and I called the “cognitive elite” in The Bell Curve. The new upper class includes (though is not limited to) the people who have the leading roles in shaping the nation’s
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are able to find valued places. My definition of valued place is the same now as when Richard Herrnstein and I coined the term in The Bell Curve: “You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone.”35 The central valued places are located in four domains
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must still be hiding in there. My wife and editor, Catherine, who has featured in so many acknowledgments, initially tried to talk me out of writing Human Diversity. When I began work in the fall of 2016, the nastiness associated with the reaction to The Bell Curve was a distant memory. Did I really
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country, and so on. The mathematical procedures will yield coefficients for each of them, indicating again how much of a change in income can be anticipated for a given change in any particular variable, with all the others held constant. Adapted from The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Copyright
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© 1994 by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Reprinted with permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Trade Publishing Group. I have made a few minor changes to the original text, eliminating some material specific to issues in The Bell Curve and rewording a few
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parents in the text matches the way her parents were proud of her math talent and urged her to consider STEM fields. She listened attentively. She reached Harvard in the early 1990s while Richard Herrnstein and I were working on The Bell Curve. Herrnstein, who had become her friend, urged her to major in applied math. She listened
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deviations increases as parental SES rises. These statements are documented in The Bell Curve. Herrnstein and Murray (1994): 286–88. Given that I was a coauthor, it may be useful to draw on an independent and authoritative source. In the wake of the controversy over The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association assembled a Task Force on Intelligence consisting
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); Firkowska-Mankiewicz (2002); and Richards and Sacker (2003). 39. The Project Talent, Aberdeen Birth Cohort, and NCDP databases were part of the table here about IQ and personality factors. NLSY79. The analysis for educational attainment (n = 8,693) regressed highest grade completed on AFQT scores and the measure of parental SES used in The Bell Curve, which combined measures
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. 12. On a personal note, my coauthor on The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein, was a behavioral psychologist who succeeded B. F. Skinner as the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard. As you will find if you read The Bell Curve or Crime and Human Nature, coauthored with James Q. Wilson, Herrnstein was a behaviorist who did not go off
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(2011); for KIPP, see Angrist, Dynarski, Kane et al. (2012); for Success Academy, see Unterman (2017). 35. Herrnstein and Murray (1994): 535. The subsequent discussion draws directly from the concluding pages of The Bell Curve. 36. Murray (2006). 37. Walter Lippmann, “The Great Confusion,” New Republic, January 3, 1923: 46. Appendix 2: Sexual Dimorphism in
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Brain: How Parallels in Sex Differences Across Domains Are Shaped by the Locus Coeruleus and Catecholamine Systems.” Progress in Neurobiology. Advance online publication. Herrnstein, Richard J. 1973. I.Q. in the Meritocracy. Boston: Little, Brown. Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. 1996 ed. New York: Free Press. Hershkovitz, Israel, Gerhard W
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: Effects of Parental Genotypes.” Science 359 (6374): 424. Korenman, Sanders, and David Neumark. 1991. “Does Marriage Really Make Men More Productive?” Journal of Human Resources 26 (2): 282–307. Korenman, Sanders, and Christopher Winship. 2000. “A Reanalysis of the Bell Curve: Intelligence, Family Background, and Schooling.” In Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, edited by Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles
Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith · 26 Jun 2019 · 370pp · 107,983 words
a shape that, particularly to an eighteenth-century eye, looks like a bell, hence it’s more common name, the Bell Curve. The Bell Curve proved so mathematically convenient that its use spread far beyond factories and patient surveys, to the point where it began to be considered a virtual natural law, particularly once maths prodigy
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Carl Friederich Gauss determined that a distribution of scientific measurement errors was given by N(z), the Bell Curve. This is the reason for the distributions
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the planet’s position. Given this limited and surely error-prone data, the rest of the scientific community attempted to predict where the planet might emerge again based on this data with no success. That was until young Gauss innovated by using the Bell Curve to model the distribution of errors in Piazzi
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making the measurement better. The distribution of these tiny atomic errors is of course binomial, and the best approximation of a large number of such errors is then given by the Bell Curve. Gauss’s new use of the Bell Curve was an inspired idea, but it must be evaluated in the context of Galileo’s critical
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used to illuminate truths in other complex physical, social and economic phenomena in the increasingly complex industrial world of the late eighteenth century? It was Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) who, in 1785, found a way to broaden the application of the Bell Curve with the publication of his Central Limit Theorem (CLT
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process like this, what can we conclude about the results, and their relationship to some ‘true’ approval rating? What the CLT tells us is that the distribution of the average approval ratings from these repeated polls will be distributed by the Bell Curve, and that the centre of that curve will be the average approval
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rating of all the people of America. CLT says the Bell Curve turns up in sampling regardless of the distribution of the thing being sampled. Even if
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Curve around the average of all the voters. The more people you poll, the easier it is to see that average in the Bell Curve. But what the CLT actually tells us
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advanced the use of probability theory from a way of explaining games of chance and astronomical calculations, to a way of describing all complex phenomena in the world. The universal faith in the Bell Curve as a natural law gave scientists confidence in the statistics that it generated. However, there is another way
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to view the Bell Curve: not as a natural law, but as an artefact of trying to see complex and uncertain phenomena through the limiting lens of sampling
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and statistics. The CLT does not prove that everything follows a Bell Curve; it
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to understand things that you can’t observe, you will always get a Bell Curve. That’s all. Despite this reality, faith in CLT and the Bell Curve still dominates in statistical modelling of all sorts of things today from presidential approval ratings to reoffending rates for criminals to educational success or failure
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Sciences. Quetelet indirectly used the idea of CLT in his measurements of Scottish soldiers and his proof of an ideal man. Just like Gravesande, he concluded that if the Bell Curve was a natural law then the deviations he saw from the average man indicated natural variation around an ideal. This is an
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astoundingly dangerous conclusion, and implicit in it is a denial of diversity and difference and an apparently scientifically sanctioned method of discrimination. In reality, the calculations presented by Quetelet poorly match the Bell Curve, and the chest-size data he used was badly extracted from the 1817 Edinburgh
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eventually lead evolutionary utopians to certain inevitable and dangerous conclusions, in terms of how society should act politically. If ‘fit’ was not explicitly ‘better’, then it was probably a good idea to attempt to make it so, by any means necessary. By coupling the Bell Curve with evolutionary theory, the now measurable characteristics
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questions asked in a standard test), it’s unsurprising that it results in a Bell Curve. The average IQ is assumed to be 100, and the Bell Curve generated by a century of IQ testing indicates approximately two-thirds of the population scores between IQ 85
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, Galton absolutely required Quetelet’s variational reasoning, which said that the measurements of human factors must be viewed statistically, through the lens of probability, and the Bell Curve. Like Quetelet’s inference that variation from his ideal soldier was a deformity, Galton reasoned that a child’s intellect was subject to ‘deformity by
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Galton reasoned, based on Quetelet’s ideas, that the quantitative factor of ‘intelligence’ had to be distributed amongst these children according to the Bell Curve. Thus, it was Galton that gave the Bell Curve its third common-usage name. He called it ‘the Normal Distribution’.6 This new name has powerful connotations. No longer is data
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the idea that eugenics was a fair and scientific way to advance human development, and was part of an august progression of liberal philosophical ideas, from Godwin’s theory of necessity, through the social utopianism of Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab to the belief that the Bell Curve reflects a natural law of normal
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truth is made even stronger by the assumption that the Bell Curve is a natural law, rather than a ubiquitous outcome of reducing underlying complex systems. Tests, of course, are sampling and averaging procedures of complex underlying phenomena (human knowledge, intelligence, plus social and economic factors, and much more). They are much like polls, where
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simple questions mask complex opinions. The implications of the CLT are that a complex underlying phenomenon when seen through a lens of statistics will give a Bell Curve, regardless of the real dynamics of the underlying phenomenon. The Bell Curve is
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an artefact of using statistics to probe things about which we are uncertain, not necessarily an artefact of the thing itself. Thus, tests generate Bell Curves, via the CLT, particularly when the underlying phenomenon being tested is complex, and the test is imprecisely measuring
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latent factor and the IQ test could quantify it, then PCA (under some questionable assumptions) provided the statistical ‘proof’. Goddard’s work translated this quantity into atoms of a new representation of human intelligence, which we can visualize as rules: If 0 < × < 25 then idiot (with probability given by the Bell Curve) If
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25 < × < 50 T then imbecile (with probability given by the Bell Curve) If 50 < × < 70 then moron (with probability given by the Bell Curve) If 70 < × < 130 then normal (with probability given by the Bell Curve) If 130 < × < infinity then gifted (with probability given by the Bell Curve) This is precisely how big data
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anti-immigration efforts, as well as financing academic publishing and research in anthropology and sociology, most of which is related to the issue of race. Perhaps the best-known work based on Pioneer Fund supported research was the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a book that has received
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renewed endorsement with the rise of the alt-right movement, and in turn revived Spearman’s century-old ideas of the g factor. In the book, psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray used meta-analysis (effectively analyses
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a positive, survey-based ‘middle-class values index’) and they, too, controversially conclude that statistically white Americans have substantially higher IQs than African-Americans, and that this difference is better explained by race than by socio-economic status. Criticisms of The Bell Curve’s methodologies and intent are still hotly debated today, particularly given the
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curve is the fat centre of the ball, and the skinny parts (what are called the ‘tails’ of the Bell Curve) are its pointy tips. What GPC is doing in this application is warping the Bell Curve to put its opposite (low-probability and high-probability) tails over the computerizable and non-computerizable jobs. But to do this
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Bell Curve (that mis-shaped rugby ball) that the algorithm has ‘learned’. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the Bell Curve is somehow a natural distribution from which one can (and should) determine such probabilities. Moreover, the fact is that the resulting numbers aren’t really probabilities under any definition that
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here Hawking, Stephen, here Hawthorne, Nathaniel, here Hayek, Frederich, here, here, here, here, here, here Health Canada, here Hebb, Donald O., here Herbst, Wolfgang, here Herrnstein, Richard J., here heuristic uncertainty factors, here, here, here, here, here Hilbert, David, here, here Hinton, Geoffrey, here, here Hippocrates, here Hofstadter, Douglas, here Holland, John
The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brain's Potential
by David Adam · 6 Feb 2018 · 258pp · 79,503 words
sit on the fence. And commentators like Watson who leap off the fence and land firmly on one side show they aren’t neutral and objective. The controversy rumbles along and still flares from time to time, most prominently in a 1994 book called The Bell Curve, in which psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray discussed racial differences in
The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan · 16 Jan 2018 · 636pp · 140,406 words
19 (7): 455–65. Cullen, Francis, Paul Gendreau, G. Jarjoura, and John Wright. 1997. “Crime and the Bell Curve: Lessons from Intelligent Criminology.” Crime and Delinquency 43 (4): 387–411. Cutler, David, and Adriana Lleras-Muney. 2008. “Education and Health: Evaluating Theories and Evidence.” In Making Americans Healthier: Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy, edited by James House, Robert
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35 (4): 879–905. Fischer, Claude, Michael Hout, Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Samuel Lucas, Ann Swidler, Kim Voss, and Lawrence Bobo. 1996. Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Flores-Lagunes, Alfonso, and Audrey Light. 2010. “Interpreting Degree Effects in the Returns to Education.” Journal of Human Resources 45 (2
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Stability in the United States.” Journal of Family Issues 23 (3): 392–409. Heaton, Tim, and Ashley Blake. 1999. “Gender Differences in Determinants of Marital Disruption.” Journal of Family Issues 20 (1): 25–45. Heckman, James. 1995. “Lessons from the Bell Curve.” Journal of Political Economy 103 (5): 1091–120. Heckman, James, John Humphries
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Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers.” Federal Sentencing Reporter 25 (1): 68–80. Hérault, Nicolas, and Rezida Zakirova. 2015. “Returns to Education: Accounting for Enrolment and Completion Effects.” Education Economics 23 (1): 84–100. Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press. Hersch, Joni. 1991. “Equal Employment Opportunity
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between Education and Earnings: The External-Test-Not-Content Hypothesis (ETNC).” Higher Education 3 (1): 43–58. Williams, Robert. 2013. “Overview of the Flynn Effect.” Intelligence 41 (6): 753–64. Winship, Christopher, and Sanders Korenman. 1997. “Does Staying in School Make You Smarter? The Effect of Education on IQ in The Bell Curve.” In Intelligence
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, 297n36 Head Start, 62 health: impact of education on, 136–39, 163; social return to education and, 171–72 Heaton, Tim, 334n53 Heckman, James, 70, 296n23, 302n8, 328n23, 336n11 Heil, Scott, 321n88 Heisz, Andrew, 312n49 Herrnstein, Richard, 291–92, 336n9 Hersch, Joni, 306n88 Heywood, John, 311n45 Higher Education Research Institute, 126, 293
The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden · 20 Sep 2021 · 375pp · 102,166 words
achieve it? To begin to convey how we can reimagine the relationship between genetics and egalitarianism, it will help here to describe where I diverge from a book in the Galtonian tradition—The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.45 The title of The Bell Curve is a nod to Galton’s statistical preoccupation, the observation that plotting the population
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contemporary educational systems and labor markets, that twin studies tell us something meaningful about the genetic causes of individual differences between people, and that intelligence is heritable (a terribly misunderstood concept that I will explain in detail in chapter 6). Given these similarities, comparisons between this book and The Bell Curve, along with Herrnstein’s earlier 1973
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this book. Here, I will argue that the science of human individual differences is entirely compatible with a full-throated egalitarianism. The final section of The Bell Curve flirts with the idea that genetics could be used to bolster egalitarian arguments for greater economic equality: “Why should [someone] be penalized in his income
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economic disadvantages simply because they happened to inherit a particular combination of DNA, and (2) that society should be organized so that it benefits the least advantaged members of society. It’s disorienting to come across these ideas in The Bell Curve, because they sound like they come straight out of a very different
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that led to him to advocate for a more equal society. The Bell Curve, with its fleeting reference to Rawlsian ideas, pointed faintly at a new way of talking about genetics and social equality. But after their tantalizing half-page dalliance with egalitarianism, Herrnstein and Murray retreat to a profound inegalitarianism, complaining that “it has become
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beads take at the bottom of a quincunx, with most of them stacked up around the center, and progressively fewer beads as you move from the center to the left or right tail, is the bell curve. The bell curve describes the shape of how many different human characteristics are distributed. If I, for instance, measured the
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” rather than “race.”7 This distinction between ancestry and race is sometimes dismissed as a bit of sophistry that allow scientists to get away with talking about biological difference between races without actually using the r-word. For instance, in a podcast interview, Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, tossed off the comment that “The
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no control, caused differences between people in things we care about—differences in education and income and well-being and health—in the societies in which we actually live.10 The Case of the Missing Heritability Especially in the wake of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, the assumptions of twin studies have come under close scrutiny
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sign that society is treating individuals qua individuals, such that each person’s unique genetically influenced talents and predispositions shine forth and affect their life outcomes. In the 1970s, Richard Herrnstein, in his book IQ in the Meritocracy, noted that high heritability was a positive sign that society had eliminated some environmental inequalities: “Eliminating
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Are (MIT Press, 2018). 44. Hawes Spencer and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “White Nationalists March on University of Virginia,” The New York Times, A12, August 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/us/white-nationalists-rally-charlottesville-virginia.html. 45. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free
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Press, 1994). 46. Richard J. Herrnstein, I.Q. in the Meritocracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). 47. Elizabeth S. Anderson, “What Is the Point of
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(June 1950): 351–57. 29. Arthur Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?,” Harvard Educational Review 39, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 1–123, https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.39.1.l3u15956627424k7. 30. . Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). 31. John Novembre
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. Block. 15. Stephen J. Ceci and Paul B. Papierno, “The Rhetoric and Reality of Gap Closing: When the ‘Have-Nots’ Gain but the ‘Haves’ Gain Even More,” American Psychologist 60, no. 2 (2005): 149–60, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.60.2.149. 16. Richard J. Herrnstein, I.Q. in the Meritocracy
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, 195–196; equality versus equity and, 159–164; GWAS and, 123–125; objections to, 121–123; phenotypes and, 131–132; red-headed children and, 131–136; of seven domains of inequality, 117–121; twin studies of, 117–121; when the worst environments produce the most equal outcomes, 156–159 Herrnstein, Richard, 16–17, 89, 123, 159
Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart · 7 Sep 2020 · 463pp · 115,103 words
something that had widespread bipartisan support in the US to reduce race and class inequality—and he went further and suggested that IQ differences between races might come down to genetic factors. A few years later the late American psychologist Richard Herrnstein argued that IQ differences between classes might be genetic in origin too
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The élite is on the way to becoming hereditary; the principles of heredity and merit are coming together.”23 This is in fact what psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray did argue about the American experience in their controversial book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). They said that the correlation between intelligence
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considerable range, between 95 and 157… And when you compare the individuals’ success in those professions, those different scores can, at the very most, account for around 29 percent of the variance in performance, as measured by managers’ ratings.”35 But the most convincing recent challenge to the Bell Curve analysis of a self
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(They argue that is true of Sweden too.) The Conley and Fletcher findings suggest that there is less genetic stickiness between generations than assumed in the Bell Curve. So the question of how fairly selected for and how fluid the cognitive class is remains messy and complex. Nevertheless, a combination of genetic inheritance, parental support of
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in Europe and North America: A Report Supported by the Sutton Trust, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics/Sutton Trust (2005). 22 Peter Saunders, Social Mobility Myths (London: Civitas, 2010), 69. 23 Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1958). 24 Charles Murray, “The Bell Curve Explained: Part
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1, the Emergence of a Cognitive Elite,”, American Enterprise Institute, May 12, 2017, https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/the-bell-curve-explained-part-1-the-emergence-of-a-cognitive-elite/. 25 For summary, see Toby Young
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and, 230 teaching, 151, 218, 226, 228, 232, 294 time-use data on, 242–43, 246–47 upgrading, 291–95 work satisfaction and, 209–11 Heath, Oliver, 171 Held, Virginia, The Ethics of Care, 231 Heraclitus, 185 hereditary cognitive elite (M. Young), 77 hereditary meritocracy, 6–9, 48, 77, 115, 118, 156 Herrnstein, Richard
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, 73 The Bell Curve (with Murray), 78, 83 Hertz, Tom, 82 Heterodox Academy
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276 mindset (Dweck), 60, 67 Mirabeau, 153, 154 moral leadership, Head (cognitive) work and, 4, 11, 19, 55 Morant, Robert, 46 Morris, Estelle, 121n motivated reasoning, 20 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 58 multiple intelligences, 67 Murray, Charles, 55, 71, 221 The Bell Curve (with Herrnstein), 78, 83 Coming Apart, 7, 52, 80, 81, 180, 279–80 Musk, Elon
Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve · 9 Jul 2024
’s like, Oh are you just angry? Do you hate your fucking dad? Did some Black kid—was he mean to you? And I’m like, No, I just read The Bell Curve, bro. I got into it because of charts.” (A few weeks later, Heimbach told me that he did, in fact, hate
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took it home. Now he could spend all the time he wanted online. What he found was the controversy over a new book called The Bell Curve. It was 1994, and the book had just been published. His impression of the conversation was something like This is too scandalous. But my god, it’s
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so well sourced. It can’t be true. And it can’t be not true. What are we gonna do? It’s gonna ruin everything. He thought, I have to get this book. The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, argues that IQ is mostly hereditary, and immutable, and that many social ills are caused by low IQ
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public aid to poor families, so less intelligent people will have fewer kids, and stop bringing down the net IQ of the nation. Parrott asked his parents to buy him a copy of The Bell Curve, and they did. He cherished it. It was confirmation, from the Ivy League–certified political elite, that IQ was
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teenager in a wealthy bedroom community outside Washington, D.C. Amazon suggested he “might be interested in” lots of other things, like The Bell Curve and Mein Kampf. He eventually found and read a book Parrott wrote about immigration, Hoosier Nation. In the old days it had been hard to get your hands on fascist
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’s annual “Kistler Prize,” a $100,000 award for people who contributed “to the understanding of the connection between human heredity and human society.” In 2011, the honoree was Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve. He would be the last one. Spencer brought Kouprianova. She knew her husband wasn’t there to celebrate Murray. He
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were talking about, how they were interpreting the Trump campaign. There was endless DIY racist propaganda. They posted the same charts over and over again, from The Bell Curve, or crime statistics collected by white nationalists, and sometimes compiled them into massive collages. The message was always the same: White people evolved to be smarter
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.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/31/us/document-Report-by-Loftin.html; United States v. Dylann Roof, 2016. What he found was the controversy: Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press, 1996). The authors claim: Evans, Gavin. “The Unwelcome Revival of ‘Race Science.’ ” The Guardian, March 2, 2018
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. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science. What is telling: Yglesias, Matthew. “The Bell Curve Isn’t about Science, It’s
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Heimbach, Matthew, 33–34, 35, 38–39, 45 aesthetic of, 131 alt-right and, 131 anger at his father, 52, 57 anticapitalism of, 71 anti-Semitism of, 59 arrest and jailing of, 205 autism spectrum disorder and, 47–48, 49, 52, 72 The Bell Curve and, 52, 57 breach with his family, 58–59 “Charlottesville 1.0
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his past ideas, 240 ruining of his life, 52, 53 Sines v. Kessler lawsuit and, 198, 207 Spencer and, 91 Washington Post story, 58 the “white dissident right” and, 68 white nationalism and, 58, 69, 70 white power events and, 75 Herrnstein, RichardThe Bell Curve, 52, 53–54, 57 Heyer, Heather, 184, 198, 199 Hitler, Adolf
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–39 homosexuality rumors about members, 36 Identity Evropa and, 35 impossibility of quitting, 38 mass anonymity and, 38 prepubescent mindset, 43 Reeve becomes a meme for, 36–37 Schoep and, 33–34, 39–43 Munchausen’s syndrome, 66–67 Murray, Charles, 94–95, 127, 163 The Bell Curve, 52, 53–54, 57 review of Kistler’s Human/Nature
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blog, 63, 65, 76 Parrott, Matt, 33 aesthetic of, 131 alt-right and, 129, 131, 142, 143 anti-Semitism and, 73, 154 autism spectrum disorder and, 47, 49, 51, 52, 72 background and family, 53–57 The Bell Curve’s influence on, 53 blackpilling of his politics, 63 changing of his worldview, 54–55 Charlottesville federal lawsuit
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in government and, 3, 215, 218, 229 Trump and, 218 Trump supporters and, 229 Watkinses and, 218 QAnon Anonymous podcast, 215–16 Quinn, Zoe, 103 R racismalt-right and, 85, 86, 89, 90, 100, 141, 146, 149, 163, 169, 171, 172 alt-right internet forums and, 39 amateur race scientists’ theories and, 126 The Bell Curve and, 54 Cantwell and, 162–64
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
by Adam Becker · 14 Jun 2025 · 381pp · 119,533 words
who spent much of his career claiming that IQ tests proved there was a persistent and inborn difference in intelligence between Black and white Americans. Jensen’s research, in turn, was cited extensively in the 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, also claiming that there was an innate difference in intelligence between different races. Reviewing
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The Bell Curve in the New Yorker, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the book suffered from “pervasive disingenuousness. The authors omit facts,
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer · 1 Jan 1997 · 404pp · 134,430 words
exposing. Yet praise it I must, for this is a damned entertaining and provocative book." Praise from Brutus indeed, yet Cochrane, along with other reviewers and numerous correspondents (some good friends), have taken me to task for my chapter on The Bell Curve (15). Some accused me of indulging in ad hominem assaults in my
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. So, the question is, how can one explore this interesting and (I think) important aspect of science without being accused of the ad hominem attack? In the end, however, this chapter is about race, not IQ, nor Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's controversial book The Bell Curve. The subject is similar to what is known as the "demarcation
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which a handful of people surrounded me and asked for an explanation of what I meant by "a normal distribution around an average of 5." On a piece of scrap paper, I drew a crude version of the normal frequency curve, more commonly known as the bell curve (see figure 6). I explained that
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) filled with graphs, charts, curves, and three hundred pages of appendices, notes, and references, all on the obscure topic of psychometrics? Because one of those curves illustrates a fifteen-point difference in IQ scores between white and black Americans. In America, nothing sells like racial controversy. The Bell Curve (1994), by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, generated a furor among scientists
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, intellectuals, and activists throughout the country that continues to this day—the Bell Curve Wars, as one debunking book is titled. The arguments in The Bell Curve are not novel, in our time or
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, Rushton believes that blacks have earlier maturation rates, higher impulsivity and aggressiveness, less mental health and law abidingness, more permissive attitudes and greater frequency of intercourse, and larger male genitalia (inversely proportional to IQ, the data for which he collected through condom distributors). In both The Bell Curve and Rushton's article, the Pioneer Fund is acknowledged. This
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walls, but nature certainly has not, as Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza, demonstrate in The History and Geography of Human Genes, lauded by Time magazine as the study that "flattens The Bell Curve" (appropriate, since it weighs in at eight pounds and runs 1,032 pages). In this book, the authors
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Security Service, 1941-1943. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Herman, J. 1981. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Herrnstein, R. J., and C. Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press. Hilberg, R. 1961. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle. ......... 1994. Transcript
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, N. 1980. German Reparations: A History of the Negotiations. Trans. D. Alon. Jerusalem: Hebrew University/Magnes Press. Sarich, V. 1995. In Defense of The Bell Curve: The Reality of Race and the Importance of Human Differences. Skeptic 3, no. 4:84-93. Sarton, G. 1936. The Study of the History of Science. Cambridge, Mass
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