The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

The subtitle is "Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life." Although you would not glean as much from the vicious attacks that have been leveled against this book since its publishing, the major thesis is that intelligence is highly correlated with success in America. This applies not only to financial success but also educational success, marital success, and happiness in general.

This is only a commonsense observation. People who can figure out how to deal with life's problems are happier. As I write this I am having a fight with Social Security to receive my pension and a fight with the bank to get a deposit credited to my account. Fighting this kind of bureaucratic battle takes intelligence. People without the ability to argue their case, write a letter, and call their Congressman lose out. This same kind of intelligence, needless to say, is valuable to employers and leads to success at work.

One of the observations is that as American society has become more mobile, like kinds of people tend to group together. There are enclaves of high income, highly intelligent people in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington DC. Lesser enclaves exist in the three cities area of North Carolina, Austin Texas, Madison Wisconsin and other university towns. More than that, the upper strata congregate very predictably in certain neighborhoods, comfortably separated from the minorities and other hoi polloi in their neighborhoods.

This results in what the authors call "cognitive stratification." Young, mobile and affluent people seek each other's company and marry each other. The society is naturally separating itself by intelligence. A topic that Murray in particular addresses elsewhere is that even though the cognitive elite have the wherewithal to raise families, they don't. Those that don't, do. The result is that the world is getting dumber, summed up quite well in Richard Lynn's Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations.

The discussion of race which has made this book infamous does no more than reiterate what psychometricians have consistently discovered since intelligence first started to be measured a century ago. Black Americans, on average, score one standard deviation lower on IQ tests than whites: averages of 85 versus 100. What they also find, but which does not excite controversy, is that Ashkenazi Jews average 115, Americans of Northeast Asian descent average about 107, American Indians average about 90, and Hispanic Americans about the same.

It is worth a paragraph to describe what intelligence is. Intelligence tests measure the ability to cope in a modern society. They are designed to be independent of culture. Some of them are even independent of language. They produce highly reproducible results – there are a wide range of intelligence tests available, and all of them will yield pretty much the same results for a given individual.

In practical terms, a one standard deviation difference in population averages means that only one person in six in the lower population has an intelligence at or exceeding the average of the higher group. Only one white person in six is as smart as the average Ashkenazi Jew, and only one black and six is as intelligent as the average white. The bell curve explicitly predicts that there will be extraordinarily smart, and extraordinarily dumb people in every population. This is only common sense – we see exceptional Blacks such as Paul Robison, Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell who far exceed almost all of their white peers. On the other hand, you run across some dumb Jews. But not very many.

Intelligence is highly correlated with success in school, income, health and happiness. This deserves a side note on statistics. A high correlation in the social sciences is not extraordinarily high. In round numbers, intelligence explains about 25% of the difference in levels of success. Other factors, such as personality, good looks, a stable family, being born rich, and so on certainly play a part. Statistically, however, none of these are as important as intelligence.

As I write this review in 2016 the question of intelligence is even more pertinent. Technology is eliminating routine jobs at an alarming pace. Typists and grocery check out clerks are becoming a thing of the past. The target now seems to be drivers, paralegals and others who do fairly routine work. It is simply easier and more accurate to have machines – often computers – do the work than to pay people. At the same time, as noted in Lynn's book above, the intelligence of nativeborn Americans is declining. The problem is compounded by the fact that America is bringing in large numbers of immigrants from the populations with lower intelligence.

Murray and Herrnstein did not offer a very optimistic conclusion or a realistic way out of this problem. There does not appear to be one. It has only gotten worse since their publication. In hindsight, the United States appears to be worse off for not having paid attention to this book when it came out, just as it did not pay attention to the Moynahan and Coleman reports in the 1960s. As things collapse as I write this, during the Clinton – Trump election campaign, it appears that the chickens are coming home to roost.

This book has been on my list for a long time. I can only applaud Drs Herrnstein and Murray in their meticulous and frankly brave effort in reporting on a very difficult topic in American discourse. Despite the fact they go through huge pains to present the data as scientifically and bias free as possible, the backlash they've received is truly sad. One of the things that struck me while reading this is how good a job they do of presenting difficult scientific discussions and statistics in a way that is surprisingly easy to understand and read for a lay person. I thought I'd be slogging through 500 pages and found the book was reading much easier and quicker than I would've thought possible. Kudos to them for making this accessible to everyone.

Everyone should read this book. It addresses so many important and sensitive topics that our country needs to address out in the open rather than hide away as taboo or "not worthy of discussion". Similarly, many people wonder why it's research that should be or needs to be done in the first place. As they lay out in the book very well, this could have great impact on all aspects of how we run government and education. This also provides ample evidence and studies to back findings and positions that are often difficult to discuss but should be set straight to the general public. The truth is always preferable to a comfortable fairy tale we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better.

I read this book after one of its authors, Charles Murray, was harassed by a mob at Middlebury College earlier this year. I wanted to understand what the fuss was about. What I found was an amazingly well researched, lucidly written and honest book that pulls no punches. It has changed my view of the world in a profound way. Truly outstanding.

An amazing book with much careful research and certainly interesting results. Sad that some of the topics are taboo in our media as there is much helpful insight for improved policy decisions. Lots of insight into many cultural problems. I especially found research on what works in a family and what doesn't. Definitely not a fast read but I found it quite clear despite my limited knowledge about statistics.

Re-rated 5 on second reading.

This is THE MOST IMPORTANT SOCIAL-SCIENCE BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY, BAR NONE. (That's the first time I've written an all-caps sentence in a review.)

This book is brilliance above brilliance. It is dry, academic writing (and only one section out of four deals with race and IQ, and only a small part of that section -- so much for all of the one-star reviews deriding it as if it were nothing else, and, even if it were, as if the truth must not be admitted, must not be spoken, if it fitteth the narrative not), but, in the best tradition of such dry academic writing, is packed with information on every page. The book is an eloquent defence of the truth of hereditarianism vis-a-vis intelligence, and conclusively demonstrates that America is stratifying -- has stratified -- and will be stratified in to a society of classes based not on descent-qua-descent, or aristocracy (as they should be), or the warrior ethic, but upon a largely-inherited intelligence, which is distributed extraordinarily unevenly across various 'population groups'.

To the egalitarian theorist, this book is heresy -- it thesis heresy -- its authors apostates who must be burned, for they give the lie to the inane notion that all men are equal in all ways.

One-quarter star deducted because the authors don't draw out the implications of their (proved) thesis, and, in a display of the cognitive dissonance engendered even amongst (especially amongst?) the learned by the dogmata of multiethnicism and the multicult and cult of diversity, show that they may not even be aware of such implications.