Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a long, data driven book about the role IQ plays in determining social outcomes. Intelligent people have better life outcomes and do better financially while low intelligence is associated with criminality, welfare dependency/unemployment/low income, illegitimacy, and so on. To me, this relationship is just common sense, yet it's an extremely unpopular idea among university social "scientists" who have been telling us for decades that these things are explained by "socioeconomic status" and the like. Murray and Herrnstein very convincingly argue that this "standard" view is wrong. The core of their research is based on data from the NLSY which is a massive survey that tracks youth over several decades. They show that intelligence is a strong predictor for many life outcomes, that is doesn't disappear with controls for socioeconomic status (which they measure as a composite of parental income, education, and occupation), that it's still there even within a fixed socioeconomic stratum/within races/within families, and that the patterns are extremely robust and not sensitive to statistical methodology. The first part of the book is the core idea of the book: the phenomenon of the emerging cognitive elite. Their claim is that over the 20th century intelligence testing has resulted in class being increasingly correlated with IQ. And they fear that assortative mating (smart people marrying other smart people) is resulting in a cognitively stratified society. (Murray's more recent book, Coming Apart, is pretty much a sequel that doesn't explicitly talk about IQ). This part was interesting, and I believe they are correct that there is cognitive stratification, although I'm not totally convinced that it's such a new phenomenon. The second part presents original research on how IQ correlates with school performance, unemployment, crime, and so on. This part is kind of slog, and again a lot of the results are just common sense, though I guess it's good someone went through the trouble to actually confirm these things empirically. The hippie dippy social "scientists" will insist these results are not causal, but there are very clear causal mechanisms for these results. In part three, they talk about race and IQ and other tricky social topics. This is the part that got people really worked up. The authors summarize the research on race and IQ. The main result is that in the US the average black score is only about 85 (relative to the white average of 100). To put this in perspective, imagine a person in the bottom 15% of whites. Half of blacks would be below this level. And at the elite levels (say 120+) blacks will be represented way below population weight (maybe 1% instead of 12%). The authors go on to debunk some commonly suggestions to explain away this data. In particular, I found their analysis of the issue of test bias to be ingenious. Ultimately, they conclude that the gap as measured reflects a true difference in cognitive ability and is not an artifact of testing. They conclude that some of the gap is probably genetic but say the exact causes haven't been definitively settled. Many liberals have been fiercely critical of this material, but their objections rarely go beyond the "point and sputter" stage. The authors also discuss "dysgenics" which eugenics in reverse. Many social policies unwittingly encourage higher fertility among the less intelligent while at the same time the most intelligent women have severely reduced fertility. They do discuss the Flynn effect briefly (in fact, I believe they coined the term "Flynn effect," but they seem to think it doesn't reflect real increases in g and that we are probably getting dumber in terms of real brain power). This issue probably deserved more thorough treatment since it seems to be the most substantive critique of the book, although I don't think it affects most of their In the last part, they discuss malleability of IQ and conclude that educational interventions designed to boost IQ generally don't work. And they discuss affirmative action in education and workforce. The edition I have has an afterward by Murray (Herrnstein passed away right around when the book was published, leaving Murray to take all the heat) and I found that to make for some of the most interesting reading. Liberals hate this book because they don't want to hear that their pet programs won't work or that racial disparities will never go away. But what's less appreciated is that this book also presents a challenge to the right. For a long time now, the right has been pushing the idea that as long as we have low taxes and minimal regulations that everyone can get by with hard work. The reality is that many people at the low end of the bell curve are being left behind economically and there's nothing they can do about it. Practically speaking, they will have to be supported at public expense in some fashion and conservatives don't acknowledge this reality.