That may be true, but "The Bell Curve" is a pretty poor book, full of questionable use of data. I wrote a fairly detailed critique of it, back in the day, which is now lost to history, but the gist was, "Murry doesn't do a very good job of making his case regarding IQ and race."
For one, "race" is a very slippery concept, and as a social construction is so deeply correlated with other determinants of well-being in the US that any imputation that it is an independent causal factor is problematic at best. Murry doesn't do a great job of untangling these effects.
For two, as applied to populations, IQ isn't necessarily more than a measure of general well-being. Alternative measures of IQ correlate pretty well with the Stanford-Binet, but you know what else does? Grip strength. The strength of your hands correlates about as well with your standard IQ score as various alternative IQ measures. The most plausible explanation for this is that all these measures are metrics of well-being, not "general intelligence".
The very notion that "general intelligence" is a measurable property, like height, rather than a complex multi-variate phenomenon that cannot be unproblematically reduced to a single number is worth taking seriously.
Murray seems mostly unconcerned by all that, and insufficiently aggressive about looking for ways of challenging his own hypotheses.
He might describe himself that way, but he advocates for socially conservative values more often than libertarians do (see "Coming Apart"). He's at least a borderline case, like a Ron Paul. AEI is a right-wing think tank.
For one, "race" is a very slippery concept, and as a social construction is so deeply correlated with other determinants of well-being in the US that any imputation that it is an independent causal factor is problematic at best. Murry doesn't do a great job of untangling these effects.
For two, as applied to populations, IQ isn't necessarily more than a measure of general well-being. Alternative measures of IQ correlate pretty well with the Stanford-Binet, but you know what else does? Grip strength. The strength of your hands correlates about as well with your standard IQ score as various alternative IQ measures. The most plausible explanation for this is that all these measures are metrics of well-being, not "general intelligence".
The very notion that "general intelligence" is a measurable property, like height, rather than a complex multi-variate phenomenon that cannot be unproblematically reduced to a single number is worth taking seriously.
Murray seems mostly unconcerned by all that, and insufficiently aggressive about looking for ways of challenging his own hypotheses.