![]() Murrayism does harm on an ongoing basis, and, far from having been shut out of the discourse, it as at the heart of the ideological agenda that currently governs the United States. Murray’s influence has damaged the interests of millions of people. ![]() ![]() Social programs can and do improve lives. ![]() Diversity is demonstrably good for society and the economy, not the reverse. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. After a long slog through the book, Murray and Herrnstein arrive at their central point. To debate whether his ideas deserve to be part of the national debate is pointless, since the fact is that they are already central to it. Tom Edsall featured it in a column (he says it raises “issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy”), and David Brooks recommended it twice, lauding the “incredible data,” along with the analysis. The New York Times reviewed Coming Apart twice. He regularly publishes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. In 2016, he won the Bradley Prize, a prestigious conservative award that carries a $250,000 stipend. He’s ensconced at the center of the conservative policy establishment as an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is one of the most successful authors of policy-relevant nonfiction working in America today. What’s more, despite the mythmaking around Murray, nobody has silenced or stymied him. And the four books all reach the conclusion that, roughly speaking, we should do as little as is politically possible. Like several of Murray’s other books, including Losing Ground, In Our Hands, and Coming Apart, the basic subject of The Bell Curve is what should be done to help the disadvantaged in America. The Bell Curve - co-authored with Richard Herrnstein - is, after all, not a work of scientific research but rather a political book written by one of the most prominent conservative policy entrepreneurs in America as part of a larger ideological project. And Harris, for his part, sees himself as exclusively defending The Bell Curve’s empirical claims about IQ, which is fine, but it’s important to consider Murray’s work with a view toward actual American public policy, which has been deeply influenced by Murray over the years, and which Donald Trump is looking to take in an even more Murray-esque direction. Harris and Klein and Sullivan have, at this point, spilled plenty of words limning their disagreements. Andrew Sullivan, the punditocracy’s original champion of Murray’s thinking on genetics, decided to jump in as well. Charles Murray and his decades-old work on IQ and race, published in his 1994 book The Bell Curve, is back in the news because of a mini feud between “new atheist” author and podcaster Sam Harris and Vox’s own Ezra Klein.
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