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My father always said that anyone who lived through John F. Kennedy’s assassination remembers what they were doing at the precise moment the president was shot. This may well be true, but we also lucidly recall the circumstances of far lesser events such as the controversy surrounding the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The furor its conclusions caused is forever ingrained in my memory. At the time I was a psychology graduate student and found that most of my associates were familiar with the work but...

My father always said that anyone who lived through John F. Kennedy’s assassination remembers what they were doing at the precise moment the president was shot. This may well be true, but we also lucidly recall the circumstances of far lesser events such as the controversy surrounding the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The furor its conclusions caused is forever ingrained in my memory. At the time I was a psychology graduate student and found that most of my associates were familiar with the work but...

College is not all it's cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky majors and grade inflation have conspired to make the letters B.A. close to meaningless. But another problem with today's colleges is more insidious: They are no longer a good place for young people to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today's colleges are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity. Once upon a time college was a halfway house for practicing how to be a grown-up. Students couldn't count on the dean of students to make allowances for adolescent misbehavior. If they wanted to avoid getting...

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal: First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a...

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise. Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and...

Live feed [choose Windows or Real Player]: http://www.c-span.org/watch/index.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS2 Scheduling info: C-SPAN ScheduleHuman Accomplishment and The Black Swan

For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks. Waiting for the scores—one for verbal, one for math, and now one for writing, with a possible 800 on each—is painfully suspenseful. The exact scores are commonly remembered forever after. ... The pivotal analysis was published in 2001 by the University of California (UC), which requires all applicants to take both the SAT and achievement tests (three of them at the time the data were gathered: reading, mathematics, and a third of the student’s choosing)....

Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them. Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated. One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will...

Max Borders: Joining us today we have Charles Murray, author of the new book, "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State." Welcome, Charles. Charles Murray: Good morning. Borders: You've studied social safety nets for most of your career. What has the welfare entitlement state done to this country? Murray: Well you have effects on two levels. One involves the effects of social programs intended to help the poor and the disadvantaged. And that was the topic of a book I wrote 20 odd years ago called Losing Ground, which said essentially we made things worse for the...

Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez "Give the money to the people," Charles Murray argues in his new book, In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State. His plan would give a $10,000 yearly grant to all Americans, once 21, who are not in jail. Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, recently took questions about "The Plan" from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez. Kathryn Jean Lopez: First things first. $10,000? Who’s getting and when? And can I use it on my credit-card debt? Charles Murray: If you've reached your 21st birthday, are a United...

This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid rise from its current 9% of gross domestic product to the 28% of GDP that it will consume in 2050 if past growth rates continue. The problems facing transfer programs for the poor are less dramatic but, in the long term, no less daunting; the falling value of a strong back and the rising value of brains will eventually create a class society making a mockery of America's ideals...

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published "The Bell Curve" 11 years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of "The Bell Curve"--the role of intelligence in reshaping America's class structure--a chance to surface. The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about...

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface. The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about...

Has a fairer America also become an America with less social mobility? That is the uncomfortable question raised by John Parker's long American survey in The Economist last month. "A decline in social mobility would run counter to Americans' deepest beliefs about their country," Parker writes. "Unfortunately, that is what seems to be happening. Class is reappearing in a new form." This was the conclusion, as well, of a recent series of articles in The New York Times -- although, as the Times and Parker both note, polls show that Americans think their chances of moving up are better than...

U.S. Experience Shows Britain What to Do with Its Underclass – Get It off the Streets Underclass is an ugly word, and we live in an age that abhors ugly words, so it is good to hear that the Blair government has devised a cheerier label: Neet, an acronym for “not in education, employment or training”. Once a government has given a problem a name it must develop effective new strategies for dealing with it. That too is in train, The Sunday Times told us last week, replete with urgent cabinet meetings, study groups roaming about the country and even...

It is a 180 Min. Presentation that repeats at 12;00 Midnight tonight.

This month is the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve, the book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray about — to quote their own subtitle — "intelligence and class structure in American life." The book generated a huge controversy when it was published — so much so that, if you trawl around the Internet or bookstores, you can find first, second, and third derivatives (so to speak) of the book: books and articles about it, books and articles about those books and articles, and so on. Most of TBC consists of summaries of research in...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version April 22, 2004, 10:15 a.m. Ditching DiversityWill elites return to racism? By John Derbyshire October of this year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's book about the part played by human intelligence in determining individual destinies in our society, and the implications for the structure of that society. By way of advance preparation I have been re-reading my own copy of The Bell Curve — it's the 1996 paperback edition, with Murray's spirited afterword rebutting...

Take a break as you fill out your 1040 form, and play this game: suppose you could choose which government entities your tax dollars support — and in what proportion. Since it's a thought experiment, let's assume that local and state government functions are part of the list. What percentages will you assign to which departments, agencies and programs? Some people will split their taxes between the local police and national defense and leave it at that. Some will assign it all to the Environmental Protection Agency. Taxpayers from red states will choose differently from taxpayers from blue states. But...

AMERICAN academic Charles Murray is a real trooper. It doesn't matter how many people call him a racist, Nazi-esque brain-weigher. He keeps churning out books that aren't afraid to call a spade a spade and a nigger a nigger. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I just say nigger? How scientifically incorrect of me. What I meant to say was "biologically inferior". This was the thesis of The Bell Curve, which was co-written by Murray in 1994. In it he scientifically "proved" that African Americans were dumber than whites or Asians for genetic reasons. So what if the IQ testing he used...

The Practice Of Eminence: An Interview With Charles Murray By Bernard Chapin CLICK HERE Toogood Reports [Christmas Weekender, December 28, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST] URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ Dr. Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar in Culture and Freedom at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. AEI is one of the most prestigious research think tanks in the world and some of the most important names in conservatism can be found within their roster of scholars and fellows. Dr. Murray has published voluminously over the years and his books have had tremendous influence over the way ideas are discussed in...

The Delusion of Darwinian Natural Law Marc D. GuerraIn a short, inconspicuous paragraph in the conclusion to the first edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin speculates that "in the distant future … psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." One hundred and forty years later, Darwin's eerie prediction about the revolutionary effect of his work on human beings' self-understanding seems all too prophetic. After a century of dissemination, the once-novel theory of evolution is widely accepted as established scientific fact. Given the quasi-religious hold...

That American life has coarsened over the past several decades is not much argued, but the nature of the beast is still in question. Gertrude Himmelfarb sees it as a struggle between competing elites, in which the left originated a counterculture that the right failed to hold back. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has given us the phrase "defining deviancy down," to describe a process in which we change the meaning of moral to fit what we are doing anyway. I wish to add a third voice to the mix, that of the late historian Arnold Toynbee, who would find our recent...

Achievements and their causes Thomas Sowell (archive) November 4, 2003 In this age of specialization, experts are said to know more and more about less and less. There are undoubtedly specialists who can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about toenails or toads. However, the grand study of sweeping events has not died out entirely. What could be more sweeping than a book titled "Human Accomplishment"? It is Charles Murray's latest book and it is dynamite. The subtitle spells out how sweeping this book is: "The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to...

BURKITTSVILLE, Md. — "I do not set out to write controversial books," Charles Murray says with an easy laugh. "I don't know whether part of the attraction might be the forbidden," he adds earnestly. "If it is, it's not very much." It is tempting to believe him. Dressed in blue jeans, tennis shoes and a flannel shirt, his hands clasped confidently behind his head, he reclines in a swivel chair surrounded by books in his elegant study here overlooking a grove of weeping willows and a murky pond. At home in this rural Maryland village, about 70 miles from Washington...

BURKITTSVILLE, Md. — "I do not set out to write controversial books," Charles Murray says with an easy laugh. "I don't know whether part of the attraction might be the forbidden," he adds earnestly. "If it is, it's not very much." It is tempting to believe him. Dressed in blue jeans, tennis shoes and a flannel shirt, his hands clasped confidently behind his head, he reclines in a swivel chair surrounded by books in his elegant study here overlooking a grove of weeping willows and a murky pond. At home in this rural Maryland village, about 70 miles from Washington...

<p>The Best and Brightest Charles Murray tries to quantify "Human Achievement."</p> <p>BY GARY ROSEN Thursday, October 23, 2003 12:01 a.m.</p> <p>In our age of overused superlatives, none stands in greater need of rehabilitation than "genius," a title that Leonardo now shares with such eminences as Warren Buffett and Eminem. Charles Murray's rough-and-ready test is whether an individual's work makes us ask, in wonder, "How can a human being have done that?" But he doesn't stop there. Incorrigible social scientist that he is, Mr. Murray wants to prove that supreme excellence actually exists in the arts and sciences. The result is "Human Accomplishment," a systematic effort to rate and rank the likes of Aristotle, Mozart and Einstein and to describe the conditions that have allowed them to flourish. Much of this brick of a book is devoted to explaining, in tiresome detail, just how Mr. Murray goes about quantifying the seemingly unquantifiable. His trick is to consult the experts--or, rather, to distill usable numbers from their encyclopedias, anthologies, general histories and biographical dictionaries. An individual making an appearance in at least 50% of the selected sources for a given field wins the label "significant figure." By Mr. Murray's reckoning, there have been 4,002 such "people who matter" in the period 800 B.C. to 1950. Each member of this Pantheon gets an "index score" on a 100-point scale, based on how much attention--pages, column inches, etc.--he receives in the specialist literature.</p>