When read with an open mind the Bell Curve makes the pieces fall into place. Of course, the book discusses uncomfortable truths which most Americans would prefer to ignore. As we know, ignoring the truth comes with a price.
Quite right.
Lots of people like to believe that IQ doesn’t measure anything important.
But there are many decades of data showing conclusively that whatever IQ tests measure, there is an astonishingly high degree of correlation between whatever it is and life outcomes. Even when you back out race, socio-economic class, family structure and just about any other factor you can come up with.
So whatever IQ is, it’s terribly important. So of course we pretend it doesn’t exist.
Almost everyone is willing to agree that geniuses and retarded people exist, very smart and very stupid. But for some obscure reason they don’t want to take that too its logical conclusion and realize that intelligence, like almost all characteristics, forms a bell curve. That is, of course, why it’s called the “normal distribution.”
Where you are on the “average” section of the bell curve is critical in life prospects. That’s 90 to 110, and it’s 52% of the population. But we pretend that 90 IQ has the same abilities as 110 IQ, and it just isn’t true.