The Inequality Taboo by Charles Murray

commentary ^ | September 2005 | Charles Murray

[dennisw]

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 innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected.

It was depressingly familiar. In the autumn of 1994, I had watched with dismay as The Bell Curve’s scientifically unremarkable statements about black IQ were successfully labeled as racist pseudoscience. At the opening of 2005, I watched as some scientifically unremarkable statements about male-female differences were successfully labeled as sexist pseudoscience.

The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media’s fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public’s misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.

Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders’ assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.

One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.

When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.

Hence this essay. Most of the following discussion describes reasons for believing that some group differences are intractable. I shift from “innate” to “intractable” to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. “Intractable” means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.

I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along:

1. The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.

2. Covering both sex differences and race differences in a single, non-technical article, I had to leave out much in the print edition of this article. This online version is fully annotated and includes extensive supplementary material.

3. The concepts of “inferiority” and “superiority” are inappropriate to group comparisons. On most specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from “low” to “high,” but the results cannot be combined into a score running from “bad” to “good.” What is the best score on a continuum measuring aggressiveness? What is the relative importance of verbal skills versus, say, compassion? Of spatial skills versus industriousness? The aggregate excellences and shortcomings of human groups do not lend themselves to simple comparisons. That is why the members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God’s chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group’s strengths.1

II

The technical literature documenting sex differences and their biological basis grew surreptitiously during feminism’s heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s. By the 1990’s, it had become so extensive that the bibliography in David Geary’s pioneering Male, Female (1998) ran to 53 pages.2 Currently, the best short account of the state of knowledge is Steven Pinker’s chapter on gender in The Blank Slate (2002).3 ........

[garbanzo]

I shift from “innate” to “intractable” to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. “Intractable” means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.

While I tend to think of IQ as respectable pseudoscience, I think this point is essentially correct. For example, why have women reached parity in fields like medicine and law, but not science?

[Fzob]

ping

[PatrickHenry]

a

"Durned Good Article, if you don't like it you're a retard!" Ping List

[LS]

I read "BC" years ago and the one study that I could not get out of my mind involved sets of identical twins, blacks and whites, raised in different households, one rich (or better off), one poor. In each case the black-white differences remained, and the ratios between them remained. Until there is some scientific evidence that this is flawed, Houston, we have a problem.

[Pharmboy]

Thanks for posting...he has cojones, eh?

One thing I would like to add: while group differences in traits, abilities and behaviors are good for predicting same in groups, they cannot be used to predict these factors in individuals based on their belonging to groups. Individuals go against type all the time, it's just that they're not in the majority within their group for the against-type trait they exhibit.

[Jim Noble]

Excellent catch!

A simple platform flows from the article: Stop the lying.

Maybe something will come of this.

[Crawdad]

I just finished "In the Name of Eugenics" this week. An interesting book.

[Popman]

Thanks, great article

[js1138]

Until you provide us with a citation, and explain just what those genetic differences are, then Houston, we have a bigot.

[longshadow]

Durned good, indeed.

I have Murray's "In Search of Happiness and Good Government" -- is ability to objectively analyze complex issues is stunning.

[Junior]

Americans did these things despite government. Indeed, for the first century and a half of this nation's history, it was effectively a libertarian state.

[Pharmboy]

Here's some evidence for ya

[Pharmboy]

Here's more

[PatrickHenry]

I have Murray's "In Search of Happiness and Good Government" -- is ability to objectively analyze complex issues is stunning.

Check this out: Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 by Charles Murray.

[Shawndell Green]

"they cannot be used to predict these factors in individuals based on their belonging to groups."

Sure they can. While there may be the odd grandmother who can outrun the odd teenage track team member, one is pretty safe in playing the odds.

[Shawndell Green]

"why have women reached parity in fields like medicine and law, but not science?"

Women's general superiority in verbal ability is mentioned in the article and verbal ability and manipulating emotions is important in law.

High grades are a very important factor in getting into medical school. As noted in the article, women get better grades than their test scores would predict. I think that is because women are more willing to do required busywork than are men of similar ability. To graduate from medical school and become a doctor takes lots of grinding work and women are, in general, more willing to work hard and steady, while men tend to work more in fits and starts.
Also, medical schools have practiced affirmative action in order to increase the number of women in medical school. Graduate schools of science are also using affirmative action to get more women advanced science degrees, but not enough women are interested in applying to science schools to attain parity.

Medicine has a nurturing and interpersonal element that appeals to women. Science deals with abstractions that do not have an emotional appeal to women. Men look at working in a field in which they do not have to have much interaction with other people, (read idiots) as being a good thing.

[Shawndell Green]

"Houston, we have a problem."

Not really. The only problem we have is dealing with reality. As mentioned in the article, people of all races and both sexes can be found across the continuum. The fact that we are never going to have equality of outcome for each and every subgroup without a police state is a problem the liberals have to deal with.

[forsnax5]

While there may be the odd grandmother who can outrun the odd teenage track team member, one is pretty safe in playing the odds.

The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. ~Damon Runyon

[RATkiller]

Bookmark

[LS]

I gave you the citation: Murray and Hernnstein cite extensive studies of fraternal twins of different races, where one was raised in a (say) rich white household and one in a poor white household; and blacks where one was raised in a rich black household and one in a poor household. The ratio between the richer/poorer twins stayed about the same in each race, but the IQ difference between blacks and whites---either "richer-raised" or "poorer-raised" stayed the same. That ain't bigotry. That's science that someone better explain, and not brush under a rug.