Thank you for noting that, and for actually bothering to read the book. It must also be said that in the famous Ch. 13 on g and race the statistical modeling was, IMHO, weaker than elsewhere in the book.
Murry’s law
1. The Law of Imperfect Selection: Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.
2. The Law of Unintended Rewards: Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer.
3. The Law of Net Harm: The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.
Thanks for the response.
I had never read the book, but was familiar with the controversy about it from 20 years ago. I didn’t read it at the time because I’m not interested in racist screeds.
Saw it about a year ago at a garage sale, and bought it just to pick apart. Much to my surprise, it wasn’t really about race at all! That was a peripheral aspect, inflated wildly out of proportion to intentionally discredit the rest of what the book had to say.
BTW, the increasing marginalization of the less capable members of our society that the book predicted unless steps were taken to prevent them has proceeded exactly as the authors said it would. If anything, it’s happening even faster than they predicted.
It’s the most important single issue of our time, and absolutely nobody is talking about it. Very sad.
I will defer to your opinion on the racial statistics issue. Don’t claim to be a statistician, never even took statistics in school.
But that there are real differences in human intelligence between individuals cannot be disputed by any reasonable person. Whether there are racial disparities is more or less irrelevant to the author’s contention. More and more, there simply is no economic demand in society for those of lower intelligence, whatever their race.
I have always been intrigued by what those who refuse to investigate the subject of differences in human intelligence between “races” are implicitly admitting.
Their reason for refusing to look is a fear of what they might find. That is we do find such differences between average intelligence of groups, those groups will be proven inferior and it would make sense to treat them as such.
This is, of course, implicitly admitting that individuals of lower intelligence, whatever their race, really are inferior and should be treated as such.
Personally, I refuse to agree that IQ, or intelligence, or whatever you want to call it, makes one human being superior or inferior to another, except in that one area.
We are all equal in the most important way. We are all children of a God who loves us. Intelligence, and any other minor differences, are from that standpoint inconsequential.