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RELATED LINKSInternal LinksGrants to:
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External LinksCharles Murray bio at AEI website MORE LINKSBrad DeLong David Brooks Gets Burned by Trusting Charles Murray...Brooks's reference to the "first, noncontroversial chapter of The Bell Curve" is hard to read as anything other than a partial attempt to try to rehabilitate the reputation that Charles Murray shattered by writing The Bell Curve. It is worth noting that nothing Charles Murray writes can be trusted without being independently verified, and that even the first chapter of The Bell Curve is "controversial"--that is, flat-out wrong.
Knight-Ridder DNA evidence shows race doesn't existThe recently completed Human Genome Sequencing Project has confirmed what many scientists knew all along — that humans don't fit the biological criteria that defines race...Any way you measure it, the amount of divergence between people is essentially zero, said Joseph L. Graves, Jr., an evolutionary biologist and author of books on race. "The scientific case for the nonexistence of human race is overwhelming," he said.
Nicholas Lemann The Bell Curve FlattenedSubsequent research has seriously undercut the claims of the controversial best seller The Bell Curve, it turns out, is full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors.
City Pages In High School, Murray Burned a Cross(scroll down to bottom) "Near the end of his high school days in Newton, Iowa, Murray and some of his pals went out one night and burned a cross next door to the police station...Murray [claimed on the Donohue show] that he had no idea as to the racial significance of cross-burning."
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PERSON PROFILECharles MurrayCharles Murray, one of the chief ideologues of the right, is a Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and has close connections to the Manhattan Institute, where he was a Bradley Fellow from 1981 to 1990. He has received more than $1 million from the Bradley foundation over the past decade, enabling him to write two important conservative books, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (1984), in which he argued that social programs designed to help the poor actually hurt them, and The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), in which he argued that Black people are genetically intellectually inferior to white people. Both books were roundly criticized by reviewers and social scientists, but had broad impacts in the popular press and, in the 1980s, in the Reagan and Bush administrations. One good critique of Murray isThe Bell Curve: Roadmap to the "Ideal" Society, a full chapter from The Feeding Trough, and is available on this web site in its entirety. A full debunking of The Bell Curve by Nicolas Lemann is available at Slate.com, or by clicking here. It reveals mathematical errors, logical errors, and the misuse of statistics (i.e. the purported "IQ" test actually has questions on subjects as involved as Trigonometry, thus measuring educational attainment, not innate intelligence). Stephen Jay Gould, author of the 1981 bestseller "The Mismeasure of Man," added a chapter in the 1996 reprinting of his book, specifically dedicated to critiquing The Bell Curve. Anyone seriously interested in Murray should read this book. To get a flavor of what Gould has to say, take a look at the outline of his critique: THE BELL CURVE
This critique puts The Bell Curve in its proper perspective as one in a long line of attempts by whites of European descent trying to find a genetic basis for their supposed superiority over other races and peoples. GrantsIt's difficult to see the exact grants to Murray, although some specific ones name him as a recipient. Click here to see grants to the Manhattan Institute; click here to see grants to the American Enterprise Institute, and grants where Murray's name is mentioned in the grant's purpose. Also seeNational Affairs, Inc. Sits on board of magazines. Personal historyCharles Murray (1943- ) Charles Murray was born in Newton, Iowa, took his bachelors degree in history from Harvard in 1965 and immediately joined the Peace Corps. He served for five years as a volunteer in rural Thailand and stayed for a sixth to do research on economic development. Returning to the United States, he completed his Ph.D. in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. Since then he has written extensively on crime and poverty and become one of the nation's most influential conservative thinkers. His 1982 monograph, Safety Nets and the Truly Needy, in which he argued that President Johnson's massive welfare spending had helped the poor no more than President Eisenhower's laissez-faire policies, so impressed the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research that it offered Murray an annual stipend of $35,000 to expand it into book form. The result, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1983), became one of the cornerstones of President Reagan's domestic policy. --From the web page of Jason Paul Mitchell, a phD student at the University of Mississippi.
Ezra Klein A Charles Murray ReaderCharles Murray has another execrable article in the Wall Street Journal arguing that most children aren't genetically capable of reading well (it's possible these inferiors can, with great persistence and dedication, learn to sound words out), and so we should stop trying to teach them. Indeed, Murray argues that, "It would be nice if we knew how [to raise intelligence], but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points...There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend." Ezra Klein Murray: Katrina Victims "Inert Women Doing Nothing For Their Children". . . I've no idea where Murray got the idea that the New Orleans evacuees lacked jobs rather than cars and social skills rather than transportation -- from deep within his own prejudices, I'd guess.
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MORE LINKSDavid L. Kirp After the Bell Curve...A new generation of studies shows that genes and environment don’t occupy separate spheres — that much of what is labeled “hereditary” becomes meaningful only in the context of experience. “It doesn’t really matter whether the heritability of I.Q. is this particular figure or that one,” says Sir Michael Rutter of the University of London. “Changing the environment can still make an enormous difference.” [Editor's note: Apparently about 12 IQ points difference, according to research.]
Bruce Murphy The legacy of Michael Joyce...In a war of ideas, you naturally funded the people who were on your side, and you made sure they were warriors who expressly aimed to influence government, the media and public policy. But ideological soldiers are rarely the same as great scholars.
Stephen Metcalf The Bell Curve is a decade old. It's still wrong.Is defending The Bell Curve an example of intellectual honesty?
Atrios The Regular Service...every time I bring up the racist tract The Bell Curve, the apologists come out in full force. This is a regular event here...It shouldn't be necessary to point out over and over again why no decent person should embrace this book or its authors, and why anyone who does is either a bigot or a fool or both, but apparently it is.
New York Times Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows"Race is a social concept, not a scientific one," said Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville, Md. "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world."
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The Bell Curve
