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Summary: The truth.....
Review: ...hurts. It's O.K., you can show it on your bookshelf. The P.C. police will not come and get you!!
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Summary: An Important Contribution to Sociological Issues
Review: Although this book did have its share of statistical flaws, questionable assumptions, and an over exaggerated notion about the consensus in psychometric testing, it was nevertheless a refreshing alternative to the sterile Marxian-lite analysis that passes for sociology these days. The authors offer a new framework in which to interpet social life and public policy. Even though the critics of this work attack it as pseudo-science and right-wing "racism", the work devoted scant attention to racial differences in intellectual capacity, and numerous pages to the role intelligence, measured by IQ, has in predicting life outcomes. Accordingly, the greatest predictor for whether you will end up in poverty, have a child out-of-wedlock, be incarcerated, hold a steady job etc. is IQ. This applies equally to blacks, hispanics, whites, asians, and Jews. Not surprisingly, when the authors do discuss racial (or ethnic) differences in intelligence they do highlight the fact that american blacks score 1 SD (or 15 points) below that of whites. However, is this controversial, or even in dispute? The authors are not the ones who designed the tests, they are simply reporting a widely available social statistic that is accessible to anyone. Is there any IQ test, or test of any kind that shows parity between whites and blacks? Even Stephan Gould does not deny this racial discrepancy exists and there has been no test to date to support the egalitarian fairy-tale. What we have here is just a vicious smear campaign attacking the messenger. Of course we also hear the popular claim that race is a social construction, and is therefore a meaningless criteria for social analysis. What is meant by a "social construction" is never said, although I imagine it is imbued with left-over vestiges of Marxian thought which deems all arts, science and literature an illusion until the fateful day of the workers revolution. Race can be defined as a sub-species that has shared a separate breeding population. This does not require that there be race a gene, it means that a race (or sub-species)is manifested by an array of different gene frequencies within a population. Zoologists are able to classify separate breeds of dogs without suggesting that there is a Siberian Husky gene which singulary distinguishes it from the Great Pyrrenes gene. Whether one accepts the Candellabra or the Eve-hypothesis of modern human evolution, both are fully able to account for racial differences in Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Classifying humans according to race is no less scientific than it is with dogs, bears, apes, cats, and so on. Reminding ourselves that we are a biological species susceptible to natural selection and the laws of hereditary is not going to extol the sentiments of egalitarian cranks who understand hieracrchy, inequality, dominance and power are the chief features of evolution witnessed everyday in the animal world. Equality is as alien to nature and her hand-mainden evolution, as fire is to snow. The Bell Curve was an important attempt to get the debate back on the right track. The authors should be commended.
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Summary: Whether you'll agree or disagree, it's worth your time
Review: American Enterprise Institute academic Michael Ledeen was right to call "The Bell Curve" "the most moderate book in recent years to spark such an accusatorial controversy." While it's true that "The Bell Curve" draws many surprising and concerning conclusions, and some conclusions that some people find alarming, the issues are legitimate and merit consideration.The basic premises and theses of "The Bell Curve" are these: that intelligence, IQ, or (perhaps less inflammatorily) cognitive ability is a real, measurable, quantifiable characteristic of a human being; that different people tend to be assigned very different roles by society depending on their level of cognitive ability; that people of different cognitive abilities behave differently in some important ways; that cognitive ability is substantially heritable; and that different groups tend to have differing levels of cognitive ability. The authors support these theses using the (remarkably rich) body of literature on the subject. Their procedures are documented with great care and a tremendous variety of sources is cited. The book can be read at a number of levels. At its shortest, the book amounts to only some thirty pages in length. Each chapter begins with a summary that briefly outlines the conclusions that will be reached. The main text of the book is about 550 pages. The content consists chiefly of validation and explanation of the authors' claims, as well as some psychometric history, all of which is both fascinating and persuasive. In addition to the primary text, the book is replete with sidenotes, endnotes, and appendices, to say nothing of the hundreds of external sources to which we are referred in the bibliography. The authors' style is simultaneously informative, accessible, frank, cautious, and persuasive. Of especial interest to the skeptical (including me) is the afterword, in which one of the authors responds to recent critical commentary of "The Bell Curve." Whatever your position on psychometrics and whatever critical commentary you may have read on "The Bell Curve," this book is an indispensable tool that will allow you to survey the evidence for yourself. Like many who read the primary source rather than relying on biased commentaries, you may find that the logic, not to mention the statistics, of the authors is inescapable. Regardless of your personal beliefs, the book brings up issues that will be fundamental to the future of the human race. It is at least worth your examination.
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Summary: not pleasnt
Review: I am a well educated african american, i fell this book is racist. such reserch should not be legal. so what if IQ diference
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Summary: Thought Police Strike Again
Review: I find it very distressing that this seminal work is out of print. This means that it is not required reading in college humanities curricula, even though it broke new ground in dealing with the relationship of "cognitive ability" to poverty, crime, illegitimacy, career success, etc. Nor will the larger public find it at their local "Tattered Cover" book store. The suppression of this work by the "cognitive elite" suggests it must have hit a tender spot in their protective intellectual armor. At the same time, this is not to say the book would not have benefitted from tighter editing. There seems to be more than one book contained in this work, perhaps two or three. It would have been better had the authors produced a more narrow argument focusing on what is known of the variations in cognitive ability and stopped there. Other work could have followed on the social and political consequences (allowing, of course, for the unfortunate fact that one of the co-authors died near completion of the tome). The authors did not address the effects of Vernacular Black English (VBE) being the mother tongue of many blacks, a fact which must be overcome to a considerable extent if intelligence test results from this sub-group are to have validity when compared with test takers whose mother tongue is American English. (They do concede that problems exist in comparing results with Latino and American Indian test takers.) How much of a problem this may be, I do not know, but a problem it is nevertheless. On the overall argument, that low intelligence correlates to a surprising degree with high rates of crime, illegitimacy and poverty, the authors cannot be faulted. The disturbing demographic picture the authors describe, of the ongoing "dysgenisis" of the American polity, correlates very well with arguments in Samuel Huntington's new book, "Who are We?" Read together, and given the obstinacy of the prevailing wisdom among the "cognitive elite," these two books could very well provide an explanation as to why the United States of America fragmented in the latter decades of the 21st century as the Soviet Union did in the latter part of the 20th century.
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Summary: Intellectuallized Eugenics is Back
Review: I liked this book better the first time I read it; when it was called 'Mein Kampf'.
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Summary: Fear of the "dreaded negro."
Review: If Blacks were not so intelligent, not so much would have been done over the ages to suppress them.
Civilizations rise and fall. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe slipped into the so-called "Dark Ages." The majority of Europeans could neither read nor write. It was the Black Moors who conquered Iberia for close to 700 years who enlightened White Europeans.
Moreover, the Greeks obtained their knowledge from the Black Egyptians. This knowledge later on spread to the rest of Europe and allowed Europeans to emerge fromt he frozen caves.
How could Blacks, a people who have been oppressed, suppressed, enslaved and spat upon for centuries be told to achieve a wonderful civilization overnight?
Blacks have done it before, and can do it again.
This work is a useless work, written to massage the fears of Whites.
I recommend "Retake Your Fame," by Aylmer von Fleischer, the works of J.A. Rogers and Ivan Van Sertima, instead of this garbage.
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Summary: Fascinating, and implying frightening consequences
Review: In reading the synopses above and the few negative reviews below, I have to wonder if their authors read the book in question, or merely the media hype. This book is not about "ethnicity and intelligence." It's not racism, nor even about race. This book tries to show that A) people are becoming stratified according to intelligence (you go to school with, work with, and largely socialize with people of similar ability) and B) many of our social problems can be explained in terms of differences in intelligence (ie, in blunt terms, dumb people are more likely to commit crimes, etc.) They provide a huge base of data to support their thesis. The authors have bent over backwards to try to avoid any hint of racism in their studies; the only place the issue even arises is when they report that blacks and Latinos have historically scored lower in IQ tests than have whites, and that Asians have scored higher, and that the claims of "cultural bias" are ! not supported by any data or studies. These details alone are enough to inflame the politically correct among us, unfortunately. To portray this book as some type of white supremecist manifesto, you would have to have a strong agenda of your own, and totally disregard the content of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Worthwhile, but incomplete
Review: Ten years after publication, this book is evidently as controversial as when published. Much of the controversy is about the validity of the book's assertions, but much of it is about topics related to the book's content, but not directly addressed by the book, and not intended by the book's authors to be inferred from what they wrote. For 29 years before this book was published I made a living directing scientific and technical research and development, in which one of the most important aspects of my success or failure was my ability (or lack of ability) in deciding whom to hire and whom to retain. So this book might offer information relevant to my decision processes. It does provide intersting background; despite some incautious or erroneous conclusions, its general theme is well worth considering. However, its practical value for people making decisions such as those I had to make is not great.
In hiring or retaining scientific and technical researchers or developers, a great deal of information is available to the decisionmaker: schools attended, educational transcripts, degrees or diplomas attained, test scores alleged to be directly related to the job to be performed, faculty recommendations, pre-hiring interviews, and (in the case of retention decisions) measures and evaluations of performance; IQ scores, of course, are not available (and in my personal opinion would not add to the information that is available, because some of the available data indirectly depends on IQ). All this available data is routinely used, and it screens out people who manifestly cannot do the job. As a result, the decisionmaker is choosing among members of a population already severely restricted by selection (like the NFL football players used as an example in the book). But there is extreme variablility in performance among members of this restricted population, despite the screening, and an R&D manager is of course vitally interested in the sources from which this variation springs.
In examining this repeatedly over many years, I concluded that demonstrated "smarts" per se, or education per se, or any of the other available measures (even including experience), has little or no predictive ability for estimating how well an individual will perform. This should not be surprising, because all of that data has already been used in the selection process that determines whether individuals will even be considered for specific jobs or particular assignments. I was able to discern only two factors that distinguished the best performers from the least performers, among those who met the threshold criteria. One of these two is motivation; the more motivated the individual to achieve well on the job, the better the performance. This obviously has little to do with IQ, and is only weakly correlated with such things as educational attainment. The other important factor, which I couldn't measure quantitatively but found it easy to discern qualitatively, was the individual's ability to discern which tasks among many the individual should most usefully focus on. The best performers display an uncanny knack for deciding whether a problem is at the right level of importance, the right level of difficulty, and the right match to the individual's personal talents and skills, to be worth a major investment of the individual's time and energy. Perhaps this has something to do with the idividual's IQ score or "g", perhaps not; I did not find it useful to speculate about that. But, unmistakeably, individuals who unerringly refused tasks they were not well suited for and accepted tasks for which they were exceptionally suited, were amomg the best performers, and those whose judgment in this respect was poor were among the least performers.
What does this say about the book? To me, it says that although much of what's in the book is presumably true, and much else is subject to dispute, it has little useful bearing on selection or retention for excellence in predicted performance on specific jobs. Whether the book's assertions are important in broader issues of social policy and social welfare I'm not competent to opine about.
More specifically, I found among the candidates I interviewed and the employees I observed, no correlation between performance on the one hand and race, sex, "credentials", economic or family background, test scores, faculty recommendations, or any other crisply definable characteristic. What does this say to me? it says that after the obvious screening to eliminate people manifestly unable to do the job, there is no discernable difference of performance between men and women, blacks and whites, people from advantaged or disadvantaged backgrounds, Asian-Americans and people of European ancestry, Jews and Episcopalians, native-born Americans and immigrants, or other such categories. Individuals must be evaluated one by one as individuals, without reference to categories.
The book is only relevant, in my opinion, in two respects. First, cultural asumptions among certain groups make members of those groups more or less likely to seek certain professions, so, for example, there is a shortage of black and Hispanic applicants for technical jobs in engineering and physical science. This is deplorable; it may perhaps be due to a correct perception in those groups that they will be discriminated against, or it may not; that I don't know. Second, because many employers rely far to much on easily available but untrustworthy data, such as "credentials", it is possible for a careful employer to find, hire, and retain outstanding performers who have been overlooked by less careful decision-makers.
In short, I find this book well worth reading and rereading, but only in the same sense that the Hollywood "Oscar" ceremony is worth watching. It provides little information useful either to individuals or to those who select individuals for specific jobs or assignments, just as, to a casting director, the question of whether someone has or has not received an "Oscar" has little bearing on whether that person is the best choice for a specific role in a particular movie. Properly viewed, the individual's match to the need is everything; the individual's background, ethnicity, and so on are irrelevant. Therefore, I consider the decade-long controversy about this book to be uninteresting and irrelevant.
Rating:
Summary: Sometimes the Truth Hurts
Review: The Bell Curve is not a book about ethnicity or race. Contrary to much of the media hype about this book, it is an attempt by the authors to compile statistical data relevant to intelligence and socio-economic status. For example, in Part II of this book, the authors attempt to show a causal relationship between intelligence and crime rates, poverty, teen pregnancy, etc. In the process of conducting their research, the researchers discover blacks in America generally score 1 standard deviation (15 points) beneath whites on various IQ tests. To discredit claims that black IQ is impacted by the oppression of blacks in America, they also revealed similar studies in Africa. In these studies, blacks generally scored 2 standard deviations beneath whites. For this, the book has been denounced as racist.
American society is becoming more and more stratified among economic lines, where poverty and underemployment is offset by spectacular business and economic success stories. The Bell Curve asks why, and then discusses the theory that intelligence may be playing a role here. Critics again claimed that connecting intelligence to success is not reasonable as the economically disadvantaged would naturally fall short on IQ tests, due to poor environmental and educational opportunities. However, the facts state otherwise. Among whites and blacks of equal socio-economic status, children of white families consistently scored 1 standard deviation above black children in the same economic bracket. Again, this was portrayed as racist.
This book is not about racism. It is about frequency distribution and intelligence scores. It is a fascinating look at the use of statistics and is recommended for any student of statistics or the social sciences. Ignore the race card, and learn from this book. As the authors claim over and over, their objective is not to create division, but to establish the foundation of further study in this area. At one time the church virtually stomped out scientific research because the answers being offered contradicted their beliefs. Likewise, perpetuating a falsehood in the name of political correctness will do nothing to help address the facts.
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