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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: 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.
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: An Absoloutely Wonderful Book!
Review: THE BELL CURVE has drawn an extreme amount of criticism because of the facts revealed within. I would not say that these are revealed, but most people already know deep down that they are true. BELL CURVE merely verbalizes them and puts them up to statistical analysis. One of the authors, Murray, says in his Afterword that BELL CURVE was authored in a moderate tone. This is completely true. In fact as I have read a commentator write that this book "bends over backward" to avoid what many would consider "incendiary" statemants. What makes this book so controversial? Why do its detractors call it "Neo-Nazi Propaganda," a term which is used to denigrate anything that seems out of line with any group's stated beliefs and idealogy? 1. Intellegence Quotient (IQ) is much more important in determining one's socio-economic status, academic performance, illegitimacy, and likelyhood of criminal behavior than one's environment. 2. IQ is genetic. It is likely more hereditary than caused by environment. IQ is estimated at being between 40-80% inherited from one's parents. The authors estimate it from their data at being around 60% hereditary. 3. IQ scores differ substantially along racial and ethnic lines. 4. The average white IQ is around 100. The average black and Hispanic IQ is at an 85. This places the average black or Hispanic at the 16th percentile of the white IQ range. This means that the average black or Hispanic is a standard deviation (a lot in layman's terms) lower in IQ than the average white. 5. East Asians (specifically Japanese, Chinese and Korean) score slightly higher than whites, but the extent of this difference is not well known. Asians have better visual-spatial scores while whites have better verbal scores than Asians. Those above five points I summarized after studying the evidence from this book. I was very intrigued to find that Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews are identified as the highest achievers of any ethnicity on IQ tests, having the best scores in verbal intellegence, and being placed a standard deviation above the white mean of 100. This book is a goldmine of statistical data on the difference between people with different levels of intelligence. In fact, only about fifty of this book's five-hundred seventy pages deal with difference between races. The authors are very careful to avoid discussing racial issues and are able to treat the subject with extreme detachment. The fact is, it is not "racism" if it is true. It is simply objective fact. The book was written so that it should appeal to leftists, that everyone should be given a fair chance based on individual ability, not being given undue "affirmative action" simply based on one's racial backround. Read THE BELL CURVE, and enjoy.
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Summary: Thought Police Strike Again
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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Summary: Racists Sure Know How to Make Money Off A Book
Review: The typical racist ideology of people who like this book is illustrated by a quote I just read in another review: "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.)"
Although it sure would be nice if our problems as a society were as easy as "dumb people" running amok, this is a HORRIBLE OVER-SIMPLIFICATION of a complicated problem.
There will always be nay-sayers that harp about other races (and/or sexes) inferiority at ever increasing levels. It wasn't too long ago when white slave-owners said it was impossible for 'negroes' to learn to read. Just as it wasn't too long ago that men were saying women couldn't handle voting or make a career out of math or science (recently brought to the forefront of public attention by comments made by Harvard's president).
By being the racist (and/or sexist) nay-sayers that they are, they are really hoping that it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'Oh, so blacks can learn how to read? Well tell them, and as many white people we can reach, that they are naturally stupider and that there is nothing they can do about it.' Thus, the oppressive system is fortified for a little while longer against change by this racist (and/or sexist) hate.
For all you fans of this book I say this: go to a school in any inner-city ghetto in America, then visit the one where your white children attend. If you can't see the stark differences, and their affect on a person's ability to perform well on a test (made by white people) then you are blind, deaf, and dumb.
I'd like to see tests done on IQ's of poor, rural, white people (like the kind in the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia) and their white counterparts in Connecticut, California, and New York. I'm sure the results would be enough to "prove" that there are two strains of white people; one smarter than the other.
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