The more I read about Charles Murray, the more I am angry, alarmed, and disturbed....

[YoungDemCA]

I knew this guy was a right-wing "intellectual" (scare quotes necessary) who co-authored "The Bell Curve" and had attracted a lot of controversy, but I didn't fully realize just how vile his entire worldview is. I chalk it up to ignorance of Murray on my part. An apt description of Murray may be something like
"Professional Racist" or "Intellectually Dishonest Hack of the Worst Sort".

He gets paid a lot of money by the American Enterprise Institute, a very influential right-wing "think tank" in Washington, D.C., to write his insidious racist, classist, far-right bullshit.

From RationalWiki:

Far more crankish, though, was the The Bell Curve's further conclusion in the third and fourth parts of the book that innate intelligence plays an important role in the different socioeconomic statuses of differing ethnic groups in the United States. Arguing that intelligence is inherited in large part, and that the average intelligence of different ethnic groups can thus be assessed, the book then concludes that different ethnic groups have varying levels of intelligence, and certain groups are poor or unfortunate mainly because they are not as smart as others

and Murray's influence:

Despite frequent and harsh criticism by academics, in some venues The Bell Curve has proven disturbingly influential. The ongoing strength of its lines of argument has continued up to the present day, particularly during such contentious public discussions as the American debate over illegal immigration from Mexico. Heritage Foundation analyst[14] Jason Richwine, notable for co-authoring that organization's report on why illegal immigrants would feast on the blood of white babies[15], made headlines in 2013 after it was discovered that his 2009 Harvard doctoral dissertation argued that persistent differences in IQ among Hispanics suggest that IQ tests should serve as a barrier to immigration.[16] Richwine cites Murray in the dissertation, stating that “no one was more influential than Charles Murray.”[17]

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

Murray on female philosophers:

“No women has been a significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.”

----

Speaking of influence: Paul Ryan has cited Murray in speeches about education, poverty, and the "culture of dependency" that is "particularly present in the inner cities."

Know thy enemy, DU. Charles Murray's poisonous worldview carries great currency with the Right-and it has infiltrated the mainstream discourse about race, poverty, education, social class, and feminism.

[The Magistrate]

1. He Is A Bad'un, Ma'am....

[YoungDemCA]

2. I'm a Sir...

nt

[The Magistrate]

4. I Will Try And Remember, Sir

My apologies.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. Here's a pretty good takedown of Murray's Bell Curve thesis:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-wealth/

salient points: IQ is more a product of wealth and socioeconomic factors than genetics (cited: significant differences in IQ scores in Ireland over a 30-year-period that coincided with a significant increase in national wealth and GDP per capita; significant differences of one standard deviation between average IQ's of American and Israeli Jews, who represent a genetically similar population in different social/economic circumstances, etc).

[Louisiana1976]

5. Charles Murray is evil.

I am not surprised that his worldview has had great influence with the Right. It provides yet another to the countless reasons the GOP should be defeated.

[madfloridian]

6. My first decade of teaching our scores were reported in stanines, based on the bell curve.

http://www.applicantselection.biz/stanine.asp

I never really thought that much about the background, as we had no choice but to count them that way.

It was Iowa Test of Basic Skills for ages. Used to evaluate student progress from 1st of year to end.

It really was used in a valuable way for us. Gave next years teachers a background.

Now in FL the FCAT is done, and even more proprietary tests are on their way next year. Pearson has the contract, a reward I guess for all their screw-ups.

[AngryAmish]

8. the bell curve is a statistical modeling device

When measuring for height human populations occur on a bell curve, a
some very short some very tall. IQ, as discussed in Murrays book, also occurs on a bell curve. Most anything humans do is measurable on a bell curve. Baseball era, 100 yards dash time, etc.

This is where the rubber hits the road: in America different racial groups have different group IQs. Murrays thesis was different group successes have to do with group IQs as well as cultural conditions, and group IQ has something to do with genetics. It is controversial because many people do not want to think there genes hold them behing in America.

[madfloridian]

13. It was only used for evaluating progress.

We only could give so-called IQ tests if we wanted to refer a student for any special classes such as gifted, etc.

I later took more courses in testing and understood more about it then. When the tests are given to you that way, at that time there is no need to dig deeper.. really useless to bother. Pretty much like teachers are having to do now...accept what is being shoved at them.

[Igel]

11. A stanine is a standard, albeit a bit dated, way of reporting results.

It's not necessarily related to IQ.

It's fairly straightforward to go from percentile, decile, etc., to stanines. (Not so easy going back--the scale's lossy.)

When I took ed psych to prepare for entrance to a teacher's preparatory program a number of years ago it was considered a required skill to be able to norm tests, calculate and interpet standard deviations (along with skew), and understand reporting in various ways (including stanines).

Now I find that older teachers have forgotten this and newer teachers often can't say what the difference between mean and median is, much less worry about measures of dispersion and using trimmed means to reduce the effect of outliers. Excel has taken away any need for comprehension. That administrators are simply teachers promoted beyond their level of first major incompetence just adds to the inanity.

[prairierose]

16. Igel, thanks for saying this....

I had to study all of this in my teacher prep program but that was in the mid 80's and my Professor was a really old guy. So, he still thought that teachers should be able to interpret classroom statistics. I learned so many things in those classes that are never used anymore and most people seem to never have heard of them. I really miss the objective review of a teacher's teaching activities rather than reviewing their work based on student scores.

As for Murray, I read the book shortly after it came out and determined that he was trying to use a statistical model to "prove" racism is correct and I thought he was full of s@#t.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

7. A big K&R! For your important post. n/t

[Fumesucker]

9. Andrew Sullivan has been quite laudatory of The Bell Curve

And yet Sullivan is regularly approvingly quoted here on the DU.

[JaneyVee]

10. One of those HBD kooks.

[FarCenter]

12. Advice for a happy life: don't take happiness advice from Charles Murray

Step aside, Princeton Mom! America has a new source of harsh-but-true politically incorrect life advice, calculated to whip so-called 'feminists' and other liberals into a frenzy because, deep down, they know it's right. He's a self-styled grouchy-grandad figure called Charles Murray, and his new book is entitled The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life. A distilled version has been riding high on the Wall Street Journal's website, and is rapidly going viral.


Murray thinks you should marry young, become deeply involved with religion, and prioritize virtuous conduct over fame and fortune. "The clichés are true," he writes. If you're under 30 and unmarried, studies suggest that one of your parents will forward his article to you approvingly within the next 48 hours.

If you're over 30, meanwhile, you might be scratching your head. Because ol' irascible Grandpa Chuck bears a striking resemblance, now you think about it, to the libertarian political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute. Yes, that Charles Murray! The one Paul Ryan quoted the other day in a gaffe about lazy "inner city" men that left itself open to an unfortunate racial interpretation, and about which Ryan was forced to issue a clarification. The one who co-authored The Bell Curve, arguing that the intractably inferior IQs of black Americans meant there wasn't much point in government efforts to alleviate poverty – and that such efforts might make things worse, anyway, by encouraging "the wrong women" to have babies.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/apr/01/charles-murray-happiness-life-advice

[WhiteTara]

14. Thank you! I love DU

how would I ever be able to get so much knowledge in one place on so many subjects.

[Starry Messenger]

15. The Bell Curve and The Pioneer Fund

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/pioneer-fund

<snip>

The Pioneer Fund's original endowment came from Wickliffe Draper, scion of old-stock Protestant gentry. Living in what one historian described as a "quasi-feudal manor house," Draper was raised in Hopedale, Mass., a company town built by his family. After losing a four-month union battle with the far-left International Workers of the World, Draper became a man obsessively seeking a way to restore the old order. Abandoned by the political mainstream after World War II, Draper turned more and more to those academics who were still dedicated to race science and eugenics — most prominently, in the early years, Henry Garrett. During the 1950s and 1960s, Garrett helped distribute Pioneer grants and was one of the founders of the International Association for the Advancement of Eugenics and Ethnology (IAAEE) in 1959. The IAAEE brought together academic defenders of segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. The Pioneer Fund also supported a variety of institutions working to legitimize race "science," including the IAAEE and the journal Mankind Quarterly, which today is published by long-time eugenicist, anti-Semite and Pioneer grant recipient Roger Pearson.

Many of those involved with the fund early on, including its first president Harry H. Laughlin, had "contacts with many of the Nazi scientists whose work provided the conceptual template for Hitler's aspiration toward ‘racial hygiene' in Germany," according to an article in the Albany Law Review. In the 1960s, according to William Tucker's scholarly book, The Funding of Scientific Racism, many board members and recipients of Pioneer grants worked to block the civil rights movement.

Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist focusing on race since 1966, got more than $1 million in Pioneer grants over three decades. In his famous 1969 attack on Head Start — the early-education program that aims to help poor children — Jensen wrote in the prestigious Harvard Education Review that the problem with black children was that they had an average IQ of only 85. No amount of social engineering could improve that performance, he claimed, adding that "eugenic foresight" was the only solution.

Roger Pearson, whose Institute for the Study of Man has been one of the top Pioneer Fund beneficiaries over the past 20 years, may provide the clearest indication of the kind of extremists supported by the fund. Pearson came to the United States in the mid-1960s to join Willis Carto, founder of the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. In 1965, Pearson became editor of Western Destiny, a magazine established by Carto and dedicated to spreading extreme-right ideology. Using the pseudonym Stephan Langton, he then became editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966 and 1967 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question." Its articles carried such titles as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power" and "Swindlers of the Crematoria." Pioneer support for all the groups linked to Pearson between 1975 and 1996 amounted to more than $1 million — nearly 10% of total Pioneer grants during that period.

In recent decades, the Pioneer Fund has supported mostly American and British race scientists, including a large number of those cited in The Bell Curve, a widely criticized 1994 book that claimed that differences in intelligence were at least partly determined by race. According to Barry Mehler, a leading academic critic of the fund, these race scientists have included Hans Eysenck, Robert A. Gordon, Linda Gottfredson, Seymour Itzkoff, Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, R. Travis Osborne, J. Philippe Rushton, William Shockley and Daniel R. Vining Jr.

<snip>

And yes, Andrew Sullivan has supported this book.

[alfredo]

17. A moderate Republican.

[MisterP]

18. there's just piles of these freaks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glayde_Whitney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stoll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Miele
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_B._MacDonald
they do seem to worry about women a lot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_IQ_Lynn_Vanhanen_2006_IQ_and_Global_Inequality.png
on edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Taylor