Charles Murray Forgot About Jews

Earlier this year, sociologist Charles Murray published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  For more than three decades Murray has written about the attributes of individual mind and character that determine the fates of nations.  His 1984 book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, argued that U.S. welfare programs of the 1960s and 1970s worsened the situation of the clients they were meant to help.  The book is widely credited with having played a significant role in the passage of the 1996 welfare reform act, which added time limits and work requirements to welfare programs.  Murray’s 1994 The Bell Curve, written with Richard Herrnstein, concluded that individual intelligence was a better predictor of economic and social success in America than factors like education and parents’ wealth.  The book warned that the differences between the “cognitive elite” and the rest of the country were growing dangerously.

Some critics said Losing Ground and The Bell Curve were racially motivated.  In this view, Murray was “really” saying, underneath the social science data, that African-Americans were less successful than white Americans because they were less intelligent and that government rules and programs could not and should not be expected to change this fact.  The subsequent debate came to include public statements on both sides of the issue by intelligence researchers, a special task force established by the American Psychological Association, entire books written with the aim of refuting Herrnstein and Murray, and a book-length counter-refutation by Murray himself.

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