The case against 'The Bell Curve.' - books that links IQ to race

Now, other objections to The Bell Curve, concentrating on those not already raised by other commentators:

* The Hollywood corollary. Perhaps black overrepresentation in basketball is essentially a fluke telling nothing about the general relationship between practice and achievement. Yet consider that blacks are also overrepresented in several performing arts, notably singing and comedy. Is this because they have superior singing and joking genes? It's hard to imagine why natural selection would have favored DNA for human song. On the other hand, African Americans as a group have spent generations learning various forms of performance. Most African culture is oral; and until recent decades, owing both to discrimination and poverty, when American blacks wanted entertainment they had to entertain each other. That is, they practiced song and comedy, and they got good at it.

* Is everybody too dumb to know who's smart? In The Bell Curve there are numerous assertions that society has handicapped itself by failing to favor the smart. For instance, the book asserts that the American economy loses as much as $80 billion per year because a 1971 Supreme Court decision bars most forms of workplace IQ testing. High-IQ workers are more productive, Herrnstein and Murray say; promoting them would increase productivity. But if high-IQ employees are more productive, that should be self-evident to employers regardless of tests. Are employers so dumb they don't promote the productive workers? On a common-sense basis, society has long been attuned to what can be accomplished by the smart, and almost always rewards this already.

* The Hiram College contradiction. Early in The Bell Curve comes a section describing how in the fifties the freshman class at Harvard was not composed exclusively of the brightest of the bright; many were slow-witted kids entering on Dad-um's alumni connections. This was actually to the good, Murray writes, because it meant that many bright kids who otherwise would have been consolidated at Harvard instead had no choice but to attend Hiram or Kenyon or some other school, distributing IQ throughout society. These days, The Bell Curve says, owing to accurate SAT testing (which is now quite accurate, but only so far as it goes), Harvard gets the brightest of the bright, withdrawing the "cognitive elite" into a small, isolated world. This, the book says, is bad.

Yet later, in a section assailing affirmative action (The Bell Curve really despises affirmative action), Murray says that offering special admissions consideration to minority students is awful because it denies some worthy white students entry slots in the top schools. But isn't the effect that a percentage of smart kids end up at Hiram and Kenyon, distributing IQ throughout society? When some smart white kids were denied admission to Harvard because the sons of the landed had a special deal--in other words, when there was a patrician system that favored the affluent--that was great, according to The Bell Curve. Now that some smart white kids are denied admission to Harvard because the sons and daughters of poverty have a special deal--the new system no longer rigged in favor of the affluent--that's offensive, according to the same book.