There's a podcast up on Powerline with Steven Hayward interviewing Charles Murray and Steve Sailer on race and Year of George and the Great Awokening.
Charles Murray, of course, is the author of several books on big government and race and IQ, and Steve Sailer blogs on the Unz Review and always has naughty statistics on race.
This gives me a chance to pass Murray's major books in review. Here are some excerpts from a review of Murray's work that I wrote in 2014.
First, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980, published in 1984, says that
the liberals confidently instrumented their Great Society legislation with studies and social science research that would confirm their "elite wisdom." But when the results came in and pronounced the failure of their policies, they said nothing and did nothing.
Then came The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1996.
[I] thought it good, but unexceptionable. Of course IQ is important in an age when wealth doesn't come in broad rich acres but right between the ears. I read [the] warning about a cognitive elite but didn't really pay much attention, not then.
Then Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 - 2010 in 2012 that I thought the best of his books.
Hey kids, let's look at White America and see how it's doing! My takeaway is that [Murray says] that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine. (Hey, why wouldn't it, since the elite has used its power to make America in its own image!) The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don't marry and the men don't work.
I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Coming Apart starting here.
Since then, Murray has written Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America in 2021. As the blurb says:
American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.
I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Facing Reality starting here.
But this week we had Charles Murray on a podcast, and the big takeaway for me was his comment on the reaction to The Bell Curve published in 1996.
The key section starts at about 10:00. Says Murray:
People didn't read The Bell Curve even when it first came out... Were there responses I respected and of course the politic thing for me to say is, to be very serious, yes, there were... Well, it's really hard for me to think of any that impressed me and there were some were written by very famous scholars that I just thought were pure "horse manure." and others in which I thought they were knowingly lying, that these people were too smart and too well informed not to know that they were lying about what was in the book.
OK. So there's a "tell" here. What is going on? Why don't liberals want to honestly discuss the question of IQ and race? The Bell Curve said that jobs increasingly required high cognitive skills, and that people without high cognitive skills would be at a disadvantage. E.g., especially, blacks.
The answer is The Sixties. In the Sixties liberals set the future by passing Civil Rights laws that made discrimination by race and sex illegal. And they passed the Great Society legislation that mandated a bunch of handouts to the poor. And they started Affirmative Action that deliberately discriminated against whites.
Charles Murray in Losing Ground said that the handouts didn't improve the lives of the poor.
Charles Murray in The Bell Curve said that the future belonged to the cognitive elite, and blacks would be particularly disadvantaged.
Charles Murray in Coming Apart said that, looking at whites only, the cognitive elite were doin' fine, the middle were doing so-so, and in the lower classes the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much. In other words The Bell Curve was right. The policy of the cognitive elite discriminates against all people with a less-than-magnificent IQ -- including whites with low IQs.
Oh, and by the way, since Coming Apart was published we now know about the white working class "dying of despair" from drink and drugs. Golly, that couldn't possibly be about the low IQ whites just not being able to make it in the economy that privileges high IQ could it? Nah! Not a chance.
You expect our liberal friends to say, oh well, looks like we screwed up? So let's all get together and try to fix things?
Well, the record of the last 35 years since Losing Ground in 1984 is pretty clear. Our liberal friends aren't going to admit that they screwed up: not on big government programs and not on race. Instead they say the whole thing is due to white racism. And patriarchal sexism, and vile homophobia. And anything else, including the kitchen sink, that they can throw at ordinary Americans.
And if you disagree with them you are going to be downrated on Google Search because "disinformation," fired from your job, and canceled from social media.
I mean, if the black crime rate is nine times the white crime rate it can't be because the politics and programs of our liberal friends in the cognitive elite actually Make Things Worse. No. It must be the "hate" of far-right white supremacist armed insurrectionists.
And that is where America is today. Unless and until we do something about it.
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