The Bell Curve was a book I had never heard of before, but after coming across this article on Twitter it looks like it had some pretty influential ideas in it, and they seem to point in the general direction that most of the liberal thinkers on this board do. Most of them are nothing new to the forum: universal basic income, increasingly intellectual elite, automation, post-industrial economy.
Anyway, surely many of you have likely read this book so I thought I'd get a thread rolling and get your already cemented opinions about it out of your brains, as often seems to happen when I post about a book.
It is a very influential book, but for all the wrong reasons. It gets used as a lightning rod for racial politics in the US, because it claims that black people are, mentally, inferior to whites.
The idea behind the Bell Curve is basically the modern incarnation of eugenics - the idea that there those who are genetically superior, and those who are genetically inferior, and that society needs to be reformed to recognise this difference, and deal with it in a sensible fashion. Politically this is an unpopular view because it generally results in some mild form of fascism, but the book doesn't get into specifics on that. Instead it focuses on charting the differences between groups, and the social implications of what this means.
In doing so it has to establish several points.
-It has to establish that these are fixed genetic, heritable differences, rather than anything else.
-It has to establish that IQ is a measure of inherent ability or potential.
-It has to establish that these differences are meaningful on a practical level
Ironically for a book about the social implications of a science, it is the at the scientific level that the book really fails, since it fails to establish any of these points in a convincing manner. It tries to do so simply by rejecting or dismissing alternatives - by shifting the burden of proof onto detractors, precisely because none of these assumptions do well in testing.
For a start, while it is clear that IQ is highly inheritable, there's very little evidence that it is fixed or genetic. Education makes a vast difference to IQ test scores, as does practice. Simply being raised in an environment where formal testing is normal gives one a huge boost, leading to IQ test results tending to reinforce existing social boundaries. Similarly, improving nutrition improves IQ test results. Inheritable does not means genetic - wealth, social class, and education are also highly inheritable characteristics.
It's hard to define what the authors really mean by inherent ability or potential. There is this idea that IQ represents some X-factor underlying all human cognitive performance, but there's no real evidence for this view. Certainly researchers have come up with measures of mental ability, particularly around emotional or social reasoning, that correlate very poorly with IQ.
But the biggest gap by far is in the area of demonstrating that these values represent a practical difference. Gould's criticisms are the most famous, mainly because he goes into the most detail. It boils down to:
-The differences being described between groups are very small.
-The individual differences between people in the groups are extremely large.
-The authors, intentionally or otherwise, blur the differences between differences between groups and differences within groups
-The result is that they are declaring as significant for the country, differences which are not statistically significant predictors of individual achievement.
Or to put it another way...
-Being a particular race is
not a significant predictor of your IQ. Nor is being in any of the other disadvantaged or advantaged groups that they discuss.
This kind of statistical mistake is unfortunately quite common in the social sciences, where the actual computation is done by a computer, and scientists may not pay as much attention to the validity of their results as they should.
