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Offering a startling perspective on the social and economic problems of contemporary America, a controversial study examines the relationship between ethnicity and intelligence. Reprint. 125,000 first printing. NYT.
Customer Review:A1MD99Z7WM27LS
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Summary: HOW ARE THE BRAINIACS WORKING OUT FOR YOU?
If brainiacs are the best, and everyone else sux, we're in trouble. Brainiacs brought us the current depression and meltdown; brainiacs brought us the 13 trillion deficit; brainiacs brought us almost every problem we have.
How come? The authors assure us brainiac f@rts smell like peach blossoms!
Brainiacs generally fail for the most obvious reasons: Theyre insulated from adversity, failure, and zits as kiddies. Therefore theyre infested with hubris.
Dont waste your time with this nonsense.
Customer Review:A3TPUVRKDAFP5C
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Summary: Can someone explain....
Why do the authors posit with such vigor and length the statement that intelligence or IQ has high predictive ability for future outcomes when THEIR OWN STATISTICS demonstrate that IQ only accounts for 5-10% of the variability in income? Meaning that 90-95% of the variability in income IS NOT EXPLAINED by IQ, but by presumably a variety of other factors. And if we assume, as we should, that income has a lot to do with social standing...then social standing has nothing to do with IQ, and this book explains nothing.
Customer Review:A25MW9XAMMBMP4
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Summary: pushing the limits of acceptable science
A book like this displays something about our culture that few want to admit: for as much as we tout the virtues, glory, and objectivity of science, books like this remind us that to some degree all the 'science' we accept today is part of a paradigm that is interwoven with our social mores. I say this not because the authors represent an outmoded racist worldview but because the majority of people who bashed this book did so simply because of its thesis and not because of its content or supporting evidence.
THE moral of our culture is that racism (however defined) is the utmost evil. So the quest to see whether or not inherent differences (and especially those relating to intelligence) exist between races is met with considerable suspicion and derision. Other possible research enterprises that can only result in one conclusions (the acceptable one, that is? How about whether or not there are differences in mathematical/scientific reasoning between males and female? Can homosexuality be 'cured'? Is homosexuality a 'birth defect'? And it is not difficult to make this list longer.
This book was written nearly 20 years ago. The thesis is that the intellectual landscape has changed drastically in the 20th century - a process they call cognitive stratification. It is a useful concept and I one I have noticed and thought about before. They confirm it - nearly all smart people are going to college and getting 'smart' jobs. The less professional jobs are being populated by lower levels of intelligence. In a way a caste society is forming in our nation.
The authors continue to show that many of the bad behaviors can be correlated with low IQ.
The book is most controversial when the subject of IQ and race is brought up. Their examination of studies suggests that African-Americans have lower IQ across the spectrum of American life. All the issues of nature/nurture and biased tests are discussed ad nauseum. The authors conclude that it is likely both genetics and environment that lead to intelligence. They also admit that the study of racial differences has been poorly examined and their pronouncements sometimes are tentative (and other times not).
I'm not sure what kind of research has been done on the subject of IQ variability between races since The Bell Curve. I expect other reviews here mention them. It seems to me that the question could be answered by studies that measured IQ of Africans as opposed to African Americans and did so in a systematic way. And additionally study IQ in other populations (Indian, East Asian, European).
Customer Review:A1PASRZ81DY9C
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Summary: Superb
The Bell Curve is an outstanding example of making compelling argument backed up by array of data and supported by statistics. The more I read the book, the more I want to give up. Although the information is interesting, the statistics have tediously overwhelmed me. I've pretty much agreed with everything contained in the book, and yes, it feels scientifically racist, but the presentation of the IQ being the most dominant trait of how society is shaped is perfectly rational and logical. I can really see the shift in how jobs are given to people going from early 20th century to the next century, and obviously, high cognitive ability does play a role because the jobs in upper echelons do require higher mental processing. It is sad to be aware that to have high IQ is to be born with it. Then again, dead-end jobs will have to be filled by people who can stand and tolerate the menial aspect of the work. I do also agree that standards of education have gotten worse over the years, and the vocabulary level of people in general is alarmingly poor. It is no wonder why the selections of books in public education are so bizarre and disappointing, and it bothers me a lot why classic books aren't read nowadays. I learned a lot about how kids are taught extensively, and then there is a fade-out of the net results after that. That's really interesting because if there is a fade-out, then I guess pouring in extra money to help the kids to stretch their minds further isn't really the answer after all. There is a racist feel about the book which cannot be dismissed, and I rather not comment on it. All in all, The Bell Curve is a superb read if one can handle the tediousness of the statistics involved.
Customer Review:AKR6UK8O6DM6X
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Summary: A wonderful book. Much ado about nothing.
Reading this book so many years after it was published and remembering the controversy surrounding it puts me in mind of the current atmosphere with the Global Warming Hysteria: Everyone has an opinion about it, no one is interested in reading the facts, and anyone who has views that challenge the received wisdom is labeled as a heretic of some sort or called out of their name "denier." It's very interesting to read this after all the hubub went down.
I found this book to be very balanced and well reasoned, and in the interest of creating a readable review, I will only deal with 10 points-- even though there are many more that could have been praised.
1. No, the book was not hate literature with footnotes. (I seem to remember that hysterical claim being made somewhere in "The Bell Curve Wars," but memory may not serve me correctly). It instead dealt with the relationship of IQ to income first (and at some length) and then went into the relationship between IQ and race. And it did that in a very even handed, well reasoned and balanced manner.
2. All of the chapters can be read as free-standing articles. The authors correctly predicted that most people would want to go directly to the section on "IQ and Ethnicity" and perhaps this is why the wrote the book in the user-friendly way that they did. Some have said that the purpose of writing a book was to circumvent the review process that would have gone with a peer reviewed article. That was not the case. It seems that these topics are so broad and cover so many disciplines, that the only way to handle them all was with a book-length treatment.
3. The authors carefully circumscribe their territory. Many later authors have tried to stretch TBC further than what it was meant to be. This book clearly stated that it was a book about "Intelligence and Class Structure In American Life," and they set about describing IQ gaps within a nation as explaining income gaps-- but they didn't get into the issue of using IQ to explain the different income of nations. One example that they gave was the average IQ of China being 110 and that of Japan being 103. Even at the time of the writing of this book, it was obvious that the actual income patterns were drastically different (even opposite) of what would be predicted based on the IQ-- and the authors didn't even get into it because it was clear that they were worried about IQ in the context of different groups within a nation.
4. It was nice to hear an alternative explanation of the wealth gap that exists within the US that could (and can) be substantiated with hard data. This book was written many years before (and foreshadowed) Paul Krugman's calling the Reagan tax cuts "the gift that keeps taking." It really does seem as though increasing IQ gaps between the most and least intelligent are enough to explain the wealth gap.
5. Before I read this book, I came into it with several questions that I thought would demolish the argument of the book. But the authors seem to have anticipated a great many arguments. They certainly anticipated nearly all of mine. For example, I'd thought that IQ could be something like a threshold value. So, for some given profession, if a minimum IQ needed to be successful therein was about 120, then two candidates with IQs of 120 and 130, respectively would be the same in every respect. But that was not the case, and the authors carefully tried to show
why more IQ points are better. (The case was a bit shaky, but I don't know if developing it more thoroughly would have lengthened an already very long book.)
6. Many later critics of this book (and many critics of many unrelated books) will try to bully their ideological foes into submission with the written word by using shock/ sneer quotes. The authors of this seem to have very deliberately avoided that and took each argument and carefully deconstructed it. The tone was not at all sneering (a welcome relief).
7. An excellent myth that was debunked in the book (with some very good and careful thinking) was the "cultural bias" myth (used by people who want to dismiss the evidence of this book out of hand without bothering to read it). So, the example that they gave was of a subject being able to recite digits forward and backward. Why would this be culturally biased since everyone uses numbers and can count from 0-10? They also analyzed an experiment where varying reaction and perception times of subjects of different ethnic groups was measured very precisely. (No surprise, the two groups were black and white since it is this one comparison that is often talked away as "cultural bias.") If the total test was 1 second long and each part took up 1/2 of a second, how can one part be cultrually biased (the part on which blacks score the lowest) but the second part be culturally neutral-- especially since they were both 1/2 second long and happened in the same test?
8. Some parts were a bit stretched. The authors talked about IQ and productivity. It seems that that would run into diminishing returns at some point, but if the argument of the authors is to be taken literally, then a busboy with a degree from a four year university could add so much value to a money losing restaurant, that it would be beneficial to hire all college graduates to work at a restaurant. The higher the degree, the better! Nonetheless, the whole book was quite coherent (as I read) and they did make very strong points. (All of the review articles that I have read have tried to take one point and contort some small weakness into a total invalidation of the many germane and strong points made in this book.)
9. It's very pleasing the way that the authors go about defining intelligence. Some have said that "intelligence is culturally defined" and therefore can't be measured by any one single test. Or that since it is not totally clear what it is, it's totally useless as a metric (by that reasoning, since it is not totally clear what mass is, it is not useful to distinguish between 1kg and 1,000kg). The authors point out that all these tests correspond to *something*, and that that *something* explains a lot of things. They start with a phenomenon (general intelligence), use it to explain results, and beforehand define what it is NOT. (They are clear that intelligence is not equal to experience, talent, insight or specific knowledge.)
10. Their discussion of the statistical techniques (Gaussian distribution, standard deviation, etc.) was beautifully economical. I did know most of that to which they referred, but as I went through pretending that I didn't (to see how well the book read), I think they did a good job explaining what was necessary with familiar analogies. They made it clear at appropriate points that they were talking about an AVERAGE IQ and not suggesting that someone's race could be used to predict their IQ. (This is something that lots of people have misunderstood.)
This is a wonderful (if dense) book. It was well worth the (secondhand) purchase price.
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