Always Changing wrote:It is a book of exaggerations, written up to reinforce negative expectations based on social class.
There was a hardbound copy of
The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murry in my carry-on bag when arriving back in Abu Dhabi in 1997. A representative of the company that was our main investor there, and who was picking me up at the airport, happened to notice it.
On the drive back to town, he asked me if I agreed with claim that there was a meaningful racial component to intelligence when comparing populations of orientals vs occidentals vs those of African descent. Before responding, I asked him if he had read the book. He said that he had and considered it to be " social pornography of the worst kind".
We were both struggling at the time to establish an Arabic technical team that could carry out environmental damage assessments from marine oil spills. It was not going well, and nerves were a bit frayed all around.
I asked if he believed that data presented by the authors to support their various claims of social stratification resulting from differences in natural intelligence as measured by IQ. He said that he did not necessarily disagree with the data presented but that the detected variations in IQ among the three general racial groups (if real) were too small to make the kinds of differences the authors attributed to them.
The topic was discussed between us on and off for several days. He found the very thesis of the book offensive. My position was that it would not hurt to take the data into consideration when setting expectations and social policy. Fact is that IQ is determined by both nature (genetics) and nurture (social environment), just like other physical attributes and abilities. The discussion eventually became so adversarial that I decided to break it off for fear of alienating our investor to the point that working with their staff became uncomfortable.
More than 20 years after those conversations, my view is that world events have made the main theses of the book more credible than they were in the '90s. And that is not necessarily a good thing.