A scientific response to the best-selling The Bell Curve which set off a hailstorm of controversy upon its publication in 1994. Much of the public reaction to the book was polemic and failed to analyse the details of the science and validity of the statistical arguments underlying the books conclusion. Here, at last, social scientists and statisticians reply to The Bell Curve and its conclusions about IQ, genetics and social outcomes.
The controversial book linking intelligence to class and race in modern society, and what public policy can do to mitigate socioeconomic differences in IQ, birth rate, crime, fertility, welfare, and poverty.
Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman have edited a book on race, class, and intelligence that will stand for the foreseeable future as the authoritative guide to the extraordinary controversy ignited by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's incendiary bestseller, The Bell Curve. The editors have gathered together both the best of recent reviews and essays, and salient documents drawn from the curious history of this heated debate. The Bell Curve Debate captures the fervor, anger, and scope of an almost unprecedented national argument over the very idea of democracy and the possibility of a tolerant, multiracial America. It is an essential companion and answer to The Bell Curve, and provides scholarship and polemic from every point of view. It is a must-read for the informed citizen in search of all the views fit to print.
As debate rages over the widening and destructive gap between the rich and the rest of Americans, Claude Fischer and his colleagues present a comprehensive new treatment of inequality in America. They challenge arguments that expanding inequality is the natural, perhaps necessary, accompaniment of economic growth. They refute the claims of the incendiary bestseller The Bell Curve (1994) through a clear, rigorous re-analysis of the very data its authors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, used to contend that inherited differences in intelligence explain inequality. Inequality by Design offers a powerful alternative explanation, stressing that economic fortune depends more on social circumstances than on IQ, which is itself a product of society. More critical yet, patterns of inequality must be explained by looking beyond the attributes of individuals to the structure of society. Social policies set the "rules of the game" within which individual abilities and efforts matter. And recent policies have, on the whole, widened the gap between the rich and the rest of Americans since the 1970s. Not only does the wealth of individuals' parents shape their chances for a good life, so do national policies ranging from labor laws to investments in education to tax deductions. The authors explore the ways that America--the most economically unequal society in the industrialized world--unevenly distributes rewards through regulation of the market, taxes, and government spending. It attacks the myth that inequality fosters economic growth, that reducing economic inequality requires enormous welfare expenditures, and that there is little we can do to alter the extent of inequality. It also attacks the injurious myth of innate racial inequality, presenting powerful evidence that racial differences in achievement are the consequences, not the causes, of social inequality. By refusing to blame inequality on an unchangeable human nature and an inexorable market--an excuse that leads to resignation and passivity--Inequality by Design shows how we can advance policies that widen opportunity for all.
Meet Turk, a frustrated claims adjuster who feels like a work monkey spinning his wheels for an insurance company. He desires to throw a monkey wrench in the works and develops a plan to free him from his boring life and make him rich. It might be one of the best fiction novels off the beaten path that looks at the American debt economy in what Kirkus Reviews called “an often-funny satire of the excesses of the free market ethos.” If successful, his plan will liberate a vast majority of human beings from the drudgery and monotony of their own monkey work or what the commoner might refer to as a job. Turk envisions the Primo-Primate Project to create a real work monkey from trained chimpanzees who operate digital sales registers. Suppose you’re looking for a fiction book with philosophical themes that explores the line between madness and spiritual revelation. In that case, you’ll enjoy the tension the author creates in this contemporary satirical novel as the lead character examines his loneliness and isolation amidst others’ perceptions of him. Enjoy the humor as Turk works to free humanity from the mundane and dull and replace it with monkey work that makes money and quite a few laughs too. The acclaimed Kirkus Reviews also said (In the Belly of the Bell-Shaped Curve,) “Carter doesn’t just offer readers a hapless Everyperson in these pages; he gives Turk dimension by making him a self-help disciple with delusions of grandeur.”
Arguing that race is a biologically significant difference, the authors challenge the weight of academic opinion on the subject and suggest honesty rather than fear-mongering in light of growing evidence that the various races are significantly different. 20,000 first printing.
The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities. What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.
This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world.
