In “You Have To Tell The Truth” — The Bell Curve After Ten Years, Steve Sailer presents “ten points about The Bell Curve that remain important today.” His fourth point stands out: Contrary to the detractors’ myth, relatively little of The Bell Curve concerns race.
The first 126 pages described “the emergence of a cognitive elite” via the higher education system. The heart of the book is the next 142 pages on “cognitive classes and social behavior,” which examines the impact of IQ on poverty, schooling, unemployment, family, crime, and so forth. Here, Herrnstein and Murray looked only at data drawn from non-Hispanic whites — to avoid confusing the effect of IQ with that of race.Then, from p. 269 to p. 315, comes the much-denounced Chapter 13 on “Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability.” Murray and Herrnstein carefully step through the evidence, pro and con, and reach the following judicious conclusion:
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.That’s it — the conclusion to the chapter that launched a thousand screeds. Not surprisingly, it’s almost never quoted.