The Bell Curve Revisited

I have been reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart: the State of White America, a book that I find more than a bit disturbing, not because I believe it to be false, but because in large part because I believe it to be correct.  The prima facia thesis that there is an ever-widening gulf between the classes in America is not particularly starting or unique.   The gulf has been apparent for some time to anyone who has been paying attention, and it can be seen in any number of ways, perhaps most obviously in the differences between the social milieu portrayed in a television series like The Good Wife and that portrayed in something like Raising Hope.  For Murray, it is not simply a matter of money, though of course money has its role to play.  It is more an attitudinal and behavioral divide predicated on the foundational American virtues of marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity.  I won't enter into a critique of either television show, but it would take only about five minutes of viewing of each to see the differences between the upper middle class lawyers that populate the The Good Wife and the lower middle class grocery workers that populate Raising Hope.  Although the latter are held up for ridicule -- it is after all a situation comedy -- Murray I think would agree that the illegitimate child that gives its name to the show's title and the prevailing slacker mores, the if-I-can-get-away-with-it-why-not duplicity, provides a more or less accurate portrayal of the attitudes and behavior that Murray uncovers in survey after survey.  That the characters of raising hope are white is to Murray's point.  He focuses on the state of white America, in part to avoid the controversy that surrounded his earlier work and to keep presuppositions about race from tainting his underlying premise which hasn't changed from The Bell Curve.

The differences in income can be explained easily enough by the increasing premium placed on cognitive capacity, or as he put it, "the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy."  I will not debate any particular measure of cognitive capacity.  The whole notion that it can be measured is tainted of late, in part because any measure reveals uncomfortable data that we would prefer to discount than confront.  Nevertheless, suffice it to say, any measure of cognitive capacity is inadequate and culturally biased if one's goal is to measure against what is most likely a mythical absolute standard of intelligence.  If one's goal is more modest -- simply to measure one's ability to function within a given intellectual context within a given culture -- then there are many thoroughly adequate measures that reveal significant differences between individuals and make predictions about their likelihood of success.  My previous college used the compass, my current college uses the ACT, and both are statistically reliable as predictors of success within a collegiate context.  Most of us concede the statistical reliability of such measures, for others, and if they provide disconcerting data about our own ability, well then we are the individual exception to the statistical rule.  Murray's follow on assumption is a bit more disconcerting, and it is buried in his use of "homogamy" above -- that cognitive capacity is as heritable as athletic ability.   It is one thing to say, "he's inherently clumsy," quite another to say, "he's inherently stupid."  Neither may be completely permissible in a cultural context that demands "eumenical niceness," as Murray puts it, but it is clear enough that "being clumsy" may limit one's opportunities with the Chicago Bulls, but it does not limit in any appreciable way one's opportunities for the good life in the same way that 'being stupid' limits them.

To be Continued