Reserved for J. Morgan's Comments "The Bell Curve (Hernstein & Murray) is a sociological analysis of stratification. The argument is that intelligence, as measured by a series of psychometrics, is a) largely a product of genetics, b) correlated with, among other things, race, and c) the single most significant factor in determining one's position in a stratified society." -J.Morgan
First- I'd like to thank J. Morgan taking the time to put together a pretty good summary on The Bell Curve and some of its problematic areas. (Read 1st Comment)
However, even though there are some reasons why the book is not as definitive as the authors intended, I don't think that we should "throw the baby out with bathwater". I think that a few of the points made in the book deserve some consideration and are not wholly without merit- provided that you believe intelligence varies between individuals and is at least partially heridatable.
I'll totally finish this post later- I have to run to Port St. Lucie to check out MATT.
Ok, back.
First- let me quote the summary found in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Stephen Pinker.
"Herrnstein's argument, he was the first to point out, should have been banal. He wrote that as social status becomes less strongly determined by arbitrary legacies such as race, parentage, and inherited wealth, it will become more strongly determined by talent, especially (in a modern economy) intelligence. Since differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it will also become more stratified along genetic lines. Smarter people will tend to float into the higher strat, and their children will tend to stay there. The basic argument should be banal because it is based on a mathematical necessity: as the proportion of variance in social status caused by nongenetic factors goes down, the proportion caused by genetic factors has to go up. It could be completely false only if there were no variation in social status based on intellectual talent (which would require that people not preferentially hire and trade with the talented) or if there were no genetic variation in intelligence."
This J. Morgan- is the baby. I think we can safely assume that is this theory holds true because of my anecdotal example A) I'd rather blargue (arguing through blogs- go ahead and use that, I just made it up) with all of you (a trade of ideas) than Paris Hilton, who common sense stipulates is a certifiable idiot and B) if height, weight, disease, and athletic ability are partially heridatable, it would totally illogical that intelligence isn't. If anyone reading this believes that intelligence is merely a factor of environment, I believe that you are sadly mistaken- but I would be interested to hear your argument.
In the second point J. Morgan made as to the unreliability of the book, he stipulates that
"The most convincing critique to me, although the most hotly debated, is that the AFQT does not accurately measure intelligence. This is the major source for data for Hernstein & Murray and, if these criticisms are accurate, it pretty much means that they have no meaningful data. The larger context of this debate is whether or not intelligence is a measurable quality in the first place. Most recent research, as I understand it, indicates that there is absolutely no reliable way to measure, or even define intelligence. Everything from IQ tests to SATS are pretty much bunk in this view."
"Spearman noted that as the data from many different mental tests were accumulating, a curious result kept turning up: If the same group of people took two different mental tests, anyone who did well (or poorly) on one test tended to do similarly well (or poorly) on the other... This outcome did not seem to depend on the specific content of the tests. As long as the tests involved cognitive skills of one sort or another, the positive correlations appeared. Furthermore, individual items within tests showed positive correlations as well. If there was any correlation at all between a pair of items, a person who got one of them right tended to get the other one right, and vice versa for those who got it wrong. In fact, the pattern was stronger than that. It turned out to be nearly impossible to devise items that plausibly measured some cognitive skill and were not positively correlated with other items that plausibly measured some cognitive skill, however disparate the pair of skills might appear to be."If anything, I think that acknowledging this view of intelligence means there is a greater need to restructure our society to avoid the eventual Aldus Huxley like conclusion.
posted by Justin at 12:24 PM 
5 Comments:
Well, I made the comment the other day that jackscolon shouldn’t let anyone who knew what they were talking about catch him referencing The Bell Curve, lest he be made to look the fool. He has graciously provided space on his blog so that I could explain why. While I am not too well versed in this debate (and certainly not one of the people who knows enough to make him look silly for citing it), I do know enough to give a basic outline of critiques of the work. Certainly, for a fuller and more rigorous critique of this work, I would direct you all to Claude S. Fischer et. al. “Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth” (Princeton University Press, 1996), my major source for this post, or my wife. Most of these critiques emerged almost immediately after The Bell Curve was published (despite Hernstein & Murray’s failure to submit their large body of data to peer review before publication), which has largely limited this work’s impact on academic sociology. Nonetheless, these critiques are not widely known or believed by the general public, and so The Bell Curve has been quite influential in that arena. So, on with the post:
The Bell Curve (Hernstein & Murray) is a sociological analysis of stratification. The argument is that intelligence, as measured by a series of psychometrics, is a) largely a product of genetics, b) correlated with, among other things, race, and c) the single most significant factor in determining one’s position in a stratified society. The study was a monumental undertaking and, in many ways, a model of scientific social investigation. There are, however, three major problems with the study that ultimately discredited the work:
1) Problematic statistical analysis. I am really weak in statistics, but the most salient academic criticism of this work is that the statistical methods used to analyze these data were flawed, resulting in spurious outcomes. The most significant statistical model in this study is a measure of three variables: scores on the Armed Services Qualifying Test (AFQT), a socioeconomic status index (SES), and age. This model was used to predict 100 different outcomes for different subgroups of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' venerable National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). The problem is that, according to subsequent examination, some by Murray himself, the measure used to determine whether this model was a good fit for these data (R-square) was inadequate. A more rigorous method yielded that the model predicted ZERO cases correctly.
2) Reliance on psychometrics. The most convincing critique to me, although the most hotly debated, is that the AFQT does not accurately measure intelligence. This is the major source for data for Hernstein & Murray and, if these criticisms are accurate, it pretty much means that they have no meaningful data. The larger context of this debate is whether or not intelligence is a measurable quality in the first place. Most recent research, as I understand it, indicates that there is absolutely no reliable way to measure, or even define intelligence. Everything from IQ tests to SATS are pretty much bunk in this view. For a more full explanation of this, see:
Ceci, S.J. (1990). On Intelligence... More or Less: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. NewYork: Basic Books.
Gardner, H., M. Kornhaber, and W. Wake (1996). Intelligence: Multiple Perspective. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
Gould, S.J. (1978). “Morton's Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity: Unconscious Manipulation of Data May Be a Scientific Norm,” Science 200, 503-509.
3) Overstating the genetic case. When Francis Collins, principle investigator for the Human Genome Project, spoke at UVA last Fall, he was asked about genetics as a factor in determining intelligence. Now, I know absolutely nothing about genetics, but his contention was that, while there may be a genetic factor to intelligence, nobody has identified it yet or demonstrated that it is causal. In his own view, intelligence is probably far too complex to be determined by genetics alone. As for the racial claims made in The Bell Curve (which earned Hernstein and Murray a seven-figure grant from the Pioneer Fund) I do know that it is pretty much bunk. As it turns out, genetics and race have very little to do with each other. In fact, according to a breathtakingly extensive study of the history of “racial science” and the reality of “race” by Alexander Alland, Jr. (Race, IQ, and Other Racisms, 2002), a human is more likely to have more genotypical similarities with someone who is phenotypically of a different “race” than they with someone who is phenotypically of the same “race.” In fact, as I understand it, most genetic historians, anthropologists, and sociologists believe that race is a social construction rather than a clearly-defined biological reality.
So there you have it. Those are the three major criticisms of the work. Again, I would highly recommend Fischer et. al., an interesting book in its own right because it is a collaboration of several faculty members at UC Berkeley, many of whom have otherwise very divergent perspectives. I will do my best to answer any questions anyone has, but no promises; this really isn't my field.
Well, what's the baby in this case?
I never really finished this post... I had some things come up and it might be a day or two, but I published it so that it wouldn't look like you wrote that whole argument for nothing. I'll get back to it as soon as I have some time.
I read some of the Bell Curve yesterday. I hate to say this, as I love to make bold cases without looking back as much as the next blogger, but I think that j. morgan and jackscolon are both right. The Bell Curve is a good, provocative book with mountains of data inside of it that should not be dismissed out of hand. The authors are good, classical liberals with lots of ideas about how to improve American and draw no racist conclusions. What was never explicitly pointed out, though, was the fact that the correlation between race and intelligence, while seemingly objective, is nevertheless contingent. The best way to phrase this would be to say that in the data that the authors analyzed, which of course are only samples, they found a real correlation between intelligence and race. HOWEVER, it wasn't a "genetic" correlation, because we don't yet have a way to interact directly with someone's genotype in order to "measure" subjective things like intelligence. So, it's not the case that if you're black, you're likely to be less intelligent than if you're white across the board. It IS likely, on the other hand, that if you're an inner-city black youth, you're more likely to be malnourished (for example) than a suburban white youth, and that if you're malnourished, you're likely to score lower on IQ tests/SAT tests/whatever. So the correlation is not between "blackness" and intelligence; it's between contingent, changeable factors that happen to be found in African-American communities in the 20th century and intelligence.
Basically, I'm putting a huge gloss on j. morgan's point #3. To sum up, again: it MUST be pointed out that, as I said above, we don't yet have enough technology to analyze our genetics in order to predict our intelligence. I'm largely leaving criticisms 1 and 2 alone; I don't know too much about statistics, and intelligence, while there are generally accepted definitions of it among scientific communities, is still subjective. How well you do on an IQ test is largely a measure of just that--how well you do on an IQ test.
One of their other bottom lines, and this is agreed upon by everyone, is that educated people (not necessary intelligent people, but "educated" people), have MUCH lower fertility rates than uneducated people. This does not allow you to draw the conclusion that "stupid" people have more babies than smart people, because you would first have to show a correlation between education (objective) and intelligence (subjective.)
I hope that helps everyone out.
Yes Charles, thank you. In reviewing my comment in light of yours, I realized that I should have made it explicit that H&M never claim that race is a causal factor with regard to intelligence, only a correlated property. And while that is not an insignificant finding, it is spurious, because, as you noted, it is contingent on other (meaning non-racial) factors. I guess my point in the third criticism I made was that once extraneous factors are eliminated, and heritable intelligence is the only consideration, the correlation between race and intelligence disappears. I think my problem with noting the correlation, then, is that, in the context of an argument that intelligence is the single most significant factor in determining position in a stratified society, the claim is misleading regarding factors that are related to intelligence. Had the claim been that one’s parents’ socioeconomic status was correlated with intelligence as measured by the AFQT, then the claim would have been more accurate. Not only would it have reinforced what we already know (that low levels of economic and social skills are transmitted generationally, facilitating cyclic poverty), but it would have also been far more actionable. Thank you for clarifying that point and forcing me to be clearer about the nature of that particular criticism.
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