5 ms·

Excellent piece. The subtext — why are our academic-political institutions treating the less fortunate as irrational — is just as important as the content.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
It's worth bearing in mind, because it pops up again and again and is popular in certain circles, that the racist message of "The Bell Curve" was modelled on earlier research that tried to explain why poor (white, though no-one would think of them as that in context) people in the UK, didn't succeed as much as those with money and connections. Clearly there must be some physical difference between the classes to explain this discrepency and re-inforce that the rich are simply better than the poor and so deserve to be rich, despite the obvious objections raised by reality. And just to ram this point home in a way that you would think would be unmistakable one of the authors of the Bell Curve, followed up with a book explaining why poor white people are also deserving of their fate. "Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  "The Bell Curve" is from 1994, a time when the importance of demand for education and skills as a driver for inequality was far less clear than it is today. The real focus of that book was not to drive any racist message, but simply to sound the alarm about how the already extant divergence in educational outcomes would only become more and more relevant in the future unless something radically effective was done to try and mitigate it. People really like to misrepresent that book for some reason, but if anything its real message has only become stronger and more relevant since then.
  - willis936 5y ago
    The bell curve is a scabrous piece of racial pornography. https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwing-a-curve.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwi...
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      To be clear, I do of course agree that the book had plenty of major flaws, including in its statistical arguments about the importance of "I.Q." specifically (or of some entirely hypothetical "general factor", whatever that might mean - a "factor" being merely a way of summarizing correlations across measurements, as opposed to anything causally relevant in any underlying model) to outcomes, and even about its observed distribution across US conventional race groups. Much of it would not stand up to even the lightest scrutiny nowadays. But its more general argument about the emergence of a "cognitive elite" on one side, and a "custodial state" on the other, might as well be called conventional wisdom today. These simply were not commonly-acknowledged facts in the mid-1990s!
    - whatlolasdqwe 5y ago
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    I don't think this is an accurate depiction of the book (at the time or now). One of the core, repeated messages of the book is that there are no mitigations possible even in theory and we should stop wasting money on trying to educate poor people as there was no way that it would help.† This is both factually and logically unsound, as well as ethically dubious even before you get into the totally pseudoscientific race angle that was used to sell these political policies to gullible racists. †Not coincidentally, the Rhetoric of Reaction lists the standard three arguments used against social progress through history as: perversity (anything you do to help will only make things worse), jeopardy (any change will risk what we have now) and ..... futility (it doesn't matter what you do, nothing will change). Bell Curve very strongly following this latter rhetorical strategy. These arguments naturally re-occur when you're arguing against something that everyone knows is a good thing, just as FUD is a popular sales strategy when you're a comfortable monopoly. You don't have to claim to be good or even just better, you just need to undermine the alternatives and the status quo survives a bit longer.
kstenerud 5y ago
This kind of thing happens in any society with high inequality: The worse it gets, the more those on top feel the need to justify their position and downplay the rage of the underclass (traditionally, this continues until the underclass finally kills off the privileged class). It permeates academia and politics because higher learning and the political sphere are squarely in the realm of the privileged in the USA.
- math-dev 5y ago
  Agree

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

It's worth bearing in mind, because it pops up again and again and is popular in certain circles, that the racist message of "The Bell Curve" was modelled on earlier research that tried to explain why poor (white, though no-one would think of them as that in context) people in the UK, didn't succeed as much as those with money and connections. Clearly there must be some physical difference between the classes to explain this discrepency and re-inforce that the rich are simply better than the poor and so deserve to be rich, despite the obvious objections raised by reality. And just to ram this point home in a way that you would think would be unmistakable one of the authors of the Bell Curve, followed up with a book explaining why poor white people are also deserving of their fate. "Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)

zozbot234 5y ago
"The Bell Curve" is from 1994, a time when the importance of demand for education and skills as a driver for inequality was far less clear than it is today. The real focus of that book was not to drive any racist message, but simply to sound the alarm about how the already extant divergence in educational outcomes would only become more and more relevant in the future unless something radically effective was done to try and mitigate it. People really like to misrepresent that book for some reason, but if anything its real message has only become stronger and more relevant since then.
- willis936 5y ago
  The bell curve is a scabrous piece of racial pornography. https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwing-a-curve.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwi...
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    To be clear, I do of course agree that the book had plenty of major flaws, including in its statistical arguments about the importance of "I.Q." specifically (or of some entirely hypothetical "general factor", whatever that might mean - a "factor" being merely a way of summarizing correlations across measurements, as opposed to anything causally relevant in any underlying model) to outcomes, and even about its observed distribution across US conventional race groups. Much of it would not stand up to even the lightest scrutiny nowadays. But its more general argument about the emergence of a "cognitive elite" on one side, and a "custodial state" on the other, might as well be called conventional wisdom today. These simply were not commonly-acknowledged facts in the mid-1990s!
  - whatlolasdqwe 5y ago
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I don't think this is an accurate depiction of the book (at the time or now). One of the core, repeated messages of the book is that there are no mitigations possible even in theory and we should stop wasting money on trying to educate poor people as there was no way that it would help.† This is both factually and logically unsound, as well as ethically dubious even before you get into the totally pseudoscientific race angle that was used to sell these political policies to gullible racists. †Not coincidentally, the Rhetoric of Reaction lists the standard three arguments used against social progress through history as: perversity (anything you do to help will only make things worse), jeopardy (any change will risk what we have now) and ..... futility (it doesn't matter what you do, nothing will change). Bell Curve very strongly following this latter rhetorical strategy. These arguments naturally re-occur when you're arguing against something that everyone knows is a good thing, just as FUD is a popular sales strategy when you're a comfortable monopoly. You don't have to claim to be good or even just better, you just need to undermine the alternatives and the status quo survives a bit longer.

kstenerud 5y ago

This kind of thing happens in any society with high inequality: The worse it gets, the more those on top feel the need to justify their position and downplay the rage of the underclass (traditionally, this continues until the underclass finally kills off the privileged class). It permeates academia and politics because higher learning and the political sphere are squarely in the realm of the privileged in the USA.

math-dev 5y ago
Agree