Scientific proof that humans are in fact hierarchical. Some people will never be successful simply because they are not smart enough. Very disruptive to the liberal consensus of the past 30ish years
It makes a number of claims people think are false and will allow elites to justify unequal systems that privilege them. The arguments in the book run like this.
>More and more people go to college. >Colleges let people in based on standardized tests. >These tests are g loaded, that is, they corelate very highly with IQ >Studies show IQ is highly heritable, so presumably due to genetics >Most people meet their mates at college or in graduate school >Thus, colleges act as a giant sorting filter, breeding high IQ people to high IQ people and creating a cognitive elite >These people will come to dominate positions of power and prestige, but low IQ people actually breed more. >This will result in a potentially dystopian society where there is a small cognitive elite and a massive underclass >The underclass will become increasingly economicly irrelevant as technology changes the economy and reduces the need for unskilled labor. We could see a dystopian society with a giant nanny state for the dumb plebs. >Given this, milquetoast mainstream 1990s Republican policies should be enacted and punishments for crime should be immediate (i.e. cut out due process, most people are guilty anyhow) because the plebs are too dumb to learn if the punishment stimulus comes too long after the illegal action they took. >Gaps in test scores and achievement between racial groups are likely due in large part to genetics and so we can only get so close to equality (°this point is ancillary to the argument but gets all the attention).
There are obviously a lot of problems here. One, it can be seen as justifying inequality as inevitable and natural. But inequality soared in the US from 1979-2020, and that can't be due to shifting genetics because humans go 20-30 years before reproducing. Genetics can't explain rapidly growing inequality or the growth of the capital share of income.
Second, the number of people meeting their mates at school didn't keep increasing, it went down.
Elite schools don't select on test scores as much as he claims they do, and it is unclear how well he understood the admissions process.
Racial gaps might be partially or fully explained by the effects of racism, poorer medical care, exposure to much higher instances or compressed poverty, violence, and epigenetic effects lingering from the Jim Crow era or even slavery.
The "cognitive elite" group he defined is very broad, 10+% of the population, but power and wealth are increasingly concentrated in a very small fraction of 1% of the population and inheritance is the major driver of membership in that class, not university selection.
So, all in all it's an interesting book but it overstates its case and ends with a boring, typical 90s conservative raft of policies.
Should note that the prophecy of the growing mass of unemployable low skilled workers part has been borne out. He seems prescient there and there are a lot of interesting statistical facts.
His later book, Growing Apart is a more modern treatment that tries to explain how a huge swath of the White population saw their real wages still growing (or begin to shrink), and defined in standard of living and life expectancy.
The problem is that, while the analysis is good, it once again says the solution is mainline GOP agenda points circle 2010 now. You get the feeling he might be cherry picking to get to the political conclusions he likes.
Also, Murray avoids taking much of a geographic lens to his treatments, and you can see why.
Some US states rank pretty far down the list on international tests of k-12 education. Others, like Massachusetts, despite an increasingly diverse student body, rank right at the top. White students in some southern states score lower than Hispanic students in high performing states (New England is a standout region). One of the things Massachusetts does is aggressively fund education (teacher pay is $65-80,000 on average) and give more funding to poorer districts. That is, many of the poorest districts have total per pupil budgets higher than much wealthier districts. MA school districts can independently over fund their schools using their local property tax levy (if Prop 2 1/2 allows room in their levy limit/ceiling) but many choose not to.
This is passed over in silence. He notes how economic mobility has slowed down, and how this corresponds to his hypothesis about schools acting as filters for mate selection. He has a point here, but he missed that economic mobility, even looking just at data for Whites, is the absolute worst in the US South.
Essentially, you get reasons he is right, but then no explanation for why the policy solutions he recommends, which have been implemented at the state level in many states, have actually led to worse outcomes.
In terms of the dystopian future, he seems prescient, but the analysis isn't that deep. Fukuyama had more interesting things to say about the Last Man phenomena in just a few sections of the End of History than Murray has to say in a whole book on the subject.
The racism aspect gets all the attention and I fear people who want to justify their racism think "ahhh, see, they want to ban this hidden knowledge. This is all true." But really the controversy covers up that the analysis just isn't that great.
>Others, like Massachusetts, despite an increasingly diverse student body, rank right at the top
Massachusetts is 80% white lmfao. The majority of top students are white. >White students in some southern states score lower than Hispanic students in high performing states
Whites consistently do significantly better on SATs than Hispanics I'd say this is bull.
Even if your points are actually true, which is questionable, pointing out possible anomalies does not refute an overall trend. It is quite obvious to anyone who spends time with different racial groups that there are racial differences, intelligence included. Whether or not it is nature or nurture is kind of irrelevant anyways, since it exists. And btw, as society becomes more "progressive," i.e. gives more handouts to inferior nonwhites, we hardly see any differences beyond the quality of academic output decreasing substantially. You're pretty stupid if you can't see this as self-evident. It doesn't mean you have to judge every individual from a certain race, although when dealing with collectives that is most pragmatic.
2 years ago
Anonymous
There are over 6 fricking billion humans on this planet, if you are seriously dumb enough to believe your antecdotal experiences give you the ability to draw conclusions about a heterogenous group of hundreds of millions of people than I pray your kids don't inherit whatever fricking dumbass genes you did.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>don't trust your lying eyes
every single fricking time
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yeah I know right. Why trust tens of thousands of interactions you’ve had with members of a certain group to give you an accurate understanding of them?
The districts where the students score highest in MA is outside the metro Boston area; i.e. where the proportion of white students is greater. Also if funding is the main driver of academic success then why do Washington DC public school students have some of the lowest scores of all metropolitan school districts despite having one of the highest per student rates of funding?
>Should note that the prophecy of the growing mass of unemployable low skilled workers part has been borne out. He seems prescient there and there are a lot of interesting statistical facts.
Already pointed out by Marx in the three volumes of Capital.
>But inequality soared in the US from 1979-2020
How this is the case when the US poverty rate is lower than it was in 1979? Differences in wealth between races still exist even with massive amounts of government spending to change that. This clearly implies there is a genetic discrepancy here. More over, your argument of "inequality increasing" is over-stated and his been debunked.
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99455/how_different_studies_measure_income_inequality.pdf
Again, you people just manipulate the methodology to get finds you want. >As shown, researchers’ estimates of income inequality differ significantly because they use different units of analysis, definitions of income, adjustments for family size, capital income measures (if any), and adjustments for inflation. And some studies provide estimates of both post- and pretax incomes.
Basically, you people just use different measurements that can not be reproduced because your work is inherently unscientific to begin with.
It's controversial among laity because it argues that IQ is linked with race; in particular that black people are likely to have a lower IQ on average than white people, and that this may in part be due to genetics and not just environment, though to what degree is unknown. Chuds use this to use this to fuel their white supremacist fantasies while progressives start crying and shitting at the suggestion that it could be true.
On the academic front it is controversial because the assumptions made, methodology used, and conclusions drawn are generally seen as poor by contemporaries. Extremely basic requirements like having your work peer reviewed were not done by the authors. Furthermore, the concept of IQ itself is controversial in academia, at least in the sense that it is a good measurement of "intelligence".
>having your work peer reviewed
Peer reviewed is basically people who have the same bias agreeing with each other. To the point they don't even to the same experiment, which gives raise to the lack of reproducibility of experiments
you don't need a phd to see that black people are just stupid, generally speaking. go talk to them or just listen to them speak. they are slow, bad with words, don't really say anything interesting, etc. Then you look at all the other factors, and it is even more obvious. And I'm not talking about ghetto blacks. If anything I have more respect for (some) of those people, since their lives actually are tough and it makes them stronger and have some higher concepts of things like honour. Eve academic blacks are generally just dumb as rocks. You are incapable of objective observation if you don't notice this, your ego is getting in the way of true perception. Of course I'm speaking in general here, which should be obvious, but leftists often will pretend this sort of argument goes for all individuals, either because they are intentionally dishonest or not good at thinking logically.
It's controversial because proponents of the book are implicitly arguing that IQ has merit and is a legitimate measurement of superior intelligence, but when I then tell then I have an IQ of 154 and can clearly recognize that they are mouth-breathing morons, suddenly they claim IQ is meaningless and refuse to acknowledge that I am their intellectual superior.
Because it's pseudoscience masquerading as thoughtful and profound social analysis.
The book'a entire methodology and conclusions can be easily picked apart by any halfway competent undergraduate.
Humans have tried to justify existing arbitrary social and cultural hierarchies with pseudoscience for as long as the actual scientific method has been around, it's not something new or interesting.
Scientific proof that humans are in fact hierarchical. Some people will never be successful simply because they are not smart enough. Very disruptive to the liberal consensus of the past 30ish years
>Very disruptive to the liberal consensus of the past 30ish years
this is bait, right?
It makes a number of claims people think are false and will allow elites to justify unequal systems that privilege them. The arguments in the book run like this.
>More and more people go to college.
>Colleges let people in based on standardized tests.
>These tests are g loaded, that is, they corelate very highly with IQ
>Studies show IQ is highly heritable, so presumably due to genetics
>Most people meet their mates at college or in graduate school
>Thus, colleges act as a giant sorting filter, breeding high IQ people to high IQ people and creating a cognitive elite
>These people will come to dominate positions of power and prestige, but low IQ people actually breed more.
>This will result in a potentially dystopian society where there is a small cognitive elite and a massive underclass
>The underclass will become increasingly economicly irrelevant as technology changes the economy and reduces the need for unskilled labor. We could see a dystopian society with a giant nanny state for the dumb plebs.
>Given this, milquetoast mainstream 1990s Republican policies should be enacted and punishments for crime should be immediate (i.e. cut out due process, most people are guilty anyhow) because the plebs are too dumb to learn if the punishment stimulus comes too long after the illegal action they took.
>Gaps in test scores and achievement between racial groups are likely due in large part to genetics and so we can only get so close to equality (°this point is ancillary to the argument but gets all the attention).
There are obviously a lot of problems here. One, it can be seen as justifying inequality as inevitable and natural. But inequality soared in the US from 1979-2020, and that can't be due to shifting genetics because humans go 20-30 years before reproducing. Genetics can't explain rapidly growing inequality or the growth of the capital share of income.
Second, the number of people meeting their mates at school didn't keep increasing, it went down.
Elite schools don't select on test scores as much as he claims they do, and it is unclear how well he understood the admissions process.
Racial gaps might be partially or fully explained by the effects of racism, poorer medical care, exposure to much higher instances or compressed poverty, violence, and epigenetic effects lingering from the Jim Crow era or even slavery.
The "cognitive elite" group he defined is very broad, 10+% of the population, but power and wealth are increasingly concentrated in a very small fraction of 1% of the population and inheritance is the major driver of membership in that class, not university selection.
So, all in all it's an interesting book but it overstates its case and ends with a boring, typical 90s conservative raft of policies.
Should note that the prophecy of the growing mass of unemployable low skilled workers part has been borne out. He seems prescient there and there are a lot of interesting statistical facts.
His later book, Growing Apart is a more modern treatment that tries to explain how a huge swath of the White population saw their real wages still growing (or begin to shrink), and defined in standard of living and life expectancy.
The problem is that, while the analysis is good, it once again says the solution is mainline GOP agenda points circle 2010 now. You get the feeling he might be cherry picking to get to the political conclusions he likes.
Also, Murray avoids taking much of a geographic lens to his treatments, and you can see why.
Some US states rank pretty far down the list on international tests of k-12 education. Others, like Massachusetts, despite an increasingly diverse student body, rank right at the top. White students in some southern states score lower than Hispanic students in high performing states (New England is a standout region). One of the things Massachusetts does is aggressively fund education (teacher pay is $65-80,000 on average) and give more funding to poorer districts. That is, many of the poorest districts have total per pupil budgets higher than much wealthier districts. MA school districts can independently over fund their schools using their local property tax levy (if Prop 2 1/2 allows room in their levy limit/ceiling) but many choose not to.
This is passed over in silence. He notes how economic mobility has slowed down, and how this corresponds to his hypothesis about schools acting as filters for mate selection. He has a point here, but he missed that economic mobility, even looking just at data for Whites, is the absolute worst in the US South.
Essentially, you get reasons he is right, but then no explanation for why the policy solutions he recommends, which have been implemented at the state level in many states, have actually led to worse outcomes.
In terms of the dystopian future, he seems prescient, but the analysis isn't that deep. Fukuyama had more interesting things to say about the Last Man phenomena in just a few sections of the End of History than Murray has to say in a whole book on the subject.
The racism aspect gets all the attention and I fear people who want to justify their racism think "ahhh, see, they want to ban this hidden knowledge. This is all true." But really the controversy covers up that the analysis just isn't that great.
>Others, like Massachusetts, despite an increasingly diverse student body, rank right at the top
Massachusetts is 80% white lmfao. The majority of top students are white.
>White students in some southern states score lower than Hispanic students in high performing states
Whites consistently do significantly better on SATs than Hispanics I'd say this is bull.
Even if your points are actually true, which is questionable, pointing out possible anomalies does not refute an overall trend. It is quite obvious to anyone who spends time with different racial groups that there are racial differences, intelligence included. Whether or not it is nature or nurture is kind of irrelevant anyways, since it exists. And btw, as society becomes more "progressive," i.e. gives more handouts to inferior nonwhites, we hardly see any differences beyond the quality of academic output decreasing substantially. You're pretty stupid if you can't see this as self-evident. It doesn't mean you have to judge every individual from a certain race, although when dealing with collectives that is most pragmatic.
There are over 6 fricking billion humans on this planet, if you are seriously dumb enough to believe your antecdotal experiences give you the ability to draw conclusions about a heterogenous group of hundreds of millions of people than I pray your kids don't inherit whatever fricking dumbass genes you did.
>don't trust your lying eyes
every single fricking time
Yeah I know right. Why trust tens of thousands of interactions you’ve had with members of a certain group to give you an accurate understanding of them?
The districts where the students score highest in MA is outside the metro Boston area; i.e. where the proportion of white students is greater. Also if funding is the main driver of academic success then why do Washington DC public school students have some of the lowest scores of all metropolitan school districts despite having one of the highest per student rates of funding?
>Should note that the prophecy of the growing mass of unemployable low skilled workers part has been borne out. He seems prescient there and there are a lot of interesting statistical facts.
Already pointed out by Marx in the three volumes of Capital.
>But inequality soared in the US from 1979-2020
How this is the case when the US poverty rate is lower than it was in 1979? Differences in wealth between races still exist even with massive amounts of government spending to change that. This clearly implies there is a genetic discrepancy here. More over, your argument of "inequality increasing" is over-stated and his been debunked.
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99455/how_different_studies_measure_income_inequality.pdf
Again, you people just manipulate the methodology to get finds you want.
>As shown, researchers’ estimates of income inequality differ significantly because they use different units of analysis, definitions of income, adjustments for family size, capital income measures (if any), and adjustments for inflation. And some studies provide estimates of both post- and pretax incomes.
Basically, you people just use different measurements that can not be reproduced because your work is inherently unscientific to begin with.
I think you knew why before posting this
It's controversial among laity because it argues that IQ is linked with race; in particular that black people are likely to have a lower IQ on average than white people, and that this may in part be due to genetics and not just environment, though to what degree is unknown. Chuds use this to use this to fuel their white supremacist fantasies while progressives start crying and shitting at the suggestion that it could be true.
On the academic front it is controversial because the assumptions made, methodology used, and conclusions drawn are generally seen as poor by contemporaries. Extremely basic requirements like having your work peer reviewed were not done by the authors. Furthermore, the concept of IQ itself is controversial in academia, at least in the sense that it is a good measurement of "intelligence".
>having your work peer reviewed
Peer reviewed is basically people who have the same bias agreeing with each other. To the point they don't even to the same experiment, which gives raise to the lack of reproducibility of experiments
you don't need a phd to see that black people are just stupid, generally speaking. go talk to them or just listen to them speak. they are slow, bad with words, don't really say anything interesting, etc. Then you look at all the other factors, and it is even more obvious. And I'm not talking about ghetto blacks. If anything I have more respect for (some) of those people, since their lives actually are tough and it makes them stronger and have some higher concepts of things like honour. Eve academic blacks are generally just dumb as rocks. You are incapable of objective observation if you don't notice this, your ego is getting in the way of true perception. Of course I'm speaking in general here, which should be obvious, but leftists often will pretend this sort of argument goes for all individuals, either because they are intentionally dishonest or not good at thinking logically.
>hurrrrrrrr duurrrrrr it’s a book so technically it’s IQfy
POL POSTS IN POL BOARDS
LIT POSTS IN LIT BOARDS
Every lost except yours in this thread has focused on the actual book dumbass.
>L ratio didn’t ask
leftists are such children, any competing worldview makes them throw tantrums. they really are privileged, spoiled little turds.
It's controversial because proponents of the book are implicitly arguing that IQ has merit and is a legitimate measurement of superior intelligence, but when I then tell then I have an IQ of 154 and can clearly recognize that they are mouth-breathing morons, suddenly they claim IQ is meaningless and refuse to acknowledge that I am their intellectual superior.
Because it's pseudoscience masquerading as thoughtful and profound social analysis.
The book'a entire methodology and conclusions can be easily picked apart by any halfway competent undergraduate.
Humans have tried to justify existing arbitrary social and cultural hierarchies with pseudoscience for as long as the actual scientific method has been around, it's not something new or interesting.