The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life QUOTES

1 " Many academic intellectuals hold middle-class values in contempt "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

2 " Richard Lynn was able to assemble eleven studies in his 1991 review of the literature. He estimated the median black African IQ to be 75, approximately 1.7 standard deviations below the U.S. overall population average, about 10 points lower than the current figure for American blacks. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

3 " Page 548:

We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

4 " Page 366:
Can the United States really have been experiencing falling IQ? Would not we be able to see the consequences? Maybe we have. In 1938, Raymond Cattell, one of the most illustrious psychometricians of his age, wrote an article for the British Journal of Psychology, “Some Changes in Social life in a Community with a Falling Intelligence Quotient.” The article was eerily prescient.

In education, Cattell predicted that academic standards would fall and the curriculum would shift toward less abstract subjects. He foresaw an increase in “delinquency against society” – crime and willful dependency (for example, having a child without being able to care for it) would be in this category. He was not sure whether this would lead to a slackening of moral codes or attempts at tighter government control over individual behavior. The response could go either way, he wrote.

He predicted that a complex modern society with a falling IQ would have to compensate people at the low end of IQ by a “systematized relaxation of moral standards, permitting more direct instinctive satisfactions.” In particular, he saw an expanding role for what he called “fantasy compensations.” He saw the novel and the cinema as the contemporary means for satisfying it, but he added that “we have probably not seen the end of its development or begun to appreciate its damaging effects on ‘reality thinking’ habits concerned in other spheres of life” – a prediction hard to fault as one watches the use of TV in today’s world and imagines the use of virtual reality helmets in tomorrow’s.

Turning to political and social life, he expected to see “the development of a larger ‘social problem group’ or at least of a group supported, supervised and patronized by extensive state social welfare work.” This, he foresaw, would be “inimical to that human solidarity and potential equality of prestige which is essential to democracy. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

5 " Page 46:
Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, … they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

6 " Page 321:
But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

7 " How large is the black-white difference?

The usual answer to this question is one standard deviation. In discussing IQ tests, for example, the black mean is commonly given as 85, the white mean as 100, and the standard deviation as 15. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

8 " The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

9 " How good a predictor of job productivity is a cognitive test score compared to a job interview? Reference checks? College transcript? The answer, probably surprising to many, is that the test score is a better predictor of job performance than any other single measure. This is the conclusion to be drawn from a meta-analysis on the different predictors of job performance, as shown in the table below. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

10 " Most Americans think that crime has gotten far too high. But in the ruminations about how the nation has reached this state and what might be done, too little attention has been given to one of the best-documented relationships in the study of crime: As a group, criminals are below average in intelligence. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

11 " There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse, with significant economic consequences. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

12 " Cognitive sorting continues from the time that students enter college to the time they get a degree "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

13 " Among the most firmly established facts about criminal offenders is that their distribution of IQ scores differs from that of the population at large. Taking the scientific literature as a whole, criminal offenders have average IQs of about 92, eight points below the mean. More serious or chronic offenders generally have lower scores than more casual offenders. The relationship of IQ to criminality is especially pronounced in the small fraction of the population, primarily young men, who constitute the chronic criminals that account for a disproportionate amount of crime. Offenders "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

14 " The idea is that criminals are distinctive in psychological (perhaps even biological) ways. They are deficient, depending on the particular theory, in conscience or in self-restraint. They lack normal attachment to the mores of their culture, or they are peculiarly indifferent to the feelings or the good opinion of others. They "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

15 " Its story line is that modern societies identify the brightest youths with ever increasing efficiency and then guide them into fairly narrow educational and occupational channels. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

16 " Over the course of a few generations, the average intelligence in an aristocratic family fell toward the population average, hastened by marriages that matched bride and groom by lineage, not ability. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

17 " A true cognitive elite requires a technological society. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

18 " The proportion of CEOs who came from wealthy families had dropped from almost half in 1900 and a third in 1950 to 5.5 percent by 1976.23 The CEO of 1976 was still disproportionately likely to be Episcopalian but much less so than in 1900—and by 1976 he was also disproportionately likely to be Jewish, unheard of in 1920 or earlier. In short, social and economic background was no longer nearly as important in 1976 as in the first half of the century. Educational "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

19 " But school is in itself, more immediately and directly than any other institution, the place where people of high cognitive ability excel and people of low cognitive ability fail. "

― , The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life