Charles Murray -- In the 1990s he riled up the country with his books on IQ and government
I interviewed many libertarians during my subversive career as a way to get them and their ideas into the paper. Murray was one of my favorites.
Charles Murray — still alive and well and controversial — recently was interviewed at length by John Stossel.
He has written more than half a dozen books since I talked to him 24 years ago, including:
By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, Crown Forum, 2015, ISBN 978-0385346511.
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Twelve, 2020, ISBN 978-1538744017
Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, Encounter Books, 2021, ISBN 978-1641771979
Something About Murray
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Oct. 11, 1998
Charles Murray exploded onto the world of big social policy ideas in 1984 with "Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1080," which essentially argued that America's entire system of welfare was, however well-intended, a complete failure whose chief victims were the very poor it was designed to help.
Murray followed up "Losing Ground" with "In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government” and in 1994, with the late Richard Herrnstein, wrote another controversial work, "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American life."
Currently the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is writing a new book, "Truth and Beauty: The Story of Human Accomplishment," Murray is coming to Pittsburgh Tuesday for two lectures.
He'll speak to Carnegie-Mellon University students about his most recent book, "What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation," at 8 p.m. in Room 2210 of CMU's Doherty Hall.
And at noon Murray will appear at an Allegheny Institute luncheon at the Westin William Penn Hotel, where he'll explain why he thinks the American experiment as envisioned by the Founding Fathers is already dead.
Murray
Q: Explain why the last 30 years of government social policy has been so harmful to society.
A: The basic argument of "Losing Ground" is pretty simple, and that is that social policy in the great reform period of the 1960s was based on assumptions about human nature and human beings that were wacky.
They assumed that people behaved without regard to the consequences of their behavior. They insisted that incentives didn't make any difference. And they in effect created a set of programs that gave young people — whether it involved crime, or dropping out of school, or having babies out of wedlock — and especially poor young people, a set of incentives to do things which made sense in the short term and were absolutely disastrous in the long term.
Q: The chief example of that would have been?
A: The one that people pick up on is welfare. I did not argue that women get pregnant in order to have a welfare payment. That wasn't the argument.
The argument is: Once you find yourself pregnant as a young woman, what do you do about it? And from time out of mind, the answer is, you get the guy to marry you. Or you don't get pregnant in the first place because you re so scared of getting pregnant. But if you do, you get the guy to marry you.
Social institutions reinforced that very powerfully, most vividly in the image of the shotgun, but in other ways, too. When I grew up in the 1950s, it was simply taken for granted in everything I was taught: If I got a girl pregnant I would have to marry her. That has pretty strong effects on behavior. And we simply threw all of that out the window.
Q: When "Losing Ground" first appeared, the reception was, ah ...
A: Hostile.
Q: Hasn't it changed since then? Aren't you given a little credit now for not being so out of it after all?
A: Ha, ha, ha. I'm laughing because there are two answers to your question. The first is that everything in "Losing Ground," just about, is now conventional wisdom.
The second point is, no, I haven't gotten any credit whatsoever. I keep waiting for these full-page ads in The New York Times by some of these folks saying, "Dr. Murray; we're sorry we said all those nasty things about you." But they haven't been written for some reason.
Q: In a paragraph, what was "The Bell Curve" about?
A: The thesis is that you can not understand what has been happening to the United States, either at the top end or the bottom end of the population, without understanding the role of IQ. That we have in the country an evolving situation over the last century in which to be smart, in the sense of ' high IQ,’ is increasingly important in getting the best jobs, the best incomes, and the rest. And to be dumb, in terms of low IQ, is increasingly punishing in terms of locking you out of jobs and locking you into poverty.
That was the message and the secondary message — this is getting to be a long paragraph - -is that cognitive stratification is occurring, whereby people are going into certain colleges, certain neighborhoods, certain jobs, who are at the high end of the bell curve on IQ. They increasingly only associate with each other. They don t have any idea how the rest of the country lives. And they have increasing power. This is dangerous. Those were the themes of "The Bell Curve."
Q: Was it greeted with such hostility ‘because you dared to talk about genetics and IQ?'
A: It was race. We had a chapter in the middle of the book which said, ‘All right, we 'know that an awful lot of people who have bought this book have turned first to this chapter.’
We said that to the reader: ‘We know you turned to this, because this is what you really want to know about. It also is not nearly as important as you think it is, but we will lay out for you what the current state of knowledge is about race differences and IQ,’ and that's what we did.
The message of that chapter was, with regard to genetics, exactly the opposite of what most people think. Most of your readers have the impression that "The Bell Curve" was an attempt to prove that blacks were genetically inferior to whites. In fact, what it says, regarding genetics, is that nobody really knows what role genetics may or may not play with IQ.
Q: Do you regret writing it?
A: No. There were periods after it first came out where I asked myself whether we really had to have that chapter on race in there. We wanted this book to be respected 50 years from now, and it will be. I am every bit as confident that a number of the books that have come out about "The Bell Curve" will be laughed at 50 years from now. So, I can live with that.
Q: At CMU you'll be talking about your latest book, "What It Means to be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation." What does it mean to be a libertarian?
A: The first step in thinking about that answer doesn't have anything to do with wondering which political candidate you should vote for or wondering whether you should support or oppose any particular political policy. The first thing you should think about is, ‘What do you want out of your own life?’
My argument is that most of us want to end our lives having created a life, having been in control of who we are and what we've done, being able to take satisfaction in our accomplishments because we were responsible for them, being able to take satisfaction in overcoming difficulties.
I go from that and say look, if that is what you want from your life, you have to realize all the ways in which the raw ingredient for that is the freedom to run your own life, and the freedom to have responsibility for your own decisions.
That in turn implies a society in which the function of government is basically to protect you from people who would use physical force against you and to protect you from people who would defraud you. Otherwise, leave me alone.
Q: To live a life as a libertarian, what principles do you have to either believe in or adhere to in your daily life?
A: A key principle is cooperation, voluntary cooperation. This is exactly the opposite of what many people think of when they think of libertarianism. They say, "Oh, those are people who want to live alone on a mountain top isolated from everybody else — utterly alone."
What a libertarian says is that in order to make my way in the world — to make a living, to make friends — I must behave in a way in which people want to buy my services, want what I sell them, want to associate with me. And to do that, guess what, you have to be nice to them.
And that is, in fact, why a libertarian society can in fact work. It encourages, on a moral level, exactly the right kinds of behavior, and the kinds of behavior that Americans have been famous for — people helping people voluntarily, doing things for each other, forming strong communities. This was true of the United States when it was run in its strictly most libertarian ways.
Q: Wasn't America founded on libertarian principles?
A: Yes. We now use the word ‘libertarian.’ But "What It Means to Be a Libertarian," the book, is essentially a Jeffersonian book. And one which Madison could read without a qualm. So could Washington. So could Adams.
Alexander Hamilton might have a few problems with it, but at the time he was a big-government man even back then. This is not some radical new idea. It is the way the Founders thought human society should be run.
Q: When you come to speak at the Allegheny Institute, you're going to talk about how the Founders' image of America has been lost or already dead. How so?
A: Think for a moment about the question of whether the federal government is limited in what it can do. Now, to the Founders, this is the central task that they were about -- to put chains around the federal government and mark out large areas of life in which the government simply had no right to act.
That is not a controversial statement about what the Founders tried to set up. Try to think at this point of any area of American life in which the Congress will as a consensus, say, ‘Oh, we can't do that because it's none of the government's business.’ And the answer is, there is no such area. None whatsoever.
Q: Are we going in the wrong direction then, despite all this talk about free markets and democracy?
A: Two things should be kept very separate. The "free market," so called, in quotes, is popular right now. What libertarians are talking about and what the Founders were talking about, was not economics. The country was not founded so as to maximize GNP growth.
The country was founded so as to maximize the right of individuals to go about their lives as they saw fit as long they didn't interfere with the equal right of everyone else to go about their lives.
That whole concept finds its antithesis in the person of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is not a radical leftist. Bill Clinton also has given no sense throughout his entire presidency that he sees any area of American life in which it is not appropriate for the government to act.
Q: In a modern, complicated, contentious world, is the idea of a very severely limited government, which I presume you would seek, realistic?
A: Let's first realize that even though government should be limited, the things government does appropriately should be done energetically and well. For example, it should have a very good law enforcement systems, particularly with regard to criminal law, so that you can go about your work without fears that people will beat you over the head.
It should vigorously enforce laws against fraud, so that you know that when you enter into contracts and business dealings of all kinds, that if the other person has defrauded you they are on the hook big-time. And it should also run a tort law system that is based on the traditional, easily understood, easily enforced principles of negligence and liability. Now, that doesn't exist any more, but it did exist.
Q: English common law….
A: Yeah. So if you have all those things, a great many of the problems the government says it has to address go away.
Q: Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Do you think the world is getting smarter or dumber about these things we've talked about?
A: A short answer to a complicated question is, I doubt if there will be a libertarian revolution politically. But I'm optimistic insofar as I think the government is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The government still has lots of power, but the fact is, the revolution — particularly in the information domain — is such that a lot of things that the government used to be able to do it just can't do anymore…
There's one other phenomenon that's going to play into this, and that's simply the increase in wealth. It's been phenomenal, over the last century. People have no idea how incredibly phenomenal it has been. That's going to continue to increase despite periodic recessions and it will let more people simply buy their way out of the governmental system they don't like, which is already happening.
Charles Murray, IQ and Race
In 1994, when Murray’s book ‘The Bell Curve” was published, it became a hot topic in the big magazines of the day — which in the day were still relevant and influential.
Magazine Watch
Oct. 20, 1994
Oct. 20, 1994
You don't have to be too cognitively gifted to notice that this is IQ Week in the magazine world. The letters I and Q are everywhere on the covers of Newsweek and The New Republic, in articles in Time and U.S. News & World Report.
It's all because some trouble-making conservative intellectual named Charles Murray has come out with an 850-page tome called "The Bell Curve," which discusses the near-verboten subject of intelligence as it relates to race and heredity.
Beside being naturally controversial, Murray's book is filled with statistical data only a social scientist could love and will remain unread by nearly everyone who discusses it, including all known Western Pennsylvania magazine columnists.
Basically, sociologist Murray and his co-author, the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein, argue that Americans are separating themselves into two classes — one low-IQed and proletarian, one high-IQed and elite and that IQ is the predetermining selective factor.
The lower your IQ, they say, the more likely it is you'll include crime, poverty and unemployment in your career plans. A high IQ means you're likely to have a stable marriage and be wealthy.
Murray and Herrnstein, who say that IQ is 60 percent heredity and 40 percent environment, get into really big trouble with liberals by arguing that because IQ determines a person's future socioeconomic status, social policy should be overhauled to take that into account.
As U.S. News says, that means "welfare, education and affirmative action programs aimed at helping the poor should be scrapped because the recipients have limited intelligence and cannot benefit from a helping government hand."
Newsweek, like U.S. News, addresses the issue of whether IQ tests mean anything. And both magazines offer sample IQ-type questions for the masochistic to try to answer.
But in his piece on "The Bell Curve" in Newsweek, Tom Morganthau says the authors' "most explosive argument is a blunt declaration that blacks as a group are intellectually inferior to whites "
Morganthau doesn't actually come out and accuse Murray of being a racist, but he doesn't cloak his low opinion of the author, his ideas and his motivations.
Time's IQ article is less subjective and takes a kinder, gentler, less argumentative approach to Murray and his ideas.
For the really serious aficionado, The New Republic offers an 11-page excerpt of the book plus 14 commentaries that call it everything from "indecent, philosophically shabby and politically ugly" to "pseudo-scientific racism." And those are its supporters. Not really.
It's hard to find anyone who sticks up for Murray. Even conservative John Leo in U.S. News is obviously discomfited by what he calls Murray's almost obsessive focus on IQ and intelligence at the expense of other determinants of economic success, such as luck, hard work and character.
In his column he says Murray's book is calmly reasoned and often thoughtful, but is obviously a calculated act of political provocation.
Leo fairly squirms when he writes, "This is all very unpleasant stuff. "Yes," he says, "there is a genetic component of some sort to intelligence. Yes, blacks have consistently scored lower than whites on IQ tests. And, no, those tests aren't 'biased.' "
But Leo says that it's still unclear exactly what IQ measures, and how much of IQ is due to genetics and how much is due to environmental factors.
Ultimately, Leo argues with his usual thoughtfulness, Murray's book "leads nowhere, except toward pessimism and negative group labeling." It also infects the growing legitimate debate over affirmative action "with deadly genetic arguments" and "could encourage a eugenic solution to the problem of the underclass."
Leo's conclusion: "This is a very unhelpful book."
The stoutly conservative magazines American Spectator and National Review will no doubt be far more kind to "The Bell Curve" at some future date. Meanwhile, read all about this furor while you can, because what's a white-hot issue today will be a cold cinder by next week.