Murray really does give the impression that he's just looking for an excuse to say all sorts of nasty things. Talking him into thinking that black people are dumb is like talking me into tequila shots, viz., disturbingly easy.

On the veldt, would Murray have survived to reproduce, given his predilection for pissing people off?

So what parts of the Bell Curve do you think were good?

Let us not forget, however, that some people's children are too stupid to breathe, much less learn.

When a well-clothed philosopher on a bitter winter's night sits in a warm room well lighted for his purpose and writes on paper with pen and ink in the arbitrary characters of a highly developed language the statement that civilisation is the result of natural laws, and that man's duty is to let nature alone so that untrammeled it may work out a higher civilisation, he simply ignores every circumstance of his existence and deliberately closes his eyes to every fact within range of his faculties. If man had acted upon his theory there would have been no civilisation, and our philosopher would have remained a troglodyte.

I've forgotten in detail -- I haven't read it for ten years, or argued about it for five -- but IIRC there were chunks of the argument that there was nothing particularly wrong with, they just weren't the bits supporting his interesting (to put it mildly) conclusions. It was only the bits claiming that IQ is pretty much entirely determined by genetics and therefore black people have been scientifically determined to be ineradicably stupid that were based on nonsense, and while that was all of the reporting on the book, it wasn't all of the book by bulk. (That is, there were chapters on things like increased income inequality between professional and nonprofessional jobs. Nothing particularly insane about that.)

This American Psychological Association review done in response to "the bell curve" gives the mainstream view on intelligence issues as of 1995:

http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~broberts/Neisser%20et%20al,%201996,%20intelligence.pdf

3: The cover was attractive.

I've forgotten in detail

Me too. What I do remember is that the observations were mostly solid, it was the interpretations one could (and of course many did) argue about.

Anyway, it wouldn't be that hard to nail it down fairly well. All we need to do is pay a few hundred carefully selected parents the equivalent of the cost of killing a few hundred Iraqis and take their infants and raise them in a controlled environment. After about eighteen years of which, we count the of Google searches and repeat hits on their various blogs.

All we need to do is pay a few hundred carefully selected parents the equivalent of the cost of killing a few hundred Iraqis . . .

Speaking of which, did everyone see this piece from a couple days ago?

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

Am I wrong for being irritated at mendaciousness instead of mendacity? On top of the basic irritation at the use of either, of course.

I suppose you prefer meretricity to meretriciousness.

But of course.

I think Murray's argument is muddled. The problem is not that there is some definite limit on what you can teach children with below average IQ, it is that better schools will help above average IQ children as well so the below average children will still be behind and will still lose out to the above average IQ children when competing for intellectually challenging jobs. So better schools may help society overall but will not reduce inequality.

What's remarkable about Charles Murray is that no matter how badly he argues he seems to reliably inspire even more pitiful performances from his critics. If I read Ezra Klein right, his argument is that the existence of the Flynn effect (the gradual increase of IQ over time) means a) we know how to raise IQ through as a policy option, and b) Murray is mendacious for not making this inference. But Murray is not mendacious for not making this inference, because this inference is, not to put too fine a point on it, retarded. The Flynn effect does not mean that we know how to raise IQ. It may mean that raising IQ is, in principle, more possible than Murray allows.

Does Murray mendaciously try to "bury" the Flynn effect? Given that he mentions it in the next sentence after the one Klein quotes, one would have to say no.

15: The Flynn effect does not mean that we know how to raise IQ.

Of course it does. We wait.

Now you're just baiting me, Tim.

I feel smarter already.

baa, is this really a point worth arguing about? Ezra is responding to the not-exactly-veiled implications of Murray's position, viz., throw those dumb blacks under a bus already. Murray's position is that the fourth-grade math teacher can't make you smarter, but the implication is that there are some things, like the dumbness of blacks, that we just can't help, and would be better off allocating away from. The response to that implied position is the one that Ezra, properly, gives: "intelligence" isn't as fixed as all that, and how the child grows up makes a big difference, and furthermore, there are still massive benefits even for those of middling intelligence to have an excellent education.

That's a fair question ogged. And I agree with you, and with Labs above, that arguing over the person Charles Murray is more or less a waste of time. There's something ineradicably creepy about the guy.

I guess the reason for the comment is that there are certain questions important to address straight up. Murray's editorial raises one of them: to wit, that it is by no means clear that "education" -- if that means any consistant educational approach we have right now -- can reliably transform really poor performers into good performers. One implication of this is that it is bad policy to expect that everyone can be educated to do skilled, information age labor. Some people use this line to reason for progressive policies meant to reduce or ameliorate dislocation caused by the free market. What I took Klein to be doing is amplifying the loathesome sub voce that he hears in Murray so as to drown out what he should in fact be listening to.

not-exactly-veiled implications of Murray's position

Which (in this article) to me seems more like "tracking" than anything else. That happens either formally or informally no matter what, and certainly happens in the workplace later on.

However, there's a tyranny of testing on the right of the bell curve too. I tested high early on and so was intensely pressured towards academia and the professions. I'd probably have made a better naval officer tho'.

Murray's editorial raises one of them: to wit, that it is by no means clear that "education" -- if that means any consistant educational approach we have right now -- can reliably transform really poor performers into good performers.

The thing is that you're being unfairly charitable to Murray. Murray isn't saying that it is "by no means clear" that education can help, he's saying that it is clear that education can't help. That's unmitigated crap.

And that's also why Ezra's point is good: there are students called genetically incapable of learning by Murray who seem to evolve rather quickly when placed into better schools.

But baa conceded Murray's creepiness, and wants to argue something about what to expect from education. Can't we agree about Murray and have that discussion anyway?

No, because this--it is by no means clear that "education" -- if that means any consistant educational approach we have right now -- can reliably transform really poor performers into good performers--simply isn't true.

Sure, I just don't want to have it on the unexamined terms that what Murray said is defensible. If baa (or anyone else) has a thesis he wants to talk about with relation to education, that sounds interesting. If it's presented as what Murray actually said, I'm going to go back to what Murray actually said.

Because of an Atrios' citation, I found Heckman's Reason review of The Bell Curve, in which he says the following: "Indeed, [Hernstein and Murray] acknowledge that there are strong indications that very intensive programs can be effective. Half-hearted interventions like Head Start are definitely not effective." It's one thing to say that it costs too much, and another to say that it can't be done.

Precisely.

there are students called genetically incapable of learning by Murray

I've no doubt there are such. The problem is, except for the extreme and obvious cases, there's no way to identify those unless one tries every method and they all fail. So, from a pragmatic POV it comes down to wasting some $ resources by trying or wasting some human resources by not trying. It's better to try. If he's worried about where the money will come from, we can get it by taking boomers and pre-boomers (me, for instance) off life-support earlier. Being in an ICU at 85 is a good example of "try" when it's better to not.

I have no doubt that there are some people incapable of learning. I'm just skeptical that when someone concludes that of an entire socioeconomic because of low-IQ, when IQ is a not a measure of innate intelligence at all.

I'm probably showing how increasingly pessimistic I'm becoming about education in general here, how ambivalent I feel about it, in my own life and on a social level. That makes it hard to engage when more/better is an unspoken assumption of the people I'm corresponding with.

I'm guessing here, but aren't you getting more pessimistic about the value of higher education, rather than about the provision of high quality elementary education? They're two very different issues, and I think the discussion relates more strongly to the latter.

But what are you pessimistic about?

When there was less income inequality in the US, it wasn't such a big deal if some people just don't do well in school. There were other routes to a successful life. That isn't very true anymore no matter how much Murray likes vocational schools.

Education policy improvements have not been a good way to reduce income inequality. Murray's actual policy suggestions will only heighten income inequality though. He is real excited about the top 10% and doesn't give a damn about everybody else. We need to develop a fully functional welfare state like they have in the rest of the first world.

I think you're right about higher education being the locus of my own discontent, and I'll concede the value of high-quality elementary, although the origins of my visceral hostility go back far into childhood. I suppose that's not an argument against high-quality, since the obvious response is that mine obviously must not have been. Perfectly circular, isn't it? But I'm wondering more-and-more if the form itself isn't, and hasn't always been, my problem.

I"'ve no doubt there are such. The problem is, except for the extreme and obvious cases, there's no way to identify those unless one tries every method and they all fail.

This, I think, is the problem with trying to teach specifically to 'those kids'. Teachers and administrators will undoubtedly be wrong as often as they are right in making these categorizations. I knew plenty of very smart kids at my rural public school who were pushed into vocational school just because of their families' name and income.

33: Murray is ignoring some major changes in colleges. They're mostly "vocational" schools now, they just don't call themselves that.

Over at Ezra's, I'm unsurprised that people showing up to insist that liberals are anti-science because Murray's research is crap. Also, someone sites that gasbag Pinker as supporting Murray. This debate breaks out every 18 months, like clockwork, and it never gets any better. Murray has shown an inability to turn poor wingnut performance into good wingnut performance, so I say we cut our losses and never mention him again and focus on the 25% of cryptoracist pundits who can be expected to improve their arguments with time and expert coaching.

Off-topic, our philosophers may be perplexed to see the newest London Times article by Jerry Fodor, as it is a book review about opera.

that's not an argument against high-quality, since the obvious response is that mine obviously must not have been. Perfectly circular, isn't it?

It's not really circular, because the research pretty much universally show that students do better when placed in better schools. (This also is part of the confusion in the discussion, I think--people like Murray are arguing that improvement isn't significant or worthwhile if it doesn't make everyone equal to the top performers.)

I'm wondering more-and-more if the form itself isn't, and hasn't always been, my problem.

But I think you'd say that you've benefited from learning to read and to do arithmetic. Early elementary school is where most people learn these things, after all.

because the research pretty much universally show that students do better when placed in better schools.

Except that even in better schools, there's still a tendency for poor kids to do significantly worse than their better off peers.(which is what I suspect baa is talking about with "no means clear that "education" can reliably transform really poor performers into good performers.")

Which of course means what we have in this country is a poverty problem, and that addressing it would help us on the educational front as well. Murray, being a giant racist tool, likes to chalk all this up to genetics.

OK, if this discussion is going to go in a productive direction, Why G Matters might be a good place to start. Does any one have problems with *that* paper?

there's still a tendency for poor kids to do significantly worse than their better off peers

Right, and this is what I was trying to get at in my parenthetical. Obviously there are other factors in play (like poverty, as you say), but longitudinal studies show a marked improvement in when individual students move from, for example, overcrowded and poorly-performing inner-city schools to charter schools or better schools out in the suburbs.

It's not sufficient, of course, because there's only so much a school can do without having any impact on home life, but it is important (and effective).

Does any one have problems with *that* paper?

I haven't read that paper, I only skimmed over it, but the main problem with the idea of "G" (being the underlying innate level of intelligence that IQ tests supposedly measure) is that it is not nearly so innate as people tend to think, particularly for the young children in question here. A problem with its application is also that most kids who are failing aren't doing so because they're hitting their "G" ceiling, but because of their particular situation in life. It's an interesting concept in the abstract, but it's very easy to excessively apply it to education policy.

Matt F is right. Skimming that paper, I don't see much to disagree with.

I start getting disagreeable at claims that tests given to a schoolchild are a good way of determining what that kid's maximum potential was at birth, and so what sort of resources would be wasted on them. I get even more disagreeable at a claim that looking at the kid's parents is a reliable way to asses what their maximum potential should be, and therefore what sort of spending would be a waste. But that paper doesn't appear to make either of those claims.

42

".... Obviously there are other factors in play (like poverty, as you say), but longitudinal studies show a marked improvement in when individual students move from, for example, overcrowded and poorly-performing inner-city schools to charter schools or better schools out in the suburbs."

Can you or anybody else give some citations that show this? My understanding is the opposite, quality of school (within the range commonly found in the US) makes little difference compared to IQ or family background. And to the extent that schools do matter, it is because of the other students not the teachers, class size or physical facilitities.

Note to be meaningful such studies must be of individual students who are randomly assigned to better schools. It is not surprising that motivated students who move themselves to better schools do better. Simlarly reports that a college education is "worth" so much a year in salarly invariably fail to adjust for the fact that students who go to college would have had superior prospects anyway.

By all means let the schools be as good as they can be, and take a larger share of the budgets than they do now, and be distributed more fairly. I've no interest in Murray's, or anybody's ideas of which classes/backgrounds are educable and which aren't. My wish that formal education could be less important as a means to success, that alternative ways of knowing and learning were more likely to be recognized and honored, has no bearing on that.

43: One of the substantive criticisms raised against The Bell Curve was its reliance on AFQT tests taken as adults. In and of itself, that's not bad, but the author extrapolated from adult performance to innate potential in childhood. It's theorized, at least, that while IQ in adults may be more or less fixed, in children, who are still growing, whatever IQ measures isn't yet determined.

So the paper seems to say that if you have a higher G, you'll be more successful largely because you can grasp complex tasks more quickly, meaning that it costs less to train you, meaning you can use your time in more ways, etc. On a skim, at least, it seems to avoid silly conclusions.

45: I don't have it in front of me, but my father worked on a longitudinal study looking at housing assistance programs, which found that kids in families who received Section 8 housing vouchers instead of living in public housing (which is most often located near poorly performing schools) showed significant improvement after they moved to areas with better schools. I'll see if I can get the report. (incidentally, a lot of information on this stuff can be found at the National Center for Education Statistics. I'll start poking around there to see if I can find anything specific.)

You're to a certain extent right about the influence of the other students, though. In one of the interviews in that study, a student mentioned that he spent more time on homework because that's what all his new friends did. The key is really to be in a "place" (broadly defined) that values (and has the ability to encourage) education. There are a lot of factors that go into that, and school quality is one of them.

But of course, whether peers or the school is the important factor is irrelevant to whether 'IQ', as a shorthand for the lifelong capacity to achieve in any intellectually demanding accomplishment, is mutable.

What do people think about Sudbury schools and other forms of low-structure education? Do they have value for all students, or just brighter students?

They probably have value for some subset of students, but it's probably not so easily identifiable a group as just "brighter students".

I'd guess (in an entirely uneducated way) that the difference between a useful unstructured school and a useless one is more the teachers than what class of students they're serving. I'd think that you'd need to be awesomely good at managing kids to run an unstructured classroom effectively, and if you did, probably most kids would benefit from it. Without seriously awe-inspiringly good teachers, on the other hand, unstructured schools probably head toward disaster very easily.

49

Whether schools are good because of the students or the teachers is relevant to policy arguments about how to improve poor schools.

As for IQ being mutable, I don't believe anyone seriously argues it is immutable. I believe it is well established that certain levels of environmental deprivation or traumatic injury will cause irreversible damage. This does not mean however that we can raise IQ easily.

Nor is IQ the sole factor determining ability to achieve in an intellectually demanding occupation. Other traits such as "diligence" are also important.

I do think it can readily be predicted that many children are not suited for intellectually demanding occupations and devoting their education to preparing for intellectually demanding positions they are unlikely to hold is not serving them or society well.

Consider the analogy of athletic ability. Even a student with little natural ability can improve his performance greatly with lots of practice and effort. But having schools devote great resources to improving the athletic peformance of students with below average ability would be foolish. Even if there were some overall benefits to society from improved health and fitness they would not outweigh the opportunity costs of a disproportionate emphasis on athletic training.

many children are not suited for intellectually demanding occupations and devoting their education to preparing for intellectually demanding positions they are unlikely to hold is not serving them or society well.

Yeah, but it's not so easy to figure out who those children are. The measures people are currently using are quite flawed. The only alternative is to put effort into educating everybody.

55

This is an interesting article (note the first figure appears to be mislabelled).

Right. And in terms of a school policy, I'd argue that it's not terribly difficult to distinguish 'innate intellectual potential' or whatever phrase you want to use, differences as between two children who have had comparable life experiences up to the point of the testing. Once you're talking about children in significantly different circumstances, though, it becomes difficult to the point of impossibility to tell whether the differences between them are innate to the children, or are artifacts of their differing experiences.

There are still cost-benefit calculations to be made about how much we can spend to get any given benefit for the children involved, and they're hard to make because it's difficult to honestly measure the benefits from different interventions. But a blanket assumption that nothing will make much of a difference is completely unproven.

54

I have no objection to educating everybody, just to educating everybody to prepare them for intellectually demanding professions that many are unsuited for and unlikely to succeed at.

And I don't think it is so hard to identify children who are unsuited for intellectually demanding professions. If at the end of sixth grade you rank in the bottom half on IQ and achievement tests I think you have poor prospects of success in an intellectually demanding profession and would likely be better off preparing for something else.

56

"... But a blanket assumption that nothing will make much of a difference is completely unproven. "

Sure but I think the burden of proof is on those advocating expensive educational projects to show they are likely to succeed. Additionally there is considerable evidence that some specific things that are often advocated, such as paying teachers more, will make little difference.

58: I don't know that you can prove this, but it seems to me like an awful lot of really smart people start out being interested in teaching (because it really is a very fulfilling job) only to realize that there are really long hours with really low pay and decide to spend their time better. So I think increasing the pay could attract a lot of these people.

59

The issue is not whether you could get smarter teachers by paying more, of course you could. The issues are:

1. How much of a difference do smarter teachers make when trying to teach dumb kids. I believe there is considerable evidence that it makes little difference.

2. Is paying more the best way to attract smarter teachers? Many districts have numerous applicants for every position and could select for brains without raising salaries if they wanted. Also private schools are sometimes reputed to be able to get smarter teachers while paying less than public schools by subjecting them to less pointless bs.

3. Is paying more to get smarter teachers the most cost effective way to improve education. For example you could also hire more dumb teachers. Will one smart teacher do better than two dumb teachers? It is not obvious. Note also if you pay more to attract smarter teachers much of the money is likely to be wasted on dumb current teachers or dumb hires if standards are not raised.

No, the issue is that some people don't want to "waste" money trying to educate "some" children. It's hard to take the belief that keeping money from trickling through the cracks is more important than keeping children from doing so as anything other than (in the most charitable language I can summon) a deeply sick and inhumane inversion of priorities.

To be fair, if we can somehow reliably identify the people who would be poorly served by the default education, we could actually improve their lives a lot by offering them a more appropriate education. Trying to teach them subjects they'll never be able to master has to be pretty demoralizing for them, and would actually make them less confident and thus successful and happy.

But, as LB says, if we can't reliably identify those people, there's not a lot we can do.

61

What is inhumane is labelling everyone who does not succeed when placed on an academic track a failure.

62

You can stop offering a default education which is unsuitable for below average kids.

Anyway unless by reliably you mean 100% I don't agree that you can't reliably predict who is likely to do poorly on an academic track.

You probably can by high school or middle school, at which point many of the kids have already been severely disadvantaged by the poor quality of their prior education and other facets of their personal circumstances. That doesn't mean that they were necessarily lacking in innate potential, nor that earlier interventions might not have been effective.

65

Well of course you can always hypothesize the existence of interventions which would have been effective just as you can hypothesize the existence of strategies which would have made the Iraq war a success. However this has little to do with realistic planning.

"... many of the kids have already been severely disadvantaged by the poor quality of their prior education and other facets of their personal circumstances. ...."

I doubt a poor quality education is a major contributor to their problems in most cases.