Why Charles Murray Promotes Racist Junk Science

Ygelsias places Murray’s “Just Asking Questions” routine in the correct context — i.e. that he’s asking these questions to reach pre-determined, abjectly horrifying policy answers. It’s worth noting, first of all, that for someone silenced by the Forces of Political Correctness, Charles Murray sure does have a lot of rare public platforms and well-connected promoters:

The Bell Curve — co-authored with Richard Herrnstein — is, after all, not a work of scientific research but rather a political book written by one of the most prominent conservative policy entrepreneurs in America as part of a larger ideological project. Like several of Murray’s other books, including Losing Ground, In Our Hands, and Coming Apart, the basic subject of The Bell Curve is what should be done to help the disadvantaged in America. And the four books all reach the conclusion that, roughly speaking, we should do as little as is politically possible.

What’s more, despite the mythmaking around Murray, nobody has silenced or stymied him. He is one of the most successful authors of policy-relevant nonfiction working in America today. He’s ensconced at the center of the conservative policy establishment as an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In 2016, he won the Bradley Prize, a prestigious conservative award that carries a $250,000 stipend. He regularlypublishesop-edsin the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times reviewedComing Apart twice. Tom Edsall featured it in a column (he says it raises “issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy”), and David Brooks recommended it twice, lauding the “incredible data,” along with the analysis. PBS built an interactive around it.

Let’s be clear about what the bottom line of The Bell Curve is:

The actual conclusion of The Bell Curve is that America should stop trying to improve poor kids’ material living standards because doing so encourages poor, low-IQ women to have more children — you read that correctly. It also concludes that the United States should substantially curtail immigration from Latin America and Africa. These are controversial policy recommendations, not banal observations about psychometrics.

Matt follows this up not merely with the horribly uncivil act of accurately describing Murray’s views, but the even less civil act of quoting him vertabim:

We are silent partly because we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. 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.

Murray believes, literally, that only affluent people should have families, and public policy should be directed at achieving this result. Libertarian fascism, one might call it. Matt goes on in detail about why Murray’s policy goals are horribly immoral and his empirical claim that welfare policies don’t help poor people is howlingly false. He also explains why the UBI is not inherently progressive policy — Murray, after all, thinks it’s the least worst option from his perspective.

And, as Matt says, while the Bell Curve is more preoccupied with class than race, the two question are of course not separable:

One thing Murray’s defenders tend to get more right than his critics is that the racial portions of The Bell Curve are relatively marginal to the overall project (as Nathan Robinson writes at Current Affairs, Murray’s bizarre non-policy book Human Accomplishment makes far more provocative claims on race), which, despite its prurient interest in racial gaps, is fundamentally about economic class. Race is, however, central to the political project of maintaining a stingy welfare state.

Indeed, cross-sectional evidence marshaled by Alberto Alesina and Ed Glaeser for their 2004 book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (you can read their main findings here) concludes that racial animosity is the main explanation for America’s relative stinginess to poor families while experimental evidence shows that increasing the salience of racial conflict promotes reactionary politics and specifically confirms that associating means-tested social assistance with black people leads many whites to become more skeptical.

African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately poor in the United States, but most recipients of social assistance are, in fact, white. Despite the complaint that critics are throwing around charges of racism to silence Murray, the reality is that promoting a heavily racialized view of the overall question of whether we should try to help poor families or punish them serves as a useful marketing gimmick for both books and legislation.

Read The Whole Thing.