By the People by Charles Murray

 I'm a big Charles Murray fan, but this one was a little disappointing to me. The first third of the book describes some of the problems he perceives with the out of control growth of government interference in the lives of U.S. citizens, but I thought his prescription for dealing with the regulatory state and perhaps rolling back some of its excesses was a little lame. The last third of the book simply seems to be a rehash of some of the research he's described in other works, such as Coming Apart.

I was surprised to see here that "The American Bar Association's Canons of Professional Ethics explicitly forbade 'stirring up litigation, directly or through agents.'" at one point in time. I can barely remember a time without ambulance chasers and other leeches.

Evidently, at one point in time the purpose of tort law was simply to "make whole" some person who had been harmed by the negligence of another. If no negligence was involved, no compensation was owed. Such cases were few. In 1944, there was a California Supreme Court decision which set the precedent for the situation we have today involving strict liability - a defendant can be forced to pay damages even if no negligence occurred. And the floodgates were opened to all the frivolous and damaging lawsuits of the last half century.

In the matter of the Executive Branch choosing which of Congress' laws to enforce,

"Presidents have been pushing against the limits on their powers since George Washington, and that tendency has increased as the limits on government have loosened over the last seventy years...a broad range of constitutional scholars agree that President Obama's unilateral actions (on changing the provisions of the Affordable Care Act and selectively enforcing immigration laws) are not the thin edge of a wedge. He is merely pounding an existing wedge deeper into constitutional limits on presidential power."

Perhaps the most damning chapter in this book is the one titled A Systematically Corrupt Political System.

"..today's political process has produced politicians who, while keeping within the law, do things that are operationally indistinguishable from the way Third World kleptocrats operate."

Think about these identifying factors.

In a corrupt system:

• Government Service is a Way to Get Rich
• You Pay for Access to the Authorities
• Officials Shake Down Businesses
• Public Officials Shower Their Friends with Gifts
• Bribes Produce Results Independently of Political Principle

Think about it a bit.

One of the examples that got me a little hot,

"...the Wireless Tax Fairness Act was expected to come to a vote in the fall of 2011. It was supported by the cell-phone industry, had broad bipartisan support, and was certain to pass. But for months House Speaker John Boehner did not bring the bill to the floor for a vote. FinbVerizon sent checks to members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican."

It's called "tollbooth" charges by author P.eter Schweizer.

Murray's fundamental theory of political corruption.

"Corruption in the political process varies directly with the number and value of things that politicians have to sell."

and his fundamental theory of democratic politics,

"People who receive government benefits tend to vote for people who support those benefits."

This applies equally to middle class Social Security recipients, welfare mothers, farmers with sugar subsidies, and multi-billion dollar defense contractors.

There's a pretty good chapter towards the end of the book about the government shakedown of big businesses in the practice of levying large fines in negotiated "sealed", or secret settlements.

"If the government has been behaving with integrity in this process, and exposure of the sealed settlements would reveal that the companies have behaved badly enough to warrant their multibillion-dollar settlements, then corporations have no choice but to start behaving better. (this is the Progressive position on corporations js) But if it is the government that has been behaving badly, selectively choosing what regulations to enforce against whom so as to yield a large cash windfall (my naturally suspicious libertarian bent makes me believe this more likely js), corporate America will have to start asking itself whether it can coexist peacefully with the regulatory state."

The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead by Charles Murray

 I think I finally figured out why I've enjoyed Charles Murray's earlier writings so much - it appears that I'm actually a curmudgeon! Now, my children could have told you that years ago, but Murray's guidelines contain things I think about nearly every day of my professional life, so my status is externally confirmed now.

Aside from tips to the younger generation about avoiding the entitlement mentality, using good manners, and avoiding questionable style choices, Murray communicates clearly about clear communication, and avoiding buzzwords and cliches, such as the ubiquitous "I'll be there for you." He translates that phrase, roughly, as "I hereby make a meaningless pretend commitment." and says a more appropriate answer might be "Who do you want me to kill?" I love it.

Of course, I have my own pet peeves when it comes to CorpSpeak (my new term for crazy things people who work in big corporations say). The first is, "I have (or don't have) visibility to that", which means that they are unaware or unable to access the item in question. Visibility is a noun which is properly used in a sentence such as, "Visibility is excellent today, luckily for our pilot - and the passengers." I'll share more with you when the time is right.

One of the grammatical errors he explains well is using "which" and "that" interchangeably. I'm probably guilty of this one quite often. "That introduces essential clauses while which introduces nonessential clauses." If the clause is not crucial to understanding the sentence, use which.

One of Murray's tips definitely identifies him as a curmudgeon of my generation, when it comes to writing.

"Edit the piece in hard copy before before sending out the final version." People of my generation grew up with, at best, electric typewriters, and we are unable to really visualize structure and perform edits without a hard copy to scribble on. I think that my children's generation, having used digital visual media their entire lives, may not have this problem, so it might not be the best tip for a newbie in the job force, but I completely can relate to it.

On editing, and how often new material will flow from your fingertips in the midst of an edit, quoting co-author Dick Herrnstein,

"I remember once when I noticed a rough transition between paragraphs. By the time I fixed it, I had seven new chapters."

I think this explains a lot about The Wheel of Time.

Perhaps his most important bit of advice for writers is simply, "Don't wait for the muse." When you have to write as part of your job, or you intend to write in  order to put a roof over your head and food on the table, you absolutely must set a time and a place for writing, and do it consistently and persistently every working day. If you wait for the muse to strike, it could be a long time before that happens, and it could also strike at a horribly inconvenient time, with no way to take a message when Calliope calls.

Murray also dispels the myth that you need to achieve great success at a young age, like Facebook's Zuckerberg. The median age at which artists and composers have created their greatest works is forty, while writers' greatest literature has been created at a median age of fifty. I guess there's hope for us middle-aged curmudgeons yet.

He also proposes several strategies to increase your personal resilience, so that you won't be overwhelmed when whirlwinds of change make life...interesting in the Chinese curse sense. One option is joining the military, which has a culture which is completely foreign to the one most people experience while growing up, and another is to "pick a place in a strange part of the world that you'd like to get to know, buy a one way airplane ticket, and go...stay for at least three years."

Something he said that you might want to think deeply upon,

"What I am about to say assumes that the purpose of a human life is not just to pass the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, with as little trouble as possible. Life should consist of something more than leisure and transient pleasures. Can we agree on that?"

I'm not so sure that we do, here in America today. They're giving us bread and circuses, and that which passes for meaningful is generally based on deception and manipulation. Think about it.

On value judgments (a curmudgeonly relic from a bygone era),

"I want to emphasize that being judgmental is not the same as being intolerant. It is appropriate to be tolerant of behaviors that you wouldn't engage in yourself, and even ones of which you disapprove but which you also judge to fall within the range of choices that people should be entitled to make in a free society. But you can't let your desire to be tolerant get in the way of your obligation to reach moral judgments. You need to think through your assessment of alternative codes of behavior, drawing upon as much accumulated human wisdom as you can about virtue and vice, and about the consequences of different behaviors for human flourishing. You not only need to do it; you must. The failure to do so doesn't define you as nonjudgmental. It defines you as lazy."

And again, on virtue,

"Lacking the cardinal virtues (courage, justice, wisdom, temperance), you can act in those other virtuous ways (being kind, compassionate, merciful, tolerant) haphazardly, and occasionally have the effect you wish, but you cannot consistently have the effect you wish, nor will you be able to bring yourself to behave in those other virtuous ways when the going gets rough. You will still mean well. You will still be nice. You won't be good."

An interesting thought,

"What was true in 1875 had been true throughout human history. Day to day, people didn't have any choice but to show up."

It was not possible to disengage from family, friends, vocation, community, or faith. You needed to be "present to win". After the invention of the phonograph and motion pictures, you could be entertained without showing up for a concert or play. After the introduction of commercial radio, then television, and now electronic media, it is possible to live a life completely alone, and never to directly engage with a living, breathing human.

This is the kind of pocket reference guide to life that ought to be on everyone's nightstand.

Real Education by Charles Murray

 Charles Murray really seems to like to take on some of the pressing issues of our times with a sometimes unconventional and almost always unpopular point of view, but one that I feel is unfortunately all too realistic. He talks about Howard Gardner's seven different types of intelligence: bodily-kinesthetic, musical, spatial, linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal and how they relate to our ability (or perhaps I should say inability) to deliver optimum education to all children with a one-size-fits-all approach.

"Educational measures such as test scores and grades tend to make differences among schoolchildren look as though they are ones of degree when in reality some of them are differences in kind. For example, a timed math test limited to problems of addition and subtraction, administered to a random cross-section of fourth-graders, yields scores that place children along a continuum distributed in a shape resembling a bell curve. These scores appropriately reflect differences in degree: Some fourth-graders can add and subtract faster and more accurately than others, but they are all doing the same thing and almost all children can be taught to add and subtract to some degree.
The same is not true of calculus. If all children were put on a mathematics track that took them through calculus, and then were given a test of calculus problems, the resulting scores would not look like a bell curve. For a large proportion of children, the scores would not be merely low. They would be zero. Grasping calculus requires a certain level of logical-mathematical ability. Children below that level will never learn calculus, no matter how hard they study. It is a difference in kind."

While Gardner and Murray have some hard data to support this, I can only confirm that this matches my experience with real world results. I have a fairly high level of logical-mathematical intelligence, and studied higher mathematics in college - until I reached linear algebra, and suddenly discovered that past a certain point, I just wasn't capable of doing much more than memorizing a few problem types and their solutions. I also have a very low level of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and it didn't matter how much instruction I got in the techniques of striking a tennis ball or hitting a baseball pitch, I was never going to be as good as someone with native talents in that area. My wife and children have an innate musical ability that I will never possess, and they can pick up instruments and play a tune on them without any prior experience - not me.

Murray says,
"For understanding an individual child and what that child's educational needs might be, you want as much disaggregation of the child's abilities as possible. For understanding the overall relationship of the components of academic ability to educational performance and later outcomes in life for large groups of people, you are better of using a combined measure."

These combined measures might be found by taking standardized tests such as the ACT, SAT, or ASVAB.

I've become a somewhat convinced of a Bell Curve theory of just about everything these days. For example, in politics, you will see a distribution of people from one end of the spectrum, from radical left to radical right, where (IMHO) most people fall into either center-left or center-right, perhaps mixing and matching their convictions between positions readily identifiable as from both sides, while a smaller group on either end might hold nine out of ten beliefs identifying them as conservative or liberal, while a very tiny group are so far out there that their beliefs may even lead to irrationality or violence.

So, it's my hypothesis that in each area of Gardner's intelligences, we'll find - over large groups of people - that the distribution of each ability follows a bell curve pattern, with some out at the far ends of the curve having either infinitesimal abilities in that area, or amazing natural abilities, and the rest scattered from mild, to average, to pretty good, in the middle of the curve. There are, unfortunately, certain folks who just aren't going to "get" mathematics, engineering or science, and others who aren't going to comprehend classic literature or write coherent research papers. Some will excel in sports or music, others in winning the popularity contest.

Murray says,
"For any ability, the population forms a continuum that goes from very low to very high. The core abilities that dominate academic success vary together. Schools that ignore those realities are doing a disservice to all their students."
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I always wondered what all the complaints were about "teaching to the test". There are lots of good tests out there, especially in the professional certification arena, where they are a very good measure of actual skills and knowledge acquired. The actual material of the tests change regularly, so even the "cheat" sites can only give you examples of what types of questions you are likely to find, and it's not really productive to attempt to memorize answers for them, you just have to know the principles and have the skills in order to pass.

The author explains,

"If teachers know that a state competency test will include on item of this particular type (calculating percentages), they can drill the students and raise the proportion that answer it correctly. But if the test uses a new context and puts a different twist on the problem...it is up to the students to generalize their knowledge, and that calls upon logical-mathematical ability."

A couple of interesting points:

"Literacy requires not just the linguistic ability to decode individual words, but also the logical-mathematical ability to infer, deduce and interpolate."

"Limits on logical-mathematical ability translate into limits on how much math a large number of children can learn no matter what the school system does."

I also found it interesting that the greatest "leap" in education in the U.S. came between 1900 and 1950. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only about 25% of adults ever reached the fifth grade, and 50% never made it past the eighth. By 1940, the percentage of students still in school up to the eighth grade had risen to 95% and by 1951, 99%. The biggest progress came with the availability of universal K-8 schooling. Gains since that point in time have been incremental.

There's a belief that the quality of schools makes a huge difference in children's educational outcomes. Sociologist James Coleman led a study that examined 645,000 students nationwide and discovered that the quality of schools "explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement." The mean scores of students on academic achievement tests are not affected by the credentials of their teachers, the curriculum, sparkling new facilities, or money spent per student.

"Once a school reaches mediocrity, a lot of the slack has been taken out of the room for improvement in academic achievement for the average student."

Granted, a good teacher can make a great deal of difference in the life of an individual child, but over the long haul, for the vast majority of students, it appears that hiring better teachers will make little difference.

Politicians may promise this and that in order to improve education in this country, and we can throw all the money in the world at the problems we believe exist, but feel-good solutions can't trump reality. You would think that the Head Start program begun back in the Johnson administration to help disadvantaged children get an educational boost would have shown some results by now, but a study by the Consortium of Longitudinal Studies found that "the effect of early education on intelligence test scores was not permanent."

"Responding to children in need is about as instinctive as human responses get, and as emotionally charged. But deciding how to use scarce resources to help disadvantaged children is not a matter of caring. It is a matter of deciding what works and what doesn't.

Murray wanders off into a discussion of statistical illiteracy, which is rather interesting in its implications.

"Widespread statistical illiteracy among the gifted is cause for immediate concern because none of us, no matter how thorough our training, has the time to assess the data independently on every topic. We all have to rely on the quality of the information we get from the media - and, as of today, that quality is terrible."

Amen!

Whether you agree with Murray's solutions (you'll have to read for yourselves to see what they are), you can't argue with his facts, gathered over the decades from study after study on education. I always find his work enlightening.

Coming Apart by Charles Murray

Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial The Bell Curve, is back with another humongous pile of statistics and some observations and interpretations about what they all mean. Murray believes that our entire American culture and society has been split into two somewhat isolated segments over the last five decades - those who, by virtue of their genetics and upbringing, go to the elite colleges and universities, and those who do not, who end up being the working class. These two cultures have grown increasingly isolated from one another, and as the first group often ends up in positions of power and responsibility, its lack of comprehension of the other's way of life can lead to many policy problems.

"As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgements about what's good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives."

Murray, a libertarian, has an interesting take on the nature of our nation, calling it the "American project".

"The American project consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems."

One thing he said in the early part of the book was a bit offensive to me,

"The people who read a book on American socioeconomic classes are self-selected for certain traits that put most of you in a position to have observed the new upper class at close hand."

Really, Charles? The only folks who are smart or perceptive enough to read your book are the upper class? How snobbish of you.

Hey, even Bill Gates can say something stupid once in a while. When asked who his biggest competitors in recruiting talent were, he said,

"Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we wont' have a future. I don't worry about Lotus or IBM, because the smartest guys would rather come to work for Microsoft. Our competitors for IQ are investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley."

Were you talking about the high IQ folks at the investment banks who ruined their companies at the crash of the mortgage bubble, Bill?

Murray also agrees with some of my thoughts about the futility of attempting to "tax the rich."

"Realistically, rolling back the disposable income of the new upper class in a major way is not an option. The American political culture doesn't work that way. The same Congress that passes higher marginal tax rates in this session will quietly pass a host of ways in which income can be sheltered and companies can substitute benefits for cash income in the next session. The new upper class will remain wealthy, and probably continue to get wealthier."

Murray also shows, statistically, that the new upper class isn't, as I'd always assumed, primarily populated by the liberal political class, but is actually fairly evenly split between conservative and liberal. That would seem to make the brawling between political parties in Congress almost a family feud, wouldn't it?

I had an idea about where Murray was going, in the first third of the book, but he suddenly appeared to change course, and began to talk about the founding virtues of our nation. I had assumed he was going to blame the increasing isolation of the new upper class, who live in high concentrations in what he identifies as "superzips", geographical areas filled with people in the 95th percentile or above in terms of education and accomplishment, near the centers of political and economic power, for the troubles we are facing as a nation, but he ended up surprising me.

From Ben Franklin,
"only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. AS nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters...The expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed."

While our founding fathers were often Deists, rather than what we would today call Christian, they believed strongly in the need for morality in society and religion as a bulwark of the freedoms present in our new republic. Murray identifies the founding virtues as industriousness - people's willingness to work hard to better their lives and the lives of those around them, honesty - the predisposition of a people to refrain from crime, to follow the rules, and to deal fairly with others, marriage - fidelity and permanence in our family relationships, and religiousity - the belief that moral values come from a divine, all powerful, omniscient creator of the universe.

As Jefferson writes, "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not violated but with his wrath?"

On the subject of marriage and child rearing, Murray mentions the fact that, though it is not politically popular to say so, all sociological studies done have shown that "the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes." Presumably, a libertarian has no axe to grind on this issue, as matters of personal behavior are usually left up to each person to determine for themselves, in libertarian philosophy.

Interestingly, Murray and his colleagues' studies find:

"Religious worshippers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art discussion and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups."

He points out that there has a been a sharp drop in church attendance over the last fifty years, and that far fewer Americans identify themselves as strongly religious these days. Oddly enough, however, it isn't the new upper class who have grown the least religious, but the lower, working class. This ties in with declines in marriage rates and longevity of marriages among the working class, while marriages appear to be happier and more durable in the superzips. Murray also attributes the apparent rise of fundamentalist Christianity to the decline in overall religiousity - the people who are left, when all those of little faith have fled, are those who have strongly held core beliefs about the nature of God and the bible - the fundamentalists.

Murray spends some time pointing out the rise in crime and the decline in honesty in our culture. I'm certain that doesn't need much proving to anyone who's been paying attention the last few decades. He also discusses labor force participation, and shows that it had already begun a precipitous decline prior to the recent recession, displaying an alarming deterioration of the work ethic that used to drive American productivity, creativity and prosperity.

Murray sees a couple of ways in which we, as a nation, can proceed from here: first, that we adopt a European model and give up on the American project. Unsurprisingly, this option doesn't really appeal to him (or me). He opens with a quote from Jefferson's inaugural address:

"The sum of good government is a state that shall restrain men from injuring one another and shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement."

The advanced welfare state of  Western Europe provides a great deal of personal freedom, and very few economic freedoms. The citizens enjoy a great deal of (illusory, in my opinion) economic security, but have, in limiting the downside, eliminated the upside for the majority. By providing for people's needs while eliminating the possibility of failure, their governments have deprived them of the satisfaction of success, accomplishment, and self-actualization. We are in serious danger of approaching this state soon here.

On the other hand, the American model has traditionally encouraged the pursuit of happiness through self determination, self improvement, hard work to get ahead, and charting one's own destiny - knowing that you have left the world a better place through your efforts, when life is at its end. The new upper class actually practices this, but they have become reluctant to, as Murray says "preach what they practice" for fear of being thought judgemental.

"Liberals in the new upper class continue to support adoption of the European model, as they have for decades. Conservatives in the new upper class still contribute to conservative candidates, but they are no more willing to preach what they practice than are those on the Left. Those in the new upper class who don't care about politics don't mind the drift toward the European model, because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience - much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens."

Ouch! Was that a burn, Charles?

Murray predicts the collapse of the European model, which we may be watching right now with the crisis in Greece and elsewhere.

"The financial bankruptcy is not anything that even the cleverest planner can avoid. As publicly financed benefits grow, so do the populations that find that they need them. The more people who need benefits, the more government bureaucracy is required. The more people who rely on support from government and the larger the government, the fewer the people in the private sector who pay for the benefits and for the apparatus of the state. The larger the number of people who depend on government either for benefits or for their jobs, the larger the constituency for voting for ever-larger government."

Hopefully, he believes, we'll wake up in time to avoid America's economic and cultural bankruptcy.

The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray

I seem to recall a while back that a president of Harvard University got into some trouble by quoting from this book, but I could be mistaken. The ideas presented by its authors would certainly be regarded as controversial, if not downright inflammatory in some circles. Hernnstein and Murray performed a statistical analysis of a long term study following thousands of young people through their lives, called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, NLSY, trying to determine the effects of IQ, or cognitive ability, on life outcomes.

Intelligence among the general population when placed on a graph, forms a statistical distribution called a bell curve, with the bulk of people in the middle, and a very small percentage at both the lowest and highest ends, hence the title of the book. When the authors talk of "low" or "high" intelligence, they're talking about the ends of the bell curve, not the great mass of "average" people in the middle.

The authors claim that in nearly all measures of success or failure in society, cognitive ability has an influence. It's obvious that those who test higher in intelligence have a better chance at getting a good education, and also rising to higher levels of education. But it's perhaps little known that students at the top end of the bell curve have been increasingly skimmed off the top to attend ten of the most elite universities in the country, and the people who graduate from those universities go on to run our industries and government, mostly.
Job performance in nearly all fields is affected by intelligence, as well. "It may be said conservatively that for most jobs, based on most measures of productivity, the difference in productivity associated with differences in intelligence diminishes only slowly...The cost of hiring less intelligent workings may last as long as they stay on the job."

While the authors make the point that "you cannot determine what a given person will do from his IQ score", they also say that high cognitive ability is "generally associated with socially desirable behaviors, low cognitive ability with socially undesirable ones." and "...the brighter young people in the NLSY are also the ones whose lives most resemble a sometimes disdained stereotype: They stick with school, are plugging away in the workforce, and are loyal to their spouse."

By the way, for the first half of the book, in order to take away the subject of race from the discussion, the authors used only the data from the white youths studied. So all of the results of low intelligence they discuss are with respect to caucasians.

Poverty is also strongly correlated with intelligence. They say it's actually better to be born smart than to be born rich. Interestingly, in 1939, half of the US population lived below the poverty line, but increases in productivity after WWII began to lower that rate, up until the mid 60s, when it leveled off around 10% and has remained ever since. Poverty actually began to be systematically studied in the mid 1800s, and it was believe that the poor fell into two categories, "deserving" and "undeserving". Some were poor because of circumstances beyond their control, and others were poor as a result of their own behavior. Whatever happened to that line of thought?

Hernnstein and Murray also link criminal behavior with intelligence. In contrast to theorists who offer a sociological explanation of crime's causes, such as poverty and unemployment, they say that more serious or chronic offenders generally have lower IQ scores than casual offenders, and that high IQ scores provide some protection against lapsing into criminality for people who have lived in environments regarded as risk factors for criminal behavior. One good quote, "Many people tend to think of criminals as coming from the wrong side of the tracsk. They are correct, insofar as that is where people of low cognitive ability disproportionally live."

In the second half of the book, the authors begin to look at the issue of race or ethnicity and intelligence. I believe this is where that Harvard president got into trouble. Although it's extremely unpopular to say it these days, there are - in the aggregate - differences between ethnic groups. The authors talk a bit about the whole issue of  cultural bias that is assumed to make it nearly impossible to test a person's IQ accurately if they've come from a different cultural background than the population the IQ test is allegedly written for.

It turns out that there are some tests available that have a strong correlation with cognitive ability scores, which appear to have no way to be culturally biased. One of these, called digit span, involves repeating a string of numbers spoken to you, either forwards or backwards. Whites, blacks, and asians perform differently on these tests. Another one involves placing your hand on a button, depressing it. Lights of different colors are arranged around the button in a wheel. When certain lights turn on, certain actions are required, such as touching the light to turn it off, or perhaps a more complex action with multiple lights. Again, different ethnic groups score differently. It's difficult to imagine that either numeric values or flashing lights can be culturally biased.

One standard test that's been used for many years to test cognitive abilities is the ASVAB. It's taken by all people who enter any of our armed forces. Strangely, scores on the ASVAB actually do a very good job of predicting success within various MOS's. Even more strangely, given assumptions of cultural bias implicit in intelligence testing, the ASVAB does a good job on predicting outcomes for whites, blacks and asians alike.

The authors go on to make some predictions about what the future may hold, and offer some ideas for helping to solve today's pressing social problems, based on their understanding of the underlying causes. I think they're on a lot more shaky ground with predictions than on their data-based conclusions about IQ and outcomes, but this is really an interesting and thought-provoking read.