Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve

Anthony Walsh

In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published a controversial book called The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life that resulted in a blizzard of both bouquets and brickbats. In the 1990s, critiquing the book became a minor cottage industry for liberal academics. The data on which the analyses were done and conclusions made came from a large national longitudinal study conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). NLSY participants are males and females of all races/ethnicities (initial n = 12,686) and have been interviewed regularly since 1979, but for the analyses in the book, Herrnstein and Murray limited their sample to whites. The main point of the book is that IQ is the overall best predictor that we have of a host of social outcomes such as job and school performance, income level, unwed motherhood, welfare dependency, civility, ...

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