CHARLES MURRAY (AUTHOR)

'Charles Alan Murray' (born 1943) is a controversial libertarian American political scientist. He is employed at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, DC. He is perhaps best known for his book ''The Bell Curve'', co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein, in which he claims that IQ is a far more reliable predictor of success in life compared to socioeconomic status. "The Bell Curve" generated substantial controversy for its statements about race and IQ.

Contents

Biography

Early Life and Education

Peace Corps Service in Thailand

Divorce and Remarriage

Research

The Bell Curve

Other Books

Op-Ed Writings

Notes

See also

External links

Pro

Con

Biography

Early Life and Education

Murray was raised in Newton, Iowa in a Republican, non-collegiate "Norman Rockwell kind of family" that stressed moral responsibility; he had an intellectual youth marked by a rebellious and prankster sensibility.^[1] As a teen he played pool at a hangout for juvenile delinquents, studied debating, and, to his parents' annoyance, espoused labor unionism.^[2]
Murray credits the SAT with helping him get out of Newton and into Harvard. "Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s." [1]
Murray obtained an A.B. in history from Harvard in 1965 and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974 [2]

Peace Corps Service in Thailand

Murray left for the Peace Corps in Thailand in 1965, staying abroad for a formative six years.^[3] At the beginning of this period, the young Murray kindled a romance with his Thai Buddhist language instructor (in Hawaii), Suchart Dej-Udom, the daughter of a wealthy Thai businessman, who was "born with one hand and a mind sharp enough to outscore the rest of the country on the college entrance exam." Murray subsequently proposed by mail from Thailand, and their marriage began the following year, a move that Murray now considers youthful rebellion. "I'm getting married to a one-handed Thai Buddhist," he said. "This was not the daughter-in-law that would have normally presented itself to an Iowa couple." [3]
Murray credits his time in the Peace Corps in Thailand with his lifelong interest in Asia. "There are aspects of Asian culture as it is lived that I still prefer to Western culture, 30 years after I last lived in Thailand. Two of my children are half-Asian. Apart from those personal aspects, I have always thought that the Chinese and Japanese civilizations had elements that represented the apex of human accomplishment in certain domains." [4]
Murray's work in the Peace Corps and subsequent social research in Thailand for research firms associated with the U.S. government led to the subject of his statistical doctoral thesis in political science at M.I.T., in which he argued against bureaucratic intervention in the lives of the Thai villagers.^[4]

Divorce and Remarriage

By the 1980s, his marriage to Suchart Dej-Udom had been unhappy for years, but "his childhood lessons on the importance of responsibility brought him slowly to the idea that divorce was an honorable alternative, especially with young children involved."^[5]
Murray divorced Dej-Udom after fourteen years of marriage [6] and two years later married Catherine Bly Cox, an English literature instructor at Rutgers University. Cox was initially dubious when she saw his conservative reading choices, and she spent long hours "trying to reconcile his shocking views with what she saw as his deep decency." In 1989, Murray and Cox co-authored a book on the Apollo program, ''Apollo: Race to the Moon''. ^[6] Murray and Cox have been involved in a Quaker meeting in Virginia, and they live in Frederick County, Maryland near Washington, D.C.^[7]
Murray has four children, two by each wife, and remains close with both families.^[8]

Research

Murray began research work at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), one of the largest of the private social science research organizations, upon his return to the U.S. From 1974-1981, Murray worked for the AIR eventually becoming chief political scientist. While at AIR, Murray supervised evaluations in the fields of urban education, welfare services, daycare, adolescent pregnancy, services for the elderly, and criminal justice.
From 1981-1990, he was a fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute where he wrote ''Losing Ground'', which heavily influenced the welfare reform debate in 1996, and ''In Pursuit''.
He has been a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute since 1990 and is a frequent contributor to ''The Public Interest'', a journal of conservative politics and culture.
Murray has received grants from the right-wing Bradley Foundation to support his scholarship, including the writing of ''The Bell Curve''.

The Bell Curve

''The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life'' (1994) (ISBN 0-02-914673-9) is Murray's controversial, best-selling 1994 book co-written with Harvard professor Richard J. Herrnstein. Its central point is that the affluent and their children (the "cognitive elite") are affluent due largely to an innate genetic and intellectual superiority to the non-affluent. The book had the potential for offending the majority of the U.S. population in that it constitutes a defense of plutocracy and inequality due to race, but it became widely read and debated, especially Chapters 13 and 14, where the authors state that blacks have a lower mean intelligence than whites and Asians due to genetic factors.
The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of IQ scores. A generalization of the binomial probability distribution, the normal distribution is used for those phenomena resulting from the sum of several random, equally likely occurrences.
Shortly after publication, large numbers of people rallied both to criticize and defend the book. Some critics denounced the book and its authors as supporting scientific racism.

Other Books

★ ''A Behavioral Study of Rural Modernization: Social and Economic Change in Thai Villages'' (Praeger Publishers, 1977)

★ ''Beyond Probation: Juvenile Corrections and the Chronic Delinquent'' - co-authored with Louis A. Cox, Jr. (Sage Publications, 1979)

★ ''Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980'', Basic Books (1984) ISBN 0-465-04231-7; on welfare reform

★ ''In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government'', Simon & Schuster (1989) ISBN 0-671-68743-3

★ ''Apollo: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of One of Humankind’s Greatest Achievements'' - co-authored by Catherine Bly Cox, Simon & Schuster, 1989.

★ ''What it Means to be a Libertarian'', Broadway Books (1997) ISBN 0-553-06928-4

★ "IQ and economic success." ''Public Interest'', 128, 21–35. (1997)

★ ''Income Inequality and IQ'', AEI Press (1998) PDF copy

★ ''The Underclass Revisited'', AEI Press (1999) PDF copy

★ ''Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950'', HarperCollins (2003) ISBN 0-06-019247-X; a quantification and ranking of well-known scientists and artists

★ ''In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace The Welfare State'', AEI Press (March 2006)

Op-Ed Writings

Murray has published opinion pieces in ''The New Republic'', ''Commentary'', ''The Public Interest'', the ''New York Times'', the ''Wall Street Journal'', ''National Review'', and the ''Washington Post''. He has been a witness before United States congressional and senate committees and a consultant to senior Republican government officials in the United States, and conservative officials in the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
In the April, 2007 issue of Commentary Magazine, Murray wrote on the disproportionate represention of Jews in the ranks of outstanding achievers and says that one of the reasons is that Jews "have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested." [8]
In the July/August, 2007 issue of ''The American'', a magazine published by the American Enterprise Institute, Murray says he has changed his mind about SAT tests and says it's time to scrap the test. "The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be ended. Not just deemphasized, but no longer administered. Nothing important would be lost by so doing. Much would be gained." [9]

Notes

1. DeParle, Jason (1994). "Daring Research or 'Social Science Pornography'?: Charles Murray", ''New York Times'', Oct. 9. (p. 3).
2. DeParle 1994, pp. 3-4. DeParle's biographical article finds in some of Murray's life and work a still-present theme of a high-school prankster who "only [learns] later what the fuss [is] all about" (p.12). Some critics, however, have found significant one incident written about by DeParle:
:"While there is much to admire about the industry and inquisitiveness of Murray's teen-age years, there is at least one adventure that he understandably deletes from the story — the night he helped his friends burn a cross. They had formed a kind of good guys' gang, "the Mallows," whose very name, from marshmallows, was a play on their own softness. In the fall of 1960, during their senior year, they nailed some scrap wood into a cross, adorned it with fireworks and set it ablaze on a hill beside the police station, with marshmallows scattered as a calling card.
:Rutledge [a social worker and former juvenile delinquent] who was still hanging around the pool hall [and considers some of Murray's other memories to be idealized] recalls his astonishment the next day when the talk turned to racial persecution in a town with two black families. "There wouldn't have been a racist thought in our simple-minded minds," he says. "That's how unaware we were."
:A long pause follows when Murray is reminded of the event. "Incredibly, incredibly dumb," he says. "But it never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance. And I look back on that and say, 'How on earth could we be so oblivious?' I guess it says something about that day and age that it didn't cross our minds" (p. 4).
3. DeParle, pp. 4-5.
4. De Parle 1994. McIntosh 2006: "My epiphany came in Thailand in the 1960s, when I first came to understand how badly bureaucracies dealt with human problems in the villages, and how well (with qualifications) villagers dealt with their own problems given certain conditions." [5]
5. DeParle, p. 7.
6. Nasa Symposium on Forty Years of Human Spaceflight (2001). The book was well reviewed: "Rich, densely packed and beautifully told.... Filled with cliffhangers, suspense and spine-tingling adventure." -Charles Sheffield, Washington Post Book World, July 9 1989. "Heart-gripping.... So brilliantly told one can almost smell the perspiration in Houston Mission Control." -Charles Petit, San Francisco Chronicle, July 9, 1989:
7. Quaker meeting: [7]; current location: DeParle p. 8.
8. Two children from each marriage: DeParle, pp. 7-8.

See also

★ The discussion of intelligence testing

★ Historiometry

★ Human Accomplishment

External links

★ C-SPAN Book TV In Depth (RealVideo), 3-hour interview.

★ [10] (RealAudio), 20 minute talk on elitism held in Sydney, Australia on 13 August, 2007.

Pro

★ Cato Institute Book Forum (RealVideo) (RealAudio), 1 hour lecture that Murray gave discussing his book ''Human Accomplishment'', and some of the response to it.

★ Address to Commonwealth Club of California on 18-Apr-2006 regarding his welfare reform proposals (RealAudio)

★ "10 questions for Charles Murray." McIntosh, Matt (2006), ''Gene Expression''.

★ "The Idea of Progress: Once Again, with Feeling" in the Hoover digest.

Con

★ NY Times biographical article: Jason DeParle (1994), "Daring Research or 'Social Science Pornography'?: Charles Murray".

★ "Flattening The Bell Curve" by Nicholas Leman, at Slate Magazine

★ "The Bell Curve is a top-level work of science" Debunking ''The Bell Curve''

★ "Debunking The Bell Curve" Articles on ''The Bell Curve''.

★ Charles Murray's "Dreyfus Affair"