The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
Richard J. Herrnstein
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.”
“There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse, with significant economic consequences.”
“Richard Lynn was able to assemble eleven studies in his 1991 review of the literature. He estimated the median black African IQ to be 75, approximately 1.7 standard deviations below the U.S. overall population average, about 10 points lower than the current figure for American blacks.”
“Most Americans think that crime has gotten far too high. But in the ruminations about how the nation has reached this state and what might be done, too little attention has been given to one of the best-documented relationships in the study of crime: As a group, criminals are below average in intelligence.”
“How large is the black-white difference? The usual answer to this question is one standard deviation. In discussing IQ tests, for example, the black mean is commonly given as 85, the white mean as 100, and the standard deviation as 15.”
“How good a predictor of job productivity is a cognitive test score compared to a job interview? Reference checks? College transcript? The answer, probably surprising to many, is that the test score is a better predictor of job performance than any other single measure. This is the conclusion to be drawn from a meta-analysis on the different predictors of job performance, as shown in the table below.”
“the use of tests endured and grew because society’s largest institutions—schools, military forces, industries, governments—depend significantly on measurable individual differences.”
“the time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject. It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise.”
“merely bringing up facts that were well known in the scientific community, but perhaps best not discussed in public. A Papua New Guinea language has a term for this, Mokita. It means ‘truth that we all know, but agree not to talk about.”
“in 1904, a former British Army officer named Charles Spearman made a conceptual and statistical breakthrough that has shaped both the development and much of the methodological controversy about mental tests ever since.5”
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Book Keywords:
blacks, equality, excellence, beauty, virtue, intelligence-quotient, africans, whites, truth
