For this blog post I looked at an interview with Charles Murray, one of the Bell Curve's authors, that was included in "The Bell Curve Wars" Murray begins the interview by attacking the assumption that race was the main point of the Bell Curve and by arguing that he (with the now deceased Hernstein) was looking at wider societal issues of class and intelligence. Murray states that his predictions about the concentration of high IQ individuals in the upper classes have come to pass. He calls the state of the labor market for low-paying, "low-intelligence" jobs "terrible" Murray than argues that the way to counteract this is for the large-scale redistribution of wealth (an interesting position for an avowed conservative). As he believes that intelligence essentially "follows" money this system would serve to "redistribute" IQ points as well as dollars. While it is difficult to quantify I think Murray and Hernstein were at least theoretically right about the concentration of intellectual capacity in the upper class. If IQ is heritable, people are more likely to marry and reproduce with others of the their class and the US is a true meritocracy, as Murray maintains, than he must be right. Many people tend to conflate meritocracy with an egalitarian social system, it is possible that a segment of the population possesses intellectual capabilities far above everyone else and will therefore thrive to an unparalleled extent. However, the current US system is not fully meritocratic, the correlation between SAT scores and IQ (themselves not perfect measures of ability) and measures of success (income, life expectancy etc.) is strong but far from perfect. The US still has a long way to go before achieving a meritocratic economic system. Nonetheless Murray's assertions about the distribution of intelligence are disconcerting. I do not accept that different racial groups have different intellectual capacities. However, I do accept that within the subset of the whole population there exist certain individuals who can process and absorb information and perform other mental tasks at a more efficient and effective level than others. In Hernstein's scenario, which I do not believe to be all that far-fetched, these individuals would dominate the financial and intellectual "resources" of our nation and the world.