Also, I'm naturally going to be skeptical of the practice of citing Charles Murray as though he is a neutral academic.
I agree that his most recent book didn't make strong points and relied too much on emotional arguments.
But
The Bell Curve and
Real Education use numerous peer-reviewed citations to support their contentions. I read some of the papers they cited and didn't find evidence that the conclusion of the original authors had been manipulated. And Murray didn't write
The Bell Curve by himself; his co-author was a respected academic from Harvard.
The problem, IMO, is that people don't like what the books say and react emotionally to them. I think that people also make invalid assumptions about what those books say. The books (especially
The Bell Curve) are reporting results of studies other people did, not making their own original judgments.
