Quotessence
Home / Authors / Charles Murray Biography

Charles Murray Biography

Author

Related Quotes

“It is said that there comes a point in every mathematics student's education when he hears himself saying to the teacher, "I think I understand"-- and that's the point at which he has hit a wall. Making sure that all gifted students hit their own personal walls is crucial for developing the empathy with the rest of the world. When they see their less lucky peers struggle academically, they need to be able to say "I know how it feels,"-- and be telling the truth.”

EmpathyIntellectual Humility
Book:Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality
Create image

“The propositions that accompany most of the chapters . . . are not as snappy as I would prefer—but there’s a reason for their caution and caveats. On certain important points, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and we don’t have to argue about them anymore. But to meet that claim requires me to state the propositions precisely. I am prepared to defend all of them as “things we don’t have to argue about anymore”—but exactly as I worded them, not as others may paraphrase them. Here they are: 1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures. 2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability. 3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things. 4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior. 5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity. 6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local. 7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common. 8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior. 9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component. 10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.”

ClassEvolutionGender DifferencesNature Versus NurtureCharles MurrayPopulation Genetics
Book:Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
Create image

“Considerable social science research has found that constant praise of children can backfire, because it so often consists of telling children how smart they are, not of praising children for the things they actually do. As a result, many children become protective of their image of being smart and are reluctant to take chances that might actually damage that image.”

HumilityPrideParentingMaturation
Book:Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
Create image

“pp. 87-88: The usual way in which the media and politicians talk about race discrimination in the job market is to compare the percentage of Africans or Latins in a given occupation with the percentage of Europeans. This makes the situation look bad. The 2014–2018 American Community Survey found that Africans, at 13 percent of the population, accounted for only 3.6 percent of CEOs, 3.7 percent of physical scientists, 4.4 percent of civil engineers, 5.1 percent of physicians, and 5.2 percent of lawyers. Latin percentages in those prestigious occupations ranged from 5.3 to 7.6 percent, but Latins are almost 18 percent of the population, so their underrepresentation was nearly the same. The picture flips when race differences in cognitive ability and job performance are taken into account. Africans and Latins get through the educational pipeline with preferential treatment in admissions to colleges and to professional programs. Their mean IQs in occupations across the range from unskilled to those requiring advanced degrees are substantially lower than the mean IQs for Europeans in the same occupations. Race differences in measures of on-the-job performance are commensurate with the differences in cognitive ability. I think it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.”

Affirmative ActionRacial DiscriminationAnti White Discrimination
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image

“Page 65: The consistent findings about cognitive ability and job performance that apply most directly to group differences in cognitive ability are these: • Measures of cognitive ability and job performance are always positively correlated. • The size of the correlation goes up as the job becomes more cognitively complex. • Even for low-skill occupations, job experience does not lead to convergence in performance among persons with different cognitive ability. • For intellectually demanding jobs, there is no point at which more cognitive ability doesn’t make a difference. Increases in IQ scores are statistically associated with increases in productivity at every level of cognitive ability.”

IntelligenceImmigrationMulticulturalismAffirmative ActionIq
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image

“Page 67: For jobs that require a college degree, race differences in cognitive ability in the workplace should be minimized by the process of obtaining that college degree. But it hasn’t worked that way since at least the 1970s. Colleges have been complicit in transmitting the mean IQ differences by race in the general population not only through the college pipeline but through the graduate-education pipeline as well.” Page 76: The mean IQs of Africans and Latins increase with each higher category, just as the European means do, but the size of the difference generally keeps pace. In the case of the European–African difference, the size of the difference tends to increase along with IQ, from 1.01 SDs for occupations with European mean IQs under 100 to 1.20 SDs for European mean IQs of 110 or higher.”

IntelligenceAffirmative ActionIq
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image

“Page 46: Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, … they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all.”

Affirmative ActionAnti White Discrimination
Book:The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
Create image

“Page 321: But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.”

IntelligenceAffirmative ActionRacial Differences In Iq
Book:The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
Create image

“Non-Latino Latino White 60.0% 12.1% Black 12.4% 0.4% East Asian 2.4% 0.0% South Asian 1.5% 0.0% Filipino/Pacific Islander 1.1% 0.0% Native American 0.7% 0.2% Southeast Asian 0.6% 0.0% Other Asian 0.1% 0.1% Other Single Race 0.3% 4.7% White & Black 0.7% 0.1% White & Native American 0.5% 0.1% White & Asian 0.5% 0.1% Other Combination 0.8% 0.6% TOTAL 81.6% 18.4%”

ImmigrationMulticulturalismAffirmative Action
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image

“Page 42: Whatever the combination of sources of test bias might be, genuine bias against a minority will show up in a way that leaves no room for doubt: It will under-predict the test taker’s performance in the classroom or on the job. Whether predictive validity is the same for different groups can be subjected to rigorous statistical scrutiny, and it has been, repeatedly. The results are unambiguous, whether the thing being predicted is grades in school or performance on the job. The major tests do not under-predict the performance of Africans or Latins.”

IntelligenceImmigrationMulticulturalismAffirmative ActionIq
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image

“Page 67: For jobs that require a college degree, race differences in cognitive ability in the workplace should be minimized by the process of obtaining that college degree. But it hasn’t worked that way since at least the 1970s. Colleges have been complicit in transmitting the mean IQ differences by race in the general population not only through the college pipeline but through the graduate-education pipeline as well.”

IntelligenceAffirmative ActionIq
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image

“pp. 6-7: I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups. But there’s no way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we have been unwilling to say that, we have been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer candidly.”

IndividualismEthnic ConflictIdentity Politics
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image

“We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people. Most students at today's colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don't want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn't make sense for them.”

Liberal Education
Book:Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality
Create image

“Page 85: Results for the military stand apart from all civilian work settings and occupations. One relevant factor for explaining the military’s success is presumably that each branch has its own minimum score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test required of all recruits. The Army requires a score at the 31st percentile or higher, equivalent to an IQ of 92.6 or more, which is roughly the top half of the African and Latin distributions.”

IntelligenceIq000Project 100Robert Mcnamara
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Create image