> . . .
> By deriving differences in recorded IQ, and by implication Socio-
> Economic Status from presumed genetic diferences, Murray took a step too
> far for those who had been willing to indulge him until then as 'telling
> unpalatable truths'. It is pointed that the Bell Curve is a departure
> from his prior writings in that these tended towards a _cultural_
> explanation of social division, the creation of an 'underclass' through
> the cultural inheritance of moral depravity. . . .
Putting aside the exaggerated rhetoric of "moral depravity," the notion of the cultural or social inheritance of personal behavior that conduces to poverty is not original to Murray, nor is it necessarily malign. In other words, there is something to it. That Murray contributes nothing to an understanding of this I don't doubt, so by all means bash away, but it is important to separate his dubious contribution from the bigger issues.
Such behavior is not unique to "the poor," of course, and when it manifests itself in, for instance, the brother of a governor or president the situation is not framed as 'poverty' since money and power establish a different background.
Even if economics entirely dictated the inevitability of poverty in the first instance, the result can be self-defeating personal behavior which is transmitted across generations. Such behavior is also a problem for poverty reduction, by whatever means, as well as for organizing the oppressed.
That idea can be found in Oscar Lewis "The Children of Sanchez" and Michael Harrington "THe Other America". The politics following from these in the 1960's in the U.S. was more positive than negative. One might simplify the differing interpretations as, the right attributes poverty entirely to individual behavior, perhaps inherited; the left might attribute *some* poverty to behavior resulting from economic circumstances. The right's solution is darwinism; the left would combine economic aid with socialization efforts.
That all poor people are nothing but noble sufferers invariably weighed down by external obstacles is just dead wrong. Everybody knows this because everybody knows someone for whom it is not true. Objections to the contrary are just self-marginalizing ideological prejudices.
>
> A lot of one-time liberals were prepared to give some room to Murray at
> that point. His analysis of the underclass seemed to explain the
> failures of the welfare state to overcome social deprivation (they
> should instead have questioned the ability of hte state to transcend its
> material basis in social division). The underclass thesis became the
> preferred liberal-left evasion of the failures of welfarism. Today, for
> example, Tony Blair's 'social exclusion unit' operates on a modified
> version of Murray's underclass thesis. The underclass thesis, in a
> nutshell is that it is the cultural inheritance of social deprivation
> that keeps people in poverty.
The liberal intellectual community in the U.S. was overwhelmingly opposed to welfare reform a la Clinton. As noted above, an "underclass thesis" does not necessarily support a lean and mean welfare system.
It is true that Clinton had Murray over to the White House and told him he was "right," which should earn him a few extra degrees in hell.
MBS