C. Heartfield and Rakesh,
I find "The Bell Curve" interesting and useful. Because it is quite carefully reasoned it provided me with an insight into why it is that Murray and conservative social theorists generally are not just wrong in degree but are interpreting their own data 180 degrees the wrong way. Murray sees a difference in IQ between racial groups that corresponds to a difference in social success and comes to the conclusion that a fair and rational marketplace has weeded out the losers. A simple lick of Occam's razor undermines both the assumption that intelligence is genetic and that intelligence determines social success - given the same data.
The one place where Murray drops from careful reasoning into idiocy is when he equates intelligence and genetics. It really may not be his fault. I have seen articles in Scientific American which called 70 and 75 percent IQ score correlations between identical twins "evidence" that IQ score is genetic. A correlation of 70 percent between people who are perfectly identical is hardly a convincing argument. When two people who have almost literally the same brain can diverge that widely, what IQ is testing is probably not the function of that brain as such.
Murray's own data suggests the very same thing when he takes two groups differentiated only by superficial "racial" characteristics - groups whose real genetic divergence is unknown and must therefore be assumed not to exist given a large enough sample size - and finds a consistent IQ disparity. The first conclusion from Murray's data, demanded by Occam's razor, is that IQ tests something social, specifically something that is related to the *social* category "race". Of course Murray tries to weasel around this with so much social Darwinist nonsense, but the fact is there is no evidence that "race" actually represents anything which might have a genetic relationship to the working of the brain. Race is, for scientific purposes, an arbitrary categorization. Even diseases that are tied to race have nothing to do with race and everything to do with place. Genetically isolated populations develop genetic disease. Thus sickle-cell anemia is not a disease of black people, but a disease which developed in an isolated population that happened to be black and happened to be from the area where African slaves were taken. There is no reason to believe and every reason to disbelieve that American blacks are a genetically isolated population to an extent that they would show a consistent divergence in brain function and certainly not to the extent that Murray demonstrates. He's cut his own throat and he's too stupid to see it.
What we are left with is a heavily socially-determined characteristic (performance on IQ tests) that corresponds with social success. There's no surprise there. The idea that we are freely and independently formed individuals who are chosen for success by an objective system is the absurdity demonstrated to be an absurdity by Murray himself. The role economists have in the thing is encouraging the notion that there is a labor "market" that is such an objective system.
peace