<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { margin-top: 0 ; margin-bottom: 0 }
--></style>
<title>
RE: Charles Murray
</title>
</head>
<body>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
> I bought it in hardcover--and then felt very guilty about giving
Murray<br>
> royalties.<br>
><br>
> So I went to an AEI lunch, yelled at him, and got thrown
out...<br>
<br>
<br>
Juicy details, please.<br>
<br>
MBS</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Not many juicy ones, I'm afraid. It was at the time of the
book's launch. The AEI had a lunch for the press and others. I used
my status as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury to get a
ticket.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>If I recall correctly (but a bunch of different meetings are
jumbled together in my mind), during the question period I asked (a)
if it was not true that differences in measured IQ accounted for a
negligible proportion of income inequality once one controlled for a
multi-dimensional measure of parents' socio-economic-status and for
education, and (b) if it was not true that the only way Herrnstein
and Murray could even claim that measured IQ was an important cause
of anything was by removing the variables--education, more than one
dimension of parents' ses--that everyone else thought were the
important causes.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I went on to assert (c) that Herrnstein and Murray's claim that
once you control for IQ that there is no sign of wage discrimination
against African-Americans was a blatant lie (they had a regression in
which predicted black and white wages were equal when the
right-hand-side variables were set at their means among whites, but
in which predicted black wages were... somewhere between 10 and 20%
lower... when the right-hand-side variables were set at their means
among blacks). And then I asserted (d) that since Murray was
maintaining (i) that measured IQ was determined by genes--barely
affected by differences in children's environments--and (ii) that
measured IQ in the U.S.--in spite of a "genetic endowment"
that from Murray's perspective had been
"deteriorating"--had been growing at 0.3 points per year
for the past-half century, the only conclusion I could draw was that
Murray was certainly not one of the cognitive elite.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>At that point I was told that my presence in the room was not
wanted...</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Brad DeLong<br>
</div>
</body>
</html>