Let's see how the professional critics have dealt with this central claim of HM.
Note Murray and Herrnstein's graphs simply show that IQ/AFQT scores or,at best, cognitive ability, not the cognitive ability one inherits in a hard sense, is more important than SES. But the finding is completely irrelevant to their thesis or at least in order to substantiate their thesis they should have drawn graphs that show that cognitive ability inherited only in the hardest sense is more important than SES. All the data about low cognitive ability being a greater predisposing factor towards pathology than SES is simple noise vis a vis their own thesis.
Why didn't they draw corrected graphs? Why didn't their sociological or economist critics call them on it even after Gould had made the point? So even if one redoes their data and finds that a corrected or more accurate SES measure is more important than IQ in the determination of the probability of who ends up poor, etc., it's still nonsensical in that it accepts the idea that there is any sense at all to the comparison of IQ and SES as an indicator of outcomes. What is the hypothesis that is being tested by this comparison? It can't be the one of genes vs environment, so what's the question this data is supposed to be answering? Just showing that SES is more important, as do Fischer et al, doesn't help us understand what we are trying to understand by this comparison.
Moreover, we don't even know if it makes any sense at all to claim that a complex behavioral property like intelligence, itself not defined, is simply genetically transmitted--Richard M Lerner, Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice and Genocide (foreword by Lewontin and Benno Muller Hill) certainly doesn't think so. Ah, another book missing from the Bell Curve critique bibliographies.
The econometricians Golderberger and Manski don't make these points --right, Barkely and Brad? they basically argue that it is impossible to compare the relative importance of SES and IQ in standardized units, not that the comparison even if possible would not validate in any way HM's claims about the importance of inherited cognitive ability. I admit to not understanding quite a bit of what GM are up to, but section C on genes and heritability (a concept that I don't think understand, making the very error that Miles noted) seems to me to be quite confused.
At any rate, HM's attempt to paint society as a machine in which everyone finds the place for which she was born and rilly belong is failed. Bourdieu's project is the exact opposite--to demonstrate how arbitrary social hierarchies are despite their durability and seeming objectivity.
Oh yes, the other thing our econometricians don't question is the class bias in the specification of social pathology, but then even Fischer et al who are sociologists don't do this either! If we accept the reasonable hypothesis that the more destructive examples thereof include Veblenian business sabotage and the like (instead of involvement in, say, the lowest levels of non violent drug trafficking), then we may find that the inheritance of property is indeed more important than IQ or any other possible independent variable in the determination of the worst forms of social pathology. But then we would have to delve into the private business of the rich as the custodial state does with the underclass, e.g., Giulani's home visits for welfare recepients. Either the project is to understand the causally relevant determinants of social pathology or of non bourgeois social pathologies only. The bourgeois bias is glaring in HM and critics alike.
yours, rakesh