Charles Murray's Two Uncomfortable Truths and His Not Bad Advice

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Jewish World Review

Michael Barone

June 25 2021

Give Charles Murray, longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, credit for courage. Again and again, despite outrageously unfair attacks, he has returned to the public arena and persisted in telling unwelcome truths. In his meticulous prose, with charts and tables so elegant as to betray an aesthetic bent, he makes his points with precision and clarity.

Murray's 1994 book "The Bell Curve," co-authored with Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, evoked furious and undeserved denunciation. It will be interesting to see whether there is a similar reaction to his latest and much shorter book, "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America."

His first truth is that "American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive abilities." Murray makes mincemeat of arguments against IQ tests and shows that they're highly correlated with achievement in schools and in later life. Asians have the highest average scores, followed by Whites, Latinos and Blacks.

Murray's second truth is that "American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime." Murray deftly extrapolates from the best available crime rates and shows that average violent crime rates are far above average among Blacks, somewhat above average among Latinos, somewhat below average among Whites and almost negligible among Asians.

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