Quotes from Richard J. Herrnstein

The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.

How good a predictor of job productivity is a cognitive test score compared to a job interview? Reference checks? College transcript? The answer, probably surprising to many, is that the test score is a better predictor of job performance than any other single measure. This is the conclusion to be drawn from a meta-analysis on the different predictors of job performance, as shown in the table below.

Most Americans think that crime has gotten far too high. But in the ruminations about how the nation has reached this state and what might be done, too little attention has been given to one of the best-documented relationships in the study of crime: As a group, criminals are below average in intelligence.

How large is the black-white difference? The usual answer to this question is one standard deviation. In discussing IQ tests, for example, the black mean is commonly given as 85, the white mean as 100, and the standard deviation as 15.

There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse, with significant economic consequences.

Cognitive sorting continues from the time that students enter college to the time they get a degree

Among the dozens of hostile articles that have thus far appeared, none has successfully refuted any of its science.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

the use of tests endured and grew because society's largest institutions—schools, military forces, industries, governments—depend significantly on measurable individual differences.

To those who held the behaviorist view, human potential was almost perfectly malleable, shaped by the environment.

The causes of human deficiencies in intelligence—or parenting, or social behavior, or work behavior—lay outside the individual. They were caused by flaws in society.

The contrary notion—that individual differences could not easily be diminished by government intervention—collided head-on with the enthusiasm for egalitarianism, which itself collided head-on with a half-century of IQ data indicating that differences in intelligence are intractable and significantly heritable

because economic success in life depends in part on the talents measured by IQ tests, and because social standing depends in part on economic success, it follows that social standing is bound to be based to some extent on inherited differences.

The idea is that criminals are distinctive in psychological (perhaps even biological) ways. They are deficient, depending on the particular theory, in conscience or in self-restraint. They lack normal attachment to the mores of their culture, or they are peculiarly indifferent to the feelings or the good opinion of others. They

The authors] have been cast as racists and elitists and The Bell Curve has been dismissed as pseudoscience . . . . The book's message cannot be dismissed so easily.

the time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject. It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise.

Once again, academia and the mass media are straining every muscle to suppress debate.

Its story line is that modern societies identify the brightest youths with ever increasing efficiency and then guide them into fairly narrow educational and occupational channels.

Over the course of a few generations, the average intelligence in an aristocratic family fell toward the population average, hastened by marriages that matched bride and groom by lineage, not ability.

A true cognitive elite requires a technological society.

The proportion of CEOs who came from wealthy families had dropped from almost half in 1900 and a third in 1950 to 5.5 percent by 1976.23 The CEO of 1976 was still disproportionately likely to be Episcopalian but much less so than in 1900—and by 1976 he was also disproportionately likely to be Jewish, unheard of in 1920 or earlier. In short, social and economic background was no longer nearly as important in 1976 as in the first half of the century. Educational

It gives a fair hearing to those who dissent scientifically from its propositions—in fact, it bends over backward to be fair

The first reactions to The Bell Curve were expressions of public outrage.

But school is in itself, more immediately and directly than any other institution, the place where people of high cognitive ability excel and people of low cognitive ability fail.