Description
In our time, the ability to use and manipulate information has become the single most important element of success, no matter how you measure it: financial security, power, or status. Those who work ideas and abstractions are by manipulating the leaders and beneficiaries of our society. In such an era, high intelligence is an increasingly precious raw material for success. But despite decades of fashionable denial, the overriding and insistent truth about intellectual ability is that it is endowed unequally, for reasons that government policies can do little to change.
The major purpose of The Bell Curve is to reveal the dramatic transformation that is currently in process in American society-a process that has created a new kind of class structure led by a "cognitive elite," itself a result of concentration and self-selection in those social pools well endowed with cognitive abilities. This transformation, sadly, has its opposite: the perpetuation of a class of people deficient in these endowments and abilities, and increasingly doomed to labor, if they find work at all, outside the information economy.
In a book that is certain to ignite an explosive controversy, Herrnstein and Murray break new ground in exploring the ways that low intelligence, independent of social, economic, or ethnic background lies at the root of many of our social problems. The authors also demonstrate the truth of another taboo fact: that intelligence levels differ among ethnic groups. This finding is already well-known and widely discussed among psychometricians and other scholars. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray open this body of scholarship to the general public.
ISBN:0029146739
