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Zusatztext Prof. Earl Hunt American Scientist The first reactions to The Bell Curve were expressions of public outrage. In the second round of reaction! some commentators suggested that Herrnstein and Murray were merely bringing up facts that were well known in the scientific community! but perhaps best not discussed in public. A Papua New Guinea language has a term for this! Mokita. It means "truth that we all know! but agree not to talk about." ...There are fascinating questions here for those interested in the interactions between sociology! economics! anthropology and cognitive science. We do not have the answers yet. We may need them soon! for policy makers who rely on Mokita are flying blind. Informationen zum Autor Richard J. Herrnstein held the Edger Pierce Chair in Psychology at Harvard University until his death in 1994. Klappentext The controversial New York Times national bestseller--now updated with a comprehensive response to critics. Covered on front pages around the world--reviled, praised, defended, and deplored--this seminal examination of the relationship between ethnicity and intelligence has "kicked up more reaction than any other social-science book of this decade" (David Brooks, The Wall Street Journal). Chapter 1 Cognitive Class and Education, 1900-1990 In the course of the twentieth century, America opened the doors of its colleges wider than any previous generation of Americans, or other society in history, could have imagined possible. This democratization of higher education has raised new, barriers between people that may prove to be more divisive and intractable than the old ones. The growth in the proportion of people getting college degrees is the most obvious result, with a fifteen-fold increase from 1900 to 1990. Even more important, the students going to college were being selected ever more efficiently for their high IQ. The crucial decade was the 1950s, when the percentage of top students who went to college rose by more than it had in the preceding three decades. By the beginning of the 1990s, about 80 percent of all students in the top quartile of ability continued to college after high school. Among the high school graduates in the top few percentiles of cognitive ability the chances of going to college already exceeded 90 percent. Perhaps the most important of all the changes was the transformation of America's elite colleges. As more bright youngsters went off to college, the colleges themselves began to sort themselves out. Starting in the 1950s, a handful of restitutions became magnets for the very brightest of each year's new class. In these schools, the cognitive level of the students rose far above the rest of the college population. Taken together, these trends have stratified America according to cognitive ability. A perusal of Harvard's Freshman Register for 1952 shows a class looking very much as Harvard freshman classes had always looked. Under the photographs of the well-scrubbed, mostly East Coast, overwhelmingly white and Christian young men were home addresses from places like Philadelphia's Main Line, the Upper East Side of New York, and Boston's Beacon Hill. A large proportion of the class came from a handful of America's most exclusive boarding schools; Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover alone contributed almost 10 percent of the freshmen that year. And yet for all its apparent exclusivity, Harvard was not so hard to get into in the fall of 1952. An applicant's chances of being admitted were about two out of three, and close to 90 percent if his father had gone to Harvard. With this modest level of competition, it is not surprising to learn that the Harvard student body was not uniformly brilliant. In fact, the mean SAT-Verbal score of the incoming freshmen class was only 583, well above the national mean but nothing to brag about. H...

List of contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

A Note to the Reader

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I.

THE EMERGENCE OF A COGNITIVE ELITE

1 Cognitive Class and Education, 1900-1990

2 Cognitive Partitioning by Occupation

3 The Economic Pressure to Partition

4 Steeper Ladders, Narrower Gates

PART II.

COGNITIVE CLASSES AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

5 Poverty

6 Schooling

7 Unemployment, Idleness, and Injury

8 Family Matters

9 Welfare Dependency

10 Parenting

11 Crime

12 Civility and Citizenship

PART III.

THE NATIONAL CONTEXT

13 Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability

14 Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ

15 The Demography of Intelligence

16 Social Behavior and the Prevalence of Low Cognitive Ability

PART IV.

LIVING TOGETHER

17 Raising Cognitive Ability

18 The Leveling of American Education

19 Affirmative Action in Higher Education

20 Affirmative Action in the Workplace

21 The Way We Are Headed

22 A Place for Everyone

Afterworld

APPENDIXES

1 Statistics for People Who Are Sure They Can't Learn Statistics

2 Technical Issues Regarding the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

3 Technical Issues Regarding the Armed Forces Qualification Test as a Measure of IQ

4 Regression Analyses (rom Part II

5 Supplemental Material for Chapter 13

6 Regression Analyses from Chapter 14

7 The Evolution of Affirmative Action in the Workplace

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Richard J. Herrnstein held the Edger Pierce Chair in Psychology at Harvard University until his death in 1994.

Summary

This work offers a perspective on the causes of the social and economic problems that plague contemporary America. It examines the relationship between ethnicity and intelligence and presents the view that America's population is becoming polarized between an educated elite and uneducated poor.

Product details

• Authors: R.J. Murray Herrnstein, Richard J Herrnstein, Richard J. Herrnstein, Herrnstein Richard J., Charles Murray
• Publisher: Free Press UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.1996
• EAN: 9780684824291
• ISBN: 978-0-684-82429-1
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 235 mm x 40 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > General, dictionaries; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; USA, SOCIAL SCIENCE / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / American Government / General, Social groups, Politics & government, United States of America, USA, Politics and government, Social groups, communities and identities