The author, John Cawley j-cawley@uchicago.edu, September 17, 1997
The relationship between cognitive ability and wages
In chapter 8 of Intelligence, Genes, and Success, my coauthors and I test the claims about cognitive ability and wages made by the authors of The Bell Curve. We show that measured cognitive ability is correlated with wages but explains little of the variance in wages across individuals and time. We also present evidence that cognitive ability is unequally rewarded in the labor market for people of different ethnicity and gender, which is inconsistent with the claim of The Bell Curve that the U.S. labor market is meritocratic.

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Customer Comments

A reader from USA, August 26, 1999
Methinks the lady doth pretend to protest too much.
When The Bell Curve first came out, I predicted that, 200 years from now, university professors would use it, along with the collapse of the iron curtain, to mark the end of "the Socialist Epoch" or "the Egalitarian Age," which I suppose, to make a nice round number, they will have in their textbooks as 1789-1989. Now I'm even more convinced. In fact, nothing could possibly better confirm the essential validity of the Bell Curve's claims than the fact, behind all the self-fueling sound and fury it provoked, and behind the holier-than-thou pretentious to be "debunking," "refuting," and "flattening" the Bell Curve, the careful reader cannot help but notice a striking absence of real, substantive objections to it. Instead, the supposed objections are either opposed to something the Bell Curve never said (and indeed, explicitly denied), or else they tend to try to nit-pick without actually disagreeing. Indeed, with Cafalli-Sforza's lead, we see a new formula emerging. If you are involved in writing up some potentially politically incorrect scientific research, here is what to do.

First, write up the research, which, of course, largely confirms the hereditarian heresy (which most people have always known, or secretly suspected, anyway). Then, decorate the outside of the package with a lot of ostentatious window dressing which, ingenuously, implies that your book "flattens" the evil heresy. That ought to keep YOUR head out of the noose! Besides, it makes the reviewers much more likely praise you, and sells more copies too. If your conscience bothers you, you can salve it with the thought that there is surely SOME version of the evil heresy which your arguments really DO oppose, even if this is just a straw man, i.e., some 100% hereditarian determinism which nobody, and certainly not the ("40-60%") Bell Curve authors, has ever actually held. The only thing that surprises me is the fact that the media and publishing world falls for this sham. I guess the relatively moderate Murray and Herrnstein have simply been designated the official targets of popular wrath, if only because they came out FIRST. And perhaps everybody else, from the most heretical hereditarian to the most orthodox Marxist, has an interest in keeping it that way.

nuenke@ix.netcom.com from California, January 2, 1999
A good book even though it is highly left-biased
This book has 25 scientific contributors, ostensibly to answer for the Carnegie Commission Task Force on Early Primary Education the question whether the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 had any scientific merit. This book takes a look at the data set and reanalyzes much of what Herrnstein and Murry had looked at.

Though it brings more perspectives on the subject, and takes issue with much of what TBC concluded, it does vindicate that TBC is now a serious beginning look at intelligence, genetics, and its impact on the nation. This book says, as so many other researchers have contended, "The Bell Curve is a serious book and is not to be ignored."

However, when reading the book, which I recommend for anyone that is very familiar with the subject, remember that of the 25 contributors, only John B. Carroll was also a signatory to "Mainstream Science on Intelligence: 52 scientists respond to The Bell Curve (12/13/1994) in the Wall Street Journal." This book is put together primarily by left-leaning academics. To balance its message, I would strongly recommend reading Arthur Jensen's book The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability. So again, read this book but keep in mind it is highly biased.

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