The Bell Curve (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles "The Bell Curve" is a best-selling 1994 book by the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray. Its central argument is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwanted pregnancy, and crime than parents' socioeconomic status or education level. Also, the book argues that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite," are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence and that this is a dangerous social trend. Most of the controversy concerns Chapters 13 and 14, in which the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discuss the implications of those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, and they did indeed write in chapter 13: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences."