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Charles Murray is a political scientist and an author. He is most famous for having co-authored

the book The Bell Curve, along with the late Richard Herndstein. Now to say that this book was

controversial is really beyond an understatement. It is probably fair to say this is the most

controversial book in the last 50 years. Now the book looks at the growing role that intelligence

plays in modern societies, and the authors worry about a kind of cognitive partitioning of our

society into separate classes. There was a time when being a few standard deviations above the

mean and intelligence didn't get you very much when you're just plowing the fields alongside your

neighbors. But now you can start a software company or a hedge fund. Okay, and this leads to

astonishing levels of wealth inequality and cultural isolation. This is a theme that Murray has

returned to and his other work and in a more recent book coming apart, which we also discuss.

Now, unfortunately for Murray, what we have here is a set of nested taboos. Human intelligence itself

is a taboo topic. People don't want to hear that intelligence is a real thing and that some people

have more of it than others. They don't want to hear that IQ tests really measure it. They don't

want to hear the differences in IQ matter because they're highly predictive of differential success in

...