In an article published on December 27, New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens wrote that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people. In his words:
“[H]ow is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?
“The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. ‘Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,’ noted one 2005 paper. ‘During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.’”
These sentences displeased many liberals, prompting The New York Times to remove them and issue an apology, which stated in part: “Bret Stephens column quoted statistics from a 2005 paper that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically. The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent.”
For insight and commentary on this controversy, The Jewish Press recently spoke with Charles Murray, one of the most respected social scientists alive today. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of numerous books – several of which have been highly influential or controversial – including Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Real Education, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, and Coming Apart.
He is also the author of a 2007 article in Commentary titled “Jewish Genius.”
The Jewish Press: What do you make of the whole controversy surrounding Bret Stephens’ column?
Murray: It’s very silly. Bret Stephens didn’t say anything that was scientifically controversial.
Is it really not scientifically controversial to say Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other groups of people? Is there no debate at all?
There’s no debate with data. I mean, people can assert that Ashkenazi Jews don’t have a higher mean [i.e., higher average] IQ than, say, European whites who aren’t Jewish, but a wide variety of studies [show this assertion to be empirically false]. Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than just about any other known ethnic group in the world. That’s a statement of our best understanding of the facts of IQ regarding ethnic groups.
There have been a number of peer-reviewed technical articles [on this topic]…as well as review articles that have analyzed all the evidence in all the separate technical articles. All of these are readily available on the Internet and Google Scholar. The literature is extremely consistent.
The New York Times said Stephens shouldn’t have cited a certain study on intelligence because one of its authors may have held racist views. What’s your take?
Henry Harpending [the author in question] was an excellent anthropologist with a distinguished history of journal articles. I don’t know all the details of all his views on every subject. The point is: Was he a good, solid, academically-respected anthropologist? And the answer is yes. And citing him is perfectly okay.
What do you make of the Times’ larger claim that we shouldn’t cite the studies of bad men?
If we stop citing scholars who were bad men, we will have to stop citing a large proportion of the technical literature in every discipline.
I cannot emphasize how unscientific it is to say that we will judge scholars on the basis of their personal views as opposed to the quality of their research and the precision of their writing.
The claim that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other groups of people is based on studies involving IQ tests. Is IQ a valid measure of intelligence?
The literature on IQ – both its predictive validity for a variety of outcomes and its statistical reliability in measuring what it purports to measure – is one of the largest and most replicated bodies of evidence regarding any scientific construct in the social sciences.
There have been literally shelves of volumes written on whether IQ is a valid measure of intelligence, and the short answer is that there is such a thing called “g” – general mental factor – and a good IQ test is the best available measure of g.
If I sound exasperated, it’s because people make assertions such as “IQ doesn’t measure anything except the ability to take IQ tests” – as if this hasn’t been studied. We know a lot about IQ. We know a lot very confidently. And most of the writing critical of IQ is done by people who haven’t the least idea what they’re talking about.
You said IQ is related to “a variety of outcomes.” What kind of outcomes?
IQ is reliably related to income, educational attainment, health, longevity, and marriage rates, among other things. It’s also negatively related to criminality and percent of out-of-wedlock births.
Some argue that even if research on Jews and IQ is valid, it shouldn’t be discussed because it will be misused – either by a non-Jew who may see Jews as arrogant or by a Jew who may start feeling superior to other people. What’s your reaction?
Grow up – that’s my reaction. If you’re talking about something as important as IQ, and you also have a population, namely Ashkenazi Jews, which is extremely overrepresented in the annals of great human accomplishment, both the arts and the sciences; if you have those two facts – and those are both facts – then it is scientifically inevitable that people will say, “Gee, I wonder if this record of extraordinary accomplishment is accompanied by any characteristics of IQ that would indicate that Jews are unusually talented in this regard.”
It’s an utterly natural scientific question to ask.
Even so, one could argue that such research shouldn’t be published because it will lead to people being arrogant or resentful of others. Is that something you think people should be concerned about?
No, people shouldn’t be concerned. Look, let me rephrase it: If somebody reads that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than people of Scots-Irish descent – and I speak as a Scots-Irish person – and they feel resentful, that’s their problem. It’s not a justified reaction. In fact, it’s a reprehensible reaction. Why worry about people who respond that way? They’re behaving as juveniles.
In an interview many years ago, I believe you also said that facts about the average IQ of a population tell you nothing about a particular individual sitting before you at a particular moment.
Exactly. And that’s worth emphasizing. We’re talking about a group mean. Are there Ashkenazi Jews with low IQs? Yes, there are. Are there members of every other ethnic group that have higher IQs than lots of Ashkenazi Jews? Of course there are.
In all of these things, we’re talking about distributions of scores that overlap, which is one of the reasons why we shouldn’t get worried about this stuff.
You write in The Bell Curve that IQ research is not just a matter of scientific curiosity; it has real implications when forming social policy. For example, the government regularly spends billions of dollars on programs to help people, some of which arguably goes to waste considering the inherent limits on how much people with low intelligence can achieve.
The facts about IQ have enormous implications for social policy in terms of what’s reasonable to accomplish and what isn’t. For example, [there’s a debate on how much] of IQ is explained by genetics and how much is explained by one’s environment. It’s extremely reasonable to ask, “How much can we expect to raise IQ if we improve parenting style, raise parental SES [socio-economic status], and make other changes in a child’s environment?”
If the answer is, “You can raise IQ a lot,” that has one set of implications for social policy. If the answer is, “The evidence suggests that it’s very difficult to raise IQ,” that has a different set of implications. It’s a good idea to know the answers to such questions.
You have written a number of thought-provoking books, including Real Education in which you argue that too many people go to college. Why do you think so?
One short answer is that only 10 or 12 percent of the population has the skill set that enables them to thrive in college.
Colleges are good for people who have skills associated with IQ. Not very many people have that as their strength. They have other strengths that can not only earn them a good living; it can make them more valuable members of society than people who can successfully complete a bachelor’s degree in physics.
We are not talking about inferior [versus] superior. We are talking about different kinds of things that different people are good at. The idea that college is something that everybody should be good at is ridiculous.
Many people believe you should go to college if you wish to make enough money to support a family.
I think that’s the wrong question to ask. I think the goal of education should be that every child, if possible, should come to adulthood having found something that he or she loves to do and having learned how to do it well. That, to me, is educational success.
If what you learn how to do well is nuclear physics, that’s great. If what you learn how to do well and love doing is making beautiful cabinets, that’s also great.
It is also deeply mistaken to take the overall statistics on income and say, “Oh, well, that will work for me.” Let’s take, as an example, people who have very high skills of the kind that would make them successful electricians but who do not have the kinds of skills that would enable them to get a degree in electrical engineering that would put them near the top of people with degrees in electrical engineering. Those people are probably going to make a lot more money being electricians than they would make trying to get a degree in electrical engineering because in the one occupation they would be near the top in their abilities and in the other occupation they would be in the lower half in terms of their abilities.
How much you make in life in an occupation depends intimately on how good you are at that particular occupation that you are going into – not whether it’s an occupation that requires a degree.
Last question: In The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, you write that people should “take religion seriously.” You’re not a rabbi or a priest, from whom one would normally expect to hear such advice. Why did you write that?
I wrote that because the audience for The Curmudgeon’s Guide is young people in their early 20s who have graduated from college, and particularly at elite colleges there’s a widespread culture that says, “Oh, nobody who is smart believes in religion anymore. Only stupid people believe that.”
That’s pretty adolescent as an attitude. Some of the deepest questions that 19- and 20-years-olds ought to be asking are “What does it mean to live a good life?” and “Why is there something rather than nothing?” – and these are questions that a deep study of religion can help elucidate.
You write that even a cursory knowledge of modern science should lead one to be less confident that religion is nonsense. Can you elaborate on this point?
The short answer to that is that the universe is not only stranger than we knew; it’s stranger than we could have imagined, and there is a lot in modern physics and cosmology that is really difficult to explain as just a matter of chance.
I don’t want to get deeply into this – it’s a complicated topic – but there are lots of ways in which the odds that a workable universe exists in a physical sense are very, very low. And that should cause people – it seems to me – to say, “Huh, that’s interesting,” and look into it a little more.