SOURCE: "Common Knowledge," in National Review, New York, Vol. XLVI, No. 23, December 5, 1994, pp. 32-3.

[Barone is a lawyer, essayist, and critic. In the following essay, he favorably assesses The Bell Curve and claims that it encourages Americans to help the intellectually deficient.]

Perhaps because I'm congenitally optimistic, I think The Bell Curve's message is already widely understood, by the American people if not by the elite. Ordinary citizens know that some people are in significant ways more intelligent than others, that only a relative few are extremely bright or extremely dull, and that intelligence bunches up at the center. They know that intelligence is not randomly distributed among members of different identifiable racial and ethnic groups. These are lessons that are taught in everyday life, and you have to undergo a pretty sophisticated indoctrination and enlist in a tightly disciplined ideological army to believe otherwise.

Of course...