Perspective

The perspective of the Bell Curve is - notoriously for some, and heroically for others - unabashedly conservative/libertarian. The authors affirm the values of individual responsibility, merit-based social institutions, bourgeois virtues, unbroken homes, limited government and free markets. They also emphasize innate biological features of human nature and recommend that society accept natural inequalities between the abilities of individuals rather than attempt to deny or repress them.

One of the reasons the reaction to The Bell Curve was so vehement was in part because it was perceived to be a right-wing response to social problems. And in some ways, it is. By emphasizing the partial heritability of IQ and then attempting to show that low IQ explains much of the variance in crime, poverty, abuse, undereducation, etc. between individuals and even races, the authors tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) deny a large role for government in altering social...