Making Sense with Sam Harris @73 Forbidden Knowledge with Charles Murray

Okay, strap in. Charles Murray is a political scientist and author, most famous for co-authoring the book *The Bell Curve* with the late Richard Hernstein. To say this book was controversial is an understatement; it is probably fair to say it is the most controversial book of the last 50 years. The book examines the growing role of intelligence in modern societies, and the authors express concern about a cognitive partitioning of society into separate classes.

There was a time when being a few standard deviations above the mean in intelligence didn’t amount to much, especially when you were just plowing fields alongside your neighbors. But now, you can start a software company or a hedge fund, leading to astonishing levels of wealth inequality and cultural isolation. This theme has recurred in Murray's other work, including his more recent book *Coming Apart*, which we also discuss.

Unfortunately for Murray, we have 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 measure intelligence, or that differences in IQ matter because they are highly predictive of success in life—not just in terms of educational attainment and wealth, but also regarding out-of-wedlock births and mortality.

People don’t want to hear that a person’s intelligence is largely due to their genes, and that there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence, even in childhood. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, but genes appear to account for 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don’t want to hear this, and they certainly don’t want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

For better or worse, these are all facts. In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence than these claims about IQ, the validity of testing for it, its importance in the real world, its heritability, and its differential expression in different populations. Again, this is what a dispassionate look at decades of research suggests.

Unfortunately, the controversy over *The Bell Curve* did not arise from legitimate, good-faith criticisms of its major claims. Rather, it was the product of a politically correct moral panic that engulfed Murray's career and has yet to release him. His co-author, Richard Hernstein, died just before the book was published, so Murray weathered the storm alone, and it rages to this day. The book was published over 20 years ago, and yet just last month, Murray was shouted down by a mob at Middlebury College—a mob that turned violent and sent the faculty member chaperoning him to the hospital.

This most recent attack is part of an anti-free speech hysteria spreading on college campuses, which finally caused me to pay attention. I should mention that some researchers recently conducted a rather delightful experiment, which they wrote about in *The New York Times*. They took the text of Murray's speech—the one he attempted to give at Middlebury—and sent it to about 70 professors to rate for political content on a scale of one to nine, from liberal to conservative, with five being precisely in the middle. The professors weren’t told who the speaker was, and the speech received a rating of 5.05—right down the middle.

When they sent it to another group of professors, telling them the speaker was Murray, the rating shifted a little, but not by much; the speech was now rated 5.77, just right of center. The man is not Heinrich Himmler.

I had assumed, as many of you probably have, that when seemingly respectable people call someone a Nazi, a fascist, a white supremacist, or a eugenicist, there must be something wrong with him. He must be getting what he deserves on some level. But what I found when I began reading Murray's work was a deeply rational and careful scholar, motivated by ethical concerns about inequality in our society.

This is not a person who favors discrimination. Whatever the difference in average IQ is across groups, you know nothing about a person's intelligence based on their skin color. That is just a fact. There is much more variance among individuals in any racial group than there is between groups. So, besides being unethical and politically imprudent, it is totally irrational to treat people as anything other than individuals.

Murray and Hernstein were absolutely clear about this in *The Bell Curve*. What happened to Murray, as far as I can tell, has had nothing to do with errors in scholarship—of which there undoubtedly must be some—or with the way he has conducted himself since, or with his personal motives for discussing these topics in the first place. Rather, his scapegoating has been entirely the result of his having merely discussed differences in human intelligence at all.

It is certainly true that the definitions of both intelligence and race are open for debate to some degree, and there can be cultural influences in the concepts we use that we don’t fully understand. But the efforts to invalidate the very notions of general intelligence and race have been wholly unconvincing from a psychometric and biological point of view, and are obviously motivated by political discomfort in discussing these topics. I understand and share that discomfort, but any fair reading of Murray would acknowledge that he understands and shares it too.

One rarely encounters a fair reading of Murray. Whenever you see discussions of *The Bell Curve*, you can be sure that their authors felt immense pressure to dismiss it, and they wind up ignoring much of what Murray and Hernstein actually wrote. Then they argue in very sloppy ways against the concept of general intelligence, and this sloppiness still has the effect of being defamatory.

Let me give you a sense of how insidious these attacks on a person's reputation can become. There are all the consequences that Murray knows about—obviously the death threats, the hecklers, the disinvitations from speaking events—but then there are things he can never know about. For instance, a couple of years ago, I was invited to write an essay for an academic journal, and I saw that one of the other contributors was Charles Murray. At that point, I hadn’t read his work and only knew about him by reputation. My first thought was, “Why do I need to be in a journal alongside Charles Murray?”

I had just had Ben Affleck call me a racist on television for my criticism of Islam. I was dealing with that blowback, and the last thing I needed was to be publicly associated with Charles Murray. Now, Murray can have no idea how many times people have shunned him in that way, nor do I have any idea how much that has happened to me for the lies that have been spread about my work.

Now, I’m sure there are many things that Murray and I disagree about that we did not explore in this podcast. He is far more convinced about the social benefits of religion than I am, for instance. But I had another agenda. At one point, I likened our conversation to visiting a nuclear power plant after an accident to assess the damage, and it did feel like this. Honestly, it felt like the intellectual equivalent of going into Fukushima with a Geiger counter to see just how hot things are—not something I was ever planning to do.

I do remain skeptical about the wisdom of looking for cross-cultural or interracial differences in things like intelligence. I’m not sure what it gets you, apart from a lot of pain. Many of the topics I discussed in the podcast with Murray are not topics I would ordinarily think about or recommend that you think about. But the purpose of the podcast was to set the record straight because I find the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and moral cowardice of Murray's critics shocking.

The fact that I was taken in by this defamation of him and effectively became part of a silent mob that was just watching what amounted to a modern witch-burning was intolerable to me. So it is with real pleasure and some trepidation that I bring you a very controversial conversation on points about which there is virtually no scientific controversy, and it’s with a man who could not have been a more genial and well-spoken guest.

Meet Charles Murray.

I am here with Charles Murray. Charles, thanks for coming on the podcast.

It’s my pleasure.

So I first heard of you, as many people did, when you published your book *The Bell Curve* in 1994, I believe. This was, along with your co-author Richard Hernstein, without question one of the most controversial books in living memory. It focused on IQ and the differences in mean IQ between groups of people, and it was treated like radioactive communication. Like most people who first heard of you at that point, I didn’t actually read the book. I just assumed that where there was smoke—certainly that much smoke—there had to be at least some fire. I assumed you had said something in those pages that was so intellectually or morally indefensible that it explained the backlash against you.

This backlash continues to this day, and we’ll talk about that. But I’ve since, in the intervening years, ventured into my own controversial areas as a speaker and writer and experienced many hysterical attacks against me and my work. So I started thinking about your case again, without ever having read you, and I began to suspect that you were one of the canaries in the coal mine that I never recognized as such.

Seeing your recent treatment at Middlebury, which many of our listeners will have heard about, where you were prevented from speaking and your host was physically attacked, I now believe that you are perhaps the intellectual who has been treated most unfairly in my lifetime. It’s just amazing to be so slow to realize that.

At first, I just want to apologize to you for having been so lazy and having been taken in to the degree that I was by the rumors and lies that have surrounded your work for the last 20 years. I want to thank you doubly for coming on the podcast to talk about these things.

Well, that’s very kind of you to say. But I’m curious, have you looked at *The Bell Curve*?

Yes, yes. Now I’m deep into your work, so I know what you wrote there, and I know what I think about it, and I’m eager to talk about it.

I’ll meet you there. There’s an aphorism from Nietzsche that I think will apply to this conversation, or at least I fear it will apply. It’s something like, “When you force someone to change his opinion about you, he holds the effort this requires very much against you.” I think many of our listeners will be ill-disposed to change their opinion about you and your work, but I’m determined to ram past that resistance in so far as that’s possible.

Well, could I just make a request of your listeners who really do resist that? I don’t ask you to read the whole book of *The Bell Curve*, but it’s not that much money on Kindle, and there’s got to be chunks of the text somewhere on the internet. Just read a few pages of the thing. This is not a hysterical book; this is not an Ann Coulter book; it’s not a Milo book.

Of all the charges about the book that drive me nuts the most, I think perhaps it was Stephen J. Gould—who probably a lot of your listeners are too young to remember—who wrote the review of it in *The New Yorker*. Gould himself was the author of a book called *The Mismeasure of Man*, which many people see as the canonical refutation of IQ as being an important concept.

In the review, Gould referred to the regression equations. Well, as it happened, with the division of work, I did all the regression analyses. I was reading the review, and Gould made a little parenthetical remark: “I bet they only did them once.” I threw the book against the wall. I literally did. My wife was in the room, and I took it and just threw it because thinking of the hundreds of hours that I spent on that.

Not only that, when we had all of the analyses done, I recreated them from scratch. I mean, recreating the variables again, doing the whole thing, so that I could just get rid of any dangers of a screw-up. I had to make the identical screw-up twice; in other words, there still had to be a mistake.

Anyway, I would argue all you need to do is read in it for a while, and you will realize the things you have heard about are simply wrong.

Yeah, well, I want to get to the most controversial points you make in the book and what you actually say about them, and what kind of public policy recommendations you make on their basis, because it is the opposite of a white supremacist, neo-Nazi book, and you have been called both of those things.

So let’s get into it. What was your basic thesis in *The Bell Curve*?

The thesis of *The Bell Curve* is actually very similar to the thesis of *Coming Apart*, which hardly anybody noticed. That is, I did notice that at the time we did it, we were saying we are looking at a future shaped by the radically increased value of IQ in the marketplace over the last century. It has also been affected by the increasing effectiveness of the higher educational system in getting intellectual talent wherever it resides and pulling it into elite universities.

The combination of these two things is creating a cognitive elite that is increasingly powerful, increasingly affluent, has its own culture, and is increasingly isolated from and ignorant of the rest of society. That essentially was the thesis of that book. That’s the reason the subtitle is *Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life*.

As I said, *Coming Apart* has large chunks of *The Bell Curve* imported into it because in *Coming Apart*, I was essentially saying it’s no longer something we’re in danger of; it’s something that has happened.

So that was the thesis. We spend the first three or four chapters talking about the nature of the cognitive elite and how it came about. Then we take eight chapters and discuss the relationship of IQ to a variety of social outcomes: unemployment, poverty, educational attainment, crime—the relative roles of IQ and basic socioeconomic variables in explaining the dependent variable.

For doing that, Dick Hernstein and I restricted ourselves to a sample of non-Latino whites. The reason we did that was we said we know that the whole issue of IQ and race is very heated, and we’re going to simplify things. We are saying this relationship of IQ to important social and economic outcomes exists in a population of non-Latino whites. Then after that, we can go to the issue of whether it applies to the nation as a whole.

Right, and that’s the point at which we got into race.

So the most controversial area of the book is in your discussion around the mean difference across races in population IQ.

It’s important to point out here that even the topic of IQ, the topic of intelligence, is taboo. People get uncomfortable hearing that intelligence is something that even differs among people. Then when you add the fact that this difference is heritable and that it matters over the course of a person’s life, that already makes people very uncomfortable.

You seem to be opening the door to eugenics and other scary ethical and political ways of thinking. Then when you add to that the fact that there are detectable differences in mean IQ between races, everything goes completely haywire for people.

So I want to move through these concepts and claims somewhat systematically, but I guess before we do that, is there anything that has happened in the intervening years, either in your own research or in the research generally, that has changed the picture significantly from when you wrote *The Bell Curve*? Have any of your important claims changed?

There have been many claims that have received a lot of additional support. For example, take something like g, the general factor of intelligence, which is what IQ tests measure. This is something which, going back to Stephen J. Gould again, he said, “No, it all depends on how you do the factor analysis. You can either make g appear in your analysis or it can go away; it’s a statistical artifact.”

Well, even at the time we wrote in 1994, an awful lot of the things that Steve Gould claimed back in 1980-81 were just not taken seriously by psychometricians. The work that had been done on it was very solid; the reality of g was already understood.

But since then, it turns out that there are a whole variety of aspects of brain functioning—the quantity of gray matter versus white matter, all sorts of things—which are linked specifically to g, not just IQ scores in general, but they are most tightly linked to this general factor for intelligence.

So if you had to say one thing that has had a lot of additional verification and elaboration, it’s the reality of g. And of course, Sam, we are also within a matter of years— I don’t think that many years before we will understand the functioning of intelligence down at the level of alleles and single nucleotide polymorphisms. We are already making a lot of progress on that.

To give you an idea of how fast the progress is, in 2013, I was doing a paper, and I set out to see if there were any SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms)—the sites in the genome that can take more than one form and account for all of human variation—that have a direct relationship to social behavior or mental functioning. I came up with seven or eight. I looked again a year and a half ago, and it was in the low dozens. Now it’s in the hundreds. In a few years, it’s going to be in the thousands.

So we will understand IQ and general intelligence genetically. I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025. There will still be blanks, but we’ll know basically what’s going on.

Just to finish up, was there anything that I changed my mind on after *The Bell Curve* came out? The answer is no. There have been some interesting tidbits that I’ve been fascinated by, but the science in *The Bell Curve* was extremely conservative. I don’t mean that politically; Dick and I weren’t stupid. We knew we were dealing with a complicated and controversial topic, so we stuck very close to the scientific mainstream.

After the book caused such a furor—and this is easy enough for your listeners to Google for themselves—they can just Google “knowns and unknowns IQ,” and that’ll pop up. The American Psychological Association established a task force in the year after *The Bell Curve*, and the task force consisted of 11 of the most eminent experts in cognitive functioning in the country, including people of various ideological perspectives.

Believe me, if you’ve been in academia, you know there’s as much ideology within each discipline as there is in politics. Anyway, the task force came up with a set of knowns and unknowns, and it tracked just about perfectly with the statements in *The Bell Curve*.

So it wasn’t that Dick and I were brilliant; it’s that Dick and I were very, very cautious. Nothing has been overturned since *The Bell Curve* came out, and there’s been nothing overturned in the area of racial difference in mean IQ.

Oh, before I answer that question, I just thought of the sweetest vindication of *The Bell Curve*. There was a whole cottage industry of books in the year after *The Bell Curve* came out attacking the book, saying this is pseudoscience and these guys don’t know what they’re doing. One of the main themes in this was that when we controlled for socioeconomic status and pointed out that in many cases the role of IQ was far greater than the role of socioeconomic status, Dick and I had not simply put enough independent variables into the equation.

We had occupation, income, and educational attainment, which, to tell you the truth, are basically the three components that social sciences had been satisfied with in measuring socioeconomic status until *The Bell Curve* came along. But we hadn’t put in enough, so they were throwing in everything but the kitchen sink—much of which were things that were very closely related to parental IQ.

A lot of the criticisms of *The Bell Curve* said, “Oh, if we add, let’s say, the number of books in the house, then you can cut down a little bit on the role of IQ.” Well, now, what do you suppose the relationship of the number of books in the house is to parental IQ?

Thank you.

So on and so forth. Anyway, the sweet, sweet vindication was when Christopher Winship at Harvard—and I’m blocking on the other guy’s name, I’m sorry—did an analysis that Dick and I should have thought of because our major database was the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

This is on me, by the way, because I was taking the lead on the quantitative analyses. I knew that there were siblings in the NLSY database, but it didn’t cross my mind to do fixed effects analysis, where in effect you were analyzing the outcomes for siblings. If you do that, you can control for everything in the shared home environment—just about everything.

So you can do much more than add in one or two more independent variables; it’s a really elegant control. The analysis was done, and the authors were not happy about it, but listen, I don’t want to diss them because they were honest, and they did point out that when you use the sibling analysis, the independent role of IQ that Dick and I claimed was not attenuated more than fractionally.

In fact, they said explicitly they were surprised that it had not been. In effect, all of our analyses about the independent effect of IQ on social outcomes had a very powerful vindication. So I had to get that in.

Wait, all right, now you asked about racial differences.

Well, Dick and I considered the possibility of just leaving race out, and we decided that it was just the elephant in the corner, and we couldn’t do it. But we also could not talk about the national implications of our analysis of whites only unless we grappled with the questions: Does an IQ test or an SAT test or any of these others measure the same thing in blacks as it does in whites? Is it as predictively valid? Is it contaminated by cultural bias? Is it contaminated by a lack of motivation or stereotype threat?

Stereotype threat is something that came up after *The Bell Curve*, but now people would say stereotype threat is at work. We had to deal with that. We had to present the story of IQ tests as applied to African Americans and other minorities and make the case that actually the tests measure the same thing in various populations.

So we set out to do so, and we tried to work into the topic sequentially, the first simplest thing being: Are the test scores different for whatever reasons? The answer is yes, they are for blacks and whites.

There’s about a standard deviation as the usual size of the difference. I’m assuming, by the way, that an awful lot of your listeners are statistically literate and they know roughly what I mean by a lot of these terms. But just to put it in more traditional terms, if you are one standard deviation below the mean, that means you’re at the 16th percentile. If you’re one standard deviation above the mean, you’re at the 84th percentile. That’ll give you a sense of what a standard deviation is.

IQ is normed so that the average in the whole population is always 100, or as close to 100 as possible. Although we’ll get into this, IQ scores have been creeping up decade by decade for reasons that are not totally understood.

So what you’re talking about is if the average for white America was 100 at the time you wrote that book, the average for black America was 85.

Right.

Now, obviously, different tests give different results, and as time goes on, this afternoon we can get into whether the gap has been converging and things like that. But one standard deviation for a considerable period of time has been a good benchmark for the size of it.

By the way, there is also a difference between whites and East Asians. It’s harder to pin that one down for a variety of technical reasons. Among others, until recently, we didn’t have really good representative samples of Chinese living in mainland China, but it’s probably three or four points, and that’s kind of a soft number.

A clearer statement about differences with whites and East Asians is that East Asians have elevated visual-spatial IQ.

With Latinos, which of course is not a racial group but an ethnic group, that’s all over the lot, but there you’re looking at that on the order of the low 90s as a mean for those in the United States.

So first, we do simply the numbers on the differences that exist.

Well, I think I should clarify a few things. So the disparity with East Asians is in favor of the East Asians now, so that they’re higher in visual-spatial reasoning.

I feel like I should give a little context here just for the general concept of IQ and what it purports to measure. There is just this fact, which is now among the most well-attested facts in psychology, that a person’s ability to reason logically, mathematically, visually, spatially, and along with their semantic knowledge of the world, or the size of their vocabularies, for instance—all of these abilities are highly correlated.

This correlation has been dubbed general intelligence, or g, and this is what IQ tests measure. The IQ tests have separate parts that interrogate these separate abilities, but a person’s ability in all of these areas is highly correlated.

It’s important to point out that things didn’t have to be this way. In fact, it’s intuitively plausible that if a person is going to be really good at math, that this ability could come at the cost of being good at language, or vice versa. But that’s generally not the case. There’s a very strong case to be made for this factor of general intelligence.

That’s actually how it got started, with Charles Spearman back in the beginning of the 20th century—a brilliant psychologist. He noticed that it didn’t make any difference what the test was for, whether it was for British history or algebra or how to fix a car or anything. No matter what the test was, as long as it tapped into something in the brain, the test score seemed to be correlated.

That was his first insight. His second insight was that the magnitudes of the correlation varied by tests. Even before he invented factor analysis, he would look at the pattern of correlation and say, “You know what? These tests seem to be clustering on something.” Then statistically, he invented a way of capturing that.

It’s that correlation. But Sam, other people are saying to themselves right now, “Wait a minute.” By the way, I could say this about myself: my verbal skills are way better than my math skills, or vice versa. And that’s true.

But think of it in terms—since most of your listeners have taken the SAT or other kinds of tests—think in terms of the comparative score on the SAT verbal versus the SAT math. I bet there may very well have been a substantial difference between your two scores. There was between mine.

But it’s not that you were below average in one and above average in the other; you were above average in both. You were just more above average in one than the other. The same thing would be true if you’re below average.

Usually, there are always exceptions. I have a close relative who is way up at the tippy top on verbal and is way below average on math, but that’s so unusual that the psychologist who tested him said that in 30 years of testing people, he had never seen that before.

By and large, you have the kinds of correlations you’re talking about, which are very well established.

Yeah, and there are a few other wrinkles here. People can be dyslexic and be very high in intelligence, but the dyslexia impedes their academic performance. There are other aspects to human ability intellectually, like creativity and ambition. There are just other things going on that explain a person’s success academically or occupationally.

Oh, let me throw in my very favorite analogy about the role of IQ and success. It comes from Stephen Goldberg, who’s a professor of sociology at City College of New York.

It’s great. He says the role of IQ in explaining success is that IQ has the same role as weight does for offensive linemen in the NFL. He said if you take the starting linemen in the NFL and correlate their productivity with their weight, the correlation is going to be basically zero because the heaviest linemen are not the best linemen.

But you have to be 300 pounds to get the job. That’s the way with IQ. Motivation, what they now call grit, and a variety of other things are decisively important. But if you’re going to be a theoretical physicist, you have to weigh 300 pounds to begin with. Among theoretical physicists, those other qualities will be really, really important in determining how good you are.

So, and then the other piece we should put in here is that it’s also one of the most robust findings in psychology at the moment—or I should say behavioral genetics—that IQ is highly heritable. It’s somewhere in the range of 50 to 80 percent, depending on how old a person is. It actually seems to become more heritable the older we get, which is strange.

There’s this concept of genetic amplification where the boundary between genetic difference and environmental difference is hard to draw because you can think of the fact that genetic tendencies early in life can lead to changes in environment.

When we think about environment, we tend to think about the environment imposed on a child by the parents or by society. But you also have to think about the things children choose to do with their lives and then increasingly do as adults.

If you become obsessed with computers and then go get a job at Google, your environment has been shaped by what you have paid attention to, and what you have paid attention to and your aptitude—the underlying aptitudes that caused you to do that—were, to a very significant degree, at least 50 percent dictated by the genes you inherited from your parents.

Yeah, all of that is true. It is also true that we are a long way from disentangling all of this. There are enough really good twin studies, and by that I don’t mean twins raised apart. I’m talking about the classic twin studies where you’re comparing identical twins with fraternal twins, which allows for some very useful and powerful disentangling of environment and genes.

So are there gene-environment interactions where, to some degree, a child creates his or her own environment that in turn reinforces the genetic material? Absolutely. Does that mean that if only you can jack up artificially the environment, you’re going to make much difference in a child’s IQ? The answer to that is not long-term. You can get some short-term effects, but the fade-out problem is universal.

Yeah, so that’s also another wrinkle here, which I think adds to people’s concern about talking about this whole area. This lack of anything obvious to do about remedying any inequalities is a major source of angst.

It’s kind of a preamble to something I’ll be coming back to. There is this notion that if traits are genetically determined, that’s bad, and if traits are environmentally determined, that’s good because we can do something about them if they’re environmental.

If there is one lesson we have learned from the last 70 years of social policy, it is that changing environments in ways that produce measurable results is really, really hard. We actually don’t know how to do it, no matter how much money we spend.

We should also note that virtually everything important psychologically, or most things that interest us psychologically about people, these traits are also highly heritable. This includes the big five personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. These are a person’s personality traits, which are also, at this point, about 50 percent ascribed to genetic inheritance and the rest to environment.

But here we get the wrinkle, and we could talk forever. I’ll just throw this in: there is the shared environment and the non-shared environment. That’s one of the things that twin studies have elucidated.

The non-shared environment takes up almost all of that 50 percent of personality characteristics that are not explained by genes. Non-shared environment can be all sorts of things. It can be that you have different teachers in schools, you ran with different peer groups. It can also be that the parents treat children differently.

The warmth of maternal warmth that a mother shows toward one twin can—and sometimes is—much different than the warmth shown to another. But the thing about the non-shared environment is it’s not susceptible to systematic manipulation. It’s idiosyncratic; it’s non-systematic.

There are no obvious ways that you can deal with the non-shared environment in the way that you can say, “Oh, we can improve the schools. We can teach better parenting practices. We can provide more money for whatever you want to provide money for.” Those all fall into the category of manipulating the shared environment.

When it comes to personality, as you just indicated, it’s 50-50, but almost all of that 50 is non-shared.

Which seems to leave parents impressively off the hook for how their kids turn out. Although it is true that parents—and I’m a father of four—resist that.

With the non-shared environment and the small role left for parenting, I will say it flat out: I read that research with the most skeptical possible eye. I was looking for holes in it assiduously.

This is Judith Rich Harris, right?

Judith Harris wrote a book on this topic, didn’t she?

Yes, Judith Harris. That was back in the 1990s. Talk about—well, look, you said that you heard about *The Bell Curve* and didn’t read it for a long time. I heard about her book and didn’t read it for a long time.

Funny how that happened.

I didn’t want to believe it.

That’s right. The book was very sound; it was very rigorously done. But at this point, I don’t know of anybody who’s familiar with the literature who thinks there’s that much of a role left for the kind the parents thought they had in shaping their children.

Well, I’m not going to stop trying. I think it’s a very hard illusion to cut through. As I read *Harry Potter* tonight to my eldest daughter, you know, that’s a good thing.

But I think it’s good to reflect on that. Reading *Harry Potter* to your eldest daughter is a good in itself.

And the fact that she behaves differently 20 years from now is not the point.

No, exactly. It is an intrinsic good, and it’s for my own pleasure that I do it largely at this point.

Again, I’m painfully aware—and I think our listeners will be—that we are proceeding along a razor’s edge in this conversation, and that my attempt to have it defensively is all too obvious.

I want, given your experience and just how combustible these issues are, to make sure we’re putting the relevant pieces in play when our listeners need to receive them.

One thing that just occurred to me: people should also understand that in addition to the fact that IQ doesn’t explain everything about a person’s success in life and their intellectual abilities, the fact that a trait is genetically transmitted in individuals does not mean that all the differences between groups—or really even any of the differences between groups in that trait—are also genetic in origin.

This is a particularly important, critically important point.

So the jury can still be out on this topic, and we’ll talk about that. But to give a clear example, if you have a population of people that is being systematically malnourished, they might have genes to be as tall as the Dutch, but they won’t be because they’re not getting enough nourishment.

In the case that they don’t become as tall as the Dutch, it will be entirely due to their environment. Yet we know that height is among the most heritable things we’ve got. It’s also like 60 to 80 percent predicted by a person’s genes.

The comparison we use in the book, which was drawn from Richard Lewontin, the geneticist, is that if you take a handful of genetically identical seed corn and divide it into two parts and plant one of those parts in Iowa and the other part in the Mojave Desert, you’re going to get way different results. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the genetic content of the corn.

Right.

I mean, a more general way to talk about this is when genes are identical, any differences you see have to be due to environment. When environment is identical, any differences you see have to be due to genes.

Yeah, does that mean that—going through my head are things like measurement error and this and the other thing—your basic point is correct.

Right.

There are many other things that IQ is correlated with. High IQ is correlated with things like liberal values and being less racist, less authoritarian, and less sexist—even less religious, particularly less fundamentalist in your religiosity.

Now, that’s not to say that there are not exceptions to every trend we would talk about. I’m sure you can find a racist, sexist, Bible-thumping genius somewhere, but there won’t be as many of these people. The link between IQ and traits like that is also strong, but a bit stronger for some others.

But again, there’s this one piece, which is IQ itself, having nothing to do with race, has been a somewhat taboo topic, particularly on the left politically.

What’s interesting is that it wasn’t always the case because the left used to be kind of boosterish about IQ testing because it seemed to promise a direct road to meritocracy. It would get us out of these class differences, and people could just be judged on their own merits.

That’s why the SAT was embedded. The SAT was going to be—and in fact, it did serve this function—a way for kids who did not go to Groton and Exeter and the rest of it to get a chance to show how smart they were, and they could be brought into the colleges, Harvard in particular. Its president back in the 1940s was very hot on using tests for precisely that purpose.

By the way, I went to Harvard in 1961, which pretty well dates me—from Newton, Iowa. I was absolutely convinced that I got in because I was able to take an SAT score and get a good score, even though I went to a mediocre public school. Sorry about that, Newton High School.

In that sense, the enthusiasm for IQ is appropriate in so far as it’s a good way to identify intellectual talent. But at this point, Sam, it’s almost as if we are in the opposite position of conventional wisdom versus elite wisdom.

When Columbus was going to sail to America, it is true that an awful lot of ordinary people still thought that the earth was flat, but among the elites, it was understood that the earth is round.

Now, ordinary people are perfectly comfortable with the idea that some people are smarter than others. They’re perfectly comfortable that what we call smart gets you kinds of jobs that you can’t get otherwise—all that kind of stuff.

It’s the elites who are under the impression that IQ tests only measure what IQ tests measure and that nobody really is able to define intelligence and that they’re culturally biased, and on and on and on. All of these things are the equivalent of saying the earth is flat.

These are not opinions that you can hold in contest with the scientific literature any more than you can be an Aristotelian physicist in contrast to a Newtonian physicist. This stuff is not subject to debate anymore, but the elite wisdom now in colleges is—and a lot of your listeners are saying what I’m saying is pseudoscience. That’s very frustrating.

Yeah, you just referenced two things which I think are widely believed, which are certainly known to be false and were known to be false at the time you wrote your book, again more than 20 years ago.

The first claim is that IQ tests simply measure people’s ability to take IQ tests.

Yeah, that is a shibboleth that is rattling around the brains of certainly many of our listeners. No one in touch with the literature has thought that was true for a generation.

And then there’s the idea that these tests are well known to be culturally biased, so that you just cannot get valid data on certain groups. This is something we’ve never been able to overcome.

That also is not the current opinion of psychometricians anywhere, is that correct?

Yeah, and let me describe a little bit why we know those two things. In terms of why we know that IQ tests measure something other than the ability to take IQ tests, it’s a matter of predictive validity.

Predictive validity means that if you take a population with IQ scores and then take their history on a variety of things of interest, such as income or job productivity or the rest of it, the IQ scores predict this outcome.

They predict income in terms of employment decisions. For job productivity, you are better off if you’re an employer and you have only one datum that you can get—you can’t have two. You are better off knowing an IQ score than you are having a personal interview, having grades, having degrees, or anything else.

The single most informative thing you can have is an IQ score. This is not the result of one or two studies; the predictive validity of IQ tests has been established over and over.

Cultural bias: you basically have a couple of ways to test for cultural bias. One of them is: Is there a racial difference in the predictive validity of the tests?

Let’s say that the SAT were culturally biased. What that says is the SAT doesn’t capture this thing called academic ability to succeed in college as well for blacks as it does for whites.

Or it could just systematically underestimate the ability of blacks relative to whites. What then will be the result? The result will be that if you let people in who have the lower IQ scores or the lower SAT scores, they’ll actually do better than the test score predicted.

The test will have under-predicted their performance. That has been tested with an extensive literature. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that test scores—whether IQ tests or SAT—under-predict black performance.

There is some evidence that they may over-predict black performance, but that raises a whole different set of issues and problematic issues. But the tests are not biased against blacks in terms of predictive validity.

The way that most people think about cultural bias, though, is in items that a white upper-middle-class kid is more likely to know the answer to than a black inner-city kid. The poster child for this was an SAT item that used analogies, and one of them involved the word “regatta” as part of the answer.

Of course, people dumped on that, saying, “Look, who’s going to know what regatta means?” Well, there’s a very direct way that you can deal with that. You can do item analysis of the tests.

You can, for example, have people simply inspect the items and rate them according to their cultural loading. That would be one approach. Then you can extract those items and see whether test scores converge, or you can see whether the items that are culturally loaded are harder for black students to answer than they are for white students.

The answer to those questions is no. The ordering of difficulty of items is the same across races, and when you have tests that are empty of any cultural loading at all, it is not that the black-white difference diminishes; it doesn’t. Sometimes it gets greater because, and this is a more complicated statement, there’s more complicated literature, but there is some evidence that the culturally loaded items are ones that minority groups do better on than the purely abstract ones.

In other words, when you say the tests are culturally biased, you are not forced to sit back and stare at the ceiling and decide whether they are on the basis of your intuition. There are very systematic ways to interrogate the quality of the tests with regard to this, and modern tests pass with flying colors.

Now we’re getting closer to the rods at the core of the reactor here. Let’s talk about the concept of race. It’s also widely believed that race is not a valid biological concept; it’s a social construct.

In many ways, this is untrue, but there’s a kernel of truth here, which is that it’s a biological concept, but it is a blurry one. I mean, it is similar to the way—race can be thought of as analogous to families. In fact, some people have said that a race is essentially just a very large family that is partly inbred.

You can see family resemblance in the races. It’s not an accident that you can generally predict where a person’s ancestors came from by just simply looking at his face. There are phenotypic differences between people that have genetic underpinnings, and it’s not merely skin deep.

There are genetic diseases that various racial groups have or are more prone to—Tay-Sachs, sickle cell anemia. This is just straight biology.

Because different racial groups differ genetically to any degree, and because most of what we care about in ourselves—the intelligence included—has some genetic underpinnings for many of these traits we’re talking about, we should expect that for any variable, there will be differences in the average level across racial groups that differ genetically to some degree.

There’s a branch point here in the conversation, which is that one thing that has changed dramatically since the time that Dick and I were working on *The Bell Curve*—we published it in ’94, which meant we were basically writing it from 1990 up to ’94.

The thing that has changed most dramatically is that now the genome has been sequenced, and so much has been learned since it has been sequenced. The whole discussion of ethnicity and race is being conducted at a much higher level of sophistication.

At the time we were working on *The Bell Curve*, they would look at blood groups and things like this to try to have something besides phenotypic characteristics—facial characteristics and skin color. Now, the ability of the geneticist to simply look at variation over a million SNPs across populations and do really fascinating cluster analysis—just the whole conversation about the word “populations” is what the geneticists like to use now instead of race, and I don’t blame them.

I’m happy talking about populations too. That’s just being done at a huge level that we never considered in *The Bell Curve*. We simply said if people call themselves black or Latino or white, we’re going to believe them, and they’re going to be our samples.

But here’s the point going forward in this conversation, Sam: the blurriness of race is noise in the signal. The blurriness of race is not going to artificially make it look as if there are genetic differences in IQ; it’s going to obscure any such genetic differences in IQ.

So in effect, we are looking at a noisy signal, and if you still see patterns in the data that point to the possibility of genetic roles, those signals have survived a lot of contamination.

But again, what we need to come back to here is that genes are almost certainly only part of the story, and there should likely be an environmental contribution here. This is something you say in your book many, many times.

Let’s go back to do the same thing with genes and IQ and race that we did with cultural bias in the tests. Do the tests measure anything except the ability to take tests?

We are not helpless to simply say, “Well, there’s still racism existing, so that must be the explanation.” There are lots of ways that we can look at patterns in the data and say, “Well, are these compatible with an exclusively environmental explanation?”

I want to stress that last point: Dick and I, our crime in the book was to have a single solitary paragraph that said, after talking about the patterns that I’m about to describe, if we’ve convinced you that either the environmental or the genetic explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we haven’t done a good enough job of presenting the evidence for one side or the other.

It seems to us highly likely that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. We went no farther than that. There is an asymmetry between saying probably genes have some involvement and the assertion that it’s entirely environmental.

That’s the assertion that is being made. If you’re going to be upset at *The Bell Curve*, you are obligated to defend the proposition that the black-white difference in IQ scores is 100 percent environmental, and that’s a very tough measure.

Here’s the way that we went about it. How did you put it a while ago? The radioactive rods were getting closer to you?

Yes.

Here’s the thinking that Dick and I had that led us to write that sentence. It starts out with simply the very high demands that the environmental hypothesis places on you. If you say, for purposes of just thinking through the arithmetic, that genes and environment are a 50-50 split in explaining the variance of IQ in a whole population, that means that in order for the environment to explain 100 percent of a standard deviation difference in mean between blacks and whites, the average black would have to be at an environment that is about 1.5 standard deviations below the white mean.

That’s a really big difference. If you take all of the measures like income, educational attainment, and occupational distribution, and a variety of other measures of environment, 1.5 standard deviations is way, way bigger than any of the observed differences.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t unmeasured differences in the environment that are also at work. It just is—you start off with a really big question in your mind: is that plausible that it can be 100 percent environmental?

Well, I think we should add here that it is possibly plausible when you bring in the Flynn effect in the sense that—so the Flynn—we haven’t even defined the Flynn effect.

We haven’t talked about that yet.

James Flynn, who I think you have actually, as far as I can tell, in *The Bell Curve*, you’re the one who brought attention to the Flynn effect.

James Flynn, yes.

Yeah, but you named it after James Flynn, who has done this research. So tell us what the Flynn effect is.

The Flynn effect is—it was noted also by a guy named Richard Lynn, who is one of the people that I’m excoriated with for citing in *The Bell Curve* as being an outright racist. But Richard Lynn also identified this in East Asian tests, and Jim Flynn identified it and brought it—he did more than Lynn did to bring it public attention.

Namely, IQ tests are renormed every time they have a new edition. So if you have the Wechsler, and let’s say they had a norming in 1950, they norm it to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

What Flynn noticed was that if you give that same test to a set of people in 1960 instead of 1950, the mean is not 100; it’s 102 or maybe 103. Over the course of the 10 years, the IQ scores of the population have risen.

As he looked at that, he found the Flynn effect—this secular increase in IQ scores going back to the 1940s and 1930s and extending out into recent data. The implications of this have just driven scholars crazy since then, and the causes of it—because there are no, even after this much time, there’s still a lot that’s not understood.

Is it simply a matter of increasing exposure to things which lets you answer IQ questions? An example: one of the kinds of IQ questions is rotating mentally in your mind’s eye an object in three dimensions and being able to say something about how it looks when you look at it from the other side.

Those are items which I think I did very poorly on, by the way.

Well, you know, the ability of people to answer that question is going to be different in 1930 when nobody sees routinely objects rotating in three dimensions in front of their eyes than in 2017, where every television commercial is having scripts and other things rotating in three dimensions as part of our daily lives.

So it could be that kind of simply modernity and sensitization to certain kinds of mental tasks that we weren’t sensitized to before could also be an increase in g. There are some reasons to believe in the analysis of test scores that it could be partly that, but not a lot.

I think that’s probably a fair characterization of the state of knowledge right now. Is improved nutrition a thesis there or not?

Improved nutrition could well be a contributor. Improved nutrition does enhance IQ, although you would think you would hit the ceiling long before the better part of a century because nutrition is probably where it needs to be now.

There’s also, by the way, there has been direct analysis of the nature of the difference between blacks and whites in IQ scores and the subtests and the nature of the Flynn effect as analyzed by subtests.

The scholars who did that—who are Dutch scholars, Jelty Richards is the lead author of one of the most important articles in this—concluded that the nature of the Flynn effect is pretty much divorced from the nature of the black-white difference.

But the Flynn effect itself is a fascinating phenomenon, and it’s a reminder that we don’t know everything there is to know about all this stuff.

Right, well that’s interesting because I have here a quote from Flynn. I don’t know when he wrote this or said this, but he says, “An environmental explanation of the racial IQ gap need only posit this: that the average environment for blacks in 1995 matches the quality of the average environment for whites in 1945. I do not find that implausible.”

End quote.

So what you just said seems to close the door to that interpretation of the black-white gap.

Yes, it does. This is a case where I am citing someone who has done analyses that are at a level of complexity that I’m not independently competent to pronounce. This is a very—there’s a top scholar who did that, and he had some co-authors whose names I don’t recall off the top of my head.

He’s a top scholar; he does really rigorous work. But that’s all I can say at this point.

So I want to just now drive to the ethical and political punchline, which is a point you emphasize in your book really as scrupulously as you could, and it did not spare you all of the pain that you subsequently suffered.

Perhaps it won’t spare us the pain for having this conversation, but this really is the takeaway message, and again, it’s the message you took away more than 20 years ago, which is: whatever their origin, mean IQ differences are not all we care about.

We care about ethics and politics, and we want societies that maximize human well-being. For this, we need political equality, and to have political equality, you have to treat people as individuals.

It’s ethically and politically prudent to do this, and here’s a crucial point: it’s also rational to do this because the differences between groups are not so large that there isn’t a substantial overlap between them for every trait we care about.

Given that the variance between individuals will be much higher than the variance between groups—again, for any trait we care about, but especially what we’re talking about now, intelligence—it would actually be irrational to read much into group differences.

So the truth is, I learn nothing about a person’s intelligence simply by being told that he’s black or white or Asian. You still need to treat people as individuals.

You make it absolutely clear in your book that given the overlap in these bell curves, there will be many, many blacks who are far more intelligent than most whites.

I mean, so this is again, it all comes back down to honestly evaluating individuals.

I emphatically agree with everything you’ve just said. As you pointed out, Dick and I have some of these passages in italics in the book. One of them we have not stressed enough is that there’s much more variation within groups than there is between.

I mean, the separation is much, much greater within groups than it is between groups, so that the overlap is very large.

But think of it in terms of being an employer and you’re trying to hire. You need a really smart guy for a job, and Barack Obama walks in to the interview.

Okay, he’s black. If you then make inferences about how smart he is based on his membership in an ethnic group, you are going to be making a huge mistake.

The same thing is true for not just employers; it’s true for admitting people to schools. It is true for all of our interactions with other people. We do not know whether they are people who we would like to hang out with. We don’t know how smart they are. We don’t know how much integrity they have by looking at them and assigning them a group membership—whether, by the way, it’s not just race, but it’s also sex and sexual orientation and ethnicity of a much more detailed form.

Any group you want to name, you don’t know on the basis of group means what you’re dealing with. It is virtually impossible to make that point stick.

Again, you made that point with absolute clarity in the book, and I just read the most controversial sections of the book last night just to assure myself of this, and you make that point repeatedly.

But I mean, to give people a taste of the reaction you got to this book, the sociologist Stephen Rosenthal called the book “a vehicle of Nazi propaganda wrapped in a cover of pseudoscientific respectability, an academic version of Adolf Hitler’s *Mein Kampf*.”

This was the tenor of the response, even among intellectuals and academics who were reviewing the book.

Yep. When we wrote the chapter, we spent a lot of time in this chapter trying to get it right—not just in the technical details, but also in the language. When we were all done with it, I actually had these hopes that when the book came out, Dick and I would be applauded for having taken this inflammatory issue and treated it, saying, “This is not such a big deal. This is nothing to get excited about, but it’s something that’s better to look at than for people to have these way exaggerated notions of what might be going on.”

I thought we might get some kudos for that, and it turned out that people who I know of—academics especially—who actually read the book had to know they were lying.

I’m thinking of specific academics; they just simply know too much about this subject not to have known that they were lying, and they lied without any apparent shadow of guilt because I guess in their own minds they were doing the Lord’s work.

Yeah, it was a kind of moral panic. I mean, when you look at just how irrational the claims were, I mean, you’re talking about claims that intelligence doesn’t exist on some level, or that it doesn’t matter, or that you can’t possibly test for it, or that there can’t possibly be differences of mean differences among groups, or that it could have no genetic underpinnings.

I mean, this is like they were throwing out a century of our growing understanding of these things and vilifying you with an energy that clearly—this is what happens when you touch a taboo in this way.

I guess that one thing that must be occurring to our listeners now—and this is my misgiving about having this conversation and going into this area at all—the question is: why talk about any of this? Why seek data on racial difference at all? What is the purpose of doing this?

Because we now have social policy embedded in employment policy and academic policy, which is based on the premise that everybody’s equal above the neck. All groups are equal above the neck, whether it’s men and women or whether it’s ethnicities.

When you have that embedded into law, you have a variety of bad things happen. Let’s go back to the employer who sees Barack Obama walk into the office for a job interview.

What I’m saying is for him to treat Barack Obama as a member of a group as opposed to the man sitting across the desk is idiotic, as well as being immoral. What social policy is doing in an employer’s mind when it is a black candidate walking into that office is all sorts of things that are raising the cost of hiring that person to that employer.

Raising the cost in terms of vulnerability to discrimination lawsuits, vulnerability to a variety of other regulatory penalties, because all at once that person cannot be evaluated on that person’s merits.

The decision must be made solely on those merits without incurring risks because if you treat all of your employees really equally, if you fire them for exactly the same reasons or refuse to promote them for exactly the same reasons, but those reasons, as all such reasons, don’t lend themselves to ironclad proof, you’re having to take a chance.

But let me give you—there’s a whole bunch of other reasons, and now I want to expand it beyond ethnic differences to gender differences.

There’s a strong argument to be made that my colleague at AEI, Christina Hoff Sommers, has made—that education in recent years has been taken over by essentially an elite wisdom which has feminized education and changed K-12 education in ways that boys don’t thrive in and girls do.

The answer to that is not to go back into an old form of education which was based on how boys learn; rather, it’s important to recognize differences between men and women, boys and girls, that exist to do a good job of educating them throughout the way that we conduct our economic and educational lives and a lot of other institutions.

The equality premise that all groups of people only have differences in outcomes because of racism or sexism or inappropriate institutions—that assumption has created huge harm.

But now to take the flip side of that: whether you acknowledge it now or just in the past, at one point there was a place for affirmative action and other attempts to promote diversity.

Do you think that was a mistake from the beginning, or do you think it’s a mistake now, or how do you think about overcoming the challenge of the lack of diversity and the attendant stratification of society?

The original sense of affirmative action, for about the first 12 months after the term came into use, was that if you were an employer, you should make greater efforts to reach out to applicant pools that you wouldn’t have otherwise reached out to.

You would take affirmative action to bring people in that had been excluded. Had people been excluded—whether women, blacks, or other minorities? Absolutely. Was there a need for affirmative action to remedy that? Yes, there was.

But at the same time that you did that—and you needed to do this on the basis of what’s good for the people you’re trying to help—it needed to be one that did not put people into places where they were set up to fail.

One of the great scandals that nobody talks about in elite schools is the dropout rates of their minority students. All of the kids who get into MIT—and by the way, I don’t have—I know about dropout rates some years ago for MIT; I don’t know recent ones.

But I know that there was a time at which the dropout rate among black students at MIT was about 24 percent. Now, to get into MIT, you are going to be in the top one or two or three percent of mathematical ability.

Let’s say everybody’s within the top five percent; you’re going to be very smart in math. But if you are let in and let’s say you’re at the fourth percentile in math ability, and you are in engineering classes with your fellow students at MIT, the rest of the students in that class are in the top one-tenth of one percent—sometimes the top one-hundredth of the top percent.

In that kind of setting, you are the dumbest kid in the class. There is no reason for 24 percent of those kids not to be highly successful at really good colleges. MIT is probably not the place for them because of the mismatch.

So I feel like some of the numbers came out wrong there. I just want to make sure I’m tracking what you’re saying. So you’re saying my kids are really smart, but there’s a huge difference between being in the top one-tenth of one percent mathematically when you’re in an engineering class at MIT and being in the 95th percentile mathematically.

Right, that’s what I was trying to say.

But I would appeal to people who are listening to this who have had that kind of experience—particularly those of you who have been in classes and you know you’re pretty smart, but you’ve been in classes where you also know that the other kids in there are a lot smarter than you are.

That can be a demoralizing experience, and imagine that’s true of every class you go to. By the way, there is a literature that has gone both ways on this issue, and for the first time this afternoon, I will say I am on one side of a contested literature where there are data that can be cited by both sides.

There have been books written that said, “No, this mismatch does not produce all the bad results that I’ve just claimed,” or even if it does produce some of those, there are other advantages to it.

So I want to acknowledge the existence of that alternative argument. Just to come back to my original question here: the reason why I wanted to have this conversation with you about race and IQ and about *The Bell Curve* is I perceive a huge intellectual and moral injustice with respect to how you were treated on this topic.

Because everything you have said about it has been as judicious and as clear-headed ethically as I would hope it would be, and you were treated like—you know, you got to attend your own witch-burning and have for the last 20 years.

So that’s why I’m kind of wading into this morass with you, but I’m still conflicted over this issue of why study this topic at all.

Because it’s very easy to see why anyone would assume that if you’re looking in an area that is producing invidious comparisons between races and you’re continuing to look in that area and continuing to be interested in that area, your interests must be motivated to some degree by a kind of morbid and quasi-racist curiosity in just sort of shoring up a notion of difference between white and black in this case.

Needless to say, I’m sure we can find white supremacist organizations who absolutely love the fact that *The Bell Curve* was published and just admonished their members to read it at the first opportunity.

Why look at this? How does this help society for us to be getting more information about racial difference?

If you go back to some of my earliest published stuff on affirmative action, you go back to 1984 when I did an article for *The New Republic* in which I was talking about the mismatch problem. A lot of that is: How would I feel if I were a black kid my age and going into college, and everybody thought I was there because I was an affirmative action kid?

I would hate that. I would really hate it. How would I feel if, on the job, I knew that everybody assumed I got that job because of affirmative action? I would hate that, and I would try to do my best to prove them wrong.

But I find that morally repugnant. A lot of it was, I think, a kind of empathy with what if I were me, but I was in the same way in personality and intellect and everything else and ambitions, but what if I were black living in this world right now?

I’ll tell you something else: when I got to Harvard in the fall of 1961, there were way fewer black students undergraduates than there are now—way fewer. But I will tell you this: it was pre-affirmative action, pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964 for that matter.

The kid from Newton, Iowa, every time he saw a black face at the student union or whatever, my instinctive reaction was, “He’s probably smarter than I am.”

I made that assumption because I figured that the black kids are very likely to have had a tougher road than I had to get there. I didn’t think about that a lot; I wasn’t obsessed with it. It was just my natural reaction.

In subsequent years, by the early 1980s, I was thinking about that way of thinking about my fellow students and the way that I knew that things were going on in the university because I had enough faculty members and enough friends who had children in college to know what was going on.

I’m saying to myself, “This is way worse.” For that matter, I had been tutoring on a volunteer basis in the early 80s kids in the inner city—black kids in the inner city—in what’s called the Higher Achievement Program.

The program is run by the Catholic Church. I’m not Catholic, but the program wasn’t limited to Catholics; it took the smartest kids from the inner city public schools and had them do intensive tutoring a couple of times a week.

I tutored those classes, and this was not touchy-feely tutoring; this is really high-paced stuff. These were great kids, and they were coming in; they were attending; they were working hard; everything was going right.

One of the things that just stuck out was the degree to which all of these attempts at affirmative action in its new form were creating an atmosphere in which it made it harder for these kids to succeed, not easier.

So I said—I said a few minutes ago that when it comes to what I see as the harms done by social policy, I am taking one side in an argument that is still legitimately contested.

All I can say is I am taking it on the basis not just of statistics in books, but personal experiences I have had where I think we are doing enormous harm to young people by making it harder to treat them as individuals.

I think your goal, which is a goal that I share, is to find some way for us to get to a truly colorblind society. I don’t consider myself well-informed enough on this topic of the effects of social policy to know how we should be tuning the various knobs within reach at the moment to get there.

But I’m very convinced at this point that identity politics and maintaining this fascination with racial difference—or really any subgroup difference—is a dead end morally and politically for us.

You look at our campuses now, and I think it’s just incontestable that identity politics have been disastrous on a whole variety of fronts.

I’d say that the identity politics are a direct straight-line outcome of insisting by law that we treat people as groups.

The real issue here is much deeper than any racial differences we’ve been talking about, and it connects your two books. It connects *The Bell Curve* and your more recent book *Coming Apart*, which you published in 2012.

As you said at the beginning, it’s this underlying fact about our society that we’ve created an economy and a social order that is increasingly giving primacy to cognitive abilities.

So IQ is relevant, and it’s increasingly relevant, and it is stratifying our society in ways that most of us have not appreciated, frankly.

You paint a picture of a stratification that is pretty surprising. I mean, so we’re going to get into what you mean by phrases like the narrow elite and the broad elites and the new underclass.

But just to set you up to describe your thesis here, in your book *Coming Apart*, you essentially start with America as it was just prior to the assassination of JFK, and you paint a picture of a remarkably homogeneous society—at least in white America.

There’s just religious and moral and aesthetic convergence, and while there’s some level of wealth inequality, it was largely a classless society. There was certainly a pretense of classlessness, where you have wealthy people who insist that they’re just like every other American, and that’s a primary value—to seem like you’re just like every other American, even if your wealth is isolating you to some degree.

Then you trace through the next 50 years, where America gets fragmented into two classes that are not only different in terms of wealth but different in terms of their values and even their epistemology.

You have people who have disproportionate influence in our society—whether economic, political, or cultural. You have influential journalists, lawyers, executives, and creative people, and they have become—and we’ll talk about this—incredibly isolated as their tastes and interests and information diets have separated them from the rest of society.

What’s interesting is that you wrote this book in 2012, and as I read it just recently, you seem to describe—without knowing it—everything you’re saying seems to be describing a Trump-shaped hole in our culture just waiting to be filled.

It really reads like a very prophetic book without you ever being explicitly so. I’m just opening the door for you to explain your thesis and talk about the current stratification in our societies.

You see it.

Yeah, and this was not because of people behaving badly. This process that led us to where we are was people behaving normally in the face of a couple of different large social forces.

The social forces were ones that I think we mentioned way earlier in the conversation. One was that from the middle of the century on, the higher educational system sucked all of this academic talent from the hinterlands and shipped it off to elite colleges.

During the same period of time, brains were getting much more valuable in the marketplace, whether it was because of new jobs in the IT industry in recent decades or whether it was simply because if you’re the CEO of a corporation making $40 billion a year and you’re really good at your job, you’re worth a lot more money than you were as CEO of a corporation with $4 billion a year.

So you had a gigantism going on in the American economy, and you had a bunch of new opportunities opening up—things like these complicated multinational deals, which were pretty much unheard of in the middle of the century.

Those are really complicated, and the lawyers who put those together have to be really, really smart as well as being well-trained lawyers, and they’re worth commissions of millions of dollars if they can do that kind of thing.

So anyway, you had those two forces, and you had a few natural impulses, such as you like to hang out with people who get your jokes. You like to marry people who get your jokes. You naturally want to gravitate, if you have the option, toward people who share your tastes and preferences.

Earlier in our nation’s history, the opportunities for doing that were fairly limited, and so you got along; you found the people in your neighborhood.

But now, you have a situation where the cognitive elite is increasingly isolated from the rest of society, and that’s a problem.

It’s a problem because it creates a disconnect between the elite and the broader population. The elite becomes increasingly out of touch with the values, concerns, and experiences of the average American.

This disconnect can lead to a lack of understanding and empathy, which can further exacerbate social divisions.

So, in summary, the trends we’ve seen over the last several decades have created a society that is not only stratified by wealth but also by cognitive ability, leading to a widening gap between the elite and the rest of society.

This is a significant issue that we need to address if we want to create a more equitable and cohesive society.

Your local city, that you got along with, but you couldn't quite create a world from scratch. In the last few decades, we have.

You've got Silicon Valley and San Francisco, that corridor which is just jam-packed with members of this new culture I'm talking about. There's the greater Los Angeles area, the greater Washington, D.C. area, and the New York City area.

You take those, and now you have enclaves of extremely highly educated and affluent zip codes that are contiguous. The life within those zip codes is different on all sorts of bases than it is outside them. None of this, again, is intrinsically bad. The culture of the new upper class is, in many ways, an admirable one. It's one that I participate in.

It's not that mainstream culture is somehow more virtuous, but this kind of separation of the classes is intrinsically worrisome in a country that has taken the ideal of equality of human worth so seriously as the United States has.

But beyond being worrisome, and this is the thing that I was noticing at the time I wrote "Coming Apart," it became much more apparent in the subsequent years that the new upper class holds ordinary Americans in contempt, disdain. They're not even hiding it anymore.

I think Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who started Heterodox Academy, has been on the podcast here. Oh yeah, great guy. He had an interview a couple of weeks ago where he said he thought that the "deplorables" comment by Hillary Clinton changed the history of the world. He may very well be right.

I mean, that one comment all by itself might have swung enough votes. It certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the new upper class looks at mainstream America, and mainstream America notices this.

In this, I think lies a lot of what I found in my Twitter feed as I became a member of the Never Trump crowd during the course of the campaign. I would get really strong stuff in return, but one of the things that struck me most were people who said, "You don't understand. We don't particularly like Donald Trump. We're not defending his character or anything like that. He's our murder weapon."

I think that is a pretty short, accurate way of saying what function Trump served. There's an irony here that I'm detecting for the first time because I want to lead you to this phrase: the hollow elite.

This disdain you described, this isolation and disdain, I think is there, but we're also talking about an elite that has been so contaminated by post-modernist, morally relativistic thinking that they actually don't think they represent any right answers or values that anyone else should abide by. At least they don't live as though they do.

They are just kind of prosecuting their own search for pleasure in isolation, happy not to be associating with all the riffraff. But they don't imagine that they are holding themselves to a standard of industriousness or honesty or any kind of core traditional value that they are judging other people on the basis of.

There's a tension here because, on the one hand, the members of the new upper classes actually behave pretty well in a lot of ways. If you're talking about social capital and the functioning of a civil society, they get married in very high proportions. They almost always get married before they have children.

The out-of-wedlock birth rate for the new upper classes is in single digits. It's kind of like the 1950s. They stay married more often than they used to. If they're in megalopolises, they may not be involved in communities, but in smaller cities, they're often involved in civic organizations and so forth.

But I do use the phrase "hollow" for the reasons that you suggest. They're behaving pretty well, but there's no code of values that they feel they are living up to and that they think are important for the rest of society to live up to.

The phrase I use in the book is, "They don't preach what they practice." But in part, they aren't preaching what they practice because, as you indicated, the idea of a code, which when I was young was that there was a code of the gentleman.

I don't mean the gentleman in the British aristocratic sense, but an American guy. There were certain things he was supposed to do and be and live up to. If you were a guy, your word was your bond. You were gracious in victory and stalwart in defeat.

I could go through a set of clichés in the book, and I said, but they're clichés precisely because they were so widely accepted. I don't know of any members personally of the new upper class that have that sense of a conscious code of virtuous behavior.

The same goes, of course, for women. In that context, you then have, on their part, a sense of superiority. You have a sense because, Sam, you know these same people who say that IQ tests only measure the ability to take IQ tests.

These people are very proud of their IQs, of how smart they are and how able they are. They also have lost a sense of seemliness. The idea in 1955, if you lived anywhere except Newport, Rhode Island, that you should build a 15,000 square foot house was ridiculous. It would be unseemly.

If you went up to Scarsdale or to the North Shore of Chicago at that point, you could also find mansions up there. But we were talking about a very small number of places that had that kind of conspicuous wealth.

Just to add another factor, since I mentioned the North Shore, if you were in the North Shore of Chicago in 1960, in the most elite communities, you were still in communities where about three-quarters of the people didn't have college degrees and where the median family income in those towns was around $60,000 to $70,000 in today's dollars.

So yeah, you had the mansions, but you had within those communities a lot of other people who didn't fit that description. You were not isolated from them by a barrier of four intervening zip codes that were almost as rich as you were.

There are simply now people living in the bubble, as I've called it. Their kids are being raised in the bubble. Their kids have never known anything except that.

So increasingly, what you have inhabiting the new upper class are people who are divorced by two or three generations from folks who worked with their hands, folks who've worked in factories, ran small shops. They've known nothing but this rarefied world that David Brooks described so wickedly and so humorously in "Bobo's in Paradise."

To give a picture of this isolation, I think it's useful. For instance, it's startling for me to reflect on this, but I think it's true to say that certainly among my peers and people I socialize with, I think there may be a few young people I know who fall outside this, but I think it's true to say that the last person on earth I knew who smoked cigarettes was Christopher Hitchens.

If my life depended on it, I could not find another person who smokes cigarettes in my contact list, you know, and let's say there's a thousand people in there. That's an amazing fact in a society where something like 30 percent of people smoke cigarettes.

That's a wonderful illustration of how isolated. In my case, I do know people who smoke cigarettes, but that's only because I go play poker at a casino in Charlestown, West Virginia, and there, about 30 percent of the guys I play poker with smoke.

But in terms of the American Enterprise Institute, where I work, I don't know anybody who smokes there. In my social circles, no. Conversely, if you're a smoker listening to this podcast, I'm sure you're surrounded by people who smoke cigarettes.

Because of the separation, it goes on to so many other things. The most brutal illustration that I have heard of the contempt that the new upper class has for these smoking non-elite people comes from Clive Crook, the journalist and columnist who bought a house in West Virginia for a weekend house.

He lives in Georgetown in Washington and has a great time out there with his wife. They've made friends with the people who lived out there; they're great neighbors. But in Georgetown, when they'd heard that Clive had bought a house in West Virginia, it was like they expected him to be a character out of "Deliverance," if you remember that novel, with missing teeth and can't talk right and are barely human.

They had no hesitation in using the most not just condescending but hateful language about these people. They probably have never met a West Virginian in their life and have no idea what that's like.

It is just fascinating to me that with very little information about someone, it seems like you could reliably predict their worldview. For instance, if you told me that someone subscribes to a magazine like Architectural Digest or the New York Review of Books, I feel like I could make money all day long betting on the things they believe and don't believe.

Whether they support gay marriage, for instance, or whether they believe in climate change, with a single data point like that, you could predict what kinds of alcohol they drink and don't drink. You could predict where their kids go to school, all sorts of stuff.

Let's just talk a little bit about what the costs are to this kind of stratification. Also, how many people are we talking about when you talk about the narrow elite? Are you talking about a truly tiny number of people, like a hundred thousand people or something?

I'm talking about a tiny number of people, and a hundred thousand is probably a good ballpark figure. Just think about it for a minute. If the narrow elite I define as people who have an effect on the nation's politics, economy, and culture, the broad elite are people who have an effect on those things in their own city, but their city is Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Kansas City, whereas the others are national.

So think of it in terms of journalists and start to list the op-ed columnists and the journalists at the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal who really have national influence. You're going to run out of names after the first several dozen.

You are still with people who have quite successful careers, but they aren't the ones who can move the needle. If you go with the same kind of question into the worlds of finance and television, who produces what's on TV, you get past the dozens, but in each of those cases, you're probably talking about hundreds or a couple of thousand people in each of those niches who are the movers and shakers.

You add them all up, and the top hundred thousand people in terms of influence in this country probably explain a whole lot of the variance in the decisions that get made.

Why is this a problem? Well, the classic, or at least the example I use all the time is, it doesn't make a difference if a truck driver in Tulsa, Oklahoma, can't empathize with the priorities of a Secretary of Commerce.

But it makes a huge difference that the Secretary of Commerce cannot empathize at all with the priorities of truck drivers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Because the Secretary of Commerce, the things that he or she does can transform that person's life for the worse.

I would say for the better, except that they very seldom do it for the better. They usually get in the way of the guy making a living. The same thing is true whether you're talking about people who write dramas for television or the people working in the IT world.

Insofar as they have no idea what the life of ordinary Americans is like, they're likely to do things that are mistakes that have greater or lesser consequences, but they're mistakes.

It would be really nice if the people who run the country had a deep, intuitive understanding of their fellow Americans. Much of what we're saying here, as I said, draws a direct line to what happened in the most recent presidential election.

The fact that it is still a source of perfect astonishment to many of us that we now have Donald Trump as President of the United States. What do you make of our current situation politically?

It was amazing to hear you describe the traditional ideals and values of a self-respecting American and to just be able to check the antithesis of all of those values exemplified by Trump. I mean, he is the antichrist with respect to values like honesty and integrity and being a good winner and a good loser.

You could not get a more perfect embodiment of the absence of those qualities, and yet he's president. What has been your experience of being a very visible conservative Never Trumper?

You must have had a similar experience to people like David Frum and other people on the classically right of center who came out early and loudly against Trump. What's that been like?

Well, it was chastening because I clearly was so wrong for so long about things. For example, I kept saying, "Look, the working-class guys I know would hate Trump if he lived next door for the reasons you just mentioned."

But also, working-class guys don't talk about their wives the way that Trump did. Not very many of them do. Working-class guys hate people who brag about their money. I mean, that's just kind of the tackiest, most unattractive thing you can do.

What I didn't get was the extent to which they were looking upon Trump as the murder weapon, as I put it a while ago. He was a guy who was not acting like this establishment elite, and they put the other Republican candidates in that category just as much as they put Hillary Clinton in that category.

But Trump also was doing something that I don't think I gave him enough credit for, and that is he really was talking to them in other kinds of ways that worked.

For this, I got a very interesting anecdote when I was signing books at an event a couple of months ago. The woman who gave me the book to sign said, "I grew up across the street from Donny Trump."

Donny Trump, apparently, even though his father was already pretty rich at that time, still lived in a pretty ordinary neighborhood in Queens. She was saying, "Oh yeah, when there was ever construction in the streets, Con Ed fixing something or something, Donnie would be out there talking to the guys."

I said, "Okay, so it's not Donald Trump the nouveau riche vulgarian that's accomplishing all this. It's the Donald Trump who used to go out and talk to the guys working construction in Queens."

So I was wrong in understanding the nature of that appeal. What's going to happen? I think you have to divorce the person of Donald Trump from the movement.

Trump may or may not get through his years in office successfully in some ways or not; I don't know. But one thing that is quite clear is that people like me, who consider ourselves limited government conservatives, I like to use the word "Madisonian" to describe people like me.

We like the Constitution of limited government and enumerated powers and all that kind of thing, and local control and subsidiarity. We are a tiny fraction of the electorate.

What the last election did was say that you've had the left, which has kind of abandoned the old-fashioned definitions of liberty and freedom and egalitarianism in favor of the social democratic versions of them.

People on the left, in principle, in deeply principled ways, think these are the best way to go. But meanwhile, over on the right, you've had principled limited government people who thought that a lot of the blue-collar Republican voters were at least sympathetic to those ideals.

It turns out that really they aren't very interested in those. They were naturally blue-collar Democrat voters historically. They shifted over because of a Democratic Party that they thought had abandoned them, particularly the white working class.

But they've shifted over for reasons of feeling more comfortable with the Republicans, not because they believe in conservative principles. So long term, I think we're going to have a redefinition of the parties such that the Republicans will be a populist-centered party for a long time to come.

I will add, Sam, I have been consistently wrong on all things political for the last 18 months, so I'm probably not changing that track right now.

You're in good company there. This final topic I want to raise with you is, on its face, a very surprising thing for you to be endorsing. This is the topic of universal basic income, which I've talked about in some contexts on this podcast as a possible remedy for the increasing role that automation is playing in our economy.

What happens when automation, and in the limit AI, get so good that jobs disappear and new ones never spring up in their place? How do you deal with what would be a 50 or 70 percent unemployment rate in some possible future?

Well, one answer, and this is an answer that is older than I realize but is suddenly very popular and current in Silicon Valley, is you give people money. This is called universal basic income.

You've written a book about this, which unfortunately I haven't read, but I've heard you talk about it. This is a surprise because in "Coming Apart," you were fairly critical of the welfare state in all its guises, and you just said something that at least implied disparagement of the welfare state in Europe as we know it.

So tell me why you are an advocate for universal basic income.

Well, I first wrote the book back in 2005 or 2006 called "In Our Hands," but I did it initially for the same reason that Milton Friedman was in favor of a negative income tax. The idea is that you replace the current system with the universal basic income and that you leave people alone to make their decisions about how to use it.

But the other reason I wanted to write the book is that I thought, and I still think, it provides a way in which we might actually revitalize America's civic culture.

This is to say the civic culture in which a lot of problems get solved at a very local level. The reason I make that argument is that an income stream, and under my plan, the money would be deposited every month electronically into a known bank account, gives people moral agency, whether they want it or not.

Let's take the example of a guy who is living off his girlfriend and he can't seem to hold on to a job. He's effectless, and she puts up with him; she loves him.

All at once, now he's got an income stream. I think it's quite probable that the young woman will say, "You know what? I think kicking in three or four hundred bucks a month at this point is appropriate." I think that's a very good thing for her to do, and it's very good for him to be hit with that request.

I also think it's a good thing that if he drinks up all his money under a universal basic income with 10 days to go, that his friends or his girlfriend or his parents or other people say, "Well, we aren't going to let you starve, but it's time to get your act together."

I think that kind of saying to someone, "Don't tell us you're helpless because you aren't helpless. The question is whether you're going to do anything about it," I think those kinds of interactions, millions of times a day around the country, would be a good thing.

If there's one thing that writing "The Bell Curve" did, it sensitized me to the extent to which a high IQ is pure luck. None of us earn our IQ, whether it's nature or nurture. We aren't the ones who did the nurturing.

Hard work and perseverance and all these other qualities are great, but we can't take credit for our IQ. We live in a society that's tailor-made for people with high IQs. The people who got the short end of the stick in that lottery, mixing my metaphors, they deserve our admiration and our support if they're doing everything right.

Now I'm thinking about a couple. They each make $13,000 a year, let's say. That's a really low-paying job. If they're working full time, that's $26,000. They're scraping by; they're above the poverty line, but not by much.

It's really hard to raise kids that way. Suppose you have a $12,000 a year universal basic income. That's $24,000. Under their $26,000, all at once, there are $50,000. With that $50,000, they can have a good lower middle-class income. They can raise a family. All sorts of things open up to them that weren't open before.

That's the reason for the title of the book, "Putting Lives Back in Our Hands." I think replacing the welfare state with that is going to be the rare case where you have side effects that are not unintended side effects that are terrible, but unintended side effects that have a potential for rejuvenating America's civic culture.

I put out a revised version of the book just last year, two years ago, because of precisely the issue you're talking about. I am one of those people who say I know how hard it is to say this time is different. I know the Luddites have been saying that for two centuries, and they've always been wrong.

This time it's different. AI is, I think, on the cusp of a J-curve where it goes from very slow progress over the last couple of decades to non-linear acceleration in the things it can do. I think it will transform the job market unrecognizably within 20 or 30 years.

I certainly do as well. Are you worried at all about the incentives just not being aligned? If you give out universal basic income, is there any tweaking of it that makes it more likely to produce the good changes you're picturing?

Oh, there are a couple of really important things. One of them is that indeed you do get rid of the other welfare state services. The second thing is that you have a very high point at which the guaranteed income is subject to a surtax.

I want to lure people into working so they get to a point where they can't afford to quit. Let's say in my plan, I say it's $30,000 of earned income. So until you've got $30,000 of income on your own, you keep all of the, let's say, $12,000.

Then after that, you start to pay a small surtax back. Well, okay, so you have been in a situation where you have the $12,000, but anything you go out and earn, you keep. So you've gotten into the habit of working, and if you've gotten up to $30,000, you're not going to trade a $42,000 a year lifestyle for a $12,000 a year lifestyle.

But if you have the payback point quicker, I think you increase the likelihood that you have disincentives to work. It needs to be deposited electronically into a known bank account. It needs to be universal because one of the key things about this is that everybody knows that everybody else is getting the money.

Once you have that universal knowledge, then a whole variety of interactions can be set in motion that wouldn't be set in motion without that knowledge. So yeah, you can tweak it. You can either have it be disastrous, but you can also fairly easily design it so that it's quite likely to produce good effects.

I am not denying it will have work disincentives. There will be work disincentives, but we are already at a point, Sam, where something more than 20 percent of working-age males with high school diplomas and no more are out of the labor force.

So we already have a whole lot of guys sitting at home in front of a TV set or a game boy, probably stoned on meth or opioids, doing nothing. We have a problem already.

I see a lot of ways in which the moral agency that an income would give could make the problem less. The dysfunction you see in white and largely rural America now, is it analogous to the dysfunction that we were seeing in the black inner city starting a few decades ago?

Are there important differences, or how do you view that? In some ways, it followed pretty much the same trajectory. Way back in 1992 or 1993, I had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called "The Coming White Underclass."

I was simply tracking the growth in non-marital births among white working-class people. I said to myself, along with Pat Moynihan, who said it better and first, that if you have communities in which large numbers of young men are growing to adulthood without a male figure, you ask for and get chaos.

I assumed that what had happened in the black community when non-marital births kept on going up was going to happen in the white community. So in that sense, they followed pretty much a predictable trajectory.

What was not predictable was the degree of demoralization that seems to be special to the white working class in the last 17 years. Here, the work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the economists of Princeton, on the rising mortality from cirrhosis of the liver and opioid overdosing and other kinds of diseases that indicate dysfunction, that rise has been anomalous.

Whereas the death rate from those causes among the white working class was 30 percent lower than for blacks in the 1990s, it's now 30 percent higher. That's different. I think the white working class in America has become demoralized in a uniquely devastating way since the turn of the century.

I realize now, Charles, that in my effort to slay the elephant in the room and then get away from him as quickly as possible, I neglected to ask you about your experience at Middlebury. Are you willing to talk about it?

Sure, I'll talk about it. It's interesting that we didn't get to it at all.

Well, no, because I just wanted to get on to "Coming Apart" and just see the rubble all around us. I wanted to just step through it.

Let me just set this up. People should know this video is available online, at least the video not of the worst part of the aftermath, but the video of students not letting you speak is, I believe, available on YouTube.

You were there, this is now just a few months ago, to talk about nothing having to do with "The Bell Curve" directly, but your reputation preceded you there. You had a de-platforming style sanctimonious eruption that made it impossible for you to speak.

Please tell us what that experience was like. It was unique. I've had a lot of protests over the years, particularly right after "The Bell Curve" came out, and I've had chanting and I have had signs held up.

But it had always been something like a kabuki dance where everybody had worked out ahead of time when it would stop and when I would be able to speak. This time, the Middlebury administration had not been able to negotiate that kind of limit.

Middlebury did a couple of things that I've given full credit for. One is they did not disinvite me; they let me come. The other thing was that the president of the college was there, and she made a statement beforehand.

Now mind you, her statement was to the effect that we have to let this awful person speak on behalf of the values of freedom of speech. I just wish she'd been a little less willing to feed the preconceptions of the crowd.

I mean, this again, I just want to reiterate, this is one of the reasons I was so eager to have you on. I find it so galling that an obviously sober and ethical and well-intentioned scholar such as yourself has to live under this cloud of notoriety.

So that every time you're introduced, people have to apologize in advance for the fact that you're even on the stage in the first place. It strikes me as an incredible injustice that academics everywhere should be able to see through immediately.

They should not pander to defamatory misconceptions that have grown up around your work. It's really annoying.

But I want to jump in here, though, that other aspects of the experience of Middlebury, specifically with Professor Allison Stanger and the Vice President for Communications, Bill Berger, who was responsible for trying to keep me safe, they were just wonderful.

Professor Stanger had exactly the right ideals about what this was all about. In her questions that she asked of me after we did our streaming, we went down to a separate room since I couldn't give the lecture in the main hall, and we did a video stream.

She asked tough questions and good questions, and we had a great conversation. So on the Middlebury campus, there are still some great people.

I also don't know what proportion of the students are engaged in this, and I say I don't know, meaning I truly don't know. You had about 200 students in the lecture hall, I would say, who were screaming and chanting and waving signs, and another 200 who were sitting there waiting to listen to me.

It may very well be that among the rest of the Middlebury student body, almost all of them were not sympathetic to the protesters. I don't know.

On these college campuses, what the division is, what I do know, and here we have evidence from Middlebury, is that a lot of the instigation of this was done by faculty, with one of the leading characters being a guy named Michael Sheridan, who's part of the anthropology department, I think, who openly admits he hasn't read a word of anything I've ever written.

But it's okay to basically tell students, "Go out and keep this racist pseudoscientist from speaking." So in some ways, I'm the worst possible person to ask about the meaning of Middlebury because I was so much in the middle of it.

The end of the evening was so unhappy in terms of us trying to get out of there and get to the car, which we did. But Professor Stanger was seriously injured in the course of that.

So you were walking from the hall to the car, and you got surrounded by a group of people who you have every reason to believe are students, or we're now worried that there's outside instigators who came to campus for the purpose of causing even more trouble.

Well, we'd finished our lecture in the Q&A, and it was Bill Berger, Allison Stanger, and me, and two large competent security guys. But when we opened the door to go into the parking lot and get to the car, I really wasn't thinking there was going to be any problem at all.

We opened the door, and there is a crowd of people, many of them having ski masks on, which when I registered it did cause me a certain amount of disquiet. Why the ski masks?

It also became clear as we started to walk down the row that they weren't going to get out of the way. We had to push through them, and the security guys were great, but there were only two of them.

They were having to pull people off and try to clear a path, and that was when Professor Stanger got injured.

That was completely unexpected, and nothing has yet been done to any of the students who can be identified as being involved in this. They have not been disciplined or kicked out of school or anything.

It is my understanding that Middlebury hired an outside investigative agency and that they are waiting for their report. Whereas I understand that that is a strategy that can rationally be employed, it's not what I think needs to be done.

I will say what needs to be done in this case. I think that justice delayed is justice denied. The next morning, all of the people who could be identified from videos being in the lecture hall, violating Middlebury's rules that had been spelled out to them before I got up on the platform, those students were identified.

I would like to have seen the president say the next morning, "We have already identified 47 of our students unequivocally in violation of Middlebury's rules. They are suspended for the rest of the term, and we are in the process of going through additional sources of information. As we identify more students who participated in this, they will be suspended as well."

I think it needed to be soon. I think it needed to be not a slap on the wrist. I think there needed to be a very unequivocal statement of this is antithetical to what a university is all about.

You don't belong on a college campus if you behave that way.

I fully agree. It should be so easy to draw this bright line here and say if you're refusing to let a scheduled speaker speak, you have to be violating a university policy, if not a more important social norm.

To the point where you get, at minimum, suspended. It's the antithesis of what a college campus is about.

If whatever penalties come down in a couple of weeks, when I guess school will be out not too long from now, but in any case, at this point, it will have been a long time ago. The parents will be on the phone saying this is not fair, that there are many others that aren't getting punished.

Anyway, my child wasn't one of the people who hurt Professor Stanger, and the whole thing will, I'm afraid, and I apologize if I'm doing the administration a misplayed injustice, and they're going to come out strong.

I'm afraid that the kids are going to get away with it.

Well, which also had, there's a distinction between the people who were shouting you down in the hall, not letting you speak, and the people who were physically assaulting you and Professor Stanger when you left the hall.

I mean, that's criminal. The latter is a crime.

Right, that's crime. It's criminal prosecution. There should be jail time for the people who injured Professor Stanger.

Well, finally, Charles, I'm just left wondering, do you regret touching these topics that have caused this much difficulty in your life? Do you regret writing "The Bell Curve"?

The short answer is no. Is that the real? Have you thought about this much?

I don't tend to think in terms of regret, but I have been really lucky in my life. After "The Bell Curve," I did a few college speeches after that, but then I was pretty much persona non grata for the next 10 years.

In the course of that, I spent five years writing a book called "Human Accomplishment," which was one of the great intellectual adventures of my life and a great memory. A variety of other things could have happened to my life.

In one sense, my life would have been different if I hadn't written "The Bell Curve." There's no doubt about that, and there's a plus side and a negative side. Until the last year, I guess the last eight months, I thought that I was pretty much rehabilitated.

The viciousness and the anger and so forth that disappeared. It's only really since the Trump phenomenon and the resist and all the rest of that that has come back.

So if you'd asked me this question a year ago, I would have definitely said not only do I not regret it, but I didn't think that the downside was that bad.

This sounds very self-pitying, so I'm exaggerating.

Listen, it's the age of Trump; you have license to be as self-pitying as you want.

Let's put it this way: it has been really annoying to have all of this stuff come back again because the white supremacists and the white nationalist stuff and the pseudoscientist stuff, there's a large part of me which says, "Oh, they can't be serious after all of the time that's gone by and all of the things that have been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt."

So I have been really annoyed over the last several months. But I hesitated too long before answering your question. I thought, "No, I don't regret writing 'The Bell Curve.'"

The hesitation came from the recent unpleasantness, which has been irritating. I mean, it's interesting because when I think of my own work, I touch similar topics.

I mean, having touched this one with you just now, for which there will be some pushback pain meted out, no doubt. But I do think more and more in terms of picking my battles just because certain topics are so difficult to parse.

They're so distracting for people; they're so reliably confusing, and they're such an easy gift to give to one's enemies who can mischaracterize your views on them.

I certainly sympathize now with people who have marshaled their careers far more circumspectly than we have because there's an infinite amount of interesting things to think about and talk about, and you can pick from the side of the menu that's not going to get you death threats.

But let me put another positive side on it, which is that once you've gone through that kind of experience, it's kind of liberating.

Because they can't say anything new about you. They've done their worst in one sense, right?

So now I am working on a book in which I'm trying to bring, in many ways, I'm trying to bring a body of technical literature to a lay audience, and this time it's on the genetics revolution.

I'm free to do this because will this provoke similar kinds of attacks? I suppose so because there are too many ways in which genes are getting involved in the issues we've been touching on today.

But who cares? At this point, Sam, I actually think I conveyed a wrong impression earlier. I really was reacting during the short term.

In so many other ways, I have been freed up in my life to do all sorts of things that I wouldn't have done if I hadn't written "The Bell Curve." On top of that, you have to remember that three or four years I spent doing it, I became joined at the hip with one of the most wonderful people I've ever known, Richard Herrnstein, and a friendship that I wouldn't trade for anything.

So if I were to rewind the tape, even though you don't rewind anything, and you asked me the question at this point, I would snap out without a moment's hesitation: I don't regret a damn thing.

Nice. Well, it's a good way to leave it. Despite the blowback, I anticipate I do not regret having this conversation with you. It's been a real pleasure.

Yeah, well, thank you, Charles.

To be continued.

To be continued.

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