Semi-Daily Journal

“This book came close to claiming that, given your genes, it makes no difference to your economic success whether you grew up in Scarsdale or the South Bronx.”

Where in the “Bell Curve” will you find such a statement? Of course Krugman can hide behind his waffle: “came close.” Stephen Pinker also “comes close” (see I can do it too) to saying the same kind thing in his book “The Blank Slate.” Yet Pinker does not suffer the kind of abuse directed at Murray.

Where is the evidence that Murray does not understand what a correlation coefficient is?

I’m really disappointed with Krugman’s articles these days. It’s a shame to see such a first-rate intellect engage in this kind vitriol.

Pinker argues, correctly, against a nurture-only social orthodoxy. "The Bell Curve" specifically focused on supporting the idea that contemporary American class distinctions are the direct result of genetic differences, including a racial component. Putting aside the collosal falsehood that "race" is a genetically determined categorical distinction; "The Bell Curve" in its subject matter is clearly a politically-motivated work. That's the difference.

But, again, there is that pesky problem also that "The Bell Curve" is crank science. It's bullshit.

[For Glenn Loury] the final straw was surely the grotesque affair of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. This book came close to claiming that, given your genes, it makes no difference to your economic success whether you grew up in Scarsdale or the South Bronx."

Paul Krugman is perfectly correct as usual. I remember having lunch with Richard Herrnstein, before I had any idea who he was other than a Harvard psychology professor. I walked away thinking, this guy is wacky. "Bell Curve" was wacky and racist. These guys had no clue what intelligence was and where to hunt for it. As Israel Scheffler always told us, "refer to intelligences not intelligence." Horowitz had a musical intelligence that was not the intelligence of a novelist that was not the intelligence of a painter or a dancer or an athlete or a physicist or an architect or a dentist or a chess mistress. Care to figure out just how intelligent wondrous Barry Bonds is?

Anne, as you probably know, there's a good amount of experimental psychology data indicating what you're saying. See also Tooby and Cosmides notable "Wason selection task" work that seems to demonstrate that human reasoning is definitely *not* a general reasoning faculty. Indeed, I think that the evolutionary psychologists are quite right in their adaptionist approach to human cognition. We've evolved a facility at a wide range of mostly discrete cognitive tasks.

That said, this (and the more general multiple intelligences view) doesn't invalidate the possibility of a measurement of "general intelligence". It just becomes an *aggregate* measurement. Think of an example of any complex piece of machinery. A car, perhaps. It is composed of a large number of interrelated devices, most of which have relatively discrete functions. Thus, some cars are quick accelerating, some have high top speeds, some are roomy and comfortable, some are quiet, some corner well, etc. Some of these functions rely upon an underlying system--acceleration, top speed, torque, are all very dependent upon the core of the engine, for example. Other functions are quite independent.

It seems to me that the examples of pathological cognitive impairments (birth defects that cause "mental retardation", brain damage from oxygen starvation, other brain damage such as Alzheimer's, etc.) demonstrate that there is definitely *some* meaning in the idea of measuring someone's "general intelligence". In almost every way a Yugo performs more poorly than a BMW 540ci even thought there's not a single "performance" system in either car that makes this so.

Similarly, it's possible that higher performing intellects are so as a result of a significant number of individually better performing discrete systems, or, alternatively, certain crucial fundamental systems upon which many others are based are better functioning.

It should be said, that the adaptionist evolutionary psychologists point out that it's almost a necessary consequence, given their view of things, that all humans have essentially the same functional adaptations with an equal facility. Even so, my intuition says that there will still be *very small* differences to which perhaps we can be extremely sensitive (in certain modern, evolutionarily atypical, conditions).

So, given a lot of caveats, my view is that a concept of "general intelligence" can still be useful. It just doesn't mean what we tend to think it means. And there's no doubt a great many things--cognitive tasks--that we're not measuring, or at least that we're improperly measuring. Also, most of the things that we think about measuring are likely to be far too culturally determined.

A Zarkov. Krugman's Loury article is from his Slate days, before the New York Times column even began, so you might want to move back the date at which you began to dislike him.

At some point in the Bell Curve, murray and hernsetein began discussing intellignece as if it were 100% inheritable. So, yes, Krugman's statement is not far off.

and yes, this was in slate in 1998, long before Krugman was supposed to have been driven insane by the Bush administration.

I don’t think M&H claim IQ is 100% inheritable. I would still like to what specifically in the “Bell Curve” indicates they don’t understand correlation.

I found Krugman’s articles in the NYT showed a steady deterioration in quality after 2000 as he abandoned economics for politics. I am far from alone in this observation. I don’t think Krugman has changed. He always sounds that way when he veers away from economics towards politics. We have many other examples of this phenomenon. For example Edward Teller was a great physicist, but he stopped doing original physics sometime in the 1950’s and became more and more a political creature. He also became more shrill, abusive and extreme. Ironically we now know from declassified Soviet documents (the Beria memo) he was right about Oppenheimer. But then even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Guess what? I do not give a fig what you and other radical rightees value. Keep on worrying about "leftist" PBS and the "myth" of global warming and the "myth" of acid rain and all the other pseudo science the radical right clings to.

Paul Krugman and Al Franken are showing you folks are no more than powder puff balls.

Go PK and AF

Fair and Balanced Ari

Liberals are given to remarkably fatuous statements, such as that everybody is equally intelligent at birth, or that there is no such thing as intelligence, or that intelligence can't be measured.

They don't really believe those things. They just believe they *should* believe them, and most of all that they should *say* they believe them.

I tried for many years to be a liberal, but I lacked the gift of faith.

A. Zarkov's post about Paul Krugman is right on target. I have read all of Paul Krugman's popular books several times, and have learned a lot from them. But his newspaper columns are shrill, intemperate and unworthy of his great talent.

He should stick to economics and avoid foreign policy, a subject on which he is bone ignorant. And when he writes about the administration's errors in economic policy, he should serve his analysis straight, without the hysteria sauce.

"I don’t think Krugman has changed. He always sounds that way when he veers away from economics towards politics."

Krugman has always personally attacked people he disagreed with, even in economics, even back in the days when he was still willing to criticize people on his own side of the political aisle. See his words about Laura Tyson, Fraga, Thurow, Arthur, Galbraith, etc. (Not to mention non-economists like Reich, Stephen Jay Gould(!), etc.) Not content to say "I disagree, here's why..." he'd go on to personalize it. And in doing so he often went off half-cocked without checking his facts and got them wrong in the process. (See his apology to Fraga, Kenneth Arrow's letter pointing out his errors re Arthur, etc.)

The difference pre-2000 was that back then he was usually talking about substantive economic issues and giving first-rate analysis of them, so personalities didn't matter much and the substance-to-personalization ratio was pretty good.

But now, with him being all politics all the time, it's all attack all the time.

OTOH, maybe PK *has* changed. After all, in 1999 he wrote ...

"I do not think of myself as an all-purpose pundit. I remember once (during the air phase of the Gulf War) seeing John Kenneth Galbraith making pronouncements on TV about the military situation, and telling friends that if I ever start pontificating in public about a technical subject I don't understand, they should gag me."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2000065/entry/1002474/

Yet now he's making his own Gulf War pronouncements, e.g. complaining about "inadequate water rations" of only two 1.5 litre bottles a day in the desert -- apparently not knowing, certainly not mentioning, the relevant and rather basic fact in the situation that the two bottles are in addition to a forced hydration regime with unlimited regular nonbottled water.

So four years made a change in him there.

"Paul Krugman and Al Franken are showing you folks are no more than powder puff balls.
Go PK and AF"

Hey, great. We can get Milton Friedman and Dennis Miller for the other side and have a tag team match!

"Paul Krugman and Al Franken are showing you folks are no more than powder puff balls.
Go PK and AF"

Hey, great. We can get Milton Friedman and Dennis Miller for the other side and have a tag team match!

Apologies for the double post, although I'm really careful not to make them here, please kill it. (If I ever start a blog it won't be with MT unless someone has a fix for this.)

Paul Krugman's pre-NYT column writings on economics are distinguished, and actually rather "conservative". The quarrel with Brian Arthur over priority was unseemly, but his put-downs were generally deserved. There is no reason to take John Kenneth Galbraith, Lester Thurow, or Arthur Laffer seriously.

Someone said "Everybody is conservative on subjects that he knows a lot about". Someone was right.

Krugman has been proven correct in his editorializing time and time again. The fact that you might not like the tone of his writing doesn't affect the overall veracity of his opinion. Why is it that when there are 100 conservative cranks spouting out the kind of swill that conservatarians like, they get conniption fits over 1 PK? Is it because he is striking a nerve? PK is on target. Get over it. Otherwise the word "shrill" becomes a very clear case of psychological projection.

"I don’t think M&H claim IQ is 100% inheritable. I would still like to [see] what specifically in the “Bell Curve” indicates they don’t understand correlation."

Do a Google search for James Heckman's 1995 Reason magazine review of the Bell Curve.

"Ironically we now know from declassified Soviet documents (the Beria memo) he was right about Oppenheimer."

Huh? Could you explain more? I'm pretty informed about this matter by way of Richard Rhodes's "Dark Sun" and I don't know what you're talking about. Oppenheimer *was* approached by a via a third party, but he rebuffed him. What he didn't do was initially report it, and then when he did, he changed his story twice. But this has always been known; Groves knew it years earlier.

Never mind. A web search has answered some of my questions.

“Dark Sun” is a good book, but it’s not up to date. You’re talking about the “Chevalier incident” where Oppenheimer fingered his friend Haakon in 1943 as having approached him on behalf of George Eltenton. Oppenheimer connected Eltenton to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Years later Oppenheimer repudiated his own story, causing him a pack of trouble. But this is old news. What’s new is the material uncovered by Jerrold and Leona Schecter. But this story itself has two parts.

Part I is the book “Special Tasks,” an oral memoir by Pavel Sudoplatov as told to the Schecters in a series of interviews circa 1992. Sudoplatov was deputy director of Soviet Foreign Intelligence from 1939 to 1942. During one of the interviews Sudoplatov named Oppenheimer as a Soviet asset. Critics cried foul, claiming Sudoplatov made it all up, and demanded hard evidence. Now comes Part II, the evidence.

In 2002 the Schecters published another book, “Sacred Secrets.” Here you will find the documentary and other evidence against Oppenheimer. For example, the Beria memo, look here:

http://www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com/bhbsource/document6.html

for an excerpt from a 1944 memo to Beria from Merkulov. At this time Beria was chairman of the Special Committee on the [Soviet] atomic Bomb, while Merkulov was then head of the NKVD. The memo clearly describes Oppenheimer as cooperating with Soviet Intelligence since 1942. There are also revealing letters from Chevalier to Oppenheimer discussing their membership in the US Communist Party, here:

http://www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com/bhbsource/document1.html

Of course Oppenheimer as always denied membership in the Communist Party, but now we know he was not truthful about this.

Chevalier (professor of French at UC Berkeley) was deeply hurt by Oppenheimer’s betrayal, as is clear from his 1960’s book “Oppenheimer: the story of a Friendship.”

In retrospect we should not be surprised about Oppenheimer. His brother was a member of the party, his wife (and her ex), his mistress, and many friends. He supported the use of nuclear weapons when the target was an enemy of the Soviet Union (Japan), but opposed nuclear R/D when the target was the Soviet Union.

Most of WWII did not see hostilities between Japan and the URSS.
One of the justifications to the use of the bombs was to fend off the URSS from grabbing a part of Japan when it was evident the defeat was at hand, avoiding the kind of partition that affected Germany.

DSW