Charles Alan Murray is an American paleoconservative and paleolibertarian leaning political scientist,
author, columnist, and pundit.
He first became well known for his Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980
in 1984, which discussed the American welfare system.
He is best known for his controversial book The Bell Curve, co-authored with Richard Herrnstein
in 1994, which argues that class and race are linked with intelligence.
Murray has also written In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, What It Means to be a
Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence
in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, and In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare
State.
He published Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality
in 2008.
Murray's articles have appeared in Commentary Magazine, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard,
The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
currently working as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think
tank in Washington, DC.
Biography Early life and education
Murray was raised in Newton, Iowa in a Republican, non-collegiate "Norman Rockwell kind of family"
that stressed moral responsibility.
He is the son of Frances B. and Alan B. Murray, a Maytag Company executive.
He had an intellectual youth marked by a rebellious and prankster sensibility.
As a teen he played pool at a hangout for juvenile delinquents, studied debate, espoused
labor unionism, and on one occasion burned a cross next to a police station.
Murray credits the SAT with helping him get out of Newton and into Harvard.
"Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me
a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover," wrote Murray.
"Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant,
president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s."
However, in an editorial published in the New York Times on March 8, 2012, Murray suggested
removing the SAT's role in college admissions, noting that the SAT "has become a symbol of
new-upper-class privilege, as people assume that high scores are purchased through the
resources of private schools and expensive test preparation programs".
Murray obtained a BA in history from Harvard in 1965 and a PhD in political science from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974.
Peace Corps service in Thailand Murray left for the Peace Corps in Thailand
in 1965, staying abroad for a formative six years.
At the beginning of this period, the young Murray kindled a romance with his Thai Buddhist
language instructor, Suchart Dej-Udom, the daughter of a wealthy Thai businessman, who
was "born with one hand and a mind sharp enough to outscore the rest of the country on the
college entrance exam."
Murray subsequently proposed by mail from Thailand, and their marriage began the following
year, a move that Murray now considers youthful rebellion.
"I'm getting married to a one-handed Thai Buddhist," he said.
"This was not the daughter-in-law that would have normally presented itself to an Iowa
couple."
Murray credits his time in the Peace Corps in Thailand with his lifelong interest in
Asia.
"There are aspects of Asian culture as it is lived that I still prefer to Western culture,
30 years after I last lived in Thailand," says Murray.
"Two of my children are half-Asian.
Apart from those personal aspects, I have always thought that the Chinese and Japanese
civilizations had elements that represented the apex of human accomplishment in certain
domains."
Recalling his time in Thailand in a 2014 episode of "Conversations with Bill Kristol," Murray
noted that his worldview was fundamentally shaped by his time there.
"Essentially, most of what you read in my books I learned in Thai villages."
He went on, "I suddenly was struck first by the enormous discrepancy between what Bangkok
thought was important to the villagers and what the villagers wanted out of government.
And the second thing I got out of it was that when the government change agent showed up,
the village went to hell in terms of its internal governance."
Murray's work in the Peace Corps and subsequent social research in Thailand for research firms
associated with the U.S. government led to the subject of his statistical doctoral thesis
in political science at M.I.T., in which he argued against bureaucratic intervention in
the lives of the Thai villagers.
Divorce and remarriage By the 1980s, his marriage to Suchart Dej-Udom
had been unhappy for years, but "his childhood lessons on the importance of responsibility
brought him slowly to the idea that divorce was an honorable alternative, especially with
young children involved."
Murray divorced Dej-Udom after fourteen years of marriage and three years later married
Catherine Bly Cox, an English literature instructor at Rutgers University.
Cox was initially dubious when she saw his conservative reading choices, and she spent
long hours "trying to reconcile his shocking views with what she saw as his deep decency."
In 1989, Murray and Cox co-authored a book on the Apollo program, Apollo: Race to the
Moon.
Murray attends and Cox is a member of a Quaker meeting in Virginia, and they live in Frederick
County, Maryland near Washington, D.C.
Murray has four children, two by each wife, and remains close with both families.
Research Murray began research work at the American
Institutes for Research, one of the largest of the private social science research organizations,
upon his return to the U.S.
From 1974–1981, Murray worked for the AIR eventually becoming chief political scientist.
While at AIR, Murray supervised evaluations in the fields of urban education, welfare
services, daycare, adolescent pregnancy, services for the elderly, and criminal justice.
From 1981–1990, he was a fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute where he
wrote Losing Ground, which heavily influenced the welfare reform debate in 1996, and In
Pursuit.
He has been a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute since 1990 and was a frequent contributor
to The Public Interest, a journal of conservative politics and culture.
In March 2009, he received AEI's highest honor, the Irving Kristol Award.
He has also received a doctorate honoris causa from Universidad Francisco Marroquín.
Murray has received grants from the conservative Bradley Foundation to support his scholarship,
including the writing of The Bell Curve.
Murray's Law Murray's law is a set of conclusions derived
by Charles Murray in his book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980.
Essentially, it states that all social welfare programs are doomed to effect a net harm on
society, and actually hurt the very people those programs are trying to help.
In the end, he concludes that all social welfare programs cannot be successful and should ultimately
be eliminated altogether.
Murray's Law: 1.
The Law of Imperfect Selection: Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social
transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.
2.
The Law of Unintended Rewards: Any social transfer increases the net value of being
in the condition that prompted the transfer.
3.
The Law of Net Harm: The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily,
the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.
The Bell Curve the Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure
in American Life is a controversial, best-selling 1994 book that Charles Murray wrote with the
Harvard professor Richard J. Herrnstein.
Its central point is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including
financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than one's parents' socio-economic
status or education level.
Also, the book argued that those with high intelligence are becoming separated from the
general population of those with average and below-average intelligence, and that this
was a dangerous social trend.
Murray expanded on this theme in his 2012 book Coming Apart.
Much of the controversy erupted from Chapters 13 and 14, where the authors write about the
enduring differences in race and intelligence and discuss implications of that difference.
While the authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ
differences are genetic, they write in the introduction to Chapter 13 that "The debate
about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains
unresolved," and "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have
something to do with racial differences."
The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of IQ scores.
The normal distribution is the limiting distribution of a random quantity which is the sum of smaller,
independent random phenomena.
Shortly after publication, large numbers of people rallied both to criticize and defend
the book.
Some critics denounced the book and its authors as supporting scientific racism.
A number of books were written in response, to criticize The Bell Curve.
Those books included a revised edition of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's
The Mismeasure of Man, The Bell Curve Wars, a collection of essays reacting to Murray
and Herrnstein's commentary, as well as The Bell Curve Debate, which contains essays that
respond to the issues raised in The Bell Curve.
Arthur S. Goldberger and Charles F. Manski critique the empirical methods supporting
the book's hypotheses.
Citing assertions made by Murray in The Bell Curve, The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled
Murray a "white nationalist," charging that he has a long history of advocating discredited
ideas that are rooted in eugenics.
In 2000, Murray authored a policy study for AEI on the same subject matter as The Bell
Curve in which he wrote: Views
Views on education Murray has been critical of the No Child Left
Behind law, arguing that it "set a goal that was devoid of any contact with reality.
... The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging
of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average."
He sees the law an example of "Educational romanticism [which] asks too much from students
at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle,
and asks too little from those at the top."
Challenging "educational romanticism", he wrote Real Education: Four Simple Truths for
Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality.
His "four simple truths" are: "Ability varies."
"Half of the children are below average."
"Too many people are going to college."
"America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted."
Human group differences Murray's views on human group differences
have been the most controversial.
In a paper published in 2005 titled "Where Are the Female Einsteins?", Murray stated,
among other things, "no woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great
philosophical traditions.
In the sciences, the most abstract field is mathematics, where the number of great female
mathematicians is approximately two.
In the other hard sciences, the contributions of great women have usually been empirical
rather than theoretical, with leading cases in point being Henrietta Leavitt, Dorothy
Hodgkin, Lise Meitner, Irene Joliot-Curie and Marie Curie herself."
Asked about this in 2014, he stated he could only recall one important female philosopher,
“and she was not a significant thinker in the estimation of historians of philosophy,"
adding "So, yeah, I still stick with that.
Until somebody gives me evidence to the contrary, I’ll stick with that statement.”
In 2007, Murray wrote a back cover blurb for James R. Flynn's book What Is Intelligence?:
"This book is a gold mine of pointers to interesting work, much of which was new to me.
All of us who wrestle with the extraordinarily difficult questions about intelligence that
Flynn discusses are in his debt."
In 2014, a speech that Murray was scheduled to give at Azusa Pacific University was "postponed"
due to Murray's research on human group differences.
Murray responded to the institution by pointing out that it was a disservice to the students
and faculty to dismiss research because of its controversial nature rather than the evidence.
Murray also urged the university to consider his works as they are and reach conclusions
for themselves, rather than relying on sources that "specialize in libeling people."
Other Murray supports gay marriage.
Other books A Behavioral Study of Rural Modernization:
Social and Economic Change in Thai Villages Beyond Probation: Juvenile Corrections and
the Chronic Delinquent – co-authored with Louis A. Cox, Jr.
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, Basic Books ISBN 0-465-04231-7; on welfare
reform In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government,
Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-671-68743-3 Apollo: The Race to the Moon, with Catherine
Bly Cox, Simon & Schuster,.
ISBN 978-0-671-70625-8 What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Broadway
Books ISBN 0-553-06928-4 "IQ and economic success."
Public Interest, 128, 21–35.
Income Inequality and IQ, AEI PressPDF copy The Underclass Revisited, AEI Press PDF copy
Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950,
HarperCollins ISBN 0-06-019247-X; a quantification and ranking of well-known scientists
and artists In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace The Welfare
State, AEI Press ISBN 0-8447-4223-6 Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing
American Schools Back to Reality, Crown Forum ISBN 978-0-307-40538-8
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
Op-ed writings Murray has published opinion pieces in The
New Republic, Commentary, The Public Interest, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
National Review, and the Washington Post.
He has been a witness before United States congressional and senate committees and a
consultant to senior Republican government officials in the United States, and conservative
officials in the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development.
In the April 2007 issue of Commentary Magazine, Murray wrote on the disproportionate representation
of Jews in the ranks of outstanding achievers and says that one of the reasons is that Jews
"have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests
since the first Jewish samples were tested."
His article concludes with the assertion: "At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining
hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable.
The Jews are God's chosen people."
In the July/August 2007 issue of The American, a magazine published by the American Enterprise
Institute, Murray says he has changed his mind about SAT tests and says it's time to
scrap the test.
"Perhaps the SAT had made an important independent contribution to predicting college performance
in earlier years, but by the time research was conducted in the last half of the 1990s,
the test had already been ruined by political correctness".
Murray advocates replacing the traditional SAT with the College Board's subject achievement
tests, "The surprising empirical reality is that the SAT is redundant if students are
required to take achievement tests."
See also Historiometry
Intelligence testing Notes
External links Quotations related to Charles Murray at Wikiquote
Biography at American Enterprise Institute The age of educational romanticism: On requiring
every child to be above average.
The New Criterion, vol 26, May 2008.
In Depth interview with Murray, February 6, 2005
Booknotes interview with Murray on The Bell Curve, December 4, 1994.
What's Wrong with Being The Best?, 20-minute talk on elitism held in Sydney, Australia
on August 13, 2007.
An interview with Charles Murray on The Marketplace of Ideas
Europe Syndrome, The Trouble With Taking The Trouble Out Of Everything Article published
March 24, 2009 in The Wall Street Journal based on a March 2009 lecture given by Charles
Murray before members and guests of the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C.
Charles Murray, doctor honoris causa from Universidad Francisco Marroquin
Real Education: Four Simple Truths to Bring America's Schools back to Reality
What is Real Education?
Brief interview with Luis Figueroa Interview with Charles Murray by Carlisyle
Johnson Welfare state and the meaning of life A 24-minute
talk held in Slovakia on May 17, 2010 Appearances on C-SPAN
Cato Institute Book Forum, 1 hour lecture that Murray gave discussing his book Human
Accomplishment, and some of the response to it.
Address to Commonwealth Club of California on April 18, 2006 regarding his welfare reform
proposals "10 questions for Charles Murray."
McIntosh, Matt, Gene Expression.
"The Idea of Progress: Once Again, with Feeling" in the Hoover digest.
NY Times biographical article: Jason DeParle, "Daring Research or 'Social Science Pornography'?:
Charles Murray".
"The Bell Curve Flattened" by Nicholas Lemann, at Slate Magazine
"Debunking The Bell Curve" Articles on The Bell Curve.