The Bell Curve - 20 Years Later

Real;ClearPolicy's statistician - Robert VerBruggen - takes a retrospective look back at The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray, twenty years after its highly controversial publication. A telling quote:

Someone running a program to help the poor might want to know (from the National Longitudinal Survey) that 45 percent of women who've received welfare and 62 percent of men interviewed behind bars are in the bottom 20 percent of the IQ distribution.

It is tempting to conclude these women and men simply aren't bright enough to make good life decisions. Alternatively one could surmise that each group has craftily found a way to be provided three hots and a cot.