Word: herrnstein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...every age, egalitarians have pursued the ideal of a classless society achieved through freedom of opportunity. Now a Harvard professor of psychology has branded the ideal a chimera. On the contrary, says Richard Herrnstein, educational equality and unrestricted social mobility will lead to a stratified society of hereditary castes...
Reviewing a century of research, Herrnstein concludes in the September Atlantic that intelligence is largely hereditary, that I.Q. influences social status, and that the nation already has a high-I.Q. ruling class and a lower class with I.Q.s below average. He believes, moreover, that the differences will become sharper. The better the U.S. succeeds in letting each man reach the level of his ability, says Herrnstein, the more will wealth and prestige be concentrated at the top. At the bottom, he predicts, will remain a human residue "that may be unable to master the common occupations" and were probably...
Environmental Handle. For the most part, Herrnstein avoids the racial issue, concentrating on the relative influence of "nature and nurture" (heredity and environment) in shaping intelligence. But today that subject is studied chiefly in hopes of accounting for the 15-point I.Q. difference typically found between American blacks and whites. Herrnstein's study thus becomes the latest in a series of documents that have sparked a continuing dispute over racial differences. It follows the 1965 Moynihan report that attributed many problems of blacks to their matriarchal families; the 1966 study by sociologist James Coleman that seemed to eliminate poor...