Andrew Sullivan Fights The Good Fight
12/01/2011
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Andrew Sullivan, who published a symposium on The Bell Curve when he edited The New Republic in 1994, has bravely returned to the fray of defending Herrnstein and Murray, exciting many lowbrow denunciations from the likes of Gawker.

Yet, clearly, stunning new developments in the real world over the last 17 years have proven Herrnstein and Murray wrong. For example, there are all those countless black Silicon Valley start-up founders who have made so much money in high-tech. And, we constantly read articles in the newspaper these days about how the Test Score Gap has vanished in one school district after another, which is why the No Child Left Behind act is right on schedule to make everybody proficient within 2.5 years. 

Today, everything is completely different than when I started following social science statistics in 1972 (see here for my first letter to the editor back in 1973 when I was 14, which was on sociologist Christopher Jencks' book Inequality, a re-analysis of the data in the 1966 Coleman Report).

In 1972, it looked like the rank order of average intelligence was Oriental, Caucasian, Chicano, and black. But, in 2011, of course, we now see from endless studies and real world examples that the actual rank ordering appears to be Asian, non-Hispanic white, Latino, and African-American. So, everything has changed!

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