artdiamondblog.com (Free subscription) | 18/11/2008
Over the weekend of August 16-17, 2008, I caught a few minutes of an interview on one of the C-SPAN channels. Charles Murray was handing softball questions to an academic philosopher named Kronman. Kronman was pontificating that life could...
The Thinking Mother (Free subscription) | 24/10/2008
Last month my TiVo surprised me by recording a BookTV lecture given by Charles Murray about education. The lecture was recorded in July 2008 at FreedomFest and was about his latest (short) book which was published in August 2008: Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality". In that lecture Murray speaks about two of his four theories about...
A Western Heart (Free subscription) | 01/12/2008
The great unmentionable is not mentioned below. As Charles Murray and others have shown long ago, poorer people tend to have lower IQs. So that alone will mean that fewer get to university -- and there's not much you can do about it. My parents were poor and I paid my own way through university, when there was a lot less help available than there is now. Why cannot the "deprived" soul...
Secular Right (Free subscription) | yesterday
... go work for Brookings? Should John Derbyshire write for The New Republic ? Should AEI offload Charles Murray, who though sympathetic to Christianity, is not (last I checked, Charles evolves) a believer? Should conservative institutions perform the sort of “faith check” (i.e., you sign some document affirming your adherence to particular propositions) before hiring individuals...
A Western Heart (Free subscription) | 21/11/2008
“The Bell Curve” was a 1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray that discussed the statistical findings about intelligence within different groups of the human population. The book proposed among other things that in the future society would be divided, not by race, but by intelligence. One might argue that it is good for smart people to run things, but if the recent elections...
Phi Beta Cons (Free subscription) | 13/11/2008
A reader ponts out that, contra Charles Murray, higher levels of education result in higher pay regardless of IQ. Even average-IQ college grads earn m... . . .
The Future Uncertain (Free subscription) | 12/11/2008
Charles Murray is the only author whose books I will read simply because he wrote them. He has a profound gift for saying provocative things elegantly yet in a way that any reasonably educated person can understand. His books alternate between serious scholarly studies ( The Bell Curve - co-authored with Richard Herrnstein - and Human Accomplishment ) and essays, mostly on the relation...
Positive Liberty (Free subscription) | 11/11/2008
Podcast: Watch a podcast of yours truly discussing the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism with Ronald Hamowy, Charles Murray, and William Galston. David Kelley, Randy Barnett, and William Niskanen are among the cameo appearances. I haven’t reviewed it yet because I have this strange horror of watching myself on video (really, hearing my own voice). [...]
The Austrian Economists (Free subscription) | 08/11/2008
CATO Unbound has an interesting discussion on this essay by Charles Murray. I particular appreciated the various comments by Bryan Caplan.
Cato Unbound (Free subscription) | 22/10/2008
Before this conversation ends, I’d like to press Charles Murray and Pedro Carneiro on signaling: For Charles: In your view, why precisely does the market financially reward students for taking lots of classes that at best seem distantly related to job performance? You don’t seem ready to sign on to my signaling story. Do you have [...]
Positive Liberty (Free subscription) | 22/10/2008
Oh, what the hell. I’m a low-level public intellectual, so I get to say crazy stuff like this. Education is overrated. Not just the BA, which Charles Murray rightly critiques at Cato Unbound. It’s worse than that. Education itself is overrated. For a wide variety of reasons, it can’t possibly be [...]
