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Among our cultural and intellectual leaders, the hot
topic is an exquisitely promoted book by Richard J.
Hernnstein and Charles Murray, called The Bell
Curve.
The topic is so hot that it has garnered scores of magazine covers and talk show appearances. The Bell Curve even inspired a fervent protest last week when the surviving author spoke in Denver.
Familiar to all students of statistics, a bell curve displays the distribution of some trait among a population. There are lots of folks in the middle, and as you go left or right from the center line, the population diminishes.
All sorts of mensurable human qualities -- height, weight, American household income before the Reagan presidency -- follow this bell curve.
Among those qualities is intelligence, or if not precisely intelligence, at least the ability to perform well on IQ tests.
The median IQ score for Asian-Americans is somewhat
higher than that for white
Americans, and the median
score for those Americans who identify themselves as
black
on forms is about 15 points lower than that
for whites.
And so what?
Statistical groupings don't tell us anything about individuals in any population, and besides, what's the point of fretting about intelligence? It's not as though American society encourages or cherishes that trait.
For instance, the current cultural icon is a character
named Forrest Gump -- an idiot. Before that, Beavis and
Butthead were the rage, and if their combined IQ extends
into double digits, then we need some new tests. There was
the movie Regarding Henry,
wherein virtue results
from the loss of frontal lobe functions. In Superman sagas,
the bad guy is usually Lex Luthor, who boasts a monstrous
IQ.
That's Hollywood, of course. But Hollywood panders to a mass market, that is, the same general public which votes.
One way to get ahead in a campaign is to be a plain
ol' country boy
while your opponent personifies all
that is anti-American because he's a double-domed Ivy
League intellectual.
The fear of being labeled as a
member of this despised minority was so potent that George
Bush, a Yale graduate, felt compelled to surround himself
with horseshoes, pork rinds and Oak Ridge Boys tapes.
Another useful tactic: Take some rather complex issue
like international trade, announce a moronic solution that
would shame even a newspaper columnist, and proclaim, in a
peckerwood accent never associated with scholarship,
It's just that simple, folks.
Observe the groves of academe, where you might naively
think that intelligence matters. See bright children gain
the hatred of their classmates for breaking the
curve
or acting white.
Try to parse the prose
produced by school administrators or officers of the
teachers' unions. Look elsewhere for signs of intelligent
life.
Further, our economy relies on stupidity: The tobacco industry. Our state lottery. The emerging prison-industrial complex. The general run of network television. A publishing industry that makes Fabio and Millie into best-selling authors.
Now I firmly support my right, and yours, to be stupid.
The authors of The Bell Curve
may or may not have
meant well, but the real problem is that their topic was
irrelevant. If they had wanted to study what it takes to
succeed in this country, they would have examined one of
these curves.
The Ball Curve: Inspect the statistical relationship between athletic skill and the attainment of many of the good things that America has to offer -- easy classes, adulation, assignations with comely cheerleaders, the need for financial advisors at age 21, publicly-financed facilities for the display of one's sporting talents, celebrity endorsement contracts and an outpouring of public interest and sympathy when on trial for heinous crimes.
The Bill Curve: An inquiry into the number of Treasury Bills controlled by the trust funds established by one's grandparents, and the subject's later success in life.
The Boll Curve: Nothing symbolizes the South quite so
much as the cotton boll, and this study would examine the
relationship between a candidate's perceived Southern
qualities
and his consequent political success.
Positive attributes include the number of guns owned by the subject, his willingness to deploy them on doves and trespassers and his televised presence at stock-car races and military festivals.
The Bull Curve: Although corporate America has been down-sizing, it still plays an important in the national culture. While other studies have examined factors like dedication and intelligence, the Bull Curve will focus on other traits.
We have developed new ways to measure such vital skills
as bull-slinging, brown-nosing and apple-polishing, and we
can group them into an Obeisance Factor.
These
scores will be applied to standard random distributions of
the corporate work force, and then compared to promotion
and compensation rates.
It is believed that the resulting Bull Curve will show no correlation between IQ and success, and a strong correlation between Obeisance Factor and success.
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