Ron Unz? writes in 2012: Look, Murray has a long track-record, and that track-record shows him to be an incompetent and a shill. When you’re the most prominent public figure writing about extremely serious and controversial topics, this is a huge problem. Let me cite a few examples.
Back in late 1980s, I read Murray’s anti-Welfare “Losing Ground,” which I thought was quite good. Obviously, I noticed he’d left out any mention of the absolutely crucial HBD/IQ role and framed his entire critique in Ayn Randian terms, but I certainly didn’t blame him. After all, authors need to eat, don’t they?
But then after his big IQ book “The Bell Curve” came out, he was asked about that in an interview, and claimed that when Losing Ground came out, he’d been totally ignorant of IQ/HBD, and never dreamed it was a factor in anything until Herrnstein had contacted him, and unfortunately, I tend to believe him. Herrnstein/Jensen/etc. had published their stuff in the late 1960s and had gotten *massive* media attention, yet Murray had spent decades as a professional social scientist focusing on welfare/underclass type issues, and had never heard of any of that research. This is not a good sign.
Next, Murray’s Bell Curve book was extremely long and full but not very good and got lots of things confused. Anyway, it didn’t really say much that his co-author Herrnstein (a very serious scholar) hadn’t already indicated 25 years earlier back in 1969. In fact, I suspect Murray was really just writing up and popularizing Herrnstein’s research, which he didn’t fully understand in depth, and this turned out to be a *huge* problem since Herrnstein died just as the book came out. I remember seeing Murray on some TV show getting hostile questions from opposing scholars, and he didn’t really handle himself very well, since Herrnstein wasn’t around to pass him the answers.
Recall also that Murray claimed that for IQ-deterministic reasons there would be a *gigantic* growth in the national white underclass, just as disorderly and violent as the existing black urban underclass, and therefore by now all our cities would have become deadly no-go ghetto zones on the way to American “custodial democracy.” Instead, crime has since totally collapsed nationwide.
Afterwards, he mostly wrote silly libertarian books to impress his silly libertarian friends and paymasters, notably proposing to solve our social problems by having the government annually distribute $10,000 worth of free crack, er, I mean $10,000 in *cash* to everyone living in ghettos. He generally avoided IQ issues, except for a long article a few years ago in Commentary, in which he endlessly praised the unimaginable genius of the Jewish Race, and (as I recall) suggested that one major proof that the Jews possessed the most brilliant minds in history was that they had discovered the only true religion. Presumably, Murray wanted to have his stipend raised so he could buy a fancier house.
