ABSTRACT
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray are interested in the causes rather than the symptoms of America’s social problems. They argue that intelligence has been ignored for too long and that without considering it, it is impossible to understand the nation’s current social challenges. They want to understand the roots of inequality in order to find new ways of solving the social challenges it creates. Herrnstein and Murray remain thematically consistent and offer a broad set of statistical analyses to support their work. But their methodology and their policy recommendations received intense criticism from those on the political left wing. Herrnstein and Murray present widening inequality along racial and class lines as a feature of US development in the twentieth century. This widening inequality has occurred despite decades of federal programs aimed at improving the lives of impoverished groups; this is a challenging reality for many scholars and policy-makers.
