Charles Murray
Charles Alan Murray (b. 8 January 1943) is an American political scientist, sociologist, and author. Since 1990, Murray has been a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a patriotic think tank. He identifies as a libertarian. Left-wing agitators, BLM, Antifa and other enemies of free speech accuse him of being a "white supremacist" because of his academic views on race and intelligence.
Life
Over his career, the married father of four has published dozens of books and articles. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (1984), which discussed the American welfare system, was widely read and discussed, and influenced government policy. However, he may be most known for The Bell Curve, co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein in 1994, which discusses the role of IQ in American society. Murray and Herrnstein discussed how the distribution of intelligence across races seemed to be different, with blacks on average having a lower IQ than whites and whites lower than Asians.
Murray recommended the elimination of all racial preference programs and the issuance of educational vouchers. He also advocated the repeal of all income transfer programs. In their place, he supported the reinstatement of short-term unemployment insurance. Murray concluded that human beings need self-respect born of satisfaction with their own achievements to be happy, and that the modern state too often deprives people of the opportunity to do things for themselves and their communities.
Later books include Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (2003), Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012), and Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class (2020). His articles have appeared in many publications including Commentary, The New Republic, National Review, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, The Public Interest, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. His awards include the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award and the Bradley Prize.
- Murray was born in 1943 in Newton, Iowa, a small town in which the main employer was the Maytag Corporation. The sense of community and trust to be found in America’s small towns has been a reference point for much of his work, which often focuses on the disintegration of community in the second half of the twentieth century. Murray attended Harvard University. Following his graduation in 1965, he joined the Peace Corps and assisted villagers in the Thai countryside. After two years with the Corps, Murray remained in Thailand for several years, working for social research firms. This work in Thailand informed Murray’s doctoral dissertation in political science at M.I.T. During his time in Thai villages, Murray had come to see that aid programs were not necessarily beneficial. Speedy change unsettled village life and displaced traditions that had evolved over decades or centuries, and he observed that governments often do not understand the priorities of their citizens. After completing his Ph.D., Murray went to work in Washington, D.C., for the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a nonpartisan social research organization. There Murray worked on evaluations of government programs in the areas of welfare, public education, criminal justice, and the prevention of family breakdown. Murray left AIR to write about the failures of government welfare programs. Taking a position with the Manhattan Institute, in 1984 he published his first heralded book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980. Murray showed that the welfare policies advanced under Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” often worsened rather than improved the condition of the poor. The book was the first of Murray’s books to generate national controversy. His 1988 book, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, dealt with the question of how one goes about living a worthwhile and satisfying life. This subject reappeared in different ways in his later books American Exceptionalism and The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead. In both books, Murray speaks of the importance to an individual of honest and meaningful labor. Implicit in this simple idea is a critique of nearly all government welfare programs, which can rob the individual of the satisfactions of personal effort, striving, and achievement. In Pursuit includes examples of the failure of government initiatives such as job-training programs. In 1989 Murray published a detailed history of NASA’S Apollo program, written in collaboration with his wife, Catherine Bly Cox. Unlike Tom Wolfe’s book about the Mercury astronauts, The Right Stuff, Murray and Cox’s Apollo focused on the engineers and scientists who created the U.S. lunar landing program.[1]
Quotes
- Libertarianism is a vision of how people should be able to live their lives—as individuals, striving to realize the best they have within them; together, cooperating for the common good without compulsion. It is a vision of how people may endow their lives with meaning—living according to their deepest beliefs and taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions.[2]
Bibliography (excerpt)
- A Behavioral Study of Rural Modernization: Social and Economic Change in Thai Villages, Praeger Publishers, 1977.
- Beyond Probation: Juvenile Corrections and the Chronic Delinquent (with Louis A. Cox, Jr.), SAGE Publishing, 1979.
- Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, Basic Books, 1984, ISBN 0465042317. Analyzes welfare reform.
- In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, Simon & Schuster, 1989, ISBN 0671687433.
- Apollo: The Race to the Moon (with Catherine Bly Cox), Simon & Schuster, 1989, ISBN 978-0671706258.
- The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (with Richard J. Herrnstein), Free Press, 1994, ISBN 0029146739.
- What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Broadway Books, 1997, ISBN 0553069284.
- "IQ and economic success", The Public Interest (1997): 128, 21–35.
- Income Inequality and IQ, AEI Press, 1998.
- The Underclass Revisited, AEI Press, 1999.
- Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, HarperCollins, 2003, ISBN 006019247X. A quantification and ranking of well-known scientists and artists.
- In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace The Welfare State, AEI Press, March 2006, ISBN 0844742236.
- Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality, Crown Forum, August 2008, ISBN 978-0307405388.
- Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Crown Forum, 2012, ISBN 0307453421.
- The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life, Crown Business, 2014, ISBN 978-0804141444.
- By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, Crown Forum, 2015, ISBN 978-0385346511.
- Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Twelve, 2020, ISBN 978-1538744017
- Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, Encounter Books, 2021, ISBN 978-1641771979
