The people who run the country have enormous influence over the culture, politics, and the economics of the country. And increasingly, they haven't a clue about how most of America lives. They have never experienced it.
IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.
I think that a great deal of what made America special is lost beyond recall, and I don't have any good policy ideas that I am at all confident will go very far in bringing that back.
I want to give people a basic income, so that if you're working hard, doing the best you can, that you can not just survive, but you can have a decent life.
Hardly anybody realizes that the first couple of chapters of 'Coming Apart' were basically a recapitulation of the argument in 'The Bell Curve.' That's how little people focused on 'The Bell Curve's' real message.
There's a big difference between being good and being nice. Being good involves tough choices - tough love.
I have always believed in enforcing the border, and doing that before you do amnesty.
People are starting to notice the great divide. The Tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets.
In 1960, it was still - no nostalgia here - an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods.
You know, there is an image of me out there for which advocacy of a universal basic income is inconsistent. It doesn't fit the narrative because this is supposed to be the hardhearted, racist, sexist, homophobe, Charles Murray. And he wants to increase spending on the poor? That doesn't fit.
We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that's increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America.
Whatever the Victorians did right in England, we need to resuscitate over here. In the late 19th century, the entire English population were propagandised into buying into a certain code of morals. I would be happy if we could emulate that in some way in America.
I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and - as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump - I can sympathize with that.
There's a big difference in outcomes between children who grow up without a father and children who grow up with a married set of parents.
Ecumenical niceness is just pabulum.
The religiosity of Americans I don't think has ever been determined by how much money they make.
If we want to jack up the tax rates on the really rich, the amounts of money that would bring in are trivial compared to jacking up rates on the middle class.
A guaranteed basic income has the potential for making civic organizations, families and neighborhoods much more vital, helpful and responsive than they have been in decades.
IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable certain things that inferior chip speed will not enable. The same is true about just about any human attribute you can think of that has no relationship to IQ whatsoever.
I am no longer a complete pariah in some academic quarters.
