Kevin Carey, Education Sector's policy director, regularly advertises that he has very little if any respect for Charles Murray, the political scientist who famously coauthored The Bell Curve in 1994. The latest such advertisement: Carey calls Murray's piece in yesterday's Washington Post ?Murray's latest attempt to re-spin his life project of promoting IQ-based genetic determinism.? I read the piece in question and don't understand what about it rankles Carey?that is, I don't understand how the article, which argues that the Tea Party is in some ways correct to assail a ?New Elite,? is doing anything to advance genetic determinism. Murray mentions ?genius genes,? yes, but the ?New Elite? he identifies is culturally, not necessarily cognitively, separate from the American ?mainstream.? Carey is a bit wobbly, too, when he attacks Murray's sketch of this ?New Elite??i.e., people who watch Mad Men but not The Price is Right, who read lots of books but not the Left Behind novels?as ?hilariously incorrect.? Carey claims, contra Murray, that today's Ivy League graduates are actually annoyingly ?culturally omnivorous? in their information grazing. But I don't know. Do fresh-faced Harvard grads really know?much about the Left Behind series?and monster trucks??And even if more than a few Ivy Leaguers do know about such things, do they?not tend to?approach them in a sort of detached, ironic, hipper-than-thou way? The ?New Elites? may be able to name Bob Barker's replacement on The Price is Right, they may even watch the show, but they don't really respect or like it in the manner that lots of supposedly ?regular? Americans do. That, I think, is what Murray is getting at.
But, frankly, should we care what Murray is getting at? Is speculating on the nature and characteristics of a vague class of ?Elites? really worth the time? Probably not.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow