at the Gstaad Symposium for Human Differentiation [see separate note], "[Murray] Rothbard had cited the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein on the genetic basis of IQ difference [...] Herrnstein became much better known decades later when, just before his death, he coauthored with [...] Charles Murray The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994)"
The book was treated as "a sign that the science of racial hierarchy was once again viable for popular discussion" (54)
Murray and Hernstein's efforts to factor in "cognitive differences caused apparently racialized patterns of structural inequality or discrimination in employment and education to vanish" (97)
they attempt to work out wages while "controlling for IQ," concluding that "[b]ecause they were less intelligent on average [...] Black Americans were being paid what they deserved"
"Herrenstein and Murray's brand of 'realism' seemed to grimly affirm an open-ended future of deepening racialized divides in achievement and wealth"; they themselves called "for America once again to try living with inequality"
Slobodian notes that this "crystallized the punitive mood of a decade that matched the 'end of welfare as we know it' with mass incarceration--pointedly replacing the carrot with the stick as the tool of social order. The prison population nearly doubled in the 1990s after more than doubling in the 1980s" (98)
Pat Buchanan claimed this book "does shoot a hole right through the heart of egalitarian socialism"
Slobodian notes that the book contained "scattered references to the journal Mankind Quarterly, founded and run since 1961 by open white supremacists," as well as a "pervasive reference to research by recipients of support from the Pioneer Fund founded in 1937 for the improvement of the white race"
"Mankind Quarterly was the flagship journal of a group of anthropologists and psychologists, most of whom specialized in psychometric techniques of intelligence management"