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My professional background consisted of evaluating specific programs the government was sponsoring in education or social services or, when I was in Thailand, rural development.
Charles Murray
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.
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.
Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families.
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.
No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions.
But in all cases when you have problems in your interactions with your boss, there's one more question you have to ask yourself: To what extent is your boss at fault, and to what extent are you a neophyte about supervisor-subordinate relationships?
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.
We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they're poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they're all underneath it.
The religiosity of Americans I don't think has ever been determined by how much money they make.
I don't think there is a libertarian position on abortion. Maybe if you took a poll of libertarians, it might be that a majority would be pro-choice, but, the libertarian position is to protect the rights of individuals against the use of force and fraud.
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.
White supremacist? Let's see: if you have a guy who was married for 13 years to an Asian woman and who has two lovely Asian daughters, wouldn't that disqualify him from membership in the white supremacist club?
To equate IQ with human virtue or wisdom or character or a whole variety of other of the most important measures of a value of a person is ridiculous.
Trumpism' is the expression by the white working class of a lot of legitimate grievances that it has with the ruling class.
When I'm talking about the white working class, here's what I'm defining: high school degree, no more, and working in a blue-collar job or a low-skilled service job. When I'm talking about the white, upper-middle class, I'm talking about people who work in the professions or managerial jobs and have at least a college degree.
People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. - there is no government money - because they think the work we do is valuable.
I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.
Probably the smartest president we've had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.
It's much more fun to talk to an audience that includes a lot of people who disagree with me.
In 1960, it was still - no nostalgia here - an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods.
When you talk to people in working class communities about men, the women aren't telling you that their guys are looking desperately for work but can't find it. An amazing number of them aren't interested in working.
I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician - that's hard.
I think we ought to strip our laws and regulations of everything that rewards or recommends or requires preferential treatment by race. I think that is one of the single most unfortunate changes of the 1960s and it is one that we can change at no cost.
It's great if someone has a road-to-Damascus experience, but I think that deep and lasting faith is a lifetime project, and includes a lot of homework.
Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.
I am no longer a complete pariah in some academic quarters.
We are under a moral obligation to do our best to realize the best that human beings can be. To neglect that obligation is to waste our lives.
IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.
My family was pretty much the way a family was supposed to be, a Norman Rockwell kind of family, I'm afraid. I say 'I'm afraid' because it will just confirm my critics' view that my views about family are unrealistic.
I would like to have seen millions of votes left blank for president to send a message there are millions of voters out there who do not like ideologue or Donald Trump.
I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do.
I had friends, but I was always a bit weird.
The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.
Certainly, I find that 'Mere Christianity' speaks to me. So why am I still an agnostic? Beats me.
The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.
Hey, I'm a libertarian. I think out of control spending messes up everything.
The new upper class devotes incredible amounts of effort to raising their kids but that also includes incredible amounts of effort in getting their kids into the right preschool in some elite communities which I think is going a little bit too far.
For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.
I hate reading reviews.
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.
I think that, in the '60s, you had lots of things going on in the culture which tended to decrease attraction to marriage, attraction to religion, and which tended to increase attraction to crime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity.
The relationship between heredity and IQ in human beings is well established. But that does not mean that if you have a group difference, an ethnic difference, that difference must also be genetic.
I have always believed in enforcing the border, and doing that before you do amnesty.
Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? Because my feeling is, if you can't answer yes to that question, you are in big trouble in trying to understand the country you live in.
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