The IQ Controversy

In his discussion of my work, Philip Green tries to rescue egalitarianism by sacrificing data. He will seem to have succeeded only to those who take his word for the facts of the matter. I will strive in this response to focus on the most relevant of those facts, suppressing my impulse to answer his ad hominen style of argument in kind.

The message I would most like to convey to the readers of Dissent is that the findings on IQ and social status that Mr. Green disputes need not be taken as inimical to socialism defined as the public ownership of the means of production. But, as I’ll try to show forthwith, those findings are profoundly inimical to egalitarianism, the idea that mainly the political system an...