Charles Murray (political scientist)

Charles Murray
Murray in 2013
Born	Charles Alan Murray (1943-01-08) January 8, 1943 (age 81) Newton, Iowa, U.S.
Spouses	Suchart Dej-Udom ​ ​ (m. 1966; div. 1980)​ Catherine Bly Cox ​ (m. 1983)​
Children	4
Awards	Irving Kristol Award (2009) Kistler Prize (2011)
Scholarly background
Education	Harvard University (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MA, PhD)
Thesis	Investment and Tithing in Thai Villages: A Behavioral Study of Rural Modernization (1974)
Doctoral advisor	Lucian Pye
Scholarly work
Discipline	Political science
School or tradition	Right-libertarianism
Institutions	American Institutes for Research Manhattan Institute for Policy Research American Enterprise Institute
Main interests	Race and intelligence Social welfare policy
Notable works	Losing Ground (1984) The Bell Curve (1994) Coming Apart (2012)

Charles Alan Murray (/ˈmɜːri/; born January 8, 1943) is an American political scientist. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.^[1]

Murray's work is highly controversial.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984) discussed the American welfare system. In the book The Bell Curve (1994), he and co-author Richard Herrnstein argue that in 20th-century American society, intelligence became a better predictor than parental socioeconomic status or education level of many individual outcomes, including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, and crime, and that social welfare programs and education efforts to improve social outcomes for the disadvantaged are largely counterproductive. The Bell Curve also claims that average intelligence quotient (IQ) differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin, a view that is now considered discredited by mainstream science.^[7][8][9]