-At times, Murray's inability in his commentary to consider flaws in the _status quo_ seems like a blindness bordering on complicity—even while, simultaneously, I find many of his specific arguments convincing!
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-Of the criminal justice system, he writes:
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-> The social scientist's view of who commits crimes is a set of snapshots—the report of a crime, an arrest, the decision to prosecute, the charge on which the suspect is tried, the outcome of the prosecution, and the sentence for a guilty plea or verdict. At each step, the authorities are usually trying to get it right, but "getting it right" means different things. Decisions to prosecute depend on many factors besides the likelihood that the arrested person committed the crime (e.g., whether these is evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt if it goes to trial). The decision about the charges that will be filed is a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation.
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-This is all very "reasonable" by the methods and epistemology of Murray's world, and I'm afraid—not a figure of speech, actually afraid—that there's nothing I could say, no words I could possibly type to explain the cruel and capricious insanity of that world's "reasonableness" to those who haven't personally been on the other side, who have never been abused by a total institution like the "justice" system.
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-(Two three-day stints in the psych ward are [what did it to me](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/). Going to school might not be bad enough if you went to a good school.)
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-_The authorities are usually trying to get it right._ [by the authority's standards!!]
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-... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_.
+The next four chapters follow a formula: "Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", "Race Differences in Violent Crime", "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", and "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Violent Crime." (Those chapter titles felt awful just to type!! Am I really doing this?) Much of the value of these chapters is in the graphs and tables documenting statistics that many readers will be unfamiliar with. The scatterplots of nationally-representative test scores are interesting. The black–white gap _did_ shrink between '70s when it was about 1.3 standard deviations, until about the 1990s, but has been stubbornly stable since then at about 0.85 standard deviations (a.k.a. [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)). Murray estimates the current white–Latino difference at 0.62 standard deviations, and the current white–Asian difference at 0.3 standard deviations (favoring Asians).