The Just Meritocracy: IQ, Class Mobility, and American Social Policy

(Hardback)

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According to this provocative work, class mobility is significantly mediated by human intelligence, and intelligence itself is significantly heritable. Liberal democratic and libertarian conservative social policies require substantial revision in light of these findings. New forms of socioenvironmental and genomic intervention recommend themselves. The author provides a detailed investigation of the facts surrounding human mental ability, its measurement, inheritability, possible neurobiological underpinnings, and its role as a currency in human mate choice. He links human mental ability with educational attainment, occupational attainment, occupational prestige, and earned income. The ethical and policy implications are profound for both liberal democratic and libertarian social thought.

Reviews

This book is well worth reading. Although written by a seemingly dedicated advocate of Marxist egalitarian morality, it is an encouraging sign that the walls that have kept academic sociolgists and anthropologists mired in ignorance of biological reality are beginning to crumble. Hopefully Kamolnick's book, despite its bias in favor of radical social engineering, will help to close the fissures that currently separate the hard sciences from the social sciences, and allow a greater degree of biological realism to enter the discourse of future generations of social scientists. * The Mankind Quarterly *

Author Bio

Paul Kamolnick is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at East Tennessee State University.