Meritocracy: Places, Everyone!

Although The BellCurve represented Murray’s first published discussion of genes and intelligence—as tactical support for his preferred policies ending assistance to the poor—his co-author had been writing on the topic for more than two decades. Herrnstein’s initial interest in intelligence marked a radical departure from his previous work. As a Harvard graduate student in the early 1950s, he had studied with the famous behaviorist B.F. Skinner, specializing in operant conditioning with pigeons. Appointed to a junior faculty position at Harvard in 1958, he received promotion and tenure only three years later, after formulating the “matching law,” an important theoretical result predicting that, when an organism is offered two response alternatives, the ratio between them will match the ratio of reinforcements associated with each alternative. His reputation well established as one of the world’s experts on pigeon behavior, Herrnstein went on to occupy an endowed chair at Harvard.