the ny times magazine interview you must read

below is by far, in my view, the best, most heated and fierce debroah solmon ny times magazine interview ever conducted.
The interview is with Charles Murray, who just wrote the great and real short "real education". He is a undoubtly a national treasure whom i find its nearly impossible to disagree with. i love how bold he is on Palin at the end. i really think this interview ended up with intellectual blows exchanged.

a must read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21wwln-Q4-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.

You’re not the first social scientist to knock the liberal arts, but you may be the first to insist that only 20 percent of all college students have the brains and abilities to understand their assigned reading. Eighty percent are not able to deal with college-level material, traditionally understood. Someone can sit down with Paul Samuelson’s textbook and stare at the pages and know what most of the words mean. That does not mean that they walk away from it understanding economics as it is taught in the textbook.

What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics? Oh, the world of work out there!

I’m sure you’re aware that unemployment is very high right now. There are very few unemployed first-rate electricians. I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician — that’s hard. If you want jobs that are in high demand, go to any kind of skilled labor. And by labor, I mean things that pay $30 or $40 an hour.

Do you see your new book as an extension of the “The Bell Curve,” which caused an uproar in 1994 by suggesting that people are only as promising as their I.Q. scores? In many ways, it is a distillation of things I’ve been thinking since “The Bell Curve.”

Europeans have historically defined themselves through inherited traits and titles, but isn’t America a country where we are supposed to define ourselves through acts of will? I wonder if there is a single, solitary, real-live public-school teacher who agrees with the proposition that it’s all a matter of will. To me, the fact that ability varies — and varies in ways that are impossible to change — is a fact that we learn in first grade.

I believe that given the opportunity, most people could do most anything. You’re out of touch with reality in that regard. You have not hung around with kids who are well in the lower half of the ability distribution.

Have you? For nearly two decades, you’ve been at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank in Washington. Why would a self-declared libertarian, the party that glorifies individualism, spend his career on the dole? But I am not spending my career on the dole. People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. — there is no government money — because they think the work we do is valuable.

Aren’t think tanks basically welfare for intellectuals? Actually, the interesting thing there is the extent to which it’s the think tanks in the last 15 years that have been producing the stuff that has had the most effect on the debate, as opposed to colleges.

What do you make of the fact that John McCain was ranked 894 in a class of 899 when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy? I like to think that the reason he ranked so low is that he was out drinking beer, as opposed to just unable to learn stuff.

What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.

She attended five colleges in six years. So what?

Why is the McCain clan so eager to advertise its anti-intellectualism? The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government. Probably the smartest president we’ve had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.