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Title: Response to Nielsen's Review of Inequality by Design
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Fischer, Claude S. Hout, Michael Jankowski, Martin Sanchez Lucas, Samuel Swidler, Ann Voss, Kim Arum, Richard |
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Response to Nielsen's Review of Inequality by Design Social Forces 76,4 (June 1998): 1539-1543. Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3005844 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: University of North Carolina Press Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Cognitive Ability; Intelligence Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This article is a response to François Nielsen's critical review of the book "Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth," by Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martin Sánchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler and Kim Voss. According to the authors, first Nielsen largely ignores the central argument of the book, one that is stated regularly: Explaining who gets ahead and who falls behind in the race for success explains nothing about systems of inequality. Second, Nielsen focuses on one chapter in IBD: chapter 4, "Who Wins, Who Loses?" It examines the "Bell Curve's" statistical analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. In defending "The Bell Curve" on this point, Nielsen misrepresents the analysis. He also slides in a critical but dubious assumption: that the AFQT is a measure of innate "cognitive ability" or "intelligence." Nielsen has two major criticisms of the re-modeling the NLSY data. First, he states that the corrected models fail to erase the AFQT score as a significant predictor of poverty. This is irrelevant. The issue is whether the AFQT score "dominates" other factors in explaining individual outcomes. Second, Nielsen charges that we use control variables especially years of schooling that are effects of "cognitive ability" and so bias the models given by the authors against the AFQT predictor. |
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Bibliography Citation
Fischer, Claude S., Michael Hout, Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Samuel Lucas, Ann Swidler, Kim Voss and Richard Arum. "Response to Nielsen's Review of Inequality by Design." Social Forces 76,4 (June 1998): 1539-1543.
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