Charles Murray (political scientist)

"Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s."

Charles Alan Murray (born January 8, 1943) is an American political scientist.

He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

Murray's work is highly controversial.

Of Scotch-Irish ancestry, Murray was born on January 8, 1943, in Newton, Iowa, and raised in a Republican, "Norman Rockwell kind of family" that stressed moral responsibility.

He is the son of Frances B. (née Patrick) and Alan B. Murray, an executive for the Maytag Company.

His youth was marked by a rebellious and pranksterish sensibility.

As a teen, he played pool at a hangout for juvenile delinquents, developed debating skills, espoused labor unionism (to his parents' annoyance), and on one occasion helped burn a cross that he and his friends had erected near a police station.

Murray credits the SAT with helping him get out of Newton and into Harvard.

Murray divorced Dej-Udom after fourteen years of marriage and three years later married Catherine Bly Cox (born 1949, Newton, Iowa), an English literature instructor at Rutgers University.

Cox was initially dubious when she saw his conservative reading choices, and she spent long hours "trying to reconcile his shocking views with what she saw as his deep decency".

His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984) discussed the American welfare system.

"Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover," wrote Murray.

Murray earned a BA in history from Harvard University in 1965 and a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1974.

Murray left for the Peace Corps in Thailand in 1965, staying abroad for six years.

At the beginning of this period, Murray kindled a romance with his Thai Buddhist language instructor (in Hawaii), Suchart Dej-Udom, the daughter of a wealthy Thai businessman, who was "born with one hand and a mind sharp enough to outscore the rest of the country on the college entrance exam".

Murray subsequently proposed by mail from Thailand, and their marriage began the following year, a move that Murray now considers youthful rebellion.

"I'm getting married to a one-handed Thai Buddhist," he said.

"This was not the daughter-in-law that would have normally presented itself to an Iowa couple."

Murray credits his time in the Peace Corps in Thailand with his lifelong interest in Asia.

"There are aspects of Asian culture as it is lived that I still prefer to Western culture, 30 years after I last lived in Thailand," says Murray.

"Two of my children are half-Asian. Apart from those personal aspects, I have always thought that the Chinese and Japanese civilizations had elements that represented the apex of human accomplishment in certain domains."

His tenure with the Peace Corps ended in 1968, and during the remainder of his time in Thailand he worked on an American Institutes for Research (AIR) covert counter-insurgency program for the US military in cooperation with the CIA.

From 1974 to 1981, Murray worked for the AIR eventually becoming chief political scientist.

While at AIR, Murray supervised evaluations in the fields of urban education, welfare services, daycare, adolescent pregnancy, services for the elderly, and criminal justice.

By the 1980s, his marriage to Suchart Dej-Udom had been unhappy for years, but "his childhood lessons on the importance of responsibility brought him slowly to the idea that divorce was an honorable alternative, especially with young children involved."

From 1981 to 1990, he was a fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute where he wrote Losing Ground, which heavily influenced the welfare reform debate in 1996, and In Pursuit.

In 1989, Murray and Cox co-authored a book on the Apollo program, Apollo: Race to the Moon.

Murray attends and Cox is a member of a Quaker meeting in Virginia, and they live in Frederick County, Maryland near Washington, D.C.

Murray has four children, two by each wife.

While his second wife, Catherine Bly Cox, had converted to Quakerism, Murray still considered himself an agnostic.

Murray describes himself as a "wannabe Christian" who takes faith seriously but has yet to acquire deep faith.

Murray continued research work at AIR, one of the largest of the private social science research organizations, upon his return to the US.

He has been a fellow of the conservative American Enterprise Institute since 1990 and was a frequent contributor to The Public Interest, a journal of conservative politics and culture.

In the book The Bell Curve (1994), he and co-author Richard Herrnstein argue that in 20th-century American society, intelligence became a better predictor than parental socioeconomic status or education level of many individual outcomes, including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, and crime, and that social welfare programs and education efforts to improve social outcomes for the disadvantaged are largely counterproductive.

The Bell Curve also claims that average intelligence quotient (IQ) differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin, a view that is now considered discredited by mainstream science.

However, in a 2012 op-ed published in The New York Times, Murray argued in favor of removing the SAT's role in college admissions, commenting that the SAT "has become a symbol of new-upper-class privilege, as people assume (albeit wrongly) that high scores are purchased through the resources of private schools and expensive test preparation programs".

Recalling his time in Thailand in a 2014 episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol, Murray commented that his worldview was fundamentally shaped by his time there, "Essentially, most of what you read in my books I learned in Thai villages."

He continued:, "I suddenly was struck first by the enormous discrepancy between what Bangkok thought was important to the villagers and what the villagers wanted out of government. And the second thing I got out of it was that when the government change agent showed up, the village went to hell in terms of its internal governance."

Murray's work in the Peace Corps and subsequent social research in Thailand for research firms associated with the US government led to the subject of his doctoral thesis in political science at MIT, in which he argued against bureaucratic intervention in the lives of Thai villagers.