1.  Very good point.

2.  Have their been any diaries on the Bell Curve (which I have not read)?  I did a quick search, and found this interesting exchange:

technolopolitical: With respect to relative poverty within a society, one would expect social sorting processes to aggregate disfunctional people, and that for many disfunctional people, low earnings are just one aspect of a syndrome. Causality between poverty and disfunction obviously runs both ways. (I emphasise that this is a statement about statistical patterns, not a generalisation that applies to everyone in a group.)

Writing this suggests a hypothesis to me, which is that societies that are more meritocratic tend to have a greater incidence of social pathologies among members of their low-income quintiles. This seems testable.

redstar: Writing this suggests a hypothesis to me, which is that societies that are more meritocratic tend to have a greater incidence of social pathologies among members of their low-income quintiles. This seems testable.

I'd be careful with this if I were you, lest the bona fides of (presumably anti-social) pathologies be determined by the dominant class(es) in said societies. Tyranny of the majority and all that...

afew: There's indeed a well-known work that can be seen in the light you suggest, The Bell Curve.

And it's actually encouraging to see that their spin is pathetic.

Maybe so.  But it still works.  People take heart in it, and find justification of their mindsets in it.  That is why I found this piece so scary, moreso because I felt out of my depth trying to "deconstruct" to the person who forwarded it to me.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.