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, DC. Murray's work is highly controversial. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984) discussed the American welfare system. He co-wrote the book The Bell Curve (1994), co-authored with Richard Herrnstein, in which the authors argue that in American society, in the course of the 20th century, 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 claimed 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. Early life 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. "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. "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." 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". Murray earned a BA in history