Almost three decades ago, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Its release was a watershed moment in the popular reception of science, in part because it purported to solve, once and for all, the seemingly intractable problem of whether nature or nurture were decisive in determining people’s life outcomes. The Bell Curve provided an explanation of class inequality in the United States that laid the blame of differential social outcomes on genetically entrenched differences between groups.

The political implications of these arguments were not hard to imagine. Already in the 1970s, economic slowdown and the abandonment of the New Deal project had created a context in which politicians were beginning to acclimatize themselves to a world in which redistribution as an aim of politics had been abandoned. Inequality was no longer the fault of an economic system, but the result of what politicians across both aisles described as a “culture of poverty.” Talk of the underclass, a barely civilized subsection of society, became all the rage as politicians looked for ways of blaming ordinary people for their inability to tackle the causes of deindustrialization, unemployment, and poverty.

The Bell Curve merged a culture of poverty argument with hereditarianism, which is the position that the causes of inequality are inborn and unavoidable. A meritocratic system, Herrnstein and Murray argued, metes out rewards of status and wealth based on the inborn talent of individuals. In systems where social mobility is more or less impossible, such as in a feudal society, genetics matters little for the difference between prince and peasant. Liberal capitalist societies, as Herrnstein and Murray argue, allow for social mobility and natural ability to exert a strong influence on the eventual social positions of individuals. As the generations go on, class becomes genetically entrenched and, ultimately, puts hard limits on the possibilities of social mobility. Similar dynamics of ingrained genetic difference were also, the authors argued, responsible for the persistence of racial inequality.