The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

by Richard J. Herrnstein

  Try this thought experiment on yourself. If all antidiscrimination law were rescinded tomorrow, would you (if you are an employer) hire whites in preference to blacks or Latinos? Would you (if you are an employee) begin looking for workplaces where you did not have to work with blacks or Latinos? Would you (if you are a customer) seek out stores and services that did not have black or Latino personnel? We put the issue that way to expose a strange dissonance among Americans. We are confident that the answer to all of those questions by virtually all of the white readers of this book is an emphatic, deeply felt “no.” May we even suggest that many of you would feel much happier about what you were doing if, as an employer, you spent your time concentrating on whether a minority applicant was the right person for the job rather than worrying about whether the applicant was likely to sue you if you turned him down; that, as an employee, you would find it a blessed relief to work in an office with black or Latino colleagues where it could be taken for granted by everyone that the personnel office had hired all of you using the same yardstick; that, as a consumer of services, you wish you could choose a surgeon who happens to be an ethnic minority, because you could be confident that his degree meant the same thing for everyone who received it.

  We have no doubt that all of the above statements are true for the vast majority of our readers, and yet many people are convinced that the population as a whole would take advantage of the situation if affirmative action were ended. Talk about it with your friends, and you will find it to be a commonplace not limited to yourself. Although they too are authentically committed to treating people fairly regardless of race, color, or creed, they worry that massive bigotry still exists and will bring back the bad old days as soon as the heavy hand of the government regulation is lifted from them. By odd happenstance, the people one knows personally are much more fair-minded than the people one doesn’t know personally.

  Is this really true? That bigotry still exists is incontestable. But that does not mean that bigotry would prevail in the American job market as of the end of the twentieth century if the vast machinery of antidiscrimination law did not exist. Much of what we have presented in this chapter about occupational gains by blacks in the years before and after 1964 suggests the opposite. The civil rights movement authentically raised white awareness of the oppression and exploitation of blacks in the job market. The trendlines in both white behavior and black outcomes began to move in the right direction, gathering speed. The civil rights legislation came along at the same time and probably tweaked the slopes of those trendlines in some instances. But the great truth about the 1960s was not that the nation finally enacted the civil rights laws but that the American people were finally and inexorably moving in the right direction anyway. We are asking that you consider seriously the proposition that it is feasible to remove antidiscrimination law, replacing it with vigorous enforcement of the time-honored American principle that all citizens are equal before the law.

  As in the case of college admissions, some economic and occupational reshuffling would occur. Some minorities would fail to get jobs that they get now. If, for example, the Washington Police Department returns to a policy of hiring the best-qualified candidates, a smaller proportion of those new police would be black. Wherever else standards have been lowered to increase the number of minorities in a workplace, the number of minorities in those positions in that workplace would probably diminish. On the other hand, the quality of the Washington police force is likely to improve, which will be of tangible benefit to the hundreds of thousands of blacks who live in that city. Minorities in all walks of life will have lifted from them the post-1964 form of second-class citizenship that affirmative action has imposed on them.

  Much of the reshuffling that may be expected will not be bad even for those who are reshuffled. As matters stand, newly hired minority executives in corporations often enjoy short-term benefits (higher pay and status at the front end than new-graduates could ordinarily expect) but a career dead end. Blacks in companies that do business with the federal government are routinely used in highly visible positions as evidence of affirmative action compliance and diverted from the more pedestrian but ultimately more beneficial apprenticeship positions that the white employees have no choice but to serve. Minority businesspeople are channeled into the minority set-aside game, learning how to serve as fronts for contracts that are actually carried out by whites, instead of running the business itself. Affirmative action has deformed many aspects of American life, not least in twisting the ways in which minorities must try to get ahead.

  We will not try to estimate what the effects of doing away with job discrimination legislation would be for business productivity. The effects would vary widely by industry and location in any case, from trivial to substantial. Nor will we spend much time talking about the benefits for whites, except to say that these benefits should be counted. It is easy for highly educated whites with many options to look benignly on affirmative action. It has little effect on their job prospects. For a young white man with fewer advantages who has wanted to be a firefighter all his life and is passed over in favor of a less-qualified minority or female candidate, the costs loom larger. To dismiss his disappointment and the hardships worked on him just because his skin is white and his sex is male is a peculiarly common—and cruel—reaction of people who burst with indignation at every other kind of injustice.

  Whatever their precise amounts, the benefits to productivity and to fairness of ending the antidiscrimination laws are substantial. But our largest reason for wanting to scrap job discrimination law is our belief that the system of affirmative action, in education and the workplace alike, is leaking a poison into the American soul. This nation does not have the option of ethnic balkanization. The increasing proportions of ethnic minorities—Latino, East Asian, South Asian, African, East European—make it more imperative, not less, that we return to the melting pot as metaphor and color blindness as the ideal. Individualism is not only America’s heritage. It must be its future.

  Chapter 21

  The Way We Are Headed

  In this penultimate chapter we speculate about the impact of cognitive stratification on American life and government. Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:

  An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.

  A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.

  A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.

  Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. Among the other casualties of this process would be American civil society as we have known it. Like other apocalyptic visions, this one is pessimistic, perhaps too much so. On the other hand, there is much to be pessimistic about.

  RECAPITULATION: THE INVISIBLE MIGRATION

  As we described in Part I, the cognitive elite refers to people in the top percentiles of cognitive ability who, over the course of the American twentieth century, have been part of a vast but nearly invisible migration. The migration does not reveal itself in masses of humanity crossing frontiers but in countless bits of data about the movement of individuals across the levels of society. Like all other great migrations, this one too will transform both the place people left and the place they go.

  At the beginning of the century, the great majority of people in the top 5 or 10 percent of the intelligence distribution were not college educated, often not even high school educated, and they lived their lives scattered almost indistinguishably among the rest of the population. Their interests were just as variegated. Many were small businessmen or farmers, sharing the political outlook of those groups. Many worked on assembly lines or as skilled craftsmen. The top of the cognitive ability distributio
n probably included leaders of the labor movement and of community organizations. Among the smart women, a few had professional careers of their own, but most of them kept house, reared children, and were often the organizing forces of their religious and social communities.

  People from the top of the cognitive ability distribution lived next door to people who were not so smart, with whose children their own children went to school. They socialized with, went to church with, and married people less bright than themselves as a matter of course. This was not an egalitarian utopia that we are trying to recall. On the contrary, communities were stratified by wealth, religion, class, ethnic background, and race. The stratifications may have been stark, even bitter, but people were not stratified by cognitive ability.

  As the century progressed, the historical mix of intellectual abilities at all levels of American society thinned as intelligence rose to the top. The upper end of the cognitive ability distribution has been increasingly channeled into higher education, especially the top colleges and professional schools, thence into high-IQ occupations and senior managerial positions, as Part I detailed. The upshot is that the scattered brightest of the early twentieth century have congregated, forming a new class.

  Membership in this new class, the cognitive elite, is gained by high IQ; neither social background, nor ethnicity, nor lack of money will bar the way. But once in the club, usually by age eighteen, members begin to share much else as well. Among other things, they will come to run much of the country’s business. In the private sector, the cognitive elite dominates the ranks of CEOs and the top echelon of corporate executives. Smart people have no doubt always had the advantage in commerce and industry, but their advantage has grown as the barriers against the “wrong” nationalities, ethnicities, religions, or socioeconomic origins have been dismantled. Meanwhile, the leaders in medicine, law, science, print journalism, television, the film and publishing industries, and the foundation world come largely from the cognitive elite. Almost all of the leading figures in academia are part of it. In Washington, the top echelons of federal officialdom, special interest groups, think tanks, and the rest of Washington’s satellite institutions draw heavily from the cognitive elite. At the municipal level, the local business and political movers are often members of the cognitive elite.

  GIVING MERITOCRACY ITS DUE

  Part I mostly described a success story—success for the people lucky enough to be part of the cognitive elite but also a success for the nation as a whole. Before turning to the dark side, we should be explicit about the good things that flow from the invisible migration.

  Chief among them is the triumph of an American ideal. Americans believe that each person should be able to go as far as talent and hard work will take him, and much of what we have described is the realization of that conviction, for people with high IQs. The breadth of the change was made possible by twentyth-century technology, which expanded the need for people with high IQs by orders of magnitude. But the process itself has been a classic example of people free to respond to opportunity and of an economic system that created opportunities in abundance.

  Life has been increasingly good for the cognitive elite, as it has displaced the socioeconomic elites of earlier times. We showed in Part I the increasing financial rewards for brains, but money is only a part of the cornucopia. In the far-from-idyllic past when most of the people at the top of the cognitive distribution were farmers, housewives, workers, and shop owners, many of them were also frustrated, aware that they had capabilities that were not being used. The graph on page 56 that traced the steep rise in high-IQ jobs over the course of the century was to some important extent a picture of people moving from unsatisfying jobs to lucrative and interesting ones.

  Technology has not just created more jobs for the cognitive elite but revolutionized the way they may be done. Modern transportation has expanded the realm in which people work. Beyond that, physical separation is becoming irrelevant. A scientist passionately devoted to the study of a certain protein or an investment analyst following a market can be in daily electronic conversation with people throughout the world who share the same passion, passing drafts of work back and forth, calling up data files, doing analyses that would have required a mainframe computer and a covey of assistants only a few years ago—all while sitting alone at a computer, which need not be in an office, but can as easily be in a beach house overlooking the ocean. Across the occupational domain of those who work primarily with their minds, the explosion of computer and communications technologies has liberated and expanded creativity, productivity, and personal freedom. There may be some costs of this physical isolation, but many people are happier and more fulfilled as a result of the reach of modern technology.

  For the nation as a whole, the invisible migration has surely brought benefits as well. We cannot measure the gains precisely, but they are the inevitable side effect of greater efficiency in identifying intellectual talent and channeling it into high-IQ occupations. Compared to 1900 or even 1950, America in the 1990s is getting more productivity out of its stock of human capital, and this presumably translates into more jobs, gains in GNP, and other effects that produce more wealth for the society at large.

  So what’s the problem? The old stratifications are fading, erased by a greater reliance on what people often call merit. Millions of people have benefited from the changes—including us. Would we prefer less of a meritocracy? Put that way, no—but “no” for larger reasons as well. The invisible migration is in many ways an expression of what America is all about.

  ISOLATION WITHIN THE COGNITIVE ELITE

  What worries us first about the emerging cognitive elite is its coalescence into a class that views American society increasingly through a lens of its own. In The End of Equality, which analyzes the stratification of American society from a vantage point different from ours, social critic Mickey Kaus describes the isolation we have in mind. He identifies it broadly with the decline of “the public sphere.”1 The end of the military draft, the social segregation of the school system, and the divisive effects of the underclass are among his suspects, and each has doubtless played an important role independent (to some degree) of the effects of the cognitive stratification that we described in Part I. Thinking about the way these forces had affected his own life, Kaus remarked: “I entered a good Ivy League college in 1969. I doubt I’ve had a friend or regular social acquaintance since who scored less than an 1100 on his or her SAT boards.”2

  Kaus is probably right. The reason why this is a problem is captured by a remark attributed to the New Yorker’s one-time movie critic Pauline Kael following Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in the presidential election of 1972: “Nixon can’t have won; no one I know voted for him.”3 When the members of the cognitive elite (of whatever political convictions) hang out with each other, often exclusively with each other, they find it hard to understand what ordinary people think.

  The problem is not simply that smart people rise to the top more efficiently these days. If the only quality that CEOs of major corporations and movie directors and the White House inner circle had in common were their raw intelligence, things would not be so much different now than they have always been, for to some degree the most successful have always been drawn disproportionately from the most intelligent. But the invisible migration of the twentieth century has done much more than let the most intellectually able succeed more easily. It has also segregated them and socialized them. The members of the cognitive elite are likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools, live in similar neighborhoods, go to the same kinds of theaters and restaurants, read the same magazines and newspapers, watch the same television programs, even drive the same makes of cars.

  They also tend to be ignorant of the same things. They watch far less commercial television than the average American. Their movie-going tends to be highly selective. They seldom read the national tabloids that have the nation’s largest circulation figures or listen to the talk r
adio that has become a major form of national communication for other parts of America. This does not mean that the cognitive elite spend their lives at the ballet and reading Proust. Theirs is not a high culture, but it is distinctive enough to set them off from the rest of the country in many important ways.

  The isolation of the cognitive elite is by no means complete, but the statistical tendencies are strong, and the same advances in transportation and communication that are so enhancing the professional lives of the cognitive elite will make their isolation from the rest of the public that much greater. As their common ground with the rest of society decreases, their coalescence as a new class increases. The traditional separations between the business world, the entertainment world, the university intellectuals, and government are being replaced by an axis of bright people that runs through society. They already sense their kinship across these spheres of interest. This too will increase with time.

  THE COALITION OF THE COGNITIVE ELITE AND THE AFFLUENT

  The trends we have described would not constitute a threat to the republic if the government still played the same role in civic life that it played through the Eisenhower administration. As recently as 1960, it did not make a lot of political difference what the cognitive elite thought, because its power to impose those values on the rest of America was limited. In most of the matters that counted—the way the schools were run, keeping order in the public square, opening a business or running it—the nation remained decentralized. The still inchoate cognitive elite in 1960 may have had ideas about how it wanted to move the world but, like Archimedes, it lacked a place to stand.