As the patience of whites for other whites wears thin, the black inner city will simultaneously be getting worse rather than better. Various scholars, led by William Julius Wilson, have described the outmigration of the ablest blacks that has left the inner city without its former leaders and role models.14 Given a mean black IQ of about 85 and the link between socioeconomic status and IQ within ethnic populations, the implication is that the black inner city has a population with a mean IQ somewhere in the low 80s at best, with a correspondingly small tail in the above-average range.’15
What is the minimum level of cognitive resources necessary to sustain a community at any given level of social and economic complexity? For sustaining a village of a few hundred people in a premodern society, the minimum average level is probably quite modest. What is it for sustaining a modern community? The question is of enormous practical significance yet remains innocent of any empirical investigation whatsoever. Perhaps the crucial feature is the average cognitive ability. Perhaps it is the size of the cadre of high-ability people. Perhaps it is the weight of the population at low end of the distribution. No one knows. Whatever the details, a prima facie case exists that the cognitive resources in the contemporary inner city have fallen below the minimum level. What looked like a rising tide of social problems a generation ago has come to look more like a fundamental breakdown in social organization.
One may look for signs that these communities are about to recover. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s has ebbed, for example, although crack is cheaper than ever, as the savage effects of the drug became evident to younger brothers and sisters. Black grass-roots efforts to restore the family and combat crime have increased in recent years. But counterpoised against these forces working on behalf of regeneration within the inner city is a powerful force working against it:. A large majority of the next generation of blacks in the inner city is growing up without fathers and with limited cognitive ability. The numbers continue to increase. The outmigration of the able continues.
While we can see how these trends might be reversed, which we describe in the next and final chapter, let us consider the prospect we face if they do not. This brings us to the denouement of our prognosis.
THE COMING OF THE CUSTODIAL STATE
When a society reaches a certain overall level of affluence, the haves begin to feel sympathy toward, if not guilt about, the condition of the have-nots. Thus dawns the welfare state—the attempt to raise the poor and the needy out of their plight. In what direction does the social welfare system evolve when a coalition of the cognitive elite and the affluent continues to accept the main tenets of the welfare state but are increasingly frightened of and hostile toward the recipients of help? When the coalition is prepared to spend money but has lost faith that remedial social programs work? The most likely consequence in our view is that the cognitive elite, with its commanding position, will implement an expanded welfare state for the underclass that also keeps it out from underfoot. Our label for this outcome is the custodial state.16 Should it come to pass, here is a scenario:
Over the next decades, it will become broadly accepted by the cognitive elite that the people we now refer to as the underclass are in that condition through no fault of their own but because of inherent shortcomings about which little can be done. Politicians and intellectuals alike will become much more open about the role of dysfunctional behavior in the underclass, accepting that addiction, violence, unavailability for work, child abuse, and family disorganization will keep most members of the underclass from fending for themselves. It will be agreed that the underclass cannot be trusted to use cash wisely. Therefore policy will consist of greater benefits, but these will be primarily in the form of services rather than cash. Furthermore, there will be new restrictions. Specifically, these consequences are plausible:
Child care in the inner city will become primarily the responsibility of the state. Infants will get better nutrition because they will be spending their days in day care centers from infancy. Children will get balanced diets because they will be eating breakfast, lunch, and perhaps supper at school. Day care centers and schools for elementary students will edge closer toward comprehensive care facilities, whose staff will try to provide not only education and medical care but to train children in hygiene, sexual socialization, socialization to the world of work, and other functions that the parents are deemed incapable of providing.
The homeless will vanish. One of the safer predictions is that sometime in the near future, the cognitive elite will join the broad public sentiment in favor of reasserting control over public spaces. It will become easier to consign mentally incompetent adults to custodial care. Perhaps the clinically borderline cases that now constitute a high proportion of the homeless will be required to reside in shelters, more elaborately equipped and staffed than most homeless shelters are today. Police will be returned their authority to roust people and enforce laws prohibiting disorderly conduct.
Strict policing and custodial responses to crime will become more acceptable and widespread. This issue could play out in several ways. The crime rate in affluent suburbs may be low enough to keep the pressure for reform low. But events in the early 1990s suggest that fear of crime is rising, and support for strict law enforcement is increasing.
One possibility is that a variety of old police practices—especially the stop-and-frisk—will quietly come back into use in new guises. New prisons will continue to be built, and the cells already available will be used more efficiently to incarcerate dangerous offenders (for example, by eliminating mandatory sentences for certain drug offenses and by incarcerating less serious offenders in camps rather than prisons). Technology will provide new options for segregating and containing criminals, as the electronic bracelets now being used to enforce house arrest (or perhaps “neighborhood arrest”) become more flexible and foolproof. Another possibility is that support will grow for a national system of identification cards, coded with personal information including criminal record. The possibilities for police surveillance and control of behavior are expanding rapidly. Until recently, the cognitive elite has predominantly opposed the use of such technology. In a few years, we predict, it will not.
The underclass will become even more concentrated spatially than it is today. The expanded network of day care centers, homeless shelters, public housing, and other services will always be located in the poorest part of the inner city, which means that anyone who wants access to them will have to live there. Political support for such measures as relocation of people from the inner city to the suburbs, never strong to begin with, will wither altogether. The gaping cultural gap between the habits of the underclass and the habits of the rest of society, far more impassable than a simple economic gap between poor and not poor or the racial gap of black and white, will make it increasingly difficult for children who have grown up in the inner city to function in the larger society even when they want to.
The underclass will grow. During the 1980s, scholars found evidence that the size of the underclass was no longer expanding.17 But even as they wrote, the welfare rolls, which had moved within a narrow range since the late 1970s, began to surge again. The government will try yet another round of the customary social programs—sex education, job training, parenting training, and the like—and they will be as ineffectual this round as they were in the 1960s and 1970s.18 Meanwhile, many low-income parents who try to do all the right things and pass their values on to their children will be increasingly unable to do so. They cannot propagate their norms in the face of a local culture in which illegitimacy, welfare, crime, and drugs are commonplace, and there is nothing magically invulnerable about them or their children. Some of the reforms we have described will be improvements—crime might actually drop in the inner city as well as in the other parts of town, for example—but the main effect will be to make it harder for the children in these solid and conventional working-class families to emulate their parents. Marriage, steady employment
, and responsible behavior of many kinds will fall among the next generation, and some portion of the working class will become members of the underclass. Few children of those already in the underclass will escape.
Social budgets and measures for social control will become still more centralized. The growing numbers of illegitimate children born to poor women will have multiplier effects on social welfare budgets—directly and through increased indirect costs generated in the educational and law enforcement systems. As states become overwhelmed, the current cost sharing between the states and federal government will shift toward the federal budget. The mounting costs will also generate intense political pressure on Washington to do something. Unable to bring itself to do away with the welfare edifice—for by that time it will be assumed that social chaos will follow any radical cutback—the government will continue to try to engineer behavior through new programs and regulations. As time goes on and hostility toward the welfare-dependent increases, those policies are likely to become authoritarian and rely increasingly on custodial care.
Racism will reemerge in a new and more virulent form. The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it is actually thinking about race will reach something close to a breaking point. This pessimistic prognosis must be contemplated: When the break comes, the result, as so often happens when cognitive dissonance is resolved, will be an overreaction in the other direction. Instead of the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed, the nation will be faced with racial divisiveness and hostility that is as great as, or greater, than America experienced before the civil rights movement. We realize how outlandish it seems to predict that educated and influential Americans, who have been so puritanical about racial conversation, will openly revert to racism. We would not go so far as to say it is probable. It is, however, more than just possible. If it were to happen, all the scenarios for the custodial state would be more unpleasant—more vicious—than anyone can now imagine.
In short, by custodial state, we have in mind a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business. In its less benign forms, the solutions will become more and more totalitarian. Benign or otherwise, “going about its business” in the old sense will not be possible. It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the state.
Extrapolating from current trends, we project that the policies of custodialism will be not only tolerated but actively supported by a consensus of the cognitive elite. To some extent, we are not even really projecting but reporting. The main difference between the position of the cognitive elite that we portray here and the one that exists today is to some extent nothing more than the distinction between tacit and explicit.
If we wish to avoid this prospect for the future, we cannot count on the natural course of events to make things come out right. Now is the time to think hard about how a society in which a cognitive elite dominates and in which below-average cognitive ability is increasingly a handicap can also be a society that makes good on the fundamental promise of the American tradition: the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life. That is the task to which we now turn.
Chapter 22
A Place for Everyone
How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault, and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well people do in life?
The answer of the twentieth century has been that government should create the equality of condition that society has neglected to produce on its own. The assumption that egalitarianism is the proper ideal, however difficult it may be to achieve in practice, suffuses contemporary political theory. Socialism, communism, social democracy, and America’s welfare state have been different ways of moving toward the egalitarian ideal The phrase social justice has become virtually a synonym for economic and social equality.
Until now, these political movements have focused on the evils of systems in producing inequality. Human beings are potentially pretty much the same, the dominant political doctrine has argued, except for the inequalities produced by society. These same thinkers have generally rejected, often vitriolically, arguments that individual differences such as intelligence are to blame. But there is no reason why they could not shift ground. In many ways, the material in this book is tailor-made for their case. If it’s not someone’s fault that he is less intelligent than others, why should he be penalized in his income and social status?
We could respond with a defense of income differences. For example, it is justified to pay the high-IQ businessman and engineer more than the low-IQ ditch digger, producing income inequality, because that’s the only way to make the economy grow and produce more wealth in which the ditch digger can share. We could grant that it is a matter not of just deserts but of economic pragmatism about how to produce compensating benefits for the least advantaged members of society.1 Such arguments make sense to us, as far as they go. After the experience of the twentieth century, it is hard to imagine that anyone still disagrees with them. But there are other issues, transcending the efficiency of an economy. Our central concern since we began writing this book is how people might live together harmoniously despite fundamental individual differences. The answer lies outside economics.
The initial purpose of this chapter is to present for your consideration another way of thinking about equality and inequality. It represents an older intellectual tradition than social democracy or even socialism. In our view, it is also a wiser tradition, more attuned to the way in which individuals go about living satisfying lives and to the ways in which societies thrive. The more specific policy conclusions to which we then turn cannot be explained apart from this underpinning.
THINKINGABOUT EQUALITY AS AN IDEAL
For thousands of years, great political thinkers of East and West tried to harmonize human differences. For Confucius, society was like his conception of a family—extensions of a ruling father and obedient sons, devoted husbands and faithful wives, benign masters and loyal servants. People were defined by their place, whether in the family or the community. So too for the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers: place was all. All the great religious traditions define a place for everyone, if not on earth then in heaven.
Society was to be ruled by the virtuous and wise few. The everyday business of the community fell to the less worthy multitude, with the most menial chores left to the slaves. Neither the Greek democrats nor the Roman republicans believed that “all men are created equal.” Nor did the great Hindu thinkers of the Asian subcontinent, where one’s work defined one’s caste, which in turn circumscribed every other aspect of life. The ancients accepted the basic premise that people differ fundamentally and importantly and searched for ways in which people could contentedly serve the community (or the monarch or the tyrant or the gods), rather than themselves, despite their differences. Philosophers argued about obligations and duties, what they are and on whom they fall.
In our historical era, political philosophers have argued instead about rights. They do so because they are trying to solve a different problem. The great transformation from a search for duties and obligations to a search for rights may be dated with Thomas Hobbes, writing in the mid-1600s about a principle whereby all people, not just the rich and well born, might have equal rights to liberty.2 Everyone, said Hobbes, is entitled to as much liberty in gratifying his desires as he is willing to allow others in gratifying theirs.3 People differ, acknowledged Hobbes, but they do not differ so much that they may justifiably be deprived of liberty by differing amounts. In the modern view that Hobbes helped shape, individuals freely accept constraints on their own behavior in exchange for ridding themselve
s of the dangers of living in perfect freedom, hence perfect anarchy.4 The constraints constitute lawful government.
Hobbes believed that the only alternatives for human society are, in effect, anarchy or absolute monarchy. Given those alternatives, said Hobbes, a rational person would choose a monarch to ensure the equality of political rights, rather than take his chances with perfect freedom. His successor in English political thought, John Locke, did not accept the Hobbesian choice between despotism and anarchy. He conceived of people in a state of nature as being in “a State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another,”5 and sought to preserve that condition in actual societies through a strictly limited government. What Locke propounded is especially pertinent here because it was his theory that the American Founders brought into reality.
But with Locke also arose a confusion, which has grown steadily with passing time. For most contemporary Americans who are aware of Locke at all, he is identified with the idea of man as tabula rasa, a blank slate on which experience writes. Without experience, Locke is often believed to have said, individuals are both equal and empty, a blank slate to be written upon by the environment. Many contemporary libertarians who draw their inspiration from Locke are hostile to the possibility of genetic differences in intelligence because of their conviction that equal rights apply only if in fact people at birth are tabulae rasae. With that in mind, consider these remarks about human intelligence from Locke’s An Essay on Human Understanding:
Now that there is such a difference between men in respect of their understandings, I think nobody who has had any conversation with his neighbors will question…. Which great difference in men’s intellectuals, whether it rises from any defect in the organs of the body particularly adapted to thinking, or in the dullness or untractableness of those faculties for want of use, or, as some think, in the natural differences of men’s souls themselves; or some or all of these together, it matters not here to examine. Only this is evident, that there is a difference of degrees in men’s understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings, to so great a latitude that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm that there is a greater distance between some men and others in this respect, than between some men and some beasts.6
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Page 60