The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

by Richard J. Herrnstein

  As for the other ways in which people found valued places for themselves, urban neighborhoods teemed with useful things to do. Anyone who wanted to have a place in the community could find one in the local school boards, churches, union halls, garden clubs, and benevolent associations of one sort or another. The city government provided the police who walked the local beat. It ran the courthouse and public hospital downtown, and perhaps an orphanage and a home for the aged, but otherwise the neighborhood had to do for itself just about everything that needed doing to keep the social contract operative and daily life on an even keel. Someone who was mentally a bit dull might not be chosen to head up the parish clothing drive but was certainly eligible to help out. And these were just the organized aspects of community life. The unorganized web of interactions was even more extensive and provided still more ways in which people of all abilities, including those without much intelligence, could fit in.

  It is not necessary to idealize old-fashioned neighborhoods or old-fashioned families to accept the description we have just given. All sorts of human problems, from wretched marriages to neighborhood feuds and human misery of every other sort, could be found. Poverty was rampant (recall from Chapter 5 that more than half of the population prior to War II was in poverty by today’s definition). Even so, when the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood were clear and uncompromising and when the stuff of community life had to be carried out by the neighborhood or it wouldn’t get done, society was full of accessible valued places for people of a broad range of abilities.

  Finding Valued Places If You Aren’t Very Smart: The Contemporary Context

  Out of the myriad things that have changed since the beginning of the century, two overlapping phenomena have most affected people with modest abilities: It has become harder to make a living to support the valued roles of spouse, parent, and neighbor, and functions have been stripped from one main source of valued place, the neighborhood.

  THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT. The cognitive elite has pulled away from the rest of the population economically, becoming more prosperous even as real wages in the rest of the economy stagnated or fell. The divergence has been most conspicuous in the lowest-skilled jobs. From their high point in 1973, the median earnings of full-time workers in general nonfarm labor had fallen by 36 percent by 1990, far more than for any other category.20 A strong back isn’t worth what it used to be. Workers in those occupations have been demoralized. They have lost their valued place in the workplace.

  So far, we agree that economics plays an important role in taking valued places in the workplace from those with low cognitive ability. But the argument typically widens, asserting that economic change also explains why people in low-skill occupations experience the loss of other valued places evidenced by falling marriage rates and rising illegitimacy: Men in low-skill jobs no longer make enough money to support a family, it is said. This common argument is too simplistic. In constant dollars, the income of a full-time, year-round male worker in general nonfarm labor in 1991 was at the level of his counterpart in 1958, when the norm was still one income per family, marriage rates were as high as ever, and illegitimacy was a fraction of its current levels. We may look back still further: The low-skill laborer in 1991 made about twice the real income of his counterpart in 1920, a year when no one thought to question whether a laborer could support a family.21 Economics is relevant in understanding how it has become harder for people of modest abilities to find a valued place, and solutions should take economics into account. But economics is not decisive.

  STRIPPING FUNCTIONS FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD. Communities are rich and vital places to the extent that they engage their members in the stuff of life—birth, death, raising children, making a living, helping friends, singing in the local choir or playing on the softball team, coping with problems, setting examples, welcoming, chastising, celebrating, reconciling, and negotiating.

  If there is one theme on which observers from both left and right recently sound very much alike, it is that something vital and important has drained out of American communities.22 Most adults need something to do with their lives other than going to work, and that something consists of being stitched into a fabric of family and community. In the preceding chapter, we alluded to the federal domination of public policy that has augmented the cognitive elite’s political leverage during the last thirty years. The same process has had the collateral effect of stripping the neighborhood of much of the stuff of life. For what seemed like sufficient reasons at the time, Congress and presidents have deemed it necessary to remove more and more functions from the neighborhood. The entire social welfare system, services and cash payments alike, may be viewed in that light. Certain tasks—such as caring for the poor, for example—were deemed to be too difficult or too poorly performed by the spontaneous efforts of neighborhoods and voluntary organizations, and hence were transferred. The states have joined in this process. Whether federal and state policymakers were right to think that neighborhoods had failed and that the centralized government has done better is still a subject of debate, as is the net effect of the transfers, but the transfers did indeed occur and they stripped neighborhoods of traditional functions.

  The cognitive elite may not detect the declining vitality in the local community. For many of them, the house is important—its size, location, view, grounds. They may want the right kind of address and the right kind of neighbors. But their lives are centered outside a geographic community; their professional associates and friends may be scattered over miles of suburbs, or for that matter across the nation and the world. For large segments of American society, however, the geographic neighborhood is the major potential resource for infusing life with much of its meaning. Even the cognitive elite needs local communities, if not for itself, then for those of its children who happen not to land at the top of the cognitive ability distribution. The massive transfer of functions from the locality to the government has stripped neighborhoods of their traditional shared tasks. Instead, we have neighborhoods that are merely localities, not communities of people tending to their communal affairs. Valued places in a neighborhood are created only to the extent that the people in a neighborhood have valued tasks to do.

  People who have never lived in such a neighborhood—and as time goes on this includes more and more of the cognitive elite and the affluent in general—often find this hard to believe. It is another case of the isolation we discussed in Chapter 21: They may read about such communities in books, but surely they no longer exist in real life. But they do. Thumb through a few weeks’ issues of the newspaper from any small town, and you will find an America that is still replete with fund-raising suppers for the local child who has cancer, drives to collect food and clothing for a family that has suffered a reverse, and even barn raisings. They may exist as well (though they are less well documented) in urban working-class neighborhoods that have managed to retain their identity. It is through such activities that much of the real good for the disadvantaged is accomplished. Beyond that, they have a crucial role, so hard to see from a Washington office, of creating ways for people of a wide level of incomes and abilities to play a part. It creates ways for them to be known—not just as a name but as a helpful fellow, a useful person to know, the woman you can always count on. It creates ways in which you would be missed if you were gone.

  Thus arises our first general policy prescription: A wide range, of social functions should be restored to the neighborhood when possible and otherwise to the municipality. The reason for doing so, in the context of this book, is not to save money, not even because such services will be provided more humanely and efficiently by neighborhoods (though we believe that generally to be the case), but because this is one of the best ways to multiply the valued places that people can fill. As the chapter continues, we will offer some other possibilities for accomplishing this and collateral objectives. But before arguing about how it is to be done, we hope that there can be wide agreement on the importance of
the goal: In a decent postindustrial society, neighborhoods shall not have lost their importance as a source of human satisfactions and as a generator of valued places that all sorts of people can fill. Government policy can do much to foster the vitality of neighborhoods by trying to do less for them.

  SIMPLIFYING RULES

  The thesis of this section may be summarized quickly: As of the end of the twentieth century, the United States is run by rules that are congenial to people with high IQs and that make life more difficult for everyone else. This is true in the areas of criminal justice, marriage and divorce, welfare and tax policy, and business law, among others. It is true of rules that have been intended to help ordinary people—rules that govern schooling, medical practice, the labeling of goods, to pick some examples. It has happened not because the cognitive elite consciously usurped the writing of the rules but because of the cognitive stratification described throughout the book. The trend has affected not just those at the low end of the cognitive distribution but just about everybody who is not part of the cognitive and economic elites.

  The systems have been created, bit by bit, over decades, by people who think that complicated, sophisticated operationalizations of fairness, justice, and right and wrong are ethically superior to simple, black-and-white versions. The cognitive elite may not be satisfied with these systems as they stand at any given point, but however they may reform them, the systems are sure to become more complex. Additionally, complex systems are precisely the ones that give the cognitive elite the greatest competitive advantage. Deciphering complexity is one of the things that cognitive ability is most directly good for.

  We have in mind two ways in which the rules generated by the cognitive elite are making life more difficult for everyone else. Each requires somewhat more detailed explanation.

  Making It Easier to Make a Living

  First come all the rules that make life more difficult for people who are trying to navigate everyday life. In looking for examples, the 1040 income tax form is such an easy target that it need only be mentioned to make the point. But the same complications and confusions apply to a single woman with children seeking government assistance or a person who is trying to open a dry-cleaning shop. As the cognitive elite busily goes about making the world a better place, it is not so important to them that they are complicating ordinary lives. It’s not so complicated to them.

  The same burden of complications that are only a nuisance to people who are smart are much more of a barrier to people who are not. In many cases, such barriers effectively block off avenues for people who are not cognitively equipped to struggle through the bureaucracy. In other cases, they reduce the margin of success so much that they make the difference between success and failure. “Sweat equity,” though the phrase itself has been recently coined, is as distinctively an American concept as “equality before the law” and “liberty.” You could get ahead by plain hard work. No one would stand in your way. Today that is no longer true. American society has erected barriers to individual sweat equity, by saying, in effect, “Only people who are good at navigating complex rules need apply.” Anyone who has tried to open or run a small business in recent years can supply evidence of how formidable those barriers have become.

  Credentialism is a closely related problem. It goes all the way up the cognitive range—the Ph.D. is often referred to as “the union card” by graduate students who want to become college professors—but it is especially irksome and obstructive for occupations further down the ladder. Increasingly, occupations must be licensed, whether the service involves barbering or taking care of neighborhood children. The theory is persuasive—do you want someone taking care of your child who is not qualified?—but the practice typically means jumping through bureaucratic hoops that have little to do with one’s ability to do the job. The rise of licensing is both a symptom and a cause of diminishing personal ties, along with the mutual trust that goes with those ties. The licensing may have some small capacity to filter out the least competent, but the benefits are often outweighed by the costs of the increased bureaucratization.

  Enough examples. American society is rife with them. In many ways, life is more complicated than it used to be, and there’s nothing to be done about it. But as the cognitive elite has come to power, it has trailed in its wake a detritus of complexities as well, individually minor, that together have reshaped society so that the average person has a much tougher time running his own life. Our policy recommendation is to stop it and strip away the nonsense. Consider the costs of complexity itself. Return to the assumption that in America the government has no business getting in people’s way except for the most compelling reasons, with “compelling” required to meet a stiff definition.

  Making It Easier to Live a Virtuous Life

  We start with the supposition that almost everyone is capable of being a morally autonomous human being most of the time and given suitable circumstances. Political scientist James Q. Wilson has put this case eloquently in The Moral Sense, calling on a wide range of social science findings to support an old but lately unfashionable truth: Human beings in general are capable of deciding between right and wrong.23 This does not mean, however, that everyone is capable of deciding between right and wrong with the same sophistication and nuances. The difference between people of low cognitive ability and the rest of society may be put in terms of a metaphor: Everyone has a moral compass, but some of those compasses are more susceptible to magnetic storms than others. First, consider crime, then marriage.

  CRIME. Imagine living in a society where the rules about crime are simple and the consequences are equally simple. “Crime” consists of a few obviously wrong acts: assault, rape, murder, robbery, theft, trespass, destruction of another’s property, fraud. Someone who commits a crime is probably caught—and almost certainly punished. The punishment almost certainly hurts (it is meaningful). Punishment follows arrest quickly, within a matter of days or weeks. The members of the society subscribe to the underlying codes of conduct with enthusiasm and near unanimity. They teach and enforce them whenever appropriate. Living in such a world, the moral compass shows simple, easily understood directions. North is north, south is south, right is right, wrong is wrong.

  Now imagine that all the rules are made more complicated. The number of acts defined as crimes has multiplied, so that many things that are crimes are not nearly as obviously “wrong” as something like robbery or assault. The link between moral transgression and committing crime is made harder to understand. Fewer crimes lead to an arrest. Fewer arrests lead to prosecution. Many times, the prosecutions are not for something the accused person did but for an offense that the defense lawyer and the prosecutor agreed upon. Many times, people who are prosecuted are let off, though everyone (including the accused) acknowledges that the person was guilty. When people are convicted, the consequences have no apparent connection to how much harm they have done. These events are typically spread out over months and sometimes years. To top it all off, even the “wrongness” of the basic crimes is called into question. In the society at large (and translated onto the television and movie screens), it is commonly argued that robbery, for example, is not always wrong if it is in a good cause (stealing medicine to save a dying wife) or if it is in response to some external condition (exploitation, racism, etc.). At every level, it becomes fashionable to point out the complexities of moral decisions, and all the ways in which things that might seem “wrong” at first glance are really “right” when properly analyzed.

  The two worlds we have described are not far removed from the contrast between the criminal justice system in the United States as recently as the 1950s and that system as of the 1990s. We are arguing that a person with comparatively low intelligence, whose time horizon is short and ability to balance many competing and complex incentives is low, has much more difficulty following a moral compass in the 1990s than he would have in the 1950s. Put aside your feelings about whether these changes in the crimina
l justice system represent progress. Simply consider them as a magnetic storm—as a set of changes that make the needle pointing to right and wrong waver erratically if you happen to be looking at the criminal justice system from the perspective of a person who is not especially bright. People of limited intelligence can lead moral lives in a society that is run on the basis of “Thou shalt not steal.” They find it much harder to lead moral lives in a society that is run on the basis of “Thou shalt not steal unless there is a really good reason to.”24

  The policy prescription is that the criminal justice system should be made simpler. The meaning of criminal offenses used to be clear and objective, and so were the consequences. It is worth trying to make them so again.

  MARRIAGE. It has become much more difficult for a person of low cognitive ability to figure out why marriage is a good thing, and, once in a marriage, more difficult to figure out why one should stick with it through bad times. The magnetic storm has swept through from many directions.

  The sexual revolution is the most obvious culprit. The old bargain from the man’s point of view—get married, because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to sleep with the lady—was the kind of incentive that did not require a lot of intellect to process and had an all-powerful effect on behavior. Restoring it is not feasible by any (reasonable) policy we can think of.

  But the state has interfered as well to make it more difficult for people with little intelligence to do that thing—find a compatible partner and get married—that constitutes the most accessible and richest of all valued places. Marriage fills a vital role in people’s lives to the extent that it is hallowed as an institution and as a relationship unlike any other. Marriage is satisfying to the extent that society validates these propositions: “Yes, you may have a baby outside marriage if you choose; but it isn’t the same.” “Yes, you may live with someone without marrying, but it isn’t the same.” “Yes, you may say that you are committed to someone without marrying, but it isn’t the same.”