The Bell Curve Chapter 2 Cognitive Partitioning by Occupation

People in different jobs have different mean IQ's. Lawyers, for example, have higher average IQ's than bus drivers. Whether lawyers must have higher intelligence than bus drivers to do their jobs is the topic of the next chapter. Here the authors simply note that people with different IQ's end up in different jobs. In 1900 a CEO of a large company was likely a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) born into affluence. He may have been bright but that was not why he was chosen. Nothing changed until the 1950's. However, the three decades that followed were a time of great social leveling when executive suites were filled with people who could maximize corporate profits irrespective if they came from the wrong side of the tracks or worshiped in a temple rather than a church. Jobs sort people by IQ just as college does but there is a big difference between educational and job sorting because people spend only a decade or two in school but a major portion of their lives working. The relationships they develop in their jobs often determine who they will marry and where they will live. More importantly, job status determines where their children will be raised; go to school; and who they will marry. Testers have noted the relationship between job status and IQ test scores since there were tests to give. Academics, however, have argued about the importance of intelligence to job performance from the beginning and the debate rages to this day. For example, it takes a law degree to practice law and it takes intelligence to get into and through law school, but aside from that, is there any good reason that lawyers need to have higher IQ's than bus drivers. At the height of egalitarianism in the 1970's the answer in academic circles, surprisingly, was "No." In other words, one had to be smart to get into medical school but once one had a medical degree he or she did not have to be all that smart to become a good doctor. Here are a few on the most germane studies relating job status and intelligence. If one is either born smart, dumb, or somewhere in-between, it shouldn't matter when a test of intelligence is administered, and indeed it doesn't! In an elegant longitudinal study relating childhood intelligence to adult outcomes, boys and girls were given IQ tests in childhood and again when they were 26 to 27 years old. The IQ scores of these children when they were 7 or 8 years old were just as correlative to their ultimate job status as were the tests performed after they finished their educations. This, of course, weakens the argument that IQ is correlated more with social status and educational advantage than it is with innate inherited intelligence. Job status also typically runs in families. We all know of families with several members who are doctors and lawyers and one who is blue-collar worker, or vice versa; but such examples stand out because they are rarities. Most close relatives occupy neighboring, if not the same, rungs on the job status ladder. This, of course, is yet another indication that intelligence is an inherited trait similar to height, weight, athletic ability and skin color. Interestingly, this observation somehow manages to be both obvious and controversial at the same time. Another nail in the coffin of inherited intelligence deniers is provided in a study of adopted children in Copenhagen between 1924 and 1947. The children had an average age of three months when placed with their new families. In adulthood they were compared with their biological siblings and their adoptive siblings to see where they landed on the occupational status ladder. Not surprisingly, the full siblings had more similar job status than the half siblings, while there was no correlation in job status between full siblings and their genetically unrelated adoptive siblings. It is important to realize that even occupations that require a high mean IQ will include individuals with modest scores. If a distribution curve with a mean of 120 is symmetrical around 20 percent will have IQs below 100. In 1900 only 10 percent of the so-called high-IQ occupations were filled by people with IQ's in the top IQ decile, most being filled by individuals with average intelligence. By 1990, 36 percent of these high paying jobs were being filled by supper smart members of the work force. As the twentieth century progressed the smart got richer and those with average or below average intelligence were progressively more often left behind. Income and job stratification by intelligence, of course, is even more pronounced if you compare people with mean IQ's of 100 (the average worker) with those with IQ's three standard deviations above the mean who graduated from an elite college like Harvard or Yale. Chances are that the average Joe has never even met such a person. In 1900 the vast majority of CEO's of large corporations were white male Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose fathers were business executives or professionals. By 1976 only 5.5 percent of the countries CEO's came from families of wealth and, while our business leaders were still disproportionately likely to be Protestant, they also disproportionately were likely to be Jewish, something unheard of in the early 1900'

s. As the twentieth century came to a close having the intellectual capacity to be educated had become the key to the executive suite. Comment: We are a segregated nation, always have been and likely always will be. However, today we are segregated not so much by race, inherited position and wealth as we are by education achievement. Unfortunately, the ability to be educated is an inherited trait determined at the time of our birth. School busing, affirmative action and head-start programs have not and will not changed this fact. The forthcoming chapters of The Bell Curve explain why these fiscally wasteful liberal boondoggles were doomed to fail from their inception.