Cognitive partitioning by intellect, education and occupation is here to stay, and, try as it may, there is little the government can do about it. In days gone by a relatively low IQ laborer could make a decent living tamping ties on a railroad, digging ditches, or cutting brush from the side of a county road. Now days machines perform these menial tasks. The low IQ laborer of yesterday likely was working side-by-side with people of higher intelligence who, because of the lack of job opportunities, were performing the same type of work. More importantly, in times past workers with differing IQs lived in the same neighborhoods; sent their children to the same schools; worshiped in the same church; and played in the same baseball team on Sunday afternoon. Economic segregation has changed all that.
Today, computers and electronic communication make it increasingly likely that people who work primarily with their minds collaborate and work only with others like them. The isolation of the cognitive elite is compounded by their choices of where to live, shop, play, worship, and send their children to school. When all is said and done, success and failure in today's high-tech American economy, and all that goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit from their parents.
Intellectual stratification is compounded by assortative mating, the fact that likes attract when it comes to marriage. Not surprisingly, intelligence is one of the most important of these likes. Assortative mating by IQ is having a more powerful effect on society with each passing generation and is the basis of a new American class system. What will be the ultimate outcome of cognitive stratification? In this chapter Herrnstein and Murray use available scientific data to peer into a murky future.
The overriding dynamic in the work place today is the increasing value of intelligence. The "smart ones" are more effectively being recruited to college; they are more productive in the workplace; and their dollar value to employers is increasing with each new technological invention. There is no reason to believe that this trend will not continue and, if it does, the economic gap separating the upper cognitive classes from the rest of society will continue. The statistics that follow reveal the enormity of the problem.
In 1930 Manufacturing employees earned around $10,000 a year while the salaries of Engineers averaged around $28,000 (in 1990 dollars). By 1986 the salaries of Manufacturing workers had a little more than doubled to $22,000 a year while the wages paid engineers had nearly tripled to $72,000. Most of these economic changes occurred from 1953 to 1961 when the salaries of engineers doubled while the wages paid manufacturing workers increased by only 20 percent.
In recent times the experts have come to agree that something beyond education, gender and work experience has been at work to increase the disparity in income observed in the workplace. This unexplained disparity in income is termed "the residual." The demand for this "residual" rather than education or job experience fueled the wage disparity observed by economists during the last two decades of the twentieth century. What is this factor called "residual?"
It could be rooted in diligence, ambition, sociability or cognitive ability. Readers will not be surprised to learn that Herrnstein and Murray believe that cognitive ability plays a major role in the observed disparity in wages between workers with similar educational backgrounds.
The authors point out that the changes in wages are, in part, a result of the shifting occupational structure of our economy. High paying jobs are tipped toward people with high intelligence and, as high-end jobs have become more numerous, demand has increased for the intellectual abilities they require. When demand for any good, in the case intelligence, goes up the price for the commodity increases. Purely on economic grounds, wage inequality grew as the economic demand for intelligence climbed during the last half of the twentieth century. Why has cognitive ability become more valuable for employers?
As technology has increased so has the economic value of intelligence. As robots replace factory workers the factory workers' jobs vanish and are replaced by people who can design, program and repair robots. Most of these new hires have higher IQs than the original factory workers they replaced. Business consultancy also is a new profession that is soaking up the graduates of elite business schools. The consultants sell their trained intelligence to the businesses paying their huge fees. The high school graduate doesn't have a prayer in this market place.
A second reason intelligent people make so much money may be traced to the growth of the post second world war economy in the United States and throughout the world. The size of corporations and the markets they serve have grown enormously since World War11. The value of a bright person who can dream up a sales campaign worth another percentage point or two in market share for a corporation competing in a $500,000 market might be worth a salary on $75,000 a year. If the same person designed a similar successful marketing plan for a fortune 500 company with billions of dollars in potential sales he would be worth a fortune to the company and his salary would be enormous.
Now consider the effects of regulation and regulation. Why do lawyers who never set foot in a courtroom make so much money? In some cases because a first rate lawyer can make tens of millions of dollars for a client by getting a favorable decision from a government agency or slipping through a tax loophole. As the rules governing private enterprise become more complex, intelligence grows in value, often in unexpected places.
For example, social psychologists who serve on advisers on jury selection make big bucks because their input raises the possibility of a favorable verdict in liability and patent law suits about 10 percent. Once again proving that intelligence is worth big bucks. The more complex a society becomes, the more valuable are people who are good at dealing with complexity and the more likely it is that those with less intelligence will be left behind to fight over the few low paying jobs that remain.
Think of it this way. The son of father whose income is in the bottom of the distribution has only one chance in twenty of rising to the top fifth of the earning distribution and a fifty-fifty chance of remaining in the bottom fifth. At present, most people are stuck near where their parents were on the income scale because IQ, which has become the major predictor of income potential, is passed on from one generation to the next in the same way as athletic ability; a propensity to develop breast cancer; or the odds of developing diabetes are inherited traits. Social engendering programs like school busing, affirmative action and, more recently, head start cannot change this circumstance significantly. OK, just how much is IQ just a matter of genes?
In truth, the present state of knowledge does not permit a precise measurement but a half century of work and hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies permits a broad conclusion that the genetic component of IQ is unlikely to be smaller than 40 percent or higher than 80 percent. The most unambiguous direct estimates, base on identical twins raised apart, produce the highest estimates of intellectual heritability. If one adopts a middling estimate of 60 percent heritability this means that 40 percent of our intelligence is a result of environmental factors such as social status, schooling, nutrition and marital status of the parents. But, Just how reliable are the various tests of heritability?
First, the heritability of any trait can be estimated as long as its variation in the population can be measured. IQ tests meet this criteria handily since they are accurate and reproducible, of that there is no disagreement. Second, heritability tells you more about a population as a whole than it does about single individuals. In this respect, a given individual's IQ may have been greatly affected by his special circumstances even though IQ is substantially heritable in the population as a whole.
Third, the heritability of a trait may change as the components of intelligence that are not inherited change (the 40 percent of intelligence that are a result of environmental factors change). If, one hundred years ago, the variations in exposure to education were greater than they are now and, if education is one of the environmental factors responsible for differences in intellect, then the heritability of IQ was lower in 1900 than it is now when educational opportunities are more readily available to the population as a whole.
This last point is especially important in modern societies, with their intense efforts to equalize opportunity. As a general rule, as environmental factors become more uniform, the component of intellect that is inherited increases. To understand this important point consider this. If we were all raised in identical environments the differences in IQ between individuals would be exclusively due to heritability, the genes that we inherited from our parents. This is one of the most important ironies of egalitarianism: the more uniform a society becomes the more similar family members are to each other intellectually and the more variation in IQ there is between members of different families. Now let's take a look at love, marriage and IQ.
Contrary to common belief, opposites do not really attract when it comes to love and marriage. In fact quite the opposite is true. Of all the correlations between husbands and wives one of the highest is IQ. Smart people tend to marry smart people of the opposite sex, it's really as simple as that! The propensity to mate by cognitive ability has not changed over the years. However, is you compare 100 Harvard/Radcliffe marriages from the class of 1930 with 100 similar marriages in 1965 things have changed markedly. The marriages in 1990 will produce children with considerably higher IQs than did the marriages in 1930 because the level of intelligence a Harvard and Radcliffe has risen so dramatically over the intervening 60 years. How much difference can it make you might ask?
In 1930 the mean IQ of a graduate from either Harvard or Radcliffe was around 117 and the average IQ of their children was about 114. By 1965 the children of Harvard and Radcliffe graduates had mean IQs around 124. These figures are based on the assumption that the propensity to marry by cognitive remained the same from 1930 to 1965, in reality it almost certainly increased as shown by Robert Mare's study of assortative mating at the University of Wisconsin from 1940 to 1987. During this period the chances of a college graduate marrying a non-college graduate fell from 44 percent to 33 percent. There were several reasons for this.
First the feminist movement drastically increased the odds that bright young women would come in contact with bright young men during the years when people choose spouses. At the same time many of the elite men's collages became coeducational.
Finally, the effect of churning. American society has historically been full of churning as newcomers came to the country and worked their way up the economic ladder while the children and grandchildren of the rich and powerful were descending the ladder. In contrast today, because of intellectual sorting we have a society that is becoming increasingly quiescent at the top as the cognitive elite move up the income ladder and stay there, resulting in a society that takes on some of the characteristics of a caste. We are not quite there yet since fewer that 60 percent of those in the top quartile of intelligence complete a masters degree. On the other side of the coin, by 1990, 81 percent of those in the top 5 percent of IQ had obtained at least a masters degree.
To make things worse, 5 percent of those who did not have educational degrees were college dropouts like the Bill Gates of the world who were making their way up the economic ladder without a college degree. These people, because of their high intellect, were living the life of the rich and famous despite the fact that they were relatively uneducated, demonstrating that intellect, not education, is the key to the fame, success and riches in twenty-first century America. This, of course, does not mean that education is unimportant to the average person; rather, it means that really smart people can succeed without it. What are the implications of all this?
The cognitive elite, irrespective of race or environmental background, are getting richer while everyone else is struggling just to stay even or, as too often is the case, falling behind. The cognitive elite are increasingly segregated from everyone else in both the work place and the neighbor hood. Finally, and of major importance, the cognitive elite are increasingly likely to marry.
Comment:
This is the closing chapter of Part 1 of The Bell Curve. It's message is clear, the coin of the day is intellect, approximately 60 percent of which is inherited from our parents and 40 percent, at most, is the result of environmental factors. Theoretically, the IQs of those who are disadvantaged can be raised by social programs designed to level the playing field (school busing, dead-start, school meals etc.). The authors do not address the success or failure of social programs designed to remove unfairness from society and provide equal opportunity for all; however, they do point out that, by providing education to the masses, we have developed a society that is becoming more segregated with each passing day not by race or religion, but by intellect. Part 11 deals with the societal consequences of being born not all that smart in an increasingly high-tech world where, with few exceptions, is the key to the golden kingdom.
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