As in previous chapters, to avoid any implications of racial bias, the authors confine their studies to whites. The message is clear- among young white men in their late twenties and early thirties, both unemployment and being out of the labor force are strongly predicted by low cognitive ability. Interestingly, when the effects of IQ were taken into account, the probability of being out of the labor force went up, not down as parental SES rose.
Strikingly, of the men that described themselves as being too disabled to work, nine out of ten were in the bottom quarter of the IQ distribution and fewer than one in twenty were in the top quarter. In fact, a man's IQ was by far and away the best predictor of whether or not he described himself as disabled. The reason for the close relationship between IQ and disability is unclear, but one possibility is that less intelligent people are more accident prone.
The discussion of unemployment is limited to males because women enter and leave the work force for reasons to do with home and family which introduce a large and complex set of issues, whereas healthy adult males were still expected to work (at least they were in the early 1990s when The Bell Curve was written). The statistics that follow focus on white men who were out of the labor force for reasons other than school. The following chart reveals that dropout from the labor force rose as cognitive ability fell.
White Men Who Spent a Month or More Out of the Labor Force in 1989
Cognitive Class Percentage
1 Very Bright 10
11 bright 14
111 normal 15
IV dull 19
V Very Dull 22
Overall Average 15
As the table shows, the very dull are twice as likely to be unemployed as are the very bright. The next step is to determine how much of this difference is due to the man's socioeconomic background.
Holding age and intelligence constant, white men from more privileged backgrounds have a modestly smaller chance of dropping out of the labor force than do men from less privileged backgrounds. However, when IQ is added to the equation the role of socioeconomic background moves in the opposite direction, a male from a well-to-do family was more likely to be unemployed than a male from a family of low socioeconomic status. In contrast, a man of average age and socioeconomic status in the 2d centile of IQ had a 20 percent chance of being unemployed, compared to only a 5 percent chance for a man in the 98th centile of intelligence.
It is not difficult to understand why high intelligence helps keep a man employed. As discussed in chapter 3, competence in the workplace is related to intelligence and bright people are more likely to find the workplace a congenial and rewarding place. Furthermore, a far sighted young man is more likely to want to lay the groundwork for a secure future by establishing a good work record while a shortsighted male maybe less inclined to do so. Statistically, smart men are more likely to be farsighted than dumb men. Now how does education influence the labor force dropout rate?
High intelligence plays a greater role in reducing labor force dropout rate in males who have a college degree than it does in males with only a high school diploma. And for both samples, high family SES did not decrease labor force dropout independent of IQ and age. Once again, the possibility of labor force dropout actually increased in males who came from families with higher SES.
So far, the authors have excluded all men who reported that they were unable to work from the analysis of labor force dropout rates. Low intelligence increases the risk of being unemployed for healthy young men but it is more complicated than that because low IQ also increases the risk of not being healthy. The following table shows the relationship of IQ and job disability in young men. It is not a pretty picture.
Job Disability Among Young White Males
No. per 1,000
Who Reported Being
Prevented from
Working by Health
problems
Cognitive Class No. per 1,000 Who
Reported Limits in
Amount or Kind of
Work by Health
Problems
0 1 Very Bright 13
5 11 bright 21
5 111 Normal 37
36 1V- Dull 45
78 V- Very Dull 62
11 Overall average 33
The numbers of those who claimed that they could not work because of a disability jumped seven fold from Class 111 to Class IV and then doubled again from Class 1V to Class V. These statistics were compiled in 1988, can you imagine what they would look like today with over 90 million people unemployed?
The propensity of disability claims among the dull and very dull can be explained in part because people with low IQs are more likely to be blue-collar workers employed as manual laborers whereas men with high IQs are likely to be white-collar workers or executives. An executive with a limp can still be an executive but a manual laborer with a similar disability faces a more serious job impediment.
However, this explanation, plausible as it may be, does not account for the relationship of intelligence to job disability because the odds of having reported a job limitation because of a health issue were 3.3 percent in those working in white-collar jobs and only slightly higher, 3.8 percent, in those who were employed in blue-collar jobs. More importantly, comparing men that had blue-collar jobs, those with IQs of 85 were twice as likely to be disabled than were men with an IQ of 115. Why might intelligence be related to disability, independent of the line of work itself? An answer leaps to mind.
Smart people are less likely to have accidents! As Lewis Terman found, people with IQs above 140 are far less accident prone than are those with average intelligence. In another study, the risk of automobile accidents rose as the driver's IQ fell. Similarly, level of education, to some degree a measure of intellect, has been linked to accidents, injury and fatal injury. As we saw in Part 1, smarter workers are typically more productive workers and we can presume that some portion of what makes a worker productive results from the fact that he avoids needless accidents. Finally, let's look at the relationship between intellect and unemployment.
Men who are out of the labor force are in one way or the other unavailable for work; unemployed men, in contrast, want work but can't find it. Again, as with job disabilities, the very dull are six times more likely to be unemployed that the very bright. Considering men of average age and socioeconomic background, the chances of being unemployed was only 4 percent for those with IQs in the upper 98th centile of intelligence while it was 15 percent for those with IQs in the lowest 2d centile of IQ.
Similar studies have shown that neither, parental SES or age had a statistically significant independent effect in the unemployment rates of either high school or college graduates. Basically, all studies to date show that IQ is, by far and away, the most important determinant of whether a male in employed, unemployed or disabled (or claims to be disabled).
Comment:
I contend that the biggest mistake the social engineers have made in recent times is to refuse to recognize the importance of inherited IQ in every facet of modern American life. Those who, through no fault of their own, were born with below average IQs are going to have a difficult struggle in our present day high-tech world. Failing to understand that we are not all born equal in anything, and certainly not IQ, has resulted in a long line of social programs (school busing, affirmative action and head-start, to name only a few of the worst offenders) that have accomplished little or nothing while leaving us bankrupt.
The Bell Curve is of great importance because it uncovers the primarily reason for our present economic and social problems, the falling intellect of our population at a time when intelligence and education are everything. As we will see shortly, lack of intellect also is a root cause of every single one of the social ills we are experiencing in our country today. Stay tuned, the worst is yet to come!
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