The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 21-The way We Are Headed

In this penultimate chapter the authors speculate about the impact of cognitive stratification on American life and government. They predict that the cognitive elite will be increasingly isolated; that the mentally gifted will be increasingly affluent; and that the quality of life for the people at the bottom of the cognitive ability distribution will continue to deteriorate. Unchecked, they predict, these trends will lead America towards something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite more firmly anchored at the top with the rules of society structured so that it is harder and harder for the haves to lose and the have-nots to succeed. American civil society will also continue to deteriorate as this scenario plays out, more crime, more illegitimacy and more poverty. Like any apocalyptic vision, this one is pessimistic, perhaps too much so. On the other hand, there is a great deal to be pessimistic about. To recapitulate, at the beginning of the last century, the great majority of really smart people were not college educated, often they had not even gone to high school. In fact, about 50 percent of them kept house, reared children and were often leaders in their religious and social communities. The really smart people lived next door to those who were not as bright. This is not to say that communities were not stratified by wealth, religion, class or ethnic background but they were not stratified by cognitive ability as is the case now. The upshot is that the scattered brightness of the early twentieth century has congregated, forming a new class that lives together, plays together and, most importantly, marries each other. Cognitive ability is the predominate deciding factor in our twenty-first century world; neither social background, ethnicity or money will bar the way, but low IQ will. Billions, if not trillions, have been spent trying to move the cognitive challenged people of the ghettos to the affluent communities of the intellectually elite in the suburbs, all to no avail. The invisible intellectual migration of the last 125 years has done more than allow the intellectually able succeed if every facet of life, it has also segregated and socialized them. Members of the cognitive elite are likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools, lived in similar neighborhoods, gone to the same kinds of theaters and restaurants, read the same magazines and newspapers and even drove the same makes of cars. All of these changes has resulted in Americans being more divided than ever before. The intellectual have-nots of society are finding it more difficult to survive in today's America with each passing day. The changing politics in our country has made the struggles of the millions of unemployed, homeless and impoverished even more difficult. For most of the twentieth century, intellectuals and the affluent were antagonists. Traditionally, intellectuals have been identified with the economic left, while the affluent have been identified with big business and cultural conservatism. These diverse categories have become muddled in recent years, as faculties at top universities put together higher salaries, lucrative consulting fees and royalties that garner them six-figure incomes. As the very bright who populate academia have become more uniformly affluent the interests of the affluent and the cognitive elite have begun to blend, and at this At this point, there is not a dimes worth of difference between them. At first glance, the high-IQ Stanford professor with a bestselling book may have little in common to the person who makes a similar income from his chain of shoe stores; however, when considering future alliances and social trends it seems likely that their increasing commonalities, including the political policies they support, are becoming increasingly similar as the intellectually elite become more affluent. The Stanford professor's best-selling book may be a diatribe against the unjust criminal justice system, but that doesn't mean that he will vote with his feet and leave his safe neighborhood in Palo Alto and move his family to Oakland, Richmond, or even San Jose. Meanwhile, the man with the chain of shoe stores may be politically to the right of the Stanford professor, but he also is looking for the same safe neighborhood and the same good schools for his children. Irrespective of their diverse occupations, the shoe store owner and the professor are likely to be quite comfortable with the idea that government is there to be used to serve their joint interests. The constitutional restraints on how a faction may use government to further its ends has loosened and an unprecedented coalition of the smart and the rich are taking advantage of this new latitude to the determent of the less well off and the mentally challenged. The authors fear for the underclass in the new America which is dominated by intellectual elite and the rich and famous. They worry that we are developing a new type of conservatism along Latin American lines where to be conservative means doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of those living in the slums below. They wrote, in the mid 1900s, that the new coalition was already afraid of the underclass and was going to have a lot more to fear in the near future. The near continual demonstrations (riots) in our inner cities, such as the black lives matter demonstrations, attest to the accuracy of their predictions. They go on to discuss the implications of cognitive stratification for the underclass, beginning with the fate of children. The greatest problems afflict children unlucky enough to be born and reared by unmarried mothers who are below average in intelligence, about 20 percent of children currently being born. They tend to have low cognitive ability themselves and suffer disproportionately from behavioral problems and are more likely to end up in prison. T

hey are less likely to marry and will produce large proportions of illegitimate children of low intelligence. Increasing numbers of children are born into the deplorable conditions discussed in chapter 15 that the government is almost helpless to influence. What happens to the child of low intelligence who survives childhood and reaches adulthood trying his best to be a productive citizen? There will be jobs for low skill labor but the wage for these jobs will be low. Attempts to artificially increase the wage for low skill labor, by raising the minimal wage for example, may backfire by making alternatives to human labor more affordable and, in some cases by making low skill jobs disappear altogether as has been the case for machines that lay track for railroads. All the fine rhetoric about "investing in human capital" to "make America competitive in the twenty-first century" is unlikely to overturn this reality: because most low IQ people are incapable of learning the skills that will make them competitive in today's high tech world. The dry tender for the formation of an underclass is a large number of births to single women of low intelligence in a concentrated spatial area. There is nothing about being white that will keep them from joining the emerging underclass of the twenty-first century. The proportion of white illegitimate births (including Latinos) reached 22 percent in 1991. In Britain, where the illegitimacy rate has historically been lower than in the United States, 32 percent of all births in 1992 were illegitimate, with no signs of slowing down. The proportion in low income communities is perhaps twice that of the general population. In America, 43 percent of all births to impoverished women were illegitimate. White illegitimacy is overwhelmingly a lower-class phenomenon and it is largely responsible for the emergence of our burgeoning underclass. An underclass needs a critical mass, At what point is that critical mass reached? How much illegitimacy can a community tolerate? At this point no one knows, but historical fact is that the trend lines on black crime, black dropout from the labor force and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward when the overall black illegitimacy ratio passed 25 percent and the rate in low-income black communities moved above 50 percent. But we need not rely on the black analogy to understand the emergence of a white underclass. Seventy-five percent of all white illegitimate births are to women with below average IQs and 45 percent are to women with IQS under 90. These women are poorly equipped for the labor market, often poorly equipped to be mothers and there is no reason to thinks that the outcomes of their intellectually challenged children will fare any better than has been the case for black children raised under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, as the illegitimacy rate continues to grow, the dynamics in the public housing market (where they will continue to be welcome) and the private housing market ( where they will not) will foster increasing concentrations of whites with high unemployment, high crime, high illegitimacy and low cognitive ability, creating communities that look very much like the inner-city neighborhoods that people now tend to associate with minorities. The authors now discuss the coming custodial state. When a society reaches a certain overall level of affluence, the haves begin to feel guilty about the condition of the have-nots. Thus dawns the welfare state, the attempt to raise the poor and needy out of their plight. What happens when those that are willing to spend their money to end poverty lose faith that their remedial social programs will work? The authors believe that the affluent cognitive elite will then implement an even more expansive welfare state for the underclass that will provide for their basis needs but also keep them out from underfoot. In other words, the economic and intellectual segregation we are now experiencing will become even more pronounced. Ultimately the affluent cognitive elite will conclude that the underclass are in that position, through no fault of their own, but because of inherent short coming about which little or nothing can be done. At that point, the ruling class will become more accepting of the dysfunctional behavior of the underclass and more willing to overlook their self destructive behavior (drug addiction, criminality, unavailability for work, child abuse and family disorganization including, most importantly, their propensity for illegitimacy. Ultimately, it will be agreed that the underclass cannot be trusted with money so public policy will be in the form of greater benefits in the form of services rather than cash. These benefits and services will come with new restrictions which will have the following consequences. Child rearing in the inner cities will become solely the responsibility of the state. Inner city day care centers and elementary schools will provide not only education, medical care and nutrition but training in hygiene, sexual socialization, work training and the other functions that their parents are deemed incapable of providing. The homeless will vanish. The cognitive elite will join the broad public sentiment and reassert control over public places. People with mental problems, that now constitute a high proportion of the homeless will be required to reside in shelters, more elaborately equipped and staffed than the shelters of today, but nonetheless institutions from which it will be difficult for them to escape. The underclass will become even more concentrated spatially than they are today. The expanded network of day care centers, homeless shelters, public housing and other services will always be located in the poorest parts of the inner cities, 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 cities to the suburbs, which has never been strong to begin with, will wither altogether. The underclass will continue to grow. During the 1980s, scholars found evidence that the size of the underclass was no longer expanding. But even as they wrote, the welfare rolls, which had moved within a narrow range since the late 1970s, began to surge again. the authors predict that the government will try yet another round of the customary social programs, sex education, job training, parental training, and the like, and they will be as ineffective this round as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, many low-income parents who try to do all that is possible to assure that their children will escape poverty will find it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to do so. They will find it impossible to propagate their norms when surrounded by a local culture in which illegitimacy, welfare, crime and drugs are common place and the norm rather than the exception. In each succeeding generation a higher proportion of the working class will become members of the underclass, and fewer of their children will be able to escape their impoverished surroundings. Social budgets and measures of social control will become increasingly more centralize. The costs for the mandated social programs to "fix the problem" will be enormous. As the states become overwhelmed the costs will be shifted to the federal budget. The mounting costs, and increasing national debt, also will 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 significant cutback in the numerous welfare programs, the government will be left with no choice but to engineer behavior through new programs and regulations. These policies are likely to become even more authoritarian than they are now and rely increasingly on custodial care. Finally, the authors predict that racism will reemerge in a new and more virulent form. The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it actually is thinking about race will reach something close to a breaking point. When this break comes, there most likely will be an overreaction in the opposite direction and racism will become more pronounced than it was before the civil rights movement. The authors do not know how likely this is to happen, but they believe it is a distinct possibility. If it were to happen, all of the scenarios for the custodial state would be more unpleasant and more vicious than anyone can now imagine. In short, the custodial state Herrnstein and Murray have in mind is a high-tech and more lavish version of an Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business as usual. However, "going about its business as usual" in the old sense will not be possible. It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its founding principles once it is accepted that a significant part of the population become wards of the state. The authors close this chapter with this admonishment. If we wish to avoid the possibility of a nation run by the haves with little or nothing left over for the have-nots, we cannot count on the natural course of events to make things come out right. Now is the time (mid 1990s, when this book was written) to think long and hard on how we can make good on the American' promise of an equal opportunity for everyone to live a satisfying life, in a society in which the cognitive elite dominate and those of low cognitive ability are increasingly handicapped. Is this even possible? ( My though, not the authors). Comment: In this disquieting chapter, Herrnstein and Murray speculate on what is likely to be the outcome in a society that is increasingly segregated by intellectual factors that are beyond human control. They are correct in their assertion that little can be done to increase the IQ of a person once he is born. In this respect, the failures of school busing, affirmative action and, most recently, head start attest to the futility of our attempts to alter the effects of the genetic code we are all born with. Yes, unfair as it may be, intelligence is an inherited trait, similar to body size and skin color, and there is little that can be done to alter it by manipulating environmental factors after birth. It has been twenty years since The Bell Curve was published. During these two decades not much has changed. The social engineers have not given up on their attempts to equalize outcomes by altering the environment of the underclass, whether it be white , black or Latino. Until such time as our political leaders wake up to the fact that little can be done to change outcomes simply by throwing money at the problems facing the emerging underclass, nothing is likely to change. At this point, the liberal elite have not yet "thrown in the towel" on their ineffective attempts to equalize outcomes by redistributing the wealth of the haves to the have-nots. Until they do, we will not know if Herrnstein and Murray's version of an custodial state (where the intellectually affluent elite provide for every need of an increasingly feeble and dependent underclass) will materialize.