IQ AND THE FUTURE OF EQUALITY
Green, Philip
This article is the last of three dealing with the subject of Genetics, IQ, and Equality. The first, entitled "Race and IQ: Fallacy of Heritability," appeared in our spring issue; the second, "The...
...Moreover, the extensiveness of the range enables us to make very fine comparisons among these apparently "innate" values, comparisons that seem to carry their own aura of reality with them...
...3) of IQ in the Meritocracy with p. 51 of "I.Q.," and both of them with the original sources: T. W. and M. S. Harrell, "Army General Classification Test Scores for Civilian Occupations," Educational and Psychological Measurement, V (1945), pp...
...Conversely—and this link in the chain of reasoning is decisive once we have begun to doubt the relevance of their largely spurious heritability data—if our achievements are unequal in the same way as are our IQs, then that coincidence may be taken as a vindication of the "reality" of whatever IQ measures, and the validity of the way in which IQ measures it...
...9. See Clarence Karier, "Testing for Order and Control in the Corporate Liberal State," Educational Theory XXII (Spring 1972), pp...
...But if IQ tests are to be put to the task of maintaining the status quo, there is no point in pretending that their "heritability" has anything to do with their utility for that 412 purpose...
...there seems to be a certain degree of fit between men's IQs and men's incomes and occupations—and Hernstein's social values...
...Standardized tests measure only a very limited number of these skills...
...And thus neither group would be passing on its own life chances, willy-nilly, to its children.' What Herrnstein seems to have done, in his sociological ignorance, is to have adopted intuitively (but without understanding its implications) Marx's notion that the division of labor, by its very existence, penalizes those who hold certain jobs for life...
...But if one score is 120 and the other 110 (or 2/3 of an SD) comparisons begin to suggest themselves...
...But that is only because in an inegalitarian society our social class positions are such important influences on our lives...
...The human environment contains hundreds of thousands of features that impinge on our development...
...Similarly, today's average backyard tinkerer can do things with an auto engine that would have been beyond the capabilities of the "genius" Watt...
...And though that ability may in some sense be "inborn," we have no reason to believe that it is inherited...
...11 Weiss et al...
...If we do away with the effective impact of social class, how then can something have a determinative role in distributing that impact...
...But IQ scores alone give us no reason to believe that the manifest differences among people are of such a nature 405 as to be considered significant inequalities...
...In a typical sleight-of-hand trick, Jensen at one point implicitly associates IQ with height by noting that "the characteristics we are most interested in, however, are continuous variables, like height and IQ...
...These findings of course justify only very tentative conclusions, and even those should not be drawn until the studies have been subjected to rigorous analysis...
...One could in fact sum them up together by saying that "disadvantage," however defined and caused, puts children into a position in which they will be more likely to receive negative rather than positive messages from hoth testing and schooling...
...Herrnstein, that is, confuses our "environment" with certain shorthand descriptions of it that we invent for ideological or scholarly purposes...
...On the basis of the only evidence we have, we cannot possibly credit the notion that occupational "success" in this or any society is in any significant way necessarily predicated on one's genetic constitution...
...Did they wish it, the testers could equally well design tests showing that most people are very close to average "intelligence," or alternatively that there are millions upon millions of submorons or geniuses: "Any distribution of I.Q...
...Scores of Army Personnel Grouped by Occupation," Occupations, XXVI (1947), pp...
...Given truly "equal" opportunity, those capable of upward social mobility will escape from the lower class...
...118-22 (and fig...
...Moreover, despite Marx's utopian preference for the society in which I can "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic," it is obvious from the bulk of his work that even Marx did not expect the total elimination of occupation in what he called "communist society...
...1OThe tests therefore are designed to uncover sharp inequalities, and of course they do so...
...Some individuals will, inherently, be capable of doing the most complex types of work...
...9 (In fact, the very first tests showed men to be more "intelligent" than women, and eventually psychometrists restandardized the tests so that they would not show that difference systematically...
...His single reference to evidence lies in a reference to "a paper by R. W. Weiss, E. Harwood, and D. Riesman," which, he claims, contains "ample data confirming the (to me) self-evident supposition that automation tends to shift available work toward higher intellectual requirements...
...II Let us now phrase Herrnstein's assertion as a question...
...q 414...
...We choose for various reasons to reward the working and nonworking members of our society with greatly disparate incomes...
...IQ tests purport to measure a phenomenon that is obviously much more subject to reform and equalization through conscious policymaking than is height...
...There would be nothing crucial that the sales managers could buy with whatever extra money income (if any) was necessary to induce them to perform their (perhaps) "more important" tasks...
...Thus it is, for example, that we would rather be operated on by a substandard surgeon of 1976 than by the greatest surgeon of the 18th century, because of the much more sophisticated equipment and knowledge available to the former...
...and we have learned this not from any impressionistic observations about human behavior, but "scientifically"—from IQ tests themselves...
...Many of the new "intellectual" jobs, furthermore, require mainly no more than the ability to submit with good discipline to on-the-job training...
...and when one is deprived of those levels of income and self-determination that the opinion-makers in one's society deem worthy of respect...
...Even the distance from -3 SD to +3 SD would be only the distance from an "IQ" of 91 to an "IQ" of 109...
...also note that case studies of individual firms often show that the increased volume of sales caused by technological innovation increases the semiskilled work force in related areas such as transportation and clerical work...
...8 In short, the IQ curve is an invention of inegalitarians who wished to represent quantitatively their own extremely hierarchical view of what they called "human nature"—it has nothing to do with "science...
...I am indebted to Robert Paul Wolff for suggesting this comparison to me...
...Andrew Levinson, The Working-Class Majority (New York: Penguin Books, 1975...
...Once again, however, we shall see that every step in this chain of reasoning is false...
...Herrnstein has thus carefully arranged matters so as to ignore the large body of both opinion and data that would discredit his "pragmatic" conclusion...
...suppose we moderate the particular influences, born of relative deprivation, that provide some people with an averagely worse life than others...
...To the extent that IQ may correlate with income or occupational standing, therefore, psychologists in their testing activities will only have succeeded in faithfully reflecting the values of their time, as embodied in the occupational class structure...
...Again, a person with an IQ of 80 is separated from one with an IQ of 130 (two SDs above and below the mean) by 50 points, or halfthe mean...
...see esp...
...That is, they do not test practical mastery of a particular body of knowledge or ability—say, the mastery needed to enable an individual to handle some specific range of socially productive jobs, to deal adequately with the labyrinthine ways of service bureaucracies, etc...
...See also Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the U.S...
...If there is an obvious exception, it would pertain to the nature of decision-making in large organizations, for here we may require greater complexity rather than simplification or routinization...
...The relative strength of the influence of those circumstances, and the influence of IQ, is startling...
...Indeed, the major criticism 410 of modern technology by both radicals and conservatives has always been that it infantilizes workers, deprives them of the instinct of workmanship, dulls their minds and limits their horizons...
...But, at the same time, he approvingly presents us with a tantalizing sample of a table from a World War II study of the occupations and IQs of enlisted men...
...Human life, to be sure, imposes certain constant requirements (though the circumstances under which they must be met are hardly constant) pertaining to decision-making ability, the awareness of danger, or ability to manipulate the behavior of others...
...The 401 question this immediately suggests is, What is there about IQ testing that makes us think its results accurately represent a "natural" or "inherent" capacity...
...The normal or bell-shaped curve represents a distribution of observations in which a few measurements are located at either extreme but most bunch toward the average value of whatever is being measured, there being also an equal number of cases on either side of the average or mean value...
...We have noted that virtually all the cases for a normal distribution fall within ± 3 SD from the median/mean: we can divide the area enclosed by a normal curve on a graph into six equal parts (equal in horizontal distance covered, that is), which will contain most of the cases in the proportion stated above...
...3. At the present moment "assortative mating for intelligence" seems to play a negligible role in the creation of social classes...
...By accidental man-made phenomena, I mean frequently occurring events that no one is consciously trying to bring about in a particular pattern...
...They suggest that if schools and colleges placed less emphasis on cognitive skills, the correlations between tests scores and status might just fall...
...But 402 environmental pressures and different subcultural and individual experiences both inhibit and channel their expression in various ways...
...In this basic respect IQ is quite unlike, say, height, which for a given individual remains objectively the same measured against some independent object as a tree or a wall, no matter who is doing the measuring or for what social purposes, and no matter the state of mind or subcultural traits of the person being measured...
...But in any event, in the absence of great inherited wealth and power, such an income ratio would satisfy almost any egalitarian as at least a first approximation of economic equality, and thus Herrnstein's claim for the rationality and inevitability of our existing occupational hierarchy is revealed as meaningless...
...of 192 places her close to the top of the entire sample, and whose retested intelligence at maturity was again virtually at the top, was raising eight children, including three sets of twins...
...If people have observably unequal capacities, it will not be because their parents could afford different kinds of education, health, etc., but solely because of their genetic constitutions—which reformers will not feel as free to "reform" as they would different environmental backgrounds...
...So far as anyone knows there is no consistent relationship of any kind between income and productivity...
...Notwithstanding their poorer salaries, on the average, the women reported greater satisfaction in their lives than the men...
...3) the development of techniques for correcting the great variety of what are now considered (nongenetic) "learning disabilities"— many of which are associated with poor nutrition, substandard living conditions, etc., not to mention patterns of family life that though difficult to change are hardly genetic in origin...
...7. See Michael Young's satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy (Penguin Books, 1961...
...IQ distributes occupation (allegedly), and the occupational distribution manifestly works to society's advantage...
...salesman and auto mechanic...
...Herrnstein and Jensen (the former at greater length) both make much of the "prestige ratings" of various occupations in a few public opinion studies, and of an alleged correlation between IQ and occupational prestige...
...And what the past and present have done, the future can undo...
...15 Self-evidence is the kind that Herrnstein and Jensen most respect...
...Thus there will always be medical danger signals that go unheeded...
...Jensen's major statements are summarized and discussed in the previous two articles in this series...
...Of course it will surely be very difficult to make all or even any of those things happen...
...THUS FAR we have said no more than that IQ inequality tells us nothing about the full range of potential human capabilities...
...Generally speaking, the shape of the bell curve reflects the unsurprising fact that often the most frequently appearing size (the mode) of a natural phenomenon (say, height) that recurs over time will also tend to be the average size (mean) as well as the middle size (median...
...Herrnstein does not seem to understand the meaning of the term "class...
...The genetic makeup of the population does not cause our widely dispersed system of rewards to persist...
...2) The Educational Testing Service has completed a six-year study concluding, according to a report in the New York Times, that disadvantaged children "enter school with a broad range of abilities and as much selfesteem as any other group but that the process of schooling may hamper these traits...
...Thus the existence of genetic diversity among people should pose no serious obstacle to the attainment of any state of social equality we may desire to reach...
...The problem with this final version of Herrnstein's argument is again that little evidence exists in support of it...
...In a rational society, he tells us, those who can be expected to add more or less worth to materials by their labor can be and perhaps should be differentiated according to their intellectual capabilities...
...an additional 27 percent between 15 and 30 points above or below the mean, that is ± 2 SD, and most of the remaining 5 percent ±3 SD from the mean (between 55 and 70, or 130 and 145...
...Said indeed...
...Again, however, the demonstration is chiefly of methodological ineptitude and sheer prejudice...
...But this is not what happens methodologically and not what happened historically...
...chaps...
...This counterexample, certainly, would be meaningless or dishonestly evasive if the standard deviation of 15 points on IQ test scores were a natural or random phenomenon...
...Indices of educational attainment, "success" in life as indicated by income, and place in the occupational hierarchy supposedly offer such correlations to a greater or lesser extent...
...According to Herrnstein they will, if they accomplish this program, have effectively equalized the effects of environment...
...In other words, once the influences of environment are detached from their present association with socioeconomic position (by those egalitarian reforms that Herrnstein so disingenuously fears), aspects of the interaction between individuals and their environments that are now dominated by gross and powerful class or caste differences would come to the fore in their own right...
...Andrew Levison has recently pointed out that file clerks and messenger boys are routinely listed as "whitecollar" or "service" workers...
...However, the paper by Weiss et al...
...For purposes of discussion, though, I assume that there may be some genetic transmission of intellectual capacity of some kind...
...However, when the joint effects of IQ, education, and social class on economic success are evaluated with multiple regression analysis, the independent effect of IQ (even assuming Jensen's .80 heritability factor) is revealed as virtually nil...
...It is obviously an easy leap from the observation that so many frequency distributions take a shape generated by the binomial theorem to the conclusion that the theorem expresses some underlying principle of reality, instead of being a mere artifact of statistical reasoning, of the way we choose to discriminate among our observations for extraneous purposes of computation...
...Second, a good part of the increase in size of the "knowledge industry" is traceable to the capacity of a more productive economy to support a growing number of workers in service rather than manufacturing industries...
...They present a series of 10 x 10 matrices, using the 10 deciles of economic success matched with those of IQ, education, and social class background...
...See the remarks by Alan Gartner and Frank Riessman in Social Policy, Nov.-Dec...
...On even the most casual inspection, it is apparent that Herrnstein is only playing with words—and playing badly (violating the rules of the game, one might say...
...The housewives, who were earning less money than anyone else, expressed about as much satisfaction as any other group in the sample...
...Clearly, if Herrnstein's argument is correct, egalitarians are caught up in a paradoxical position...
...worse, there is much evidence that casts a great deal of doubt on his central proposition...
...that is its most apparent product now...
...New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1971), p. 557 17...
...it does not mean that we all become the same person with one uniform life-style...
...Income, pitchers' earned-run averages, and numbers of miles between places of work and places of residence are also "continuous variables"—but that does not mean they are "polygenic...
...test scores can be skewed to the right by making the test questions more difficult, or to the left by making them easier," and thus the results "tell us nothing about the actual shape of mental-ability distribution...
...According to Herrnstein, "the ties among I.Q., occupation, and social standing make practical sense...
...Many psychologists, however, will continue to insist that "intelligence," no matter how measured, is probably distributed "normally," because so many other things are...
...In general and historically, the routinization of work is the consequence of new, productive techniques that are invented by persons of great originality (if not of genius) who do not necessarily have much social support...
...This being the case, it does not matter whether egalitarians try to eliminate or attenuate the impact of class stratification, because they cannot do so...
...Eventually, therefore, in the interest of social efficiency we will have to use IQ as a guide to occupational placement, because a very large proportion of the population will prove not to possess the intellectual abilities requisite for "good" or important jobs in the kind of highly technological society that the advanced industrial nations are all tending to become...
...The social policies of the past and the inertia of the present cause it to persist...
...Having done so, he can indeed safely conclude that persons with higher IQ "naturally," if they are men, earn and deserve the higher pay they receive: one has only to see how important their jobs are to know it...
...Like Jensen's argument, however, Herrnstein's is false...
...That choice having been made, the population then sorts itself out into the existing income-generating positions according to various of its characteristics...
...The questions, in other words, exist to produce scores that the test-makers thought would be an appropriate collection of scores, and there were and are no other, "objective" grounds at all on which the appropriateness of the questions could be demonstrated...
...It is possible that individual manufacturing corporations did introduce technological improvements that changed their requirements for semiskilled production workers, but in the aggregate automation did not appear to have a uniform effect on either raising or lowering skill requirements...
...A good portion of those with intellectual capacities genetically below the competence level will remain behind and marry each other...
...But of course these correlations in no way teach us that society either i or needs to be intellectually graded...
...2. As I pointed out in my "Race and IQ: The Fallacy of Heritability" in the Spring 1976 Dissent, the data on heritability actually tell us nothing about the genetic inheritance of intelligence...
...IQ tests can be put to such use only because the realities of power and social class division stand behind them...
...III The Herrnstein-Jensen argument, though it purports to be based on the science of genetics, is in the end not a biological argument after all...
...20 But again, many of these new service jobs are not intellectually demanding in the sense that IQ supposedly measures intellect (though some of the new service jobs may be extraordinarily demanding of hun n sympathy, flexibility, etc...
...The point, then, is not to repeat Herrnstein's error but rather to recognize the arbitrariness of his, and Jensen's, argument...
...no other practical purpose is served...
...In a study from which he quotes in his book, there is a graphic figure horizontally divided into segments each representing a 5-IQ-point spread, and each containing a vertically (and neatly) arranged list of all the occupations for which the mean IQ 413 of the people filling those occupations falls within that segment...
...One such causal factor is the occupational status of one's father: in short, birth rather than 408 "merit...
...Their claim is that IQ is in any event a valid predictor of our social achievements...
...Since the whole purpose of egalitarian reform is precisely to end the irrational and unnecessary association between occupation and the availability of a society's range of goods and services, by making the latter available to all with a minimal inequality regardless of occupation or income, egalitarians need feel no alarm at all about the prospect that people of different inherent capacities might wind up handling different jobs...
...22 o Notes 1. Richard Herrnstein's original article, "I.Q.," appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Sept...
...According to the account at the latest report, she had no outside activity at that time other than an interest in the P.T.A., but was apparently content, if not serene...
...Above all, the tests, once we understand their true nature, give us no reason to believe that on the downward side there is inherently a serious general deficiency in human intelligence— despite those appearances to the contrary that too many testers have deliberately helped to foster...
...Press, 1975...
...But this is nonsense...
...This is a most substantial difference...
...The other strongest causal factor is one's educational attainments, measured merely as years of formal schooling undergone...
...VI Admittedly, it would again be compounding Herrnstein's error to claim that the very limited evidence we have about the effects of intellectual advance is anything more than ambiguous...
...From here on this is a discussion of the validity of IQ measurements as an index of intelligence, and a critique of the argument that Herrnstein and Jensen use to assert this validity...
...Rather, we use techniques ranging from our common sense appreciation of whether a measurement technique has been well chosen for its purpose to our observation of attempts to make predictions based on laws deduced from the measurements: in other words, we must judge...
...In hunter/gatherer societies, e.g., there were different occupational but no social classes, and therefore one's occupation—being either a hunter or a gatherer—did not affect one's social position adversely...
...When aggregate demand for manufactured goods picked up in the 1960s, blue-collar workers were once again in great demand...
...and also like Jensen's, it is sometimes foolishly false.' According to Herrnstein, if we concede that there is any significant hereditary component in intelligence, we face a dilemma.' The more "equal opportunity" is realized in a society, the more will distinctions between people with respect to their capacities to perform needed social tasks be traceable solely to the genetic differences between them...
...Thus Herrnstein replaces a selfcontradictory argument with one that seems at least to make logical sense...
...He seems to agree with Marx that certain types of work are inherently degrading of body and soul as compared to others...
...Each of these three studies, of course, upholds an environmentalist interpretation of both the malleability of the IQ gap and the reasons for its existence, and so provides further ammunition for those who believe that IQ tests measure adjustment to a social system as much as or more than they measure anything that might be called "native intelligence...
...sales manager and cabinet maker, or electrician or lathe operator...
...But for IQ tests, 100 has been set as the midpoint (mean, mode, and median) and the SD is 15 points...
...What all this means (aside from telling us something about the social power of the testmakers) is that there is nothing inherently "natural" or "real"about the great spread of intellectual capacities, which according to our social mythology IQ tests uncover—but which in reality they actually create...
...6. In fact, though, the great merit of the normal curve of error, as it is properly called, is its use in determining the reliability of generalizations obtained from studying sample populations, as indicated by our ability to replicate our results with a different sample...
...On the contrary, we can as easily posit a set of circumstances under which Herrnstein's prophecy would be disproved: (1) the long-term elimination of arbitrary social barriers, special constraints on labor mobility, and extreme negative social conditions...
...Since the preparation of this article (and the preceding two, in the Spring and Summer issues), the results of three new pieces of research have been reported that are worthy of the reader's attention...
...Similarly, we are all capable of making our own judgments as to whether high-IQ women who are past the age of childbearing and childrearing (leaving aside entirely the question of whether that latter task might not be apportioned more equally among the sexes) are contributing the most they can to society when relegated to the boards of powerless voluntary associations...
...One of the more charming things about Jensen and Herrnstein is that they don't know that Young's book is a satire...
...Equal opportunity" in American parlance, or in the minds of the French revolutionaries who created the slogan of careers open to the talents, is a legal or (more recently) a sociological norm, not at all a factual description of human lives...
...If both power and income were redistributed in offices and workplaces, if executive work commanded neither differential pay nor differential access to control over one's environment, there would be no reason to believe that what now are prestigious but psychologically difficult white-collar jobs would be more attractive than blue-collar jobs in the eyes of most people...
...6 Many psychologists have made that leap, and it is this kind of reasoning that Herrnstein and Jensen follow when they deduce that the decidedly inegalitarian outcomes of IQ testing accurately reflect a "natural," random distribution of intelligence...
...and society is thus wisely "husbanding its intellectual resources" when it informally enforces those ties by molding 406 the more important occupations "in greater esteem and paying them more...
...Even the most radical policy of equalizing the conditions under which we all begin the struggle of life only means equalizing certain institutionalized conditions that can be affected by social and economic policy...
...This happens to be the form taken by the distribution of many accidental or random phenomena, both "natural" and man-made...
...Do that throughout, and we will have a straight line running beneath our vertical job title lists—so much for the "bell-shaped curve...
...Most jobs require a wide variety of skills...
...See Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 220...
...see the New York Times, Feb...
...This "pragmatic answer,"upon which their whole argument about the necessity of inequality ultimately stands or falls, goes as follows: Whatever IQ scores do or do not "really" measure, and whatever "heritability" really is or is not, the "fact"is that IQ scores correlate closely with other aspects of social behavior that are presumably of great practical importance to us...
...After all, every one of the forms of parent or child behavior that predict a comparatively bleak social future can be found in families of all social classes even now...
...A first simple correlation shows that a person in the top tenth IQ class has a 30 percent chance of also being in the top income tenth...
...is a prominent example...
...Among the reasons were the desire to separate sheep—the "mentally defective''--from goats—"normals"—very visibly...
...Equal opportunity carried to its consistent extreme—that is, to the point where so much equalization has taken place that no one has a real advantage over anyone else by virtue of birth—means in effect, for this society, that everyone would be provided with roughly as supportive an environment as that in which the average middle-class white American child grows up today...
...If the size of those deviation units and thus of the standard deviation is very small as compared with the mean size of whatever is being measured, we are given a totally different impression of the phenomenon than we would obtain if the deviation units were comparatively large: we obtain a relatively "egalitarian" bell-shaped curve in which the existing, proportional inequalities don't amount to very much...
...The entries in the matrix cells are probabilities based on the connection between economic success and the other variables...
...What identifies a social class is that its members and their children obtain a range of benefits by virtue of membership in it that are denied, formally or informally, to members of a "lower" class...
...Clearly, no one need doubt that in some degree or other, as yet unknown, underlying individual differences in intellectual capacity, of a magnitude we cannot possibly estimate, are linked to some of our genes, in a manner and to an extent of which we have no knowledge at all...
...The new methods are then put into practice and supervised by highly skilled persons, and finally come to be so simplified and organized that they can be managed by any averagely intelligent person...
...but, even so, the generalization that technological progress routinizes work requirements is surely on safer ground than its contrary...
...that the inequality with which it distributes them takes the form of what statisticians call a "normal distribution...
...p. 163...
...In the context of IQ tests, of which the mean value (of the most well known ones) is 100 with a standard deviation of 15 points (see below), a normal distribution entails that approximately 68 percent of observed cases fall equally within plus or minus one-standard deviation (SD) from 100 (i.e., 34 percent from 85 to 100, and 34 percent from 100 to 115...
...today), and an SD of six inches, then we would know that about 95 percent of those males were between 4'9" and 6'9...
...18 But nothing in IQ tests relates to the ability to be an "intelligent" decisionmaker...
...No labor market economist has ever suggested that available human resources are inadequate...
...The sole purpose of testing for this abstract norm is to place everyone on a wide, finely graded ordinal scale and so to produce a nationwide comparative ranking...
...It therefore is hardly surprising that the partial correlations on which they rest so much of their case are spurious...
...but none are associated exclusively with social class membership...
...In the furor stirred up by the new inegalitarians' contention that differences in intelligence are inherent, most of the notoriety has gone to Arthur Jensen's allegation that heredity accounts for the average IQ gap between America's blacks and whites...
...That comment can now be extended...
...It is an equally easy leap to the further conclusion that any measurement system (such as IQ tests) ought therefore to generate measurements whose frequency curve is "normal...
...We have to accept that the people who get paid the most money do the most important work and are also the "most intelligent" people...
...We have no grounds for believing that if, after a period of mutual retraining, prestigious and well-paid high-IQ public relations men, stock analysts, or real estate brokers switched jobs with prestigeless, lower-IQ truck drivers (or with any random sample of housewives), the real productivity of society would in the long run be any the less...
...Thus the 398 egalitarian drive to reform the environment so as to make it more equal for all will paradoxically but necessarily result in the creation of a self-reproducing lower class...
...This is a considerably greater degree of absolute inequality than even that given in my first height example (12/69...
...Second, "men's work" is ranked by him primarily according to the income it generates and by the alleged correlation between occupational income and IQ held to be socially constructive...
...2) the development of a social determination to devote a greater portion of resources to education and training for all levels of skilled work—including compensatory education, where necessary...
...Finally, those who possess differential capacities will constitute permanent social classes...
...186-87...
...The content of IQ tests is therefore quite arbitrary as to the qualities that are being measured, and how they are being measured...
...as long as we don't pretend we can speak with any more precision, it seems a safer assumption than the contrary...
...8. Martin Bronfenbrenner, Income Distribution Theory (New York: Aldine-Atherton, 1971), p. 57...
...Among these, IQ and whatever underlying native capacity it may reflect has only a negligible independent effect...
...The present genetic condition of social classes suggests no inherent, necessary obstacles to the attainment of greater equality in the future...
...Social class" is only an analytic category at a fairly high level of abstraction, created by human beings in order to help us understand what we do to each other en masse...
...Of the 21 job descriptions given for the 117.5-122.1 (sic) column, 14 could easily be telescoped into the three categories of "clerical office worker," "draftsman," and "lab technician," leaving only 10 job descriptions in that column...
...Even in...
...There is nothing inherently wretched about working in a factory (Marx could hardly have thought that and praised the bourgeoisie for its introduction of a high level of industrialization, not to mention a work environment in which workers must perforce learn to cooperate with each other...
...What are some of these intellectual discriminations that, Herrnstein asserts, "husband" society's "intellectual resources" and thus validate IQ testing as an index of human ability...
...But if American or any similar society fails to devote itself to training people for new jobs, and creating new jobs (or redefining old ones) so that they are fit for people, it will not be because of any impediment in "human nature" but because of a lack of will or other relevant resources...
...But they would most certainly be redistributed...
...Those who are capable will naturally be rewarded more than the less capable or incapable...
...But one hardly makes the effects of the division of labor worse by eliminating the extraneous conditions of class existence that are now attached to it...
...And where technological advance has decreased employment opportunities for the semiskilled, as in the petroleum refining industry, it has increased opportunities for "skilled maintenance men"—not, one would think, a job category beyond the capabilities of most persons who have developed good learning habits in school...
...The conventional distinction between "white-collar" and "bluecollar" work obscures the reality that many jobs of the former type are no more oriented toward independent intellectual understanding than traditional factory work: perhaps even less, if factory workers were encouraged to take an interest in the organization of their own productive process...
...Quite apart from the butchery of Dewey's pragmatism inherent in the vulgar notion that what is useful to act on is what we ought to call "true," the force of this argument depends entirely on our subjective agreement that the occupational hierarchy in, say, American society is first, "rational," and second, not replaceable by any different arrangement...
...Jencks therefore concludes, contrary to Herrnstein, that...
...In the sense, therefore, in which statisticians say a measurement is "valid"—truly measuring what is supposed to be measured—IQ tests and measures (such as the 15 point SD) associated with them cannot possibly be said ever to have been validated...
...If we could democratize the workplace and redistribute income and prestige—if we can do what egalitarians propose to do—then genetically determined IQ differences, if they exist at all, will be of no further moment...
...Art imitates nature again...
...and so too, by extension, is the similarly wide dispersal of rewards that people in societies such as ours obtain for doing different kinds of work...
...But suppose we smooth over the differences between the various averagely different life-styles...
...At least some part of every individual's intellectual capability, he adds, must be genetically composed, or inherent...
...If different tests could be developed for particular parochial subcultures, testing could be used to identify "underachievers": i.e., those members of a subculture whose schoolwork is being done at a level below that at which the tests indicate it should be done...
...This suggests the need for a further clarification...
...There are millions and millions of people in any categorically described "social class" whose actual lives are not comprehended by 399 some or all of the correlations associated with membership in that class...
...The millions of people who have been labeled "below average" by the IQ testers are "below average" only because every "normal" frequency distribution requires that a large number of observations be below (and above) average, not because they are humanly inferior, or incompetent to do socially useful work...
...1973), and reprinted in Alan Gartner et al., The New Assault on Equality (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp...
...The answer, according to Herrnstein and Jensen, is that IQ unequally distributes important conceptual abilities...
...the assertion that they actually do measure some real aspect of human nature is no more than a meretricious attempt to sugar-coat that power and that class division...
...The only pragmatic truth offered by the analysis of IQ scores is thus the pragmatic truth that many people, including some academics, are well served by the status quo and will use any means, including that of making intellectually shoddy arguments, to help maintain it...
...Jensen, in a typical passage, says "we see that the prestige hierarchy of occupations is a reliable objective reality in our society"—having just quoted a paragraph from the most famous social mobility study that includes the phrase, "Our argument tends to imply that a correlation between IQ and occupational achievement was more or less built into IQ tests, by virtue of the psychologists' implicit acceptance of the social standards of the general populace...
...87-90...
...Suppose we could eliminate or attenuate the effects of our present social environment on differential social class behaviors—would then "assortative mating" (for intelligence) come to hold the determinative role that now is held by the nongenetic determinants of class membership ?3 Merely to ask the question in this way is to highlight the outlandish quality of Herrnstein's reasoning...
...Herrnstein avoids Jensen's conclusions about race but links the notion of the genetic determination of IQ with a peculiar use of the conceptual category, "social class...
...More, if we wished to move in the direction Marx indicated through his attacks on the division of labor and its consequences, we could easily involve many more people in "mental" as opposed to "physical" labor for at least some period of their work lives in general, or some part of each of their working days in particular...
...Thus two people with IQs one SD above and below the mean differ in their IQs by almost onethird of the social mean (30/100...
...nothing in the IQ literature tells us anything about how much decision-making ability there is in a society, or where it is located...
...It has also been expanded into a book, I.Q...
...accountant and production manager...
...All the evidence we have reviewed points in the same direction...
...In the high-IQ column we could, conversely, break down "accountant" or "chemist" into several subcategories each, with as much reason as the authors decomposed "clerical office worker" in the middle column...
...When confronted with the criticism that society's occupational hierarchy is not to any great extent rationally arranged according to IQ—that we do not live in a "meritocracy," unless to a very, very limited extent—Herrn409 stein replies by arguing that whether society is now meritocratic, it is bound to become more so with the spread of computer technology and similar innovations...
...There is little here to support the feminist argument that a housewife's life is intolerable, especially for educated, intelligent women...
...Class is thus one of the two major kinds of social grouping (the other being caste) that dbes indeed distribute benefits or penalties in every area of a person's life...
...3) An IQ study of black children who were adopted into white families suggests that their placement into a mainstream middle-class environment resulted in a rise of their IQs toward the national norm...
...The quotation is from a 1968 HEW study by Otis Dudley Duncan, which has become a basic source...
...Given Herrnstein's values, we should all be grateful for that...
...Herrnstein's statement is in his reply to critical letters in the "More About I.Q...
...Contrarily, if the SD were two inches, it would seem a fairly egalitarian society to us by 403 comparison with the other one—though the proportional distribution of heights would be exactly the same—and if it were found that short men were less attractive to women than tall men, innovation with elevator shoes might become a serious issue...
...they might not even be attenuated...
...Given that conjunction of conditions, the proportion of the population capable of putting its talents to work at useful careers in any imaginable future society ought to rise sharply...
...But we have every reason to disbelieve this...
...But class can only have that effect, and indeed can only exist as a useful analytic conception, where benefits and penalties are distributed with a marked inequality...
...There is no need for egalitarians to deny that whatever it is IQ tests measure may be as unequally distributed as the test results show, because there is no reason to believe that what IQ tests do measure is in any extent a reasonable index of our innate intellectual capacities, whether those are in whole or in part genetic or environmental in their origins...
...From the few efforts that have been made at understanding the shape of our technological future, a much less dramatic picture emerges...
...Nor is it necessary to take a Luddite view that all intelligence testing must be done away with, although clearly in an inegalitarian society such testing is likely to be used to accentuate the inequalities...
...it is ignored when he speaks of bartenders, PR men, etc., and merely tacked on to his report of a high-IQ study, of which the most important finding is that IQ, as opposed to education, "definitely affects income...
...A much more grandiose assault has been made on egalitarianism by Jensen himself and, more prominently, by the psychologist Richard Herrnstein...
...When either of those values shows signs of a drift away from the norm, the 404 tests are rewritten to make them "harder...
...or prevented from further breeding if they were already here...
...See Weiss et al., "Work and Automation," Contemporary Social Problems, 3rd ed., Robert K. Merton and Robert Nisbet, eds...
...But we are still left with not the faintest grounds, "pragmatic" or otherwise, for believing, or acting as though we believe, that IQ scores measure, or the shape of the IQ curve distributes, a trait that is functionally related to the accomplishment of socially important tasks...
...We learn only that in the U.S...
...In respect to those inherited capabilities necessary for performing socially useful work, normal people probably vary much less from each other than IQ tests are permitted to suggest, if only all were given a chance to develop their talents to the fullest...
...On the other hand, some as yet unknown but clearly significant portion of the new automated systems jobs do not themselves require a striking degree of cognitive or conceptual ability but, at the most, the "wide variety of skills" Jencks refers to...
...3. 5. This point has been made with great force and clarity by Michael Walzer in his "In Defense of Equality," Dissent, Fall 1973, pp...
...To return to the case of human height, if we were told that the height of adult males in a certain society showed a midpoint of 5'9" (about what it is in the U.S...
...399-408...
...He not only posits the existence of a lower class as a permanent phenomenon in technologically complex societies but argues that egalitarianism would make class stratification even worse than it need be...
...Anyone who has ever flown in a plane with one engine out, or driven in a car with failing brakes, or worried about the dangers of faulty 407 wiring, will be able to make his or her own judgment of whether society is (or was) "wisely husbanding" its intellectual resources...
...These do require some upgrading (though hardly an inordinate amount) in the levels of intellectual skill associated with productive labor...
...66-81...
...1971, pp.43-64...
...What he expected, rather, was the diminution of the tyranny of the working day (the notion that is at the heart of Das Kapital), so that no person's living time need be totally dominated, nor character brutalized, by lengthy, exclusive immersion in one stultifying job...
...It is only comparatively wretched when one is deprived of the ability to exercise all one's faculties by an extreme specialization of labor...
...This is certainly how those Americans who were interviewed by Sennett and Cobb or Robert Coles see it: to the extent that they see their lives as a humiliation, they associate that condition with their powerlessness...
...As to the effect of technological progress, it can only be said that, when challenged, Herrnstein simply reiterates his original, unsupported statement...
...and that the people presently doing "less important" work could not do the more important work equally well...
...However, in this version of the argument he has allegedly deduced his vision of extensive and "natural" human inequality from IQ test scores...
...Thus, IQ tests consist of questions selected precisely in order to produce a mean of 100 and an SD of 15...
...they will create a class, perpetuated by their children whose own intelligence will also be below competence level, and so on and on...
...Given what we know about the various conditions, ranging from the subtle to the manifestly hideous, which block the expression of human potential, and given also what we know about the ability of human beings to express an underlying trait in so many culturally diverse ways (with the appropriate training), we should probably reach a conclusion quite contrary to Herrnstein's...
...Obviously, the c,uestion is, do they...
...The authors do this for all segments, and then draw a line from left to right across the page that curves just below the bottom title in each vertical column...
...Thus the really significant element in a normal distribution is the size of the standard deviation (see p. 402) of the population sample...
...We will simply have insured that the difference and especially the pathologies will occur less often (much less often, we hope), and that sociologically their incidence will have been randomized, rather than associated more or less with particular, identifiable groups of people—"classes...
...Unfortunately it turns out that the original authors broke down job titles very finely in the midrange segments while telescoping them together at the extremes...
...For although Jensen and Herrnstein (and many others) write as though all normal distributions are effectively the same—that is, demonstrate the same extent of variation among the measured subjects—this is not the case...
...What is naturally useful is hardly the same as what is found useful by a majority of the inhabitants of a stratified society, subjected to the manifold influences of custom, propaganda, and coercion, and all the other realistically inescapable obstacles to creating any alternative way of life...
...Why they wanted to do that is itself an interesting question...
...Although Jencks's Inequality is the best-known example of this analysis, the most lucid presentation of such data is that of Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis in their essay on "IQ in the United States Class Structure," first published in Social Policy III (Nov.-Dec...
...In fact, then, the paper to which Herrnstein refers, if it "confirms" anything, confirms the more self-evident proposition that technological advance, by creating such instruments as adding machines, pocket calculators, key punch machines, continuousflow production systems, etc., makes it easier for the person of average intelligence to do jobs that used to be reserved for those with special mathematical ability—as reading off from dials the states of a production process that in the past could only be supervised by someone conversant with all the complicated techniques utilized in the process...
...Jensen even mentions the ranking of occupations by their "intellectual demands," as rated by one psychologist writing in the 1920s...
...4 Those manifestations of social behavior have nothing whatever to do with genes, and therefore there is little or no danger that any group of people engaging in such behaviors (even making the extremely questionable assumption of assortative mating among them) could ever form a distinctive, self-reproducing gene pool...
...What all IQ-type tests have in common (as I have noted in the first of these three articles) is that one must be tuned in to the idea of abstract testing behavior in order to do well at them: and that state of mind is a social artifact, not an inbred trait...
...That "reality"—the reality of the normal distribution of intelligence and its associated widely dispersed units of deviation—is attested to by the usefulness of IQ tests, if by nothing else about them...
...or income and social utility...
...moreover, the mean, median, and modal value are identical...
...We would think to ourselves that male height in that human group was extremely unequal, and it would never occur to us to adopt policies for equalizing it, such as the mass production of elevator shoes, crash programs of research into the nutritional deficiencies of short people, etc...
...The correlation between IQ level and occupational attainment is the one they fasten upon most tenaciously...
...that of B if their IQ scores were respectively 120 and 118...
...101-10...
...154-80...
...But nowhere except in utopian fantasies can we find a prognostication that highly demanding intellectual work is going to become the average work of even "postindustrial society...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), and Education and Economic Growth (New York: N.Y.U...
...1) Researchers at the University of Michigan suggest that family size is the strongest predictor of the average IQ of the children in a family—since, in the multichild family, parents will have to give less attention to each additional child...
...Thus it might be said on behalf of Jensen and Herrnstein that, since critics like myself (with our quibbles about the validity of the heritability data) cannot prove IQ is not heritable, we should submit our criticisms to the judgment of the ultimate intellectual tribunal: IQ tests being socially valuable, we should agree that the social report they give us must be "true...
...5-41...
...The work of Jane R. Mercer of the Sociology Department, University of California at Riverside, is a step in this direction...
...Rather, its authors report: Not long ago many people believed that advanced technology would raise the educational and skill requirements of workers in all sectors of the economy...
...The criticism may be exaggerated (or the past it holds up as a model may be romanticized...
...it even begins to seem feasible to make requirements out of them, formally or informally, so that we begin to want our managers to have IQs of 120, and foremen of "only" 110.' All of these comparisons and assessments are functions entirely of the size of the standard deviation...
...Jencks, et al., pp...
...EDS...
...in the Meritocracy (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), but the book is inferior to the article—a work of pseudoscholarship that makes no reference to the standard critical writings in the IQ controversy...
...Suppose, e.g., the IQ SD were set at 3 points...
...The resulting differential reward structure will be seen as "rational" or "fair," since it will not be linked to the vagaries of an unequal environment...
...If an individual with low scores has the necessary noncognitive skills, and if he can get into an occupation, his performance on the job will not usually be appreciably below the norm for the occupation...
...11-46, 301-10, and 407-18...
...On the contrary, intelligence tests measure only expressed conceptual reasoning powers...
...They have made the common error of neglecting to ask whether other factors ("intervening variables") that influence both IQ and occupational rank (or income) might not account for the alleged correspondence between them...
...Here their errors begin...
...413-14...
...Christopher Jencks and his associates, applying a complex analytical model called "path analysis" to existing data about social mobility, have found that factors other than IQ do appear to be the real predictors (in a causal sense) of occupational rank...
...This deduction is based entirely on prejudice...
...1971, pp...
...Bell, ibid...
...In addition to their inadequate defenses of IQ measurements and heritability studies, and as though recognizing that IQ tests have in truth never been validated, Jensen and Herrnstein both give what the latter calls "a pragmatic answer" to their critics...
...To say that you have an IQ of 50 points less than another, when for more than 99 percent of the population the entire range itself only contains 90 IQ points, is clearly to suggest that there is a great variation in "innate" intelligence (the + 3 SD score of 145 is more than 2'/z times as large as the -3 SD score of 55...
...I IV n reply to the contentions that what we know about IQ scores and their causes has no relevance to what we really want to know about human intelligence—that human social inequality can easily be explained without reference to genetics, and that the worst of this inequality at least is remediable—Herrnstein and Jensen demonstrate that they have one other string to their bow...
...To that extent also, and by suggesting the putative existence of millions of natively "incompetent" persons, they have put the tests to the use for which they were intended by some of their American originators...
...Some of them are associated with social class membership and some not...
...But those abilities are not measured on intelligence tests...
...First, technological progress indeed brings about a relative increase in the size of the "knowledge industry...
...This is why "technological progress" is progressive: it enhances the productive powers of averagely competent persons...
...19 This increase is brought about in part by the replacement of industrial human and machine labor with sophisticated automatized control systems...
...First, Herrnstein and Jensen are making the totally unwarranted assumption that the human intelligence that is transmitted genetically is the same, with the same general dimensions, as the one that is reflected in IQ test scores...
...To give but one example of the many striking cases, a woman whose I.Q...
...See also Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery (New York: Praeger, 1970...
...All "normal" distributions are indeed alike with respect to the way in which they distribute measurements proportionally, but they can take very different shapes depending on the average size of the differences between the various measurements...
...Here he diverges from the marginalist economists, who make no assertions about human nature or "natural" inequality...
...No doubt, IQ acquires at least a surface plausibility if scores correlate with productive achievement in a highly productive society...
...4. Edward Banfield, in his The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), explicitly says that the social class attitude types he discusses are ideal types, and that representatives of each type can be found in all actual income classes...
...the pseudotheory of the heritability of IQ suggests no inherent obstacle to the attainment of greater equality in the future...
...229-39, and Naomi Stewart, "A.G.C.T...
...Income is simply a function of marketplace and political power, both of which are generated by a long train of historical circumstance that has not necessarily had anything to do with "merit" or "usefulness...
...No one, after all, would think to make statements about the intelligence of A vs...
...In addition, among the American founders of "objective testing" there was a lot of plain old-fashioned racism, and they often expressed the thought that the tests could be used for eugenic purposes, to identify the lesser breeds such as Slays, Jews, Orientals, Negroes, etc., who could then either be prohibited from immigrating into the U.S...
...bartender and truck driver (8 points...
...First, in every case mentioned either directly or by implication, he rates more highly the job that pays more and is also (for men) either relatively nonproductive or involves only paperwork that is often irrelevant to any effort at extending the real wealth and thus the economic well-being of society (not to mention its artistic wealth and cultural well-being...
...The normal curve is thus favored by statisticians for its utility, not because it is known to tell "the truth" about the universe...
...Compare pp...
...Even occupation, which for Herrnstein and Jensen is the most important distributor of social rewards and penalties, does not function in that way unless occupational position is also associated with strongly unequal class membership...
...others will not...
...All in all, then, IQ tells us nothing about innate abilities, for there is no way to measure those abilities against a base line that can be defined independently of particular, prejudicially influential social standards (and it would certainly be an outre form of neo-Social Darwinism that would assert, e.g., that "natural selection" aids those who are fitted to survive in 20th-century capitalist society...
...Whether the data from which statistical generalizations are obtained truly measure what they were supposed to is a question of validity, and there are no statistical rules for determining that...
...That proportion could be greatly expanded if political leaders or their constituents did not willfully choose to spend the social surplus on other goods or services, ranging from sophisticated weapons to primitive cosmetics...
...I I Furthermore, the comparisons Herrnstein does give are only for men, who turn out to do all the husbanding of society's intellectual resources on their own...
...Although meeting those credentials requirements is hard for people with low test scores, inasmuch as most schools deliberately track such persons away from a college-oriented curriculum, IQ itself appears to mean little once one actually has a job: The modest relationship between test scores and wages in most occupations seems to reflect the fact that test scores have only a modest effect on actual competence in most lines of work...
...21 • Third, if aggregate economic demand is maintained, technological progress also creates an extensive number of useful if only semiskilled jobs...
...If we eliminated those particular influences—if we eliminated serious deprivation (absolute or relative) and class or caste discrimination—the stimulating or retarding effects of our environments would hardly be eliminated...
...Their wide variability over a continuous range of values is said to be polygenic...
...In two previous articles in these pages, I have demonstrated that Jensen's theorizing is tendentious or incompetent and his "empirical" case fraudulent...
...Egalitarians hope to accomplish this by eliminating or controlling the pathologyinducing conditions of social life—nutritional deficiencies, inadequate health care, alienation from educational and social institutions, discrimination in job markets, etc...
...Thus, if there are more jobs in which people have mean IQs falling within one segment than another, and the job title list under each segment begins on the same line, then the first list will extend farther down the page than the second...
...In no way, then, does technological progress outpace the improvement of the human material genetically available in modern societies...
...1972 and Jan.Feb...
...they are merely crude guides to averagely different life experiences that, for some reason or another, we wish to be aware of...
...there will always be parents who for one reason or another do not adequately stimulate all or some of their children, or who pass on their own dislike of schooling to their children, or who have objectively unfounded low valuations of the future they pass on to their children...
...Rather, they use their assertions about the heritability of IQ to give a unique twist to the economist's structural theory that differential monetary rewards are necessary to a smoothly functioning economy...
...12 Jensen's passage is typically the exact opposite of a truthful report of the data...
...There will always be a large class of the intellectually inferior, who must therefore receive inferior rewards from any rational society...
...or income and moral goodness...
...This study, on the surface, seems to contradict the first but actually does not...
...7-84...
...The notes to this article appear on pp...
...Even were we to grant for purposes of argument that the normal curves we draw are generated not by requirements we set for engaging in statistical reasoning, but to reflect the real world of things somehow, we still would have no reason to confuse the allegedly normal distribution of underlying native intelligence with the particular normal distribution of IQ scores...
...section referred to in note 1. 16...
...Thus, they reason, the wide dispersal of IQ scores is not a mere statistical artifact but the reflection of an underlying genetic reality...
...Those powers are surely required for many of the important tasks of a complex society, and it is certainly healthier to be able to express them rather than have them bottled up inside...
...Both schooling and IQ scores stress the ability and willingness to do well on written tests of academic subject matter, and neither bears any visible, immediate relation to the acquisition of job-oriented skills of any kind—and the likelihood of success is for both strongly dependent on the various background circumstances of one's life to which Jencks (and Bowles and Gintis) pointed...
...Herrnstein thus offers us two fascinating conclusions...
...says no such thing...
...The distribution of IQ scores, and their alleged and partial correlation with occupational rank, is no guide at all to the amount of underlying intellectual talent that is potentially available to us...
...If there is any shortage of intellectually skilled workers in any field, it is because we do not train enough interested persons in the 411 appropriate techniques (medical care in the U.S...
...see his discussion in chap...
...18, 1976...
...Those particular values exist as they do only because the early psychometrists wanted to create a body of "data" that would justify ranking people very much above or below each other...
...If the correlations were random, then an individual's chance of appearing in any of the matrix boxes would be 10 percent...
...It is true, to some extent (no one is sure what extent) various behavioral patterns are on the average associated not only with IQ score but also with social class identity...
...the second, "The Pseudoscience of Arthur Jensen," in the summer issue...
...That is, educational attainment and social class are shown to have a strong effect on income regardless of IQ, but IQ regardless of educational attainment and social class has only a very weak effect...
...A very convincing presentation of the same argument is Lester Thurow's "Education and Economic Equality," Public Interest, Summer 1972, pp...
...When challenged with the obvious argument that many women of high IQ are not being rewarded at all, or not equivalently, for the work they do, Herrnstein can add nothing to his earlier comment, in summarizing a study of high-IQ persons, that: Women's salaries were substantially lower than the men's and did not correlate with contentment...
...and that the normal distribution is really a natural distribution...
...1. From Herrnstein's use of these occupation studies we also learn that there are no depths to which he won't stoop to bolster a shaky case...
...The relationship between income/occupation and IQ reflects a subjective social reality, and the earnings accruing to IQ are no more a validation of its social utility than the sales of a book are a validation of its literary or scholarly merit...
...This theory tells us that some people will "rationally" or efficiently be paid more than others because they add more value to the worth of given products...
...In that case, in fact, we would not bother to have IQ testing at all...
...Lo and behold, Herrnstein then tells us the job lists are longer in the middle of the page than at its extremes, and the Iine takes the shape of "the familiar" bell curve...
...4) the long-run maintenance of a high level of aggregate economic demand coupled with a commitment to technological progress of a kind that draws on human capacities rather than stifling them...
...Fourth, the expanding demand for intellectually trained personnel, to the extent that demand does expand, has until now been matched, at least in the U.S., by an everexpanding proportion of social resources devoted to educating people to meet that demand...
...V J ensen and Herrnstein thus fail to establish either that IQ is pragmatically "real" or that the social hierarchy it correlates with is "rational...
...An exchange between Herrnstein and Noam Chomsky, in which Chomsky presents an argument similar to that made here may be found either in Social Policy III (May-June 1972 and July-August 1972), or in Cognition, 1, (n.d...
...IQ scores, which are decidedly unequal, are furthermore the best guide we have to the extent of each person's inherent capability...
...Of course, such tranquillity may be gone now, fifteen years later...
...However, today most labor force experts believe that the high unemployment experienced by factory workers during the late 1950s was due not to the advent of automatic machinery but to inadequate aggregate demand for manufactured goods...
...I concluded the second of these articles by suggesting that the existence of genetically different races within a society is not by itself a necessary obstacle to equality...
...13 Moreover, lest we think that educational attainment predicts income because the educated also have high IQs, Jencks notes that the strength of the correlation rather lies in the tendency of employers (and personnel directors looking for a cheap way to distinguish among otherwise indistinguishable job candidates) to require formal educational credentials of very doubtful applicability to on-the-job performance...
...14 What Jencks does not say, though it follows directly from his analysis, is that schooling and IQ scores correlate as well as they do because they are such similar experiences, at least as practiced in the United States...
...Assuming even some fairly high (and thus unjustifiable) figure for the heritability of IQ, then, writes Jencks, "if all the nongenetic causes of inequality were eliminated, the income gap between the top and bottom fifths of all male workers would fall from around 7 to 1 to around 1.4 to 1." Moreover, even that relationship may now be slightly overstated, in that more recent studies show a sharp drop in the job-market dollar value of a college education—and thus, to some marginal extent, of IQ...
...So what...
...This must certainly be true of IQ tests that, in the language of testing theory, are norm-referenced...
...On the contrary, we have to wonder whether many of the pains inherent in "the degradation of labor" do not result from the all-too-obvious 400 association of certain jobs with an inferior and unhappy social existence...
...It is as though 32 percent of all American men were either shorter than 4'0" or taller than 7'5...
...In an egalitarian society, it would not matter that, owing to their differential intelligences, some persons were mechanics and others sales managers...
...See p. 14 of Jensen's HER essay...
...highly technical fields, the difference between good and bad work seems to be more a matter of habits, values, attitudes, and outlook than of knowing the right answers to written or oral questions...
...Adjustment to their "lot," which is fundamental in justifying the women's role, is only incidental to his argument about men...
...that is, if we had set out to "measure" intelligence according to some objective baseline standard and discovered, to our surprise, that our sample showed a mean score of 100 and an SD of 15 points...
...nothing about the nature of IQ—not even its "normal" distribution— casts doubt on the view that the results of IQ testing are best explained by an examination of the social framework in which the testing is embedded...
...Rather the norm-referenced tests simply rank people relative to each other around an abstract "performance" norm that has no corollary in concrete, socially relevant task performance...
...Leaving aside for now the practical applicability of that theory (not to mention the startling discrepancy between "marginal" differences, as the economists call them, and those that exist in the American income and wealth structure), we can consider Herrnstein's elaboration...
...Such findings do not support the theory that if schools and colleges placed less emphasis on academic standards and cognitive skills, employers would fall back on tests to measure these skills...
...Then the difference of 2/ 3 of an SD between A and B would be a mere 2 IQ points rather than 10, and only psychometric pedants would dream of making competence comparisons between them...
...1973, pp...
...This claim is made by Daniel Bell in his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), esp...
...Black families on the average are larger than white (and have a higher incident of one-parent homes...
...It would be hard to pick a brighter group than the women in this study, yet they seemed to be adjusting easily to their lot [sic...
...It is also clearly suggested that someone at or near the lower end of the scale must be decisively incompetent by comparison with someone at or near the upper end...
...In the passage just quoted, Herrnstein is contrasting the intelligence we demand of engineers and ditchdiggers, which seems superficially reasonable enough—though it isn't at all clear why anyone has to make "ditchdigger" a career...
...only those with serious organic defects (and perhaps there could be many fewer of those given improved obstetrical care) would have to fall into the category of being unable to do worthwhile work...
...No doubt, any such judgment will be neither better nor worse than Herrnstein's, since all rankings of occupational merit are completely arbitrary...
...In sum, this version of the claim that there must always be significant class differences, for reasons of efficiency, is based solely on the deduction that statistically below-average performance on IQ tests demonstrates a real incapacity to do useful work—which is about as gross as the measured difference in IQ points suggests it is...
...if the argument about the supposedly genetic roots of inequality is to proceed any further on a rational basis, it must do so without reference to the subject of race...
...there will always be "bad company" for some children to fall into...
...Even were we somehow to be shown that we really need an occupational hierarchy based on "intelligence," that hierarchy would apparently not have to be nearly so sharply graded as to create the serious, classwise differences of income we now live with...
...They would be found in different places and manifested in different ways than is presently the case...
...The more children in a family, and above all the more children in a poor or otherwise deprived family, the more the conditions I described in my earlier articles as potentially affecting measured test performance are clearly exacerbated...
...But the size of the deviation units is given by the standard deviation, that is, the distance from one deviation point (separating those six blocks of space) to the next...
...In its original form this table—the only "hard evidence" Herrnstein ever offers on this issue—shows at least 10 points of average IQ difference between the following pairs of occupations (higher IQ listed first): public relations man and foreman (or machinist or musician or airplane mechanic...
...We will in no way have eliminated the differences in or even the pathologies of social life...
...Social or economic positions are not in themselves "environments...
...Herrnstein also elaborates his position in "More About I.Q.," Atlantic Monthly, Dec...
Vol. 23 • September 1976 • No. 4
