THE IQ CONTROVERSY - AN EXCHANGE

...the number of occupations for which we can actually define what exactly gets done, and what it's worth to us, is minimal...

...Direct evidence is lacking, but indirect evidence again seems to support my view...

...But the surgeons get paid more...

...My family doctor is undoubtedly more intelligent than most 304 TO REVERT briefly to the question of arbitrary or real value in work, the fact is that we can measure only changes in productivity (marginal increments), but can't measure productivity itself at all (especially white-collar or professional productivity) unless we find some independent baseline...

...Green does, that there are countless subtle and unidentified environmental forces pushing IQs up and down, but at this point, five or so IQ points out of a practical range of about 100 is the limit for identified environmental factors, the rest is speculation...

...Can well-being be effectively randomized among various social groups in plural societies...

...Herrnstein therefore, in sum, takes his stand on a doctrine that is scientifically untenable and the creation (largely) of ideologues...

...Apparently he does, but on no further evidence than that there are in the U.S...

...They do not mean that environment plays little or no role, for the genetic substrate is always acting in an environment to produce the phenotype...

...I will try to answer all of his serious criticisms or, if I can't, acknowledge my inability to do so...

...But all this correlation-mongering is beside the point and proves nothing either way, and I regret having to make more of it than it's worth, being forced to do so only by Herrnstein's fertility in generating spurious correlations...

...If the consequential jobs did not require intelligence (or whatever general human traits are measured by tests), the correlation might decline or disappear without harm...

...The real questions that then suggest themselves several of which I addressed directly though perforce briefly in my last article, are: is such a complex economic structure manageable by means of a reward system that, without equalizing absolutely, distributes a range of what we now consider "middle-class" incomes...

...As for the others, the "results" of all such studies are subject to the crucial proviso that their value for h 2 will be too high if the 302 investigators assumed environmental differences among the members of the tested group when actually hidden or ignored environmental similarities were having a similar influence on IQ levels...

...Having done so, he must confront on its own terms the democratic demand that we proceed with the equalization process of the last century...

...EDs...

...Can it be doubted that inequality in status and wealth expresses to some extent a community's method, however unwitting or imperfect, for channeling people into occupations according to what I have been calling the social consensus...

...Herrnstein's formula is IQ—) education—>income...

...Where are Sweden's "unemployable" illiterates...

...UNFORTUNATELY, on the subject of occupation and IQ Herrnstein makes his own unique contribution to the lore of pseudoscience...

...If we measured height in yards instead of feet and inches, people would differ by fewer units but we would then use fractions or decimals to note who was tall or short and by how much...

...But as for the poverty that allegedly must come to "millions," by virtue of their productive incapability, though its existence in the U.S...

...I will soon turn to the relevant data on the heritability of IQ, but first note a point that Mr...

...Occupational status correlates with schooling, therefore also with IQ...

...Given, first, the absence of demonstrated major control by the environment and, second, plenty of data consistent with major genetic control, I am proposing only that it is worth thinking about the possibility that the range of intellectual competence is as genetic as it seems to be...

...But let us look at it here from another perspective, that of the 305 costs of overcoming it...

...But the 50 million Americans with IQs less than, say, 90 pose a social challenge of considerable magnitude...

...Green implies that the predictiveness of schooling is largely a reflection of what may be called credentialism, 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...

...simply by the universal provision of sunlamps...

...J. Herrnstein refers to Philip Green's three articles on the subject of genetics, IQ, and equality—"Race and IQ: Fallacy of Heritability" (Dissent, Spring 1976), "The Pseudoscience of Arthur Jensen" (Summer 1976), and especially, "IQ and the Future of Equality" (Fall 1976), in which Green discusses Herrnstein's work in some detail...

...Collectively, they comprise inequality, the target of egalitarianism...

...As Herrnstein must be aware (since his analysis of diminished correlations is the same that Jencks makes) the passage I quoted from Jencks about the small impact of IQ on income-earning ability on the job, occurs after consideration—and careful, reasoned dismissal—of the possible effect to which Herrnstein now calls attention: else I would not have quoted it, since the point is so obvious...

...My point was not that the IQ differences we deal with aren't real but that those differences, and above all their extent, are not innate and should not be taken as innate merely because IQ tests are made up so as to distribute them on a bell curve...

...and of foregone production from those barred from productivity by the various miseries the cycle of poverty imposes on them— probably requires more onerous taxation than would the implementation of "full employment" programs combined with wage supplements of the kind proposed by Jencks and Lester Thurow...

...Despite the amusing inconsequence of the passage (he is comparing skin color at birth in the U.S...

...Finally, as a practicing social scientist who makes at least some attempt to look at the data even when they offer discomfort to his own predispositions, I am very disturbed by Herrnstein's next-to-last sentence...

...Unionized workers earn more because the structure of certain industries gives unions market power, not because the work they do is more valuable...

...I think it is easier to replace people's muscles and sense organs with machines than their higher mental faculties...

...Our knowledge, e.g., tells us that in corporate bureaucracies, public or private, administrative featherbedding is the rule rather than the exception...

...people channel other people...

...Green seems to scorn the social consensus when he writes "all rankings of occupational merit are completely arbitrary...

...Heritability, then, estimates the relative contributions of genetic and environmental variability to the observed variability of a trait within a population...

...Those "uses" of a lower class are real enough, but they are hardly eternal structural necessities...

...Actually, they alarm me, and they alarm me precisely because political thinkers of good will (such as I take Mr...

...Green thinks schooling, rather than IQ itself, is the active agent in the correlation...

...The American disease, in other words, is not even a necessary corollary of welfare capitalism, let alone of a more egalitarian "post-industrial" society...

...Before taking his doubts in order, it may be worth pointing out that the foregoing comments about the distribution of social rewards seem to me so obvious that it constantly astounds me to find them disputed...

...Green does not doubt the correlation, which is a fact beyond denying, but he doubts that it measures anything but the sociological biases of employers, who, he believes, hire people for positions that mirror the family background of the job applicants, signified by their academic credentials...

...Right, he and I and the deans of the medical schools and the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Secretary of the Treasury and an unemployed tool-and-die maker and a "welfare mother" trying to raise three children on a pittance and my plumber: we all get together and agree on who's going to get what...

...The heritability question, then, is irrelevant to the range of intellectual performance in society at a moment in time, though not to the prospects for improvement...

...On the other hand, most of the average IQ differences among definable social groups are easily explicable by reference to differences in their average environments...

...that executives in large corporations get salary raises, not cuts, when sales drop...

...Green overlooks...

...That is to say, even if IQs of 70 and 130 just reflect different environments, the differences in intellectual performance would be just as real and just as socially significant...

...The question is rhetorical and ultimately unanswerable, but what makes Herrnstein think he knows the answer...

...Can blue-collar work, or nonprofessional work generally, be made more self-governing and enlightening than it is now, to the extent that active democratic citizenship becomes more than a myth for millions of people in all modern societies...

...On the other hand, reports of findings that falsify the JensenHerrnstein thesis come to one's attention almost weekly, as indicated in Footnote 22 of my last article...

...To the extent that people land in an occupation because of their cognitive ability, the correlation between cognitive ability and performance within that occupation is diminished...

...Nor are they arbitrary in being easy to change by direct social action...

...Even so, our mutual valuations change over time, despite Herrnstein's dictum to the contrary, and they are not at all alike in all industrial 301 societies, as studies of comparative income distribution and approaches to welfare and work demonstrate...

...So much, this time, for IQ and "status...

...In his letter Herrnstein sounds at times genuinely interested in social change...

...The last sentence quoted from Jencks in the paragraph above shows that to be a false formula, for if IQ did influence occupational status or income through education then the IQ/ status correlation would be stronger than the education/ status correlation, not "considerably" weaker...

...Why he carries this pseudoscience around with him like precious personal luggage is a question only he can answer...

...A person who fails to learn to read in an average school with typical instruction is handicapped, whether the underlying deficit was inherited, acquired, or some combination...

...But what Chomsky was trying to point out is that thoroughgoing egalitarianism is not "utopian" in Herrnstein's sense of the term—that is, Chomsky argues that as far as we know there is nothing immutably present in "human nature," as opposed to the perceived exigencies of economic organization in our particular civilization and epoch, that makes equalizing impossible...

...The decreasing proportion of farm workers in the labor force in the 20th century has largely been replaced by white-collar, service, and clerical jobs, not by blue-collar or factory work...

...In short, there is no reason to believe that genetically based social classes or groups now exist, or ever did or will or must exist...

...Just from the standpoint of middle-class self-interest the current cost to Americans of dealing with an underclass—the bulk of the costs, that is, of crime, crime prevention, and punishment...

...people who benefit from the existing way of doing things strive to keep it that way, and since they control a disproportionate share of resources and of access to communications media, they finally accrue much more power or even authority than it is abstractly necessary for them to have in a productive society...

...Claims like Herrnstein's are not social science, they are ideology given the weight of "authority" by the continual references the ideologues make to their own and each other's unsupported assumptions and misstated "facts...

...It is considerably lower than the correlation between his status and his educational attainment...

...nor would Jencks have written it...

...Speaking politely, this is a fiction...

...If and when technology superannuates us as workers, or education or science wipes out the differences in performance, society can become truly egalitarian...

...Green remains convinced that he has demolished the formal data, he is left with the plain fact that social inequality tends to grow out of human diversity in any society with a division of labor...

...I think that schooling channels people into occupations partly because educational credentials capture important human qualities, such as the cognitive abilities measured by the IQ...

...The study (or two, it's hard to tell) that Herrnstein describes in his Atlantic Monthly article and book is, as I suggested in my third article (in more generous language), incompetent...

...But however opinions may differ, they should not differ about the basic observation—that occupations are seen to cover a range of consequentiality, from more to less, in any conceivable modern society...

...By existing methods of education, they hardly learn to read...

...Green has doubts about IQ scores, about measures of status, and about the meaning of the correlations between them...

...Situational poverty—that of the elderly, the ill or disabled, the alcoholic—can of course exist anywhere, but it poses problems only for social policy, not for social theory...

...Not consensus but power dredges the channels...

...But for present purposes, I would prefer to bypass the technical issues in heritability estimation by retreating to a noncontroversial form of the argument, as follows...

...In fact he manages, again, not to reply to or even deign to notice anything in my entire presentation of labor-market possibilities...

...The correlation between IQ and status shows (among other things) the social consensus implicitly channeling scarce mental capacities into consequential jobs...

...A high correlation (typically greater than 0.70) has been the repeated finding between the average IQ of people in common occupations and the perceived status of the occupation...

...He will seem to have succeeded only to those who take his word for the facts of the matter...

...nor will one find any such "data" in Herrnstein's own book—published in 1974...

...What he is giving us in his final comment, after all, taken together with his other comments about "disadvantaged" people and their genes, is the unoriginal message that the poor must always be with us...

...IT IS DISHEARTENING to have spent almost 50 pages demonstrating that hereditarianism is a meretricious doctrine, only to be asked to do it all over again by someone who (as his reference to Jencks's value for h 2 and his last paragraph reveal) has paid no attention at all...

...I do not know of a single such study that has stood up to a careful reinvestigation from the standpoint of assessing its adequacy as a controlled experiment free of gross experimenter bias...

...Green's comments make it clear that he does not realize that such disadvantaged people number in the millions in the United States alone, perhaps because there are few of them in his immediate circle...

...Let us grant the trivial claim that at this stage in our history we lack the social invention and consciousness to reward people according to "needs...

...Moreover, schooling is correlated with IQ, so when status is correlated with the one, it can hardly avoid being correlated with the other...

...There may be reasons of class interest for turning one's back on egalitarian reform, but to call the pseudoscience of hereditarianism to one's aid is to traduce the pursuit of knowledge...

...The more heritable IQ is, the less it is equalized within a population by equalizing the environment, at least to a first approximation...

...I will strive in this response to focus on the most relevant of those facts, suppressing my impulse to answer his ad hominen style of argument in kind.* The message I would most like to convey to the readers of Dissent is that the findings on IQ and social status that Mr...

...But as long as the case for the innateness and ineradicability of massive differences in intellectual capacity among large classes of people remains based on the shoddy reasoning and willfully irrelevant assertions of the hereditarians, egalitarians need pay it no attention...

...I believe that socialism's tendency toward egalitarianism explains its recurrent lapses into anarchy at one extreme or bureaucratic totalitarianism at the other...

...What is Mr...

...and Israel) showing that various forms of social and educational policy, from the improvement of nutrition to the simple cutting down of family size to complex programs of educational therapy, can have lasting impact on the expressed intellectual capacity of children with apparently irremediable problems...

...with "technological requirements," or to the dependence of employment prospects on the economic behavior of firms and governments, or to the simplification of work through routinization, or to the feeble intellectual requirements of many so-called white collar jobs, or to the possible gains to be made from devoting more resources to education and training, or from the implementation of workplace democracy...

...Jencks adds that "the correlation between a man's occupational status and his test scores is about the same as the correlation between his status and his father's status...

...One can disbelieve the estimates by denying the data or by distrusting statistics or Mendelian genetics, but there would still be no basis for concluding the reverse—that the IQ is not heritable—simply because no existing data support such a conclusion...

...Like all hereditarians, Herrnstein is incapable of understanding that phenomena can be perfectly "real"—socially real— without being genetically indelible...

...Children with high scores tend to do well...

...Concretely, of course, a society, having been organized one way for years or centuries, will be difficult to reorganize without great upheaval and dislocations...

...In this claim, Mr...

...That proposition may have seemed reasonable when the New Testament was being set down, but now it is, to put it kindly, fatuous...

...In Great Britain, the society where there is right now the loudest outcry against "to much equality" and its supposedly ill effects, the very unsocialist financial editor of the Guardian recently conceded that there is no evidence nor any reason for the belief that the absence of huge income differentials for managers has any impact at all on their job performance...

...Heritability of a trait is the result of the interplay between environmental and genetic influences on variations in that trait for tested subjects...

...Green's objection to this...

...But, taken either way, the proposition stands or falls on hereditarian reasoning: social mobility helps the genetic cream raise itself from the (absolutely or relatively) lower class, and the genetic scum remains to interbreed and perpetuate itself...

...It is true that a scale with larger performance steps per IQ point would give smaller IQ differences between people, but the smaller differences on the scale would then stand for larger differences in performance...

...Money is the obvious medium of social reward but there are also gradients of status, admiration, respect, and power...

...The details of estimation are complex, statistical, and subject to an inescapable range of uncertainty for traits as multiply determined as the scores on IQ tests...

...But, as I'll try to show forthwith, those findings are profoundly inimical to egalitarianism, the idea that mainly the political system and our cultural heritage stand in the way of a society in which the members share wealth or status or access to goods and services in approximately equal measure, and that it would be desirable to make the necessary political and cultural changes...

...This implies a net gain in the intellectual requirements for employment, unless it should turn out that today's white-collar jobs are intellectually equivalent or inferior to 1900's farm work or that blue-collar work has greatly declined in its demands on intellect...

...Concretely also, in any society from the very worst to the best of the bad there will be some, maybe even many things that are being done the way they would have to be done anywhere under similar circumstances—so again, some of the power of the powerful comes to seem and even to be necessary...

...This, I believe, is why modern societies are becoming increasingly concerned with the social costs of functional illiteracy and other intellectual deficits of the type that beset the lower quarter or third of the distribution of cognitive performance...

...but as the generations pass, their class and its descendants mold social channels, promulgate influential social symbols, prevent contrary views on ways of life from getting a full hearing—so what was once historically "necessary," if it ever was, becomes imposed...

...Furthermore, I could have added the telling finding of Bowles and Gintis that "cognitive differences account for a negligible part of schooling's influence on economic success: individuals with similar levels of adult IQ but differing levels of schooling have substantially different chances of economic success," and that "schooling affects chances of economic success predominantly by the noncognitive traits which it generates, or on the basis of which it selects individuals for higher education...

...Alleged" is what I called it, and "alleged" is what it remains...

...As for mathematical navigators, I still wish Herrnstein would explain why they get paid much less than, say, successful p.r...

...This was the prospect I noted first in 1971 and the data collected since have made it that much clearer...

...Green must also want his surgeon to know anatomy, his airplane navigator to know trigonometry, and his grocer to know how to add or, at least, how to operate his cash register...

...The findings that Mr...

...As for the equally fabulous correlation between income and IQ that Herrnstein now suggests, it too must be discarded...

...My emphasis...

...He does not answer Jencks's calculation that the possible genetic component in American income inequality is extremely slight...

...But the gradients of reward are society's way of translating the social consensus into competition for occupations, so as to improve the likelihood that better performers will land the more consequential jobs...

...Having disposed of all possibilities for social change by this resort to the myth of the consensual free market, as though that argument had never been dealt with, Herrnstein then gradually moves on to the proposition that the poor must always come to form a permanent, self-reproducing underclass...

...But an IQ of 130, though not a guarantee of occupational success or personal fulfillment, is demonstrably a help...

...Individual occupations rise and fall with shifts in technology and in society's fashions and needs, but the shifts are rare compared to the stability of the social consensus throughout the industrial world...

...For example, I would expect a diminished correlation between grades and IQ among students at Stanford or Yale or Harvard Law School...

...He ignores my references to rises in "IQ" keeping pace surgeons...

...I know several estimable grocery store owners or empoyees who operate their cash registers quite nicely—that the only mistakes they ever make are in their own favor I take to be a sign of real intelligence—without showing any other signs of special "cognitive ability" at all, and in fact I should think the job not beyond the range of any person with an undamaged brain...

...is highly heritable but is not so in Norway...

...doctors have high incomes because (inter alia) medical schools have wilfully limited admissions...

...Both occupations serve useful social purposes, but an incompetent doctor is usually seen as more threatening than an incompetent postman...

...To begin with, I don't know why he thinks I agree with him on the correlation between IQ and occupational status...

...Herrnstein himself, without understanding what he is doing, has shown that this is so even for "physical" traits, in a passage in his original Atlantic Monthly article in which he points out that skin color in the U.S...

...One familiar example is the contrast between a physician and, let us say, a postman...

...I wish he were right, but he is sadly mistaken...

...THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE of intellectual diversity manifests itself in the data correlating IQ with occupational status...

...To repeat, our ability to improve our social world is a matter of will and intelligence...

...Giant corporations don't pay more to their executives than small corporations because the work they do is more important, but because the giant corporations have more money...

...So what...

...Nowhere...

...In Gartner et al., The New Assault on Equality...

...Can we be productive enough to afford a generous welfare system that protects those who from no fault of their own can't do income-producing work...

...Thus even from an "incentives" standpoint modern poverty—the existence of a real lower class— probably imposes more strictly economic costs than it grants economic benefits...

...Maybe Herrnstein doesn't trust Jencks's findings, but since he gives us only his own opinion to replace them with, he gives in fact nothing...

...they are victimized by advertising and merchandising...

...As human traits go, this would be considered an example of high heritability...

...As for the assessments of value, "arbitrary" is exactly what they are...

...If the environmental influence is relatively unvarying— that is, if members of the tested group have lived in environments that influenced them both strongly and similarly—than the randomly expectable trait differences between them will seem to be accounted for genetically...

...In summary, when society has a consensus about the values of jobs and when people differ in the quality of their work, then society tries to match the better performers with the more valued jobs...

...He finds the credentials dubious because of studies showing little correlation between IQ or schooling and performance in certain occupations...

...Perhaps in the future it will, but not yet...

...Herrnstein, who seems to have only a smattering of knowledge about his own society, has utterly failed to get the latest news of the world elsewhere...

...Herrnstein's reference to my treatment of "standard deviations" is a typical example of the way hereditarians befog the discussion of this issue...

...but it is always taking place everywhere...

...Society typically responds to these two facts by rewarding best those who hold the more consequential jobs...

...In modern societies, the traits measured on IQ tests are channeled by schools...

...Certainly his view will astonish, say, the Swedes, who are going to have to scurry around creating a mock-up culture of poverty to show him when he comes to visit...

...Surgeons are generally considered among the less intellectually oriented members of the medical profession, and their job demands no more "cognitive ability" than that of any skilled craftsman...

...Green to be) stubbornly refuse to believe them...

...Society," that is, doesn't channel anyone...

...Insofar as social mobility is correlated with IQ, it will reduce the correlation between performance and IQ within the occupation...

...It is here, at last, that he reveals the great poverty of both his imagination and his knowledge...

...When geneticists say that a trait has high heritability, they mean that the observed variation in the trait is the result of variation in the genes rather than in the environments in which the genes are expressed...

...In the meantime, a gradient of social reward seems to me benign compared to direct coercion, if the gradient is no steeper than necessary to keep the allocation of ability reasonably productive...

...is real enough, its necessity is a complete myth...

...The differences between people of high and low IQ, Mr...

...I wonder when Herrnstein and Jensen are going to spare us their imaginative assertions about that correlation, or expose to the light of day at least one study that shows it...

...And to prove it, Herrnstein points to the pseudoegalitarianism of the mythical free market...

...Perhaps he is still trying to respond to Noam Chomsky's more radical egalitarianism, but even in that argument he misses the point...

...In short, it's our knowledge of how we actually earn our social living, and also of the way other, equally productive societies with differently graded reward systems earn theirs, that tells us Herrnstein's proposition is false...

...Green disputes my claim that technology has so far made brains more important in society, not less...

...One can imagine a society that does better than ours in compensating for low scores, but not when reformers insist on assuming, contrary to fact, that there is no problem to begin with...

...Green abhors and denies should instead be guiding him and other socialists toward the formulation of social organizations that do not, *R...

...Medical schools don't limit admissions in response to the market fact that doctors have high incomes...

...4) Though learning is obviously not nearly as easy as tanning, there is a large and growing literature from various nations (especially but not only the U.S...

...In what sense "arbitrary," Mr...

...I would agree with him that the biases exist and even that academic level is more highly correlated with occupational status than IQ...

...To put it bluntly, do we know whether society would suffer more from a work stoppage by a random selection of 10 million well-paid white-collar and professional workers, 10 million less-well-paid blue-collar workers, or 10 million housewives...

...millions" of functionally illiterate "disadvantaged people" who are presumably hopelessly (genetically) debarred from keeping up with the pace of modern technology...

...There are genetic subtleties that could in principle produce exceptions to this assertion, as I and others have tried to spell out in some detail, but here I simply acknowledge them without further elaboration...

...His sole reply, which constitutes nothing more than the endless rearguard action of the conservative ideologue, is that things are exactly the way they are because that's exactly the way they have to be: everywhere...

...Why the (if anything) overly moderate egalitarianism of my articles should provoke such an excess of zealotry against "anarchic" total leveling is a puzzle—except on the assumption that for some reason or other Herrnstein is passionately committed to hierarchy, an assumption his language and mode of argumentation all too easily bear out...

...In a society with a division of labor, some people's labor will be more consequential than others', as judged by the members of the society...

...Green is right in the one sense that is probably irrelevant...

...What on earth is Herrnstein trying to say with these "examples...

...The channelers may even be people who originally performed a historically "objective" social task (that was Marx's view, at any rate...

...The result is social stratification, and to the extent that the required abilities are genetic, the stratification will produce a genetic gradient in society, parallel to the social one...

...Only ignorance of the world outside research laboratories (and perhaps within them) can allow Herrnstein so to overvalue "cognitive ability," when anyone who has ever dealt with a successful manager of any kind of physical or intellectual production knows that the traits that leap to the eye in such a person are decisiveness, drive, instinct, strength, vigor, shrewdness, application, "personality," manipulativeness, the ability to learn from experience, and only secondarily the kind of ablity that gets tested by IQ tests...

...Next, not only do jobs differ in perceived status but people also differ, for whatever reasons, in the quality of their work...

...and when we have machines and systems that do what accountants and controllers do we'll still be trying to find human beings willing to do general maintenance work in factories, or to mine coal...

...We may speculate, as Mr...

...The active force of channeling is visible wherever overt discrimination occurs (has Herrnstein never heard of discrimination...

...In this Chomsky is certainly right and Herrnstein's contrary assertion is wrong, because it is based, as we shall see, on a misuse of genetics...

...Nevertheless, the recurrent estimate of IQ's heritability by dozens of workers all over the world has almost invariably been above 50 percent and more often above 60 percent than below...

...In any event, that is not the present dispute between Herrnstein and myself...

...Interestingly, the free-market version of the labor market really might work in a genuinely egalitarian society, in that only if all "demands" had equal economic force behind them would the "law" of supply and demand actually distribute jobs and goods in accordance with individuals' desires...

...Second, most, virtually all, data on blood relatives is consistent with a substantial heritability for IQ...

...Green makes light of the intellectual difference between people and two standard deviations on either side of the mean (IQ 70 versus 130 by the standard scale...

...But there is no baseline...

...People are not interchangeable parts in the engines of society...

...If that is so then he ought to stop his destructive crusade...

...When the data Jencks used are subjected to corrected versions of his own method, the result is a heritability of 60 percent or above, as Jencks himself freely acknowledges...

...We've seen earlier how difficult it is to decide what's "socially" useful...

...of welfare and social services taken up primarily by the poor...

...A "community," he tells us, blandly reasserting the notion of meritocracy, channels "people into occupations according to what I have been calling the social consensus...

...And would these small accomplishments be satisfactory middle-range substitutes for utopian vision...

...the task is, yes, "of considerable magnitude," not least because of the need for the irrationally organized industrial world to find new arenas for productive activity by its inhabitants...

...Much of this correlation reflects the schooling required for various occupations, but, once again, I would not dismiss schooling as credentialism...

...and his and his peers' contribution to the national health and thus to productivity is much greater than that of an equivalent number of surgeons...

...Green disputes need not be taken as inimical to socialism defined as the public ownership of the means of production...

...The prospects for reducing intellectual differences enough to make them socially insignificant depend on heritability...

...Green cites with relative approval Christopher Jencks's lower estimate (i.e., 45 percent), but Jencks's method has now been shown to contain a technical flaw...

...First, no empirical studies yet demonstrate a major impact on IQ of any environmental factor...

...I have discussed these issues elsewhere and so will just summarize my views here...

...Summers, I bet, will seem as hot and winters as cold measured in Celsius, though the units are larger than Fahrenheit...

...Green argues, in effect, the reverse: "the generalization that technological progress routinizes work requirements is surely on safer ground than its contrary...

...2) In any event, we cannot generalize from any of these test groups, whatever their heritability index, to anyone else, because all the heritability measure does is tell us the unique relationship between environmental and genetic influence for members of that group...

...It is a social structure operating through institutions that "channels" people, not a consensus...

...As I wrote (and Herrnstein makes no reply), "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.'" And the "social consensus," so-called, to the limited extent that it may actually exist in this particular aspect of social life, is usually little more than resigned acquiescence in the way things are by people who had no hand in making them that way, but can't see their way clear to any painless alternative—not least because spokesmen for the established order keep assuring them there isn't any...

...To be sure, there are many occupations in American society about whose social value or consequentiality opinions may differ...

...IN MY ARTICLE I dealt with the problem of human unproductivity at some length, of course...

...For now and for a while at least, society will continue to need a way to guide people into positions that accord with their abilities...

...To the extent that conventional schools can boast of no such accomplishment, that is, first because they haven't tried, second because formal schooling meets only a small part of the needs of such children, and third because our understanding of the precise environmental causes of subnormal expressed intelligence and how to deal with it is just emerging from its infancy...

...About these serious questions of "equality," Herrnstein has never had anything to say and still doesn't...

...And so on...

...Green correctly reports the findings but has missed the point...

...to create in effect a complex, industrial/commercial society without division of labor or a money economy...

...Since the admissions process filters out virtually all but the top fraction of a percent of the distribution of cognitive ability, performance at those schools reflects traits not so sharply prescreened, such as energy, health, interest in the law curriculum, etc...

...There is, in short, a social consensus at any time about the value of different jobs...

...It takes books to substantiate the critical findings, but the gist can be stated in a page or two...

...I have been working on this problem since 1973, and in that time not a single study has come to my attention that makes the hereditarian prospect "clearer...

...If there is anything to argue about, it must be about the quantification, not about the simple observation that animates it...

...Herrnstein makes no reply, I notice, to my critique of his own implicit valuations, and he does not objectify them with his vague references to occupational status...

...q 306...

...I think he is mostly correct up to this point, but the next step in his argument is questionable at best...

...The quality of school performance, as well as the sheer level of schooling, is predicted better by a child's IQ than by any other fact about him, including measures of family status...

...Of the major studies of separated twins on which the allegedly high value for h 2 rests, the most famous (that of Cyril Burt in England) has been revealed to be fraudulent...

...Herrnstein seems to have no conception that poverty as an element in class structure is an aspect of social policy and social psychology, and that its impact can and does vary from society to society just as they do...

...Moreover, Jencks himself knows perfectly well how to establish a correlation...

...Green thinks that I describe these findings because they please me...

...On the whole and contrarily there is every reason to believe that when the children of those who perform poorly, perform poorly themselves, they most often do so for perfectly understandable social reasons, and not at all for "innate" genetic reasons...

...That can be and almost certainly has been true even of studies of separated identical twins...

...The conclusion that I came to, however, was that, given reward gradients "no steeper than necessary," and given progress on the fronts mentioned above, we could have within our grasp a society in which class would not distribute "benefits and penalties with a marked inequality," and thus need no longer be an "important influence" on our lives...

...At every occupational level there is the natural attrition of people rising to higher status or slipping lower...

...In fact, the illiterates have to be imported from Southern Europe and North Africa, but far from being "unemployable" they practically get shanghaied to the more prosperous Northern European economies during periods of economic growth...

...The perceived status of numerous common oc297 cupations has been found remarkably stable, from the 1920s until now, in a number of industrial nations including Soviet Russia...

...generate more production of useful goods and services than skilled or even semiskilled industrial workers...

...In short, even if Mr...

...that from the 1920s onward the number of people employed in the administration of passenger railroading, and their salaries, went up up up while passenger miles traveled went down down down—the list is endless, the irrelevance of productivity to pay is clear.* * Herrnstein's sociology continues to baffle me and, I imagine, the rest of Dissent's readers...

...If learning the tools of a trade is at all correlated with IQ, then the network of correlations is not an accident, not even a bourgeois conspiracy...

...The argument must not really be about that obvious, qualitative observation, but about the effort to quantify it...

...Even if the heritability is small, the phenotypic differences are still whatever they 298 are...

...Does Herrnstein disagree that such a prospect is attainable...

...The real point is that only someone remarkably unsophisticated about the workings of an industrial economy would think that theoretical physicists and chess players are or should be its most highly rewarded inhabitants, or that middle- or lower-range whitecollar workers, real estate agents, political scientists, TV network executives, and so on ("consequential jobs...

...Note that the exclusion of nonwhites, women, and farmers 303 almost certainly inflates the correlation quite a bit, so the .50 is very overstated...

...He thinks that IQ is 299 immaterial, while I think it is crucial...

...0 300 I see that Richard Herrnstein has finally dropped the extreme claim, with which he first gained notoriety, that egalitarian reforms will have the effect of making class stratification even worse than it now is...

...but genes and the imaginary requirements of occupational status rankings have absolutely nothing to do with the difficulties ahead of us...

...Oddly, he writes about this prospect as though all egalitarianism must be intransigently absolute...

...If it is evidence we are interested in, there is Jencks's summary, which is that "the correlation for white, non-farm men probably averages around .50...

...3) To the extent, moreover, that there may possibly be a slight genetic influence on IQ or "intelligence" variation among groups, and a somewhat greater influence among individuals, no necessary social consequences follow, because human cultural traits are malleable regardless of the sources of influence on them...

...Green does not say...

...Green attributes to their environments...

...People with IQs of 70 are, by and large, at an overwhelming disadvantage in modern society...

...He merely announces that "society" needs gradients of social reward "no steeper than necessary"—a mind-numbing truism to which Mao Tse-tung would have given eager assent, as will I (though the present Chinese leadership might think it a code phrase for "GangofFour" radicalism...

...And though Herrnstein purports to be offering a cry of despair, what comes across most strongly in all his work is a counsel of hope: hope for comparatively well-off taxpayers that they don't have to support expensive programs of social betterment because nothing can be done for those people anyway, it's all in their genes...

...They are not arbitrary to the people who believe, for example, in the significance of the work done by physicians or engineers or airplane pilots...

...because of their inherent contradictions, quickly confront their citizens with the alternatives of political chaos and faceless regimentation...

...Throughout the span of occupations, some sort of filtering must go on...

...In that sense the power of the powerful comes to seem and even to be "necessary"—but only because they helped make it so...

...He is arguing in a circle...

...For people who live in environments that in some way or other especially torment or uplift them, there is no prima facie reason and no experimental evidence for believing that heredity has any influence on variation in their average IQs from those of other people...

...The credentials are no doubt imperfect, but I cannot believe they are empty...

...he is merely helping to make a bad problem worse, on false grounds...

...It's not clear whether Herrnstein means that the absolutely poor as a permanent selfreproducing underclass must always exist, or that the relatively less-well-off in any society must always form such a class, regardless of how "poor" they are...

...Had they chosen, suggests Mr...

...Absolute egalitarianism is certainly utopian in Marx's sense of the term—there are no active, existing social forces striving for it or heralding the changes in social psychology necessary for its realization...

...I fear that like many people he never questions the social value of his own most prized possession—"higher mental faculties"—but I have sad news for him: what he and I do can in the aggregate be displaced by technological advance ("Sunrise Semester") a lot more easily than what spot-welders do...

...I HAVE DIRECTED ATTENTION to the correlations between IQ scores and socioeconomic or occupational status as evidence for the social mechanism just outlined...

...the sorts of things he does for us—diagnosis, e.g.—demand a great deal of conceptual skill...

...Herrnstein, in fact, does not dispute anything I said about the obvious independence of productive behavior from our particular American income arrangements...

...So much for "h 2...

...I must therefore, briefly, repeat the main points: (1) Any measure of heritability in people (and it doesn't matter if Jencks has reassessed h 2 to be .99) is not a measure of genetic transmission, because unlike domestic animals, the people have not been bred and raised under controlled conditions with relevant environmental constraints held constant...

...children with low scores tend to do poorly and drop out...

...Green says that people's variation in IQ seems important only because the testers have arbitrarily (he thinks maliciously) chosen a scale of measurement to make it seem so...

...One may reasonably question how good or effective an arrangement this is, but not, it seems to me, whether some arrangement or other is needed, given the underlying facts...

...they usually lack the educational credentials required for satisfying or lucrative jobs...

...Green would do his cause good if he learned to live with the facts, perhaps even to use them creatively...

...However, I do not share his opinion that a person's schooling is trivial for most occupational purposes...

...The various gradients are imperfectly, though considerably, correlated...

...they suffer disproportionately from emotional stress and psychopathology...

...The exceptions in principle have so far failed to be demonstrated in fact...

...Productivity" is nothing more than the value added to a socially useful process...

...But most especially in the arrangement of the details of economic organization it is still political and economic power that does the arranging, not a force of nature, and channeling always has been and still is done by channelers, not by "the market" or "the consensus...

...Green, a scale with a standard deviation of 1.5 instead of the conventional 15, then differences would cease seeming important...

...with skin color among adults in Norway), the point is useful: if we were convinced that tanners was goodness we could wipe out the "heritability" of skin color in the U.S...

...As Herbert Gans put it, we have so large a lower class because we derive other benefits from its existence and from our refusal to do anything about it—e.g., "dirty work" gets done by people without choice, and the rest of us are enabled to feel superior...