The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

by Richard J. Herrnstein

  We cannot agree with Hacker’s characterization of the state of knowledge, but we enthusiastically subscribe to his concluding sentence. By all means, let people on all sides of this issue assemble hard data. The purpose of the foregoing examples is to make two points: (1) the scattered evidence about job performance and affirmative action—indirect and direct, soft and hard—suggests large and pervasive effects, and (2) there is no excuse for not having many more hard-data studies of the type that Silberberg conducted. Job performance is important, it is measurable, and the issue of affirmative action and its effects on job performance has been on many people’s minds for years. Many corporations routinely conduct studies of job performance and have databases that could be reanalyzed to assess the effects of affirmative action on job performance.

  The request we make of Hacker and other proponents of affirmative action is that they join us in encouraging such work. Confident that group differences in job performance are not an important problem, they can try to prove their case. Our own conclusion is that they cannot do so. If this is so, the debate about affirmative action must shift to another level: How much degradation of job performance is acceptable in pursuit of the other goals of affirmative action? And that in turn brings us to first questions. What, after all, is the nation trying to accomplish with affirmative action in the workplace? What are the right measures of success?

  A POLICY AGENDA

  In thinking about affirmative action in the workplace, more than psychometric realities or efficiency in the workplace must be considered. To avoid misunderstanding, this is a good time to lay out our perspective on these other matters.

  As of the 1950s, minorities, especially blacks, in many parts of the country were systematically and unjustly excluded from entering skilled and professional occupations of all kinds.

  At least since the 1950s, changes in white attitudes, as expressed in the civil rights movement and in myriad other events in race relations, the removal of Jim Crow restrictions in the South, and affirmative action requirements opened up opportunities for minorities. Progress was made.

  In the 1990s, racial hostility continues to be a significant problem in American life.

  Affirmative action has an internally consistent rationale even if it is at odds with the maximum efficiency in hiring productive workers.

  This last remark calls for some elaboration. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are sure that a history of unfair discrimination has handicapped some people so that they fare less well in the job market than they otherwise would. Their handicaps may handicap their descendants, so that past unfairness is propagated indefinitely into the future, unless we do something about it. A properly constructed affirmative action policy may then be temporarily less efficient but more efficient in the long run. If it achieves long-run efficiency by breaking the cycle of past discrimination, it is arguably fair. And even if the long run is indefinitely far off, many people are willing to pay some price in lost productivity for a large enough gain in group equality.

  Or suppose that we knew that the inequality in employment that we observe arises for reasons we consider inherently unfair. Perhaps blacks are, for example, not being hired to be shop clerks in neighborhoods because the customers (or the other workers) are bigoted.34 It may be efficient to hire fewer clerks who will be discriminated against, but it is not fair. Many people would be willing, again, to lose some efficiency in return for greater equality.

  In short, we sympathize with some of the imaginable reasons for affirmative action in the workplace and are under no illusions about the ways in which perceptions of racial differences still affect employers’ hiring decisions. But affirmative action does not mean just wanting good things. It means specific and often substantial constraints on the employer’s ability to make use of the most qualified people. What should we make of such policies as of the 1990s?

  Trying to Reconcile Ethnic Equity and Competitive Fairness

  It is possible for an advocate of current affirmative action policies to concede all the factual points we have made in this discussion and still be in favor of continuing and even stronger affirmative action policies. For such advocates, it makes no difference if the tests are reliable and valid predictors of job performance. If a disadvantaged group performs at a lower level, to these advocates, it is self-evidently society’s fault, and government must take whatever steps are necessary to bring the disadvantaged group up to the level of other groups, ensuring equal employment and income in the meantime. Sometimes this argument is couched specifically in terms of the black experience in the United States, sometimes as part of a broader argument for an egalitarian agenda.35

  Our dispute with the egalitarian position has to be carried out on ethical and philosophical grounds, for there is nothing much to argue about in the facts. Briefly, we differ with the contemporary advocates of continued quotalike hiring requirements on two counts.

  First, we adhere to the 1964 view of what constitutes fairness, exemplified by Hubert Humphrey, who, in fighting for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, declared that it “does not limit the employer’s freedom to hire, fire, promote, or demote for any reason—or for no reasons—so long as his action is not based on race,” and then volunteered to eat the bill in public if he were wrong about what the new law would do.36 Like the senator, we reject equality of outcome as an appropriate goal. Equality of opportunity is the test most consistent with the vision of the Congress that enacted the law in 1964, and for that matter with the vision that animated the Constitution. The appropriate goal is a job market in which people are not favored or held back simply because of their race. Nothing in nature or knowledge, however, says that all groups should be equally successful in every walk of life. This may be “unfair” in the same sense that life is unfair, but it need not mean that human beings are treating one another unfairly.

  Consider the convenient and appropriate case of athletic performance. By the standard of proportional equality, there are “too many” black players in the National Basketball Association compared to the number of white players. No one thinks this is unjust. When professional tennis equalized the purses for male and women champions, it did not also require the men and women to play against other, because everyone recognized that all the top men would almost always beat all of the top women. If men and women players were ranked in a single list, would there be “too many” males among the top 100 tennis players in the world? Any particular disproportion may be unfair, but it may not. It may be less obvious why there are disproportions in other pursuits, hence harder to tell whether they are fair, but the principle is the same, and simple: If the quality of performance fairly differs among individuals, it may fairly differ among groups.37 If a disproportion is fair, then “correcting” it—making it proportional—may produce unfairness along with equal representation. We believe that is what has happened in the case of current forms of affirmative action. People who bring equal qualifications to a job should have an equal shot at being hired, and affirmative action regulations, originally intended to promote precisely that goal, now impede it.

  Second, the debate will be healthier if those who want private businesses to support social objectives openly acknowledge that such support does in fact entail costs in efficiency and productivity, hence the benefits that flow from greater efficiency and higher productivity—including a stronger economy for American society as a whole.38 Nor are the costs in productivity unique to private businesses. When a police department hires people who become less effective police officers than those it could have hired, the department loses some of its capability to provide law enforcement. Affirmative action can cost something in government services every bit as much as in the productivity of a private business.

  We do not require equal outcomes, but we do want fair treatment. What policy alternatives might be employed to bring about this state of affairs in hiring and promotion? Before exploring four alternatives, let us say clearly that the worst alternat
ive, the one we do not discuss further, is what we are now doing: not raising the question at all and proceeding as if there are easy and costless ways to achieving fairness.

  Alternative I: Creating Tests That Are Legal Under the Current Requirements

  In theory, employers could construct job-specific tests that meet the Supreme Court’s (and now the Congress’s) definition of fairness. It would be expensive, and the tests would seldom (if ever) be more predictive than a general test of cognitive ability. But it is feasible. The difficulty is that predictiveness comes primarily from the tests’ measure of g. Therefore, although they cannot be faulted under the other legal requirements, they will nonetheless be thrown out because of disparate impact. This is what has happened most famously at New York City’s Police Department, which for more than a decade has been spending large amounts of money trying to create a sergeant’s examination. Each successive version has met strict standards of job specificity and freedom from demonstrable cultural bias, but large ethnic disparities have persisted.39 The disparities themselves invalidate the test, and a new version must be prepared. The police department has even used a videobased test, on grounds that any form of paper-and-pencil test must necessarily discriminate against minorities.

  The case of the New York Police Department is one example of many.40 In practice, no test that produces disparate results has been able to withstand challenge. The lesson of the last two decades is that ethnic bias in a job test need not be proved. It need only be alleged. This has been most consistently the case for public employment—police, firefighters, sanitation workers, teachers, administrative staff—where political constituencies can most easily bring pressure to bear.

  Alternative II : Choosing Among Applicants with Equal Education

  Ordinarily a fair way to ease the existing affirmative action requirement would be to permit employers to narrow the pool of qualified applicants by using education as a screen. Thus, for example, the 80 percent rule (see the definition on page 482) could be calculated on the basis of applicants who met a minimum educational level, not all applicants. But affirmative action at the university level (Chapter 19) prevents this solution from working, because the same degree may not have the same meaning for blacks, Latinos, and whites in terms of cognitive ability. We showed this for the bachelor’s degree in the preceding chapter. But employers who try to make finer discriminations are no better off. In the NLSY, the black-white differences for every educational level, from high school diploma to Ph.D, are large, with the smallest being a difference of 1.2 standard deviations.41

  Nor does it help to differentiate by major area of study. In the NLSY, a black and a white with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, math, or a hard science—majors that would apparently be least susceptible to double standards—were nonetheless separated by 1.1 standard deviations in IQ. Differences for other common majors (behavioral and social sciences, fine arts, education, or business) ranged from 1.4 to 1.6 standard deviations. For Latinos, the gap was smallest for engineering, math, or a hard science (.7 standard deviation) and ranged from .9 to 1.3 standard deviations for the others.

  The educational credential used to be an effective way for a person from a deprived background to stand on an equal footing with other job applicants. It is still so treated that way in political rhetoric. The reality facing employers is that, given the aggressive affirmative action that universities have employed over the last three decades, educational credentials can no longer be used to compare the intellectual qualifications of black, Latino, and white job candidates.

  Alternative III: Race Norming

  An employer who hires large numbers of people cannot very well get along without using a test, but at the same time probably cannot devise a test that will pass muster with the government. So it will have to test applicants knowing that the test will produce unacceptably large group differences between whites and blacks, then comply with the 80 percent rule by hiring additional applicants from the protected minorities.

  The simplest way to do this is to employ a pass-fail cutoff. Everyone above the cutoff is deemed qualified for the job, and then the employer uses other methods to choose among the candidates, making sure that the end result meets the 80 percent rule. This is a common solution and requires only that the cutoff be low enough that a sufficient number of protected candidates get into the final group of candidates.42 But the pass-fail cutoff throws away a great deal of valuable information. Suppose that after complying with the 80 percent rule, the employer ends up with six new white employees out of twenty whites who applied and two out of seven black applicants. Why just take any six whites who scored above the cutoff? Why not instead take the whites with the top six scores? Similarly, why not take the top-scoring two blacks?

  This is called top-down hiring. If the test has high validity, if the group differences are large, and if there are many applicants, it is much more efficient than a cutoff.43 But there is a difficulty with this method. By deciding in advance on the number of whites and blacks who will be hired and then picking the top-scoring candidates, the employer is using quotas, which is illegal (even before the 1991 Civil Rights Act, an employer who used explicit quotas was vulnerable to legal action).

  One way to get around this difficulty is to use race norming. The raw scores are converted into percentiles based on the distribution of scores within each group: a white applicant receives a percentile score based on the distribution of white scores; a black applicant’s score represents his percentile within the black distribution; and so on. Then the employer makes hiring decisions on the basis of these race-normed percentiles. Starting in the late 1970s, the U.S. Department of Labor began promoting this solution, offering such race-normed scores for the General Aptitude Test Battery (the GATB, described in Chapter 3).44

  By the early 1980s, race norming had became a common solution to the employer’s dilemma. To see how race norming works, we may use the example of the popular Wonderlic Personnel Test, a highly g-loaded paper-and-pencil test that takes just twelve minutes. In its test manual in use during the 1980s, the Wonderlic company gave precise instructions for what it called “percentile selection”—its term for race norming—along with an “Ethnic Conversion Table.” Suppose that five candidates—white, black, Latino, Asian, and American Indian—all got the Wonderlic’s mean score of 22 prior to any adjustment for group distributions. Using the Ethnic Conversion Table, the personnel office would then assign those five candidates, all of whom had identical scores, to the 45th percentile (for the white), 80th percentile (for the black), 75th percentile (for the Latino), 55th percentile (for the Asian), and 60th percentile (for the American Indian), and those scores would thereafter be treated as the “real” scores.45 An employer could then hire from the top down using these adjusted scores and expect to end up with ratios of employees that would avoid triggering the Uniform Guidelines.

  In 1986, the U.S. Department of Justice challenged race norming on the grounds that it was an unlawful and unconstitutional violation of the rights of people who were neither black nor Latino. In our example, a black with a score of 80 would indeed have a much better chance of being hired than a white with a score of 45, though both had the same score on an unbiased, valid test. The Departments of Justice and Labor adjudicated their differences, agreeing to study the method further. Race norming had few defenders in public, where its unfairness seemed palpable. In the Civil Rights Act of 1991, race norming was banned for any employer subject to federal regulation. For now, this experiment in affirmative action policy—ironically, by far the most efficient from a productivity standpoint and even the “fairest,” insofar as the highest scorers at least won out in competition with members of their own group—has been suspended.

  Alternative IV: Returning to the Original Conception of Affirmative Action

  We are dissatisfied with all of the foregoing alternatives and are broadly critical of the way in which the well-intentioned effort to end employment discrimination has played
out. We therefore close by urging consideration of this proposition: If tomorrow all job discrimination regulations based on group proportions were rescinded, the United States would have a job market that is ethically fairer, more conducive to racial harmony, and economically more productive, than the one we have now. We cannot prove that the proposition is true (just as no one can prove that it is not), but here are two reasons for taking it seriously.

  The first is public approval of the old concept of fairness. Preferential affirmative action has been a favorite cause of intellectuals, journalists, and liberal politicians, but it has never been rooted in broad public support. Instead, according to polls taken in the 1970s and 1980s, most Americans favor hiring by ability test scores over preferential hiring for protected groups. At the same time, they approve of having the government offer a helping hand—for example, by offering free courses to people to help them do better on ability tests used for employment. A clear majority of blacks similarly favor ability test scores over preferential hiring.46 A return to policies based on evenhandedness for individuals (not for groups) seems sure to attract enthusiastic and broad public support.

  The second reason is the potential for good faith. Our fundamental recommendation for the workplace resembles the one we offered for higher education: get rid of preferential affirmative action and return to the original conception of casting a wider net and leaning over backward to make sure that all minority applicants have a fair shot at the job or the promotion. To the extent that the government has a role to play, it is to ensure equality of opportunity, not of outcome. Once again, we anticipate that the main objection will be that ending affirmative action as now practiced will take us back to the bad old days. As we come to the end of our long wrestle with the new American Dilemma known as affirmative action, let us expand on our reasons for our optimism that the United States can do without it very well.