The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

by Richard J. Herrnstein

  Once sex was no longer playing as important a role in the decision to marry, it was essential that these other unique attributes of marriage be highlighted and reinforced. But the opposite has happened. Repeatedly, the prerogatives and responsibilities that used to be limited to marriage have spilled over into nonmarital relationships, whether it is the rights and responsibilities of an unmarried father, medical coverage for same-sex partners, or palimony cases. Once the law says, “Well, in a legal sense, living together is the same,” what is the point of getting married?

  For most people, there are still answers to that question. Even given the diminished legal stature of marriage, marriage continues to have unique value. But to see those values takes forethought about the longterm differences between living together and being married, sensitivity to many intangibles, and an appreciation of second-hand and third-hand consequences. As Chapter 8’s evidence about marriage rates implies, people low on the intelligence distribution are less likely to think through those issues than others.

  Our policy prescription in this instance is to return marriage to its formerly unique legal status. If you are married, you take on obligations. If you are not married, you don’t. In particular, we urge that marriage once again become the sole legal institution through which rights and responsibilities regarding children are exercised. If you are an unmarried mother, you have no legal basis for demanding that the father of the child provide support. If you are an unmarried father, you have no legal standing regarding the child—not even a right to see the child, let alone any basis honored by society for claiming he or she is “yours” or that you are a “father.”

  We do not expect such changes miraculously to resuscitate marriage in the lowest cognitive classes, but they are a step in the return to a simpler valuation of it. A family is unique and highly desirable. To start one, you have to get married. The role of the state in restoring the rewards of marriage is to validate once again the rewards that marriage naturally carries with it.

  More General Implications for Policy

  Crime and marriage are only examples of a general principle: Modern American society can be simplified. No law of nature says that the increasing complexity of technology must be matched by a new complexity in the way the nation is governed. The increasing complexity of technology follows from the functions it serves. The increasing complexity of government does not. Often the complexities introduced by technology require highly sophisticated analysis before good law and regulation can be developed. But as a rule of thumb, the more sophisticated the analysis, the simpler the policies can be. Policy is usually complicated because it has been built incrementally through a political process, not because it has needed to become more complicated. The time has come to make simplification a top priority in reforming policy—not for a handful of regulations but across the board.

  More broadly, we urge that it is possible once again to make a core of common law, combined with the original concepts of negligence and liability in tort law, the mechanism for running society—easily understood by all and a basis for the straightforward lessons that parents at all levels of cognitive ability above the lowest can teach their children about how to behave as they grow up. We readily acknowledge that modernity requires some amplifications of this simple mechanism, but the nation needs to think through those amplifications from the legal equivalent of zero-based budgeting. As matters stand, the legal edifice has become a labyrinth that only the rich and the smart can navigate.

  BLANKS UNFILLED

  We have presented what we believe needs to be done. We also understand that a common response will be incredulity, for different readers will interpret the long chapters that have come before as a manifesto for completely different kinds of policy initiatives. Specifically, two lines of argument are likely to follow from this book. To some, we will have made a case for increased income redistribution. To others, we will have made a case for steps to manipulate the fertility of people with high and low IQs. We will be pleased if the book leads to a vigorous discussion of these issues, but we have just a few words to say about them here.

  Dealing with Income

  Ever since most people quit believing that a person’s income on earth reflects God’s judgment of his worth, it has been argued that income distributions are inherently unfair; most wealthy people do not “deserve” their wealth nor the poor their poverty. That being the case, it is appropriate for societies to take from the rich and give to the poor. The statistical relationship we have documented between low cognitive ability and income is more evidence that the world is not fair.

  But it is not news that the world is unfair. You knew before reading this book that income differences arise from many arbitrary causes, sociological and psychological, besides differences in intelligence. All of them are reflected in correlations of varying sizes, which mean all of them are riddled with exceptions. This complicates solutions. Whenever individual cases are examined, differences in circumstances will be found that do reflect the individual’s fault or merit. The data in this book support old arguments for supplementing the income of the poor without giving any new guidance for how to do it.

  The evidence about cognitive ability causes us to be sympathetic to the straightforward proposition that “trying hard” ought to be rewarded. Our prescription, borrowing from the case made by political scientist David Ellwood, is that people who work full time should not be too poor to have a decent standard of living, even if the kinds of work they can do are not highly valued in the marketplace.25 We do not put this as a principle of government for all countries—getting everybody out of poverty is not an option in most of the world—but it is appropriate for rich countries to try to do.

  How? There is no economically perfect alternative. Any government supplement of wages produces negative effects of many kinds. Such defects are not the results of bad policy design but inherent. The least damaging strategies are the simplest ones, which do not try to oversee or manipulate the labor market behavior of low-income people, but rather augment their earned income up to a floor. The earned income tax credit, already in place, seems to be a generally good strategy, albeit with the unavoidable drawbacks of any income supplement.26

  We will not try to elaborate on these arguments here. We leave the income issue with this: As America enters the twenty-first century, it is inconceivable that it will return to a laissez-faire system regarding income. Some sort of redistribution is here to stay. The question is how to redistribute in ways that increase the chances for people at the bottom of society to take control of their lives, to be engaged meaningfully in their communities, and to find valued places for themselves. Cash supplements need not compete with that goal, whereas the social welfare system that the nation has developed in the twentieth century most definitely does. We should be looking for ways to replace the latter with the former.

  Dealing with Demography

  Of all the uncomfortable topics we have explored, a pair of the most uncomfortable ones are that a society with a higher mean IQ is also likely to be a society with fewer social ills and brighter economic prospects, and that the most efficient way to raise the IQ of a society is for smarter women to have higher birth rates than duller women. Instead, America is going in the opposite direction, and the implication is a future America with more social ills and gloomier economic prospects. These conclusions follow directly from the evidence we have presented at such length, and yet we have so far been silent on what to do about it.

  We are silent partly because we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to enc
ourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also dis-proportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe.

  The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves. There is no reason to assume that the hazards associated with low cognitive ability in America are somehow circumvented by having been born abroad or having parents or grandparents who were. An immigrant population with low cognitive ability will—again, on the average—have trouble not only in finding good work but have trouble in school, at home, and with the law.

  This is not the place, nor are we the people, to try to rewrite immigration law. But we believe that the main purpose of immigration law should be to serve America’s interests. It should be among the goals of public policy to shift the flow of immigrants away from those admitted under the nepotistic rules (which broadly encourage the reunification of relatives) and toward those admitted under competency rules, already established in immigration law—not to the total exclusion of nepotistic and humanitarian criteria but a shift. Perhaps our central thought about immigration is that present policy assumes an indifference to the individual characteristics of immigrants that no society can indefinitely maintain without danger.

  CONCLUSION

  Hundreds of pages ago, in the Preface, we reflected on the question that we have been asked so often, “What good can come from writing this book?” We have tried to answer it in many ways.

  Our first answer has been implicit, scattered in material throughout the book. For thirty years, vast changes in American life have been instituted by the federal government to deal with social problems. We have tried to point out what a small segment of the population accounts for such a large proportion of those problems. To the extent that the problems of this small segment are susceptible to social-engineering solutions at all, they should be highly targeted. The vast majority of Americans can run their own lives just fine, and policy should above all be constructed so that it permits them to do so.

  Our second answer, also implicit, has been that just about any policy in any area—education, employment, welfare, criminal justice, or the care of children—can profit if its designers ask how the policy accords with the wide variation in cognitive ability. Policies may fail not because they are inherently flawed but because they do not make allowances for how much people vary. There are hundreds of ways to frame bits and pieces of public policy so that they are based on a realistic appraisal of the responses they will get not from people who think like Rhodes scholars but people who think in simpler ways.

  Our third answer has gone to specific issues in raising the cognitive functioning of the disadvantaged (Chapter 17) and in improving education for all (Chapter 18). Part of our answer has been cautionary: Much of public policy toward the disadvantaged starts from the premise that interventions can make up for genetic or environmental disadvantages, and that premise is overly optimistic. Part of our answer has been positive: Much can and should be done to improve education, especially for those who have the greatest potential.

  Our fourth answer has been that group differences in cognitive ability, so desperately denied for so long, can best be handled—can only be handled—by a return to individualism. A person should not be judged as a member of a group but as an individual. With that cornerstone of the American doctrine once again in place, group differences can take their appropriately insignificant place in affecting American life. But until that cornerstone is once again in place, the anger, the hurt, and the animosities will continue to grow.

  In this closing chapter, we have focused on another aspect of what makes America special. This most individualistic of nations contains one of the friendliest, most eager to oblige, neighborly peoples in all the world. Visitors to America from Tocqueville on down have observed it. As a by-product of this generosity and civic mindedness, America has had a genius for making valued places, for people of all kinds of abilities, given only that they played by a few basic rules.

  Once we as a nation absorbed people of different cultures, abilities, incomes, and temperaments into communities that worked. The nation was good at it precisely because of, not in spite of, the freedom that American individuals and communities enjoyed. Have there been exceptions to that generalization? Yes, predominantly involving race, and the nation rightly moved to rid itself of the enforced discrimination that lay behind those exceptions. Is the generalization nonetheless justified? Overwhelmingly so, in our judgment. Reducing that freedom has enervated our national genius for finding valued places for everyone; the genius will not be revitalized until the freedom is restored.

  Cognitive partitioning will continue. It cannot be stopped, because the forces driving it cannot be stopped. But America can choose to preserve a society in which every citizen has access to the central satisfactions of life. Its people can, through an interweaving of choice and responsibility, create valued places for themselves in their worlds. They can live in communities—urban or rural—where being a good parent, a good neighbor, and a good friend will give their lives purpose and meaning. They can weave the most crucial safety nets together, so that their mistakes and misfortunes are mitigated and withstood with a little help from their friends.

  All of these good things are available now to those who are smart enough or rich enough—if they can exploit the complex rules to their advantage, buy their way out of the social institutions that no longer function, and have access to the rich human interconnections that are growing, not diminishing, for the cognitively fortunate. We are calling upon our readers, so heavily concentrated among those who fit that description, to recognize the ways in which public policy has come to deny those good things to those who are not smart enough and rich enough.

  At the heart of our thought is the quest for human dignity. The central measure of success for this government, as for any other, is to permit people to live lives of dignity—not to give them dignity, for that is not in any government’s power, but to make it accessible to all. That is one way of thinking about what the Founders had in mind when they proclaimed, as a truth self-evident, that all men are created equal. That is what we have in mind when we talk about valued places for everyone.

  Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and incompetences, assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally; that of all the rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen.

  Afterword

  In November 1989, Richard Herrnstein and I agreed to collaborate on the book that would become The Bell Curve. It occupied both of our professional lives for the next four and a half years. On June 3, 1994, the day that we submitted the final revisions of the manuscript and the date you will find on the Acknowledgments, we learned that Richard Herrnstein had inoperable cancer. He died on September 13, 1994, after setting an example of courage and serenity that his friends can only hope to emulate
in their turn.

  The Bell Curve was released by the Free Press in early October 1994. The initial reaction to it was encouraging. Acting on Herrnstein’s suggestion, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held a small conference of academics and journalists from various points on the political spectrum. The conference went well, with brisk exchanges about a book on which people had differing opinions but which they discussed over the course of two days as a serious and careful work of scholarship. Two weeks after the conference, Malcolm Browne’s thoughtful review appeared in the New York Times Book Review.1

  Then came the avalanche. It seems likely that The Bell Curve will be one of the most written-about and talked-about works of social science since the Kinsey Report fifty years ago. Most of the published reaction was virulently hostile. The book was said to be the flimsiest kind of pseudoscience. A racist screed. Designed to promote a radical political agenda. An angry book. Tainted by the work of neo-Nazis.

  “Never,” my AEI colleague Michael Ledeen observed a few months after publication, “has such a moderate book attracted such an immoderate response.” It is my thought, too, as I am sure it would be Richard Herrnstein’s. If there is one objective that we shared from the beginning, it was to write a book that was relentlessly moderate—in its tone, science, and argumentation. You have in your hands the means for deciding whether you agree.