Human Diversity

by Charles Murray

  Thinking of the distinction between milieu and environment in this way makes it easy for me to understand why the shared environment explains so little. Go back to our clone of Mozart. Let’s say that you and your spouse are the cloned boy’s adoptive parents. You know about his talent, and you think classical music would be the highest expression of his talent. What are you going to do that will channel that genius into composing some new string quartets in the classical style? You can try all sorts of things to manipulate the family environment, but you can’t affect the milieu. Every moment that the cloned Mozart is not directly under your control, he will be swimming in the milieu—in comparison to which parents are nearly powerless. He may compose some mind-bendingly wonderful popular music or even wonderful atonal music. Not the Jupiter.

  The milieu exerts a similar influence over everyone’s life decisions. The occupations that are in vogue. The age at which people marry and the number of children they have. Sexual mores. Conceptions of virtue. Religiosity. The milieu changes continually, usually in the way that an ocean liner changes course—visibly, but seldom abruptly.32 Government can affect milieu, but, sadly, the best examples of “successfully” doing so are the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. In democratic regimes, changes in the milieu are commonly driven by broad changes in the culture that then prompt expression in public policy. The civil rights movement followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a recent example in American history—it is inconceivable that the Civil Rights Act would have been passed in any earlier administration no matter how hard a president or party fought for it. The milieu wasn’t yet right.

  The manipulable environment refers to discrete aspects of our world that are at least theoretically possible to manipulate. It includes parenting practices, parental SES, the school, and most other aspects of what twin studies call the shared environment. Even if you share my belief that the milieu is a far more powerful influence, doesn’t the fact that these influences are manipulable mean that we ought to try to manipulate them for the benefit of those who need help? That brings us to a question that policy analysts have been pondering for many years:

  Why Is It So Hard for Outside Interventions to Work?

  Of the 10 propositions that I defend in Human Diversity, the one that might attract the most vehement criticism is the final one, #10: “Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.” I almost refrained from spelling it out. What’s the point, since the amount of money now being spent on such programs is rounding error in the federal budget? I included Proposition #10 nonetheless because among the truths that need to be understood is how incredibly difficult it is to get people to change permanently if they don’t already want to—and sometimes even if they do.

  One way or another, I have spent more than half a century around programs that were trying to get people to change the way they behave, whether as a “change agent” (how quaint that label sounds now) in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, an evaluator of social programs in the field in the 1970s, or a policy analyst reading the technical literature on social programs from the 1980s onward. These have been experiences that would make a cynic of a far saintlier person than I, and I suppose they account for my instinctive reaction to reports of success: “Oh yeah?” I have indeed grown cynical listening to glowing descriptions of programs that turned out to bear no resemblance to what was happening on the ground. I grew cynical because of technical articles in which the upbeat “Conclusions” section about a program’s accomplishments didn’t match up with the numbers in the “Results” section.

  But those were not the experiences that most affected me. I alluded to my most dispiriting ones in the acknowledgments for Losing Ground, written soon after I had stopped evaluating social programs. My first debt, I wrote, was to the people who had run the social programs I had observed:

  Whether they have been counseling inner-city students in Atlanta, trying to keep Chicago delinquents out of jail, or teaching prenatal care to Thai villagers, they have shared an uncommon energy and dedication.… [But] the people who were doing the helping did not succeed nearly as often as they deserved. Why, when their help was so obviously needed and competently provided, was it so often futile?33

  I am under the impression that I now know some answers to that question that I did not know in 1984.

  The Fragility of Induced Effects

  Effects of outside intervention are fragile. In a scientific sense, this is most apparent in the hundreds of attempts since the 1960s to positively affect the capabilities and behavior of disadvantaged populations, such as the pre-K programs I discussed in chapter 13. This is not the place to hash out the contentious literature on other types of interventions, but I think that four generalizations drawn from that literature are easily defended.

  The first one is positive: Programs for people who self-select into the program can work.

  Alcoholics Anonymous is the most famous example, but there are others. KIPP and Success Academy are charter schools that have had success in educating students who include many minority children from low-income households.34 The parents self-select on behalf of their children and the children themselves also have to buy into KIPP’s and Success Academy’s rigorous expectations. This is not to say that programs with self-selected clients are universally successful. But we do know how to help people who consciously want to help themselves and are prepared to try hard.

  The other three generalizations apply to programs that try to help people without self-selection, and they are pessimistic:

  Substantively significant short-term effects have been observed, but even these have been comparatively rare.

  Fadeout of those immediate effects over a period of a few years has been nearly universal.

  Over the last six decades, not a single major improvement in the education or socialization of the disadvantaged has been scaled up to the state or national level.

  What makes this dismal experience puzzling is that everyone who has spent time with these efforts has seen anecdotal cases of not just “substantively significant” but what looked like dramatic change. I remember observing classes in an inner-city school in Atlanta where an experimental method of teaching math was being used. The same kids who had been somnolent or sullen in other classes were on the edge of their seats, completely engaged in an extremely fast-paced, intensive instruction in honest-to-god math. This was in the late 1970s. The method was never scaled up, and I can understand why. It required teachers to expend an enormous amount of nervous energy over the entire class period. I can’t imagine being able to summon that kind of energy for more than two periods a day at most. I can’t imagine that more than a small fraction of teachers have the skillset required to do it successfully even for two periods a day. Is it possible to take a class of ordinary students in a school in a socioeconomically deprived neighborhood and make them excited about math? Yes, I’ve seen it done. Do I have the remotest practical idea for how to do it on a large scale? No.

  There are success stories of all kinds out there, but they seldom last. The school dropout whose mentor convinced her to return to school is enthusiastic for a few months and then drops out again. The drug user relapses. The student who got special tutoring in reading and whose grades went up in the first semester flunks the second semester. If failure to follow up the initial success were the explanation, then the solution would be simple: Provide follow-up support. But this leads to a second theme regarding the fragility of environmentally induced change:

  The Relapse Syndrome

  It is striking and even mysterious how hard it is to sustain a good effect. I’m not talking about disadvantaged children, but about you and me.

  Does the word “diet” come to mind? Losing weight is something that large numbers of Americans have successfully accomplished—temporarily. But the number of people who are able to maintain their new, lower weight is minuscule compared to the number who gain all the we
ight back within a few months.

  What makes this especially odd is that the experience of the diet is often positive. After a few days, you find that you aren’t suffering from terrible hunger after all, and you have more energy. As you lose weight, you like the way you look in the mirror and like the compliments you get from friends. You are getting exactly the positive reinforcement that you hoped to get. And yet a few months later you are off the diet and have gained back all the weight. Why? Different people have different answers, but it comes down to this: You theoretically should be able to manipulate the environment to produce a change in your phenotype, but it’s as if there were an ineluctable gravitational force pulling you back to a genetic baseline, whether that genetic baseline is grounded in your metabolism, your self-discipline, or some other complicated set of personal tendencies over which you don’t seem to have enough control.

  The same may be said of other self-initiated attempts at improvement, whether it’s a resolution to stick to an exercise regime or to keep your desk tidy. It’s not that we fail, nor that we find we don’t like being fit or having a tidy desk. We succeed for a while and enjoy the results. But it all fades away.

  I will use another personal example, because it involves an achievement that has eluded educators despite their most strenuous attempts: dramatically raising cognitive function—not an effect size of +0.35 or +0.50, but of two or three standard deviations.

  One summer while I was in graduate school, I enrolled in the Evelyn Wood speed-reading course. When I entered the course, a pretest revealed that I read at about 500 words per minute—okay but nothing special. At the end of the course (as I recall, it was about six weeks) I was reading at around 2,500 words per minute. It is hard to convey what a phenomenal experience it is to be turning the pages of a book every few seconds with full comprehension. Furthermore, the change was not as straightforward as losing weight. The program had drastically raised my ability on a complex cognitive task. As a graduate student with a crushing reading load, it seemed too good to be true.

  And it was. There was a catch, and my Evelyn Wood teacher was stern about it: You’ve got to read everything using the Evelyn Wood technique. You can’t decide to pick up a detective novel and read it slowly just for fun. If you do, you’ll lose your speed. I can’t complain that I wasn’t warned. And of course, I didn’t follow through, and within a few months I was back at baseline. The experience often comes to mind when people ask me if there’s any way to raise IQ and I have to answer that there’s no way to raise it dramatically. Then some corner of my mind goes back to that brief, shining moment when one of my own cognitive abilities shot upward like a rocket, and I add, “not permanently.”

  Nutritionists have a phrase for what happens with diets. Each person has a “set point” (or “settling point”): a weight range that the body will defend if weight falls below or above that range. I’m not going to get into the science of diets, but the concept applies to a wide variety of traits that technically can be changed by environmental stimuli, but seldom are permanently changed by those stimuli. A heritability of, say, 50 percent means that half of the expression of that trait is environmental, but it does not necessarily mean that any nontrivial proportion of that environment can be manipulated to achieve a preferable expression of that trait over the long term. It’s another reason I think the environmental role assigned to traits by twin studies overestimates the plasticity of human beings. We are not made of soft plastic that can be molded and then hardens into place. We are balls of Silly Putty. We can be molded into interesting shapes—temporarily. Leave us alone for a while and we’re flat again.

  Toward the Best of All Possible Worlds

  Custom dictates that policy analysts finish books by presenting politically realistic policy recommendations. But despite being a policy analyst by profession, I have never done so. I can’t think of any that I believe would make a difference. Instead, I have advocated changes that I think would work if they were implemented but that I know are politically impossible—replacing all welfare and income transfer programs with a universal basic income, legal defense funds to support systematic civil disobedience to the federal government, and universal education vouchers, among others.

  Valued Places and the Four Wellsprings for Human Flourishing

  However, I do have beliefs about policy implications more sweepingly defined. Readers who don’t know what they are have an ample choice of sources. I’ve touched on them in all but a few of the books I’ve written from Losing Ground on, most comprehensively in In Pursuit (1988). I’m not going to write another full-scale description here. But since the broad policy implications I have in mind bear intimately on what motivated me to write Human Diversity, a few paragraphs are appropriate.

  DOCUMENTATION

  I am about to level a series of sweeping criticisms of public policy and the new upper class without documentation. For those who are curious, here are the past discussions I am drawing on.

  On the proper dependent variable for assessing public policy: In Pursuit, chapters 1, 2, and 8.

  On valued places and the four wellsprings for human flourishing: In Pursuit, chapter 12; The Bell Curve, chapter 22; In Our Hands, chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11; Coming Apart, chapter 15.

  On the forces creating the new upper class: The Bell Curve, chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4; Coming Apart, chapters 1 and 2.

  On the segregation of the new upper class: The Bell Curve, chapter 21, and Coming Apart, chapters 3 and 4.

  On elites changing the rules in ways that they approve but which make life difficult for ordinary Americans: Losing Ground, chapters 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 14; In Pursuit, chapters 5 and 12; The Bell Curve, chapters 21 and 22; Real Education, chapters 3 and 5; Coming Apart, chapters 14, 15, and 17; By the People, chapters 2, 3, and 4.

  My argument begins with two apparently unrelated propositions. First, the ultimate goal of public policy is not to do things like raise incomes or increase college graduation rates but to enable people to flourish and to achieve deep satisfactions in life—to pursue happiness in the Aristotelian sense of that word. Second, recent decades have seen the development of the new upper class that I described in Coming Apart—not just influential and affluent, but smart, highly educated, with its own distinctive culture, significantly cut off from mainstream American society. It is the same group, no longer emergent but having come to power, that Richard Herrnstein and I called the “cognitive elite” in The Bell Curve. The new upper class includes (though is not limited to) the people who have the leading roles in shaping the nation’s economy, culture, and politics.

  As individuals, most members of the new upper class are fine people, personally and professionally. As a group, however, I think they have much to answer for. They have created a world that is ideal for them, filled with the kind of complexity that they are able to navigate and through which they can extract both money and power. At the same time, they have abdicated their role as stewards of the culture. The new upper class has been attentive to issues of economic inequality and inequality of opportunity but has refused to take seriously other questions that invoke human flourishing—the ways in which all human beings, not just those with IQs of 130-plus, can reach old age satisfied with who they have been and what they have done. For me, what matters most is not material equality, but access to the wellsprings of human flourishing, which in turn requires that society be structured so that people across a wide range of personal qualities and abilities are able to find valued places.

  My definition of valued place is the same now as when Richard Herrnstein and I coined the term in The Bell Curve: “You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone.”35 The central valued places are located in four domains that I have argued are the wellsprings of human flourishing: family, community, vocation, and faith. The valued places those wellsprings offer for adults are spouse, parent, relative, friend, neighbor, congregant, and colleague. It is my view that social policies since the mid-twentieth
century, continuing to the present, have inadvertently stripped ordinary people of valued places while leaving intact the ones enjoyed by the new upper class.

  I accept a role for economics. Hunger and homelessness are not conducive to human flourishing. The government can provide resources that enable people to be not homeless and not hungry. My own favored solution is a universal basic income that replaces the existing system of transfers. I have written at length about why I think that such a system would eliminate involuntary poverty and revitalize civil society.36 But this is not the place to make the case for a specific solution. Rather, I want to stress that satisfactions and dignity both arise from occupying valued places, and valued places have to be formed gradually by the people who occupy them. What the new upper class can do is honor the wellsprings. That means, for example, celebrating marriage not just as one of many options, but as the institution that gives the most people the best chance of creating a deep and fulfilling intimate relationship with another adult. It means celebrating Tocquevillian community, whether it is found in a small town or a neighborhood in a megalopolis. It means celebrating productive work of all kinds. It means celebrating the fulfillment that people of faith derive from their faith.