The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (83 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 alternative, 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.

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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.