The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (89 page)

The great bulk of the American population is amply equipped, in their cognitive resources and in other personal characteristics, to find valued places in society. We must emphasize that, because for hundreds of pages we have focused on people at the two tails of the bell curve. Now is a
good time to recall the people in the broad part of the curve, between the extremes. In figure after figure throughout Chapter 16, the pattern was consistent: The prevalence of the social maladies we reviewed was strikingly concentrated in the bottom IQ deciles. By the time people were even approaching average IQ, the percentages of people who were poor, had babies out of wedlock, provided poor environments for their children, or exhibited any other problem constituted small percentages of the population. Translated into the themes we are about to introduce, the evidence throughout this book supports the proposition that most people by far have enough intelligence for getting on with the business of life. We believe the policies we advocate will benefit them as well, by creating a generally richer and more vital society, but it should be made explicit: Our solutions assume that the average American is an asset, not part of the problem.

Nonetheless, millions of Americans have levels of cognitive ability low enough to make their lives statistically much more difficult than life is for most other people. How may policy help or obstruct them as they go about their lives? Our thesis is that it used to be easier for people who are low in ability to find a valued place than it is now.

In a simpler America, being comparatively low in the qualities measured by IQ did not necessarily affect the ability to find a valued niche in society. Many such people worked on farms. When farms were small, technology was limited to the horse-drawn plow and a few hand tools, and the same subsistence crops were grown year after year. People who would score 80 or 90 on an IQ test could be competent farmworkers, not conspicuously distinguished from most other people in wealth, home, neighborhood, or status in the community. Much the same could be said of a wide variety of skilled and unskilled trades. Even an unskilled laborer who was noticeably lower on the economic scale was part of a community in which many others with many levels of ability lived close to him, literally and socially. Inevitably, with technological advances, the niches for the less intelligent have shrunk.

As for the most intimate affiliations—marriage and children—there formerly was little difference between people of varying abilities: To be married meant to be responsible for each other, and for the children of
that marriage, in unqualified and uncompromising ways that the entire community held to be of the highest importance. Those who met those responsibilities had a valued place in the community by definition. Those who failed conspicuously in those responsibilities were outcasts by definition. Meeting the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood did not take a lot of money and did not take high intelligence. The community provided clear and understandable incentives for doing what needed to be done.

Urban communities were somewhat different from small towns in these respects but not unrecognizably so. The top socioeconomic layer moved off to its own part of town, but this left a broad range of people living together in the rest of a city’s neighborhoods, and the social functioning of those neighborhoods shared many characteristics with small towns. The responsibilities of marriage and children were as clearly defined in urban neighborhoods as in rural ones, and success and failure in those responsibilities were as visibly rewarded and punished.

As for the other ways in which people found valued places for themselves, urban neighborhoods teemed with useful things to do. Anyone who wanted to have a place in the community could find one in the local school boards, churches, union halls, garden clubs, and benevolent associations of one sort or another. The city government provided the police who walked the local beat. It ran the courthouse and public hospital downtown, and perhaps an orphanage and a home for the aged, but otherwise the neighborhood had to do for itself just about everything that needed doing to keep the social contract operative and daily life on an even keel. Someone who was mentally a bit dull might not be chosen to head up the parish clothing drive but was certainly eligible to help out. And these were just the organized aspects of community life. The unorganized web of interactions was even more extensive and provided still more ways in which people of all abilities, including those without much intelligence, could fit in.

It is not necessary to idealize old-fashioned neighborhoods or old-fashioned families to accept the description we have just given. All sorts of human problems, from wretched marriages to neighborhood feuds and human misery of every other sort, could be found. Poverty was rampant (recall from Chapter 5 that more than half of the population prior to War II was in poverty by today’s definition). Even so, when the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood were clear and uncompromising and when the stuff of community life had to be carried out by
the neighborhood or it wouldn’t get done, society was full of accessible valued places for people of a broad range of abilities.

Out of the myriad things that have changed since the beginning of the century, two overlapping phenomena have most affected people with modest abilities: It has become harder to make a living to support the valued roles of spouse, parent, and neighbor, and functions have been stripped from one main source of valued place, the neighborhood.

T
HE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT.
The cognitive elite has pulled away from the rest of the population economically, becoming more prosperous even as real wages in the rest of the economy stagnated or fell. The divergence has been most conspicuous in the lowest-skilled jobs. From their high point in 1973, the median earnings of full-time workers in general nonfarm labor had fallen by 36 percent by 1990, far more than for any other category.
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A strong back isn’t worth what it used to be. Workers in those occupations have been demoralized. They have lost their valued place in the workplace.

So far, we agree that economics plays an important role in taking valued places in the workplace from those with low cognitive ability. But the argument typically widens, asserting that economic change also explains why people in low-skill occupations experience the loss of other valued places evidenced by falling marriage rates and rising illegitimacy: Men in low-skill jobs no longer make enough money to support a family, it is said. This common argument is too simplistic. In constant dollars, the income of a full-time, year-round male worker in general nonfarm labor in 1991 was at the level of his counterpart in 1958, when the norm was still one income per family, marriage rates were as high as ever, and illegitimacy was a fraction of its current levels. We may look back still further: The low-skill laborer in 1991 made about twice the real income of his counterpart in 1920, a year when no one thought to question whether a laborer could support a family.
²¹
Economics is relevant in understanding how it has become harder for people of modest abilities to find a valued place, and solutions should take economics into account. But economics is not decisive.

S
TRIPPING FUNCTIONS FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
Communities are rich and vital places to the extent that they engage their members in the
stuff of life—birth, death, raising children, making a living, helping friends, singing in the local choir or playing on the softball team, coping with problems, setting examples, welcoming, chastising, celebrating, reconciling, and negotiating.

If there is one theme on which observers from both left and right recently sound very much alike, it is that something vital and important has drained out of American communities.
²²
Most adults need something to do with their lives other than going to work, and that something consists of being stitched into a fabric of family and community. In the preceding chapter, we alluded to the federal domination of public policy that has augmented the cognitive elite’s political leverage during the last thirty years. The same process has had the collateral effect of stripping the neighborhood of much of the stuff of life. For what seemed like sufficient reasons at the time, Congress and presidents have deemed it necessary to remove more and more functions from the neighborhood. The entire social welfare system, services and cash payments alike, may be viewed in that light. Certain tasks—such as caring for the poor, for example—were deemed to be too difficult or too poorly performed by the spontaneous efforts of neighborhoods and voluntary organizations, and hence were transferred. The states have joined in this process. Whether federal and state policymakers were right to think that neighborhoods had failed and that the centralized government has done better is still a subject of debate, as is the net effect of the transfers, but the transfers did indeed occur and they stripped neighborhoods of traditional functions.

The cognitive elite may not detect the declining vitality in the local community. For many of them, the house is important—its size, location, view, grounds. They may want the right kind of address and the right kind of neighbors. But their lives are centered outside a geographic community; their professional associates and friends may be scattered over miles of suburbs, or for that matter across the nation and the world. For large segments of American society, however, the geographic neighborhood is the major potential resource for infusing life with much of its meaning. Even the cognitive elite needs local communities, if not for itself, then for those of its children who happen not to land at the top of the cognitive ability distribution. The massive transfer of functions from the locality to the government has stripped neighborhoods of their traditional shared tasks. Instead, we have neighborhoods that are merely localities, not communities of people tending
to their communal affairs. Valued places in a neighborhood are created only to the extent that the people in a neighborhood have valued tasks to do.

People who have never lived in such a neighborhood—and as time goes on this includes more and more of the cognitive elite and the affluent in general—often find this hard to believe. It is another case of the isolation we discussed in Chapter 21: They may read about such communities in books, but surely they no longer exist in real life. But they do. Thumb through a few weeks’ issues of the newspaper from any small town, and you will find an America that is still replete with fund-raising suppers for the local child who has cancer, drives to collect food and clothing for a family that has suffered a reverse, and even barn raisings. They may exist as well (though they are less well documented) in urban working-class neighborhoods that have managed to retain their identity. It is through such activities that much of the real good for the disadvantaged is accomplished. Beyond that, they have a crucial role, so hard to see from a Washington office, of creating ways for people of a wide level of incomes and abilities to play a part. It creates ways for them to be known—not just as a name but as a helpful fellow, a useful person to know, the woman you can always count on. It creates ways in which you would be missed if you were gone.

Thus arises our first general policy prescription:
A wide range, of social functions should be restored to the neighborhood when possible and otherwise to the municipality.
The reason for doing so, in the context of this book, is not to save money, not even because such services will be provided more humanely and efficiently by neighborhoods (though we believe that generally to be the case), but because this is one of the best ways to multiply the valued places that people can fill. As the chapter continues, we will offer some other possibilities for accomplishing this and collateral objectives. But before arguing about how it is to be done, we hope that there can be wide agreement on the importance of the goal: In a decent postindustrial society, neighborhoods shall not have lost their importance as a source of human satisfactions and as a generator of valued places that all sorts of people can fill. Government policy can do much to foster the vitality of neighborhoods by trying to do less for them.

The thesis of this section may be summarized quickly: As of the end of the twentieth century, the United States is run by rules that are congenial to people with high IQs and that make life more difficult for everyone else. This is true in the areas of criminal justice, marriage and divorce, welfare and tax policy, and business law, among others. It is true of rules that have been intended to help ordinary people—rules that govern schooling, medical practice, the labeling of goods, to pick some examples. It has happened not because the cognitive elite consciously usurped the writing of the rules but because of the cognitive stratification described throughout the book. The trend has affected not just those at the low end of the cognitive distribution but just about everybody who is not part of the cognitive and economic elites.

The systems have been created, bit by bit, over decades, by people who think that complicated, sophisticated operationalizations of fairness, justice, and right and wrong are ethically superior to simple, black-and-white versions. The cognitive elite may not be satisfied with these systems as they stand at any given point, but however they may reform them, the systems are sure to become more complex. Additionally, complex systems are precisely the ones that give the cognitive elite the greatest competitive advantage. Deciphering complexity is one of the things that cognitive ability is most directly good for.

We have in mind two ways in which the rules generated by the cognitive elite are making life more difficult for everyone else. Each requires somewhat more detailed explanation.