The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (86 page)

Cynical readers will be asking what else is new. The privileged have always used the law to their advantage. Our own analysis is hardly novel; it is taken straight from a book of essays written more than two centuries ago,
The Federalist.
People are not naturally angelic but self-interested—else, as Publius pointed out, governments would not be necessary in the first place. Politically, people form factions to pursue their common ends. Give them access to government power to further those ends, and they will take advantage of it. The only modest additions we make to these ancient truths are two propositions: First, as of the 1990s, the constitutional restraints on how a faction may use government to further its ends have loosened. Second, an unprecedented coalition of the smart and the rich will take advantage of this new latitude in new ways.

What new ways? There are many possibilities, but the central ones all involve the underclass. We fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent—not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but “conservatism” along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below. In the case of the United States, the threat comes from an underclass that has been with American society for some years but has been the subject of unrealistic analysis and ineffectual, often counterproductive policy. The new coalition is already afraid of the underclass. In the next few decades, it is going to have a lot more to be afraid of. Now is the time to bring together
from many chapters throughout the book the implications of cognitive stratification for the underclass.

Statistically, it is not good for children to be born either to a single mother or a married couple of low cognitive ability. But the greatest problems afflict children unlucky enough to be born to and reared by unmarried mothers who are below average in intelligence—about 20 percent of children currently being born.
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They tend to do badly, socially and economically. They tend to have low cognitive ability themselves. They suffer disproportionately from behavioral problems. They will be disproportionately represented in prisons. They are less likely to marry than others and will themselves produce large proportions of the children born to single women of low intelligence.

Attempts to compensate for cognitive disadvantage at birth have shown how extraordinarily hard it is to do. Many readers no doubt find the plight of children to be among the most compelling arguments for government activism, as we do. But inadequate nutrition, physical abuse, emotional neglect, lack of intellectual stimulation, a chaotic home environment—all the things that worry us when we think about the welfare of children—are very difficult to improve from outside the home when the single mother is incompetent. Incompetent mothers are highly concentrated among the least intelligent, and their numbers are growing. In Chapter 15, we discussed differential fertility—a bloodless term—and suggested that the nation is experiencing dysgenic pressure—another bloodless term. In the metric of human suffering, increasing numbers of children are born into the conditions we most deplore and the conditions that government is most helpless to affect.

What happens to the child of low intelligence who survives childhood and reaches adulthood trying to do his best to be a productive citizen? Out of the many problems we have just sketched, this is the one we choose to italicize:
All of the problems that these children experience will become worse rather than better as they grow older, for the labor market they will confront a few decades down the road is going to be much harder for them to cope with than the labor market is now.
There will still be jobs for low-skill labor, mostly with service businesses and private households, but the natural wage for those jobs will be low. Attempts to increase their wage artificially (by raising the minimum wage, for example, or mandating
job benefits) may backfire by making alternatives to human labor more affordable and, in many cases, by making the jobs disappear altogether. People in the bottom quartile of intelligence are becoming not just increasingly expendable in economic terms; they will sometime in the not-too-distant future become a net drag. In economic terms and barring a profound change in direction for our society, many people will be unable to perform that function so basic to human dignity: putting more into the world than they take out.

Perhaps a revolution in teaching technology will drastically increase the productivity returns to education for people in the lowest quartile of intelligence, overturning our pessimistic forecast. But there are no harbingers of any such revolution as we write. And unless such a revolution occurs, all the fine rhetoric about “investing in human capital” to “make America competitive in the twenty-first century” is not going to be able to overturn this reality: For many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of the teaching.

The dry tinder for the formation of an underclass community is a large number of births to single women of low intelligence in a concentrated spatial area. Sometime in the next few decades it seems likely that American whites will reach the point of conflagration. The proportion of white illegitimate births (including Latinos) reached 22 percent in 1991.
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There is nothing about being Caucasian that must slow down the process. Britain, where the white illegitimacy ratio, which was much lower than the American white ratio as recently as 1979, hit 32 percent in 1992 with no signs of slowing down.

When 22 percent of all births are to single women, the proportion in low-income communities is perhaps twice that. In the NLSY, 43 percent of all births to white women who were below the poverty line were illegitimate, compared to 7 percent for all white women anywhere above the poverty line.
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In the nation at large, we know from the 1992 Census Bureau study of fertility that women with college, degrees contribute only 4 percent of white illegitimate babies, while women with a high school education or less contribute 82 percent. Women with family incomes of $75,000 or more contribute 1 percent of white illegitimate babies, while women with family incomes under $20,000
contribute 69 percent.
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White illegitimacy is overwhelmingly a lower-class phenomenon.

In the past, whites have not had an “underclass” as such, because the whites who might qualify have been too scattered among the working class. Instead, white communities in America had a few streets on the outskirts of town inhabited by the people who couldn’t seem to cope and skid rows of unattached white men in large cities, but these scatterings were seldom large enough to make up a neighborhood. An underclass needs a critical mass, and white America has not had one. But if the overall white illegitimacy ratio is 22 percent—probably somewhere in the 40 percent range in low-income communities—and rising fast, the question arises: At what point is critical mass reached? How much illegitimacy can a community tolerate? Nobody knows, but the historical fact is that the trendlines on black crime, dropout from the labor force, and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward as the overall black illegitimacy ratio passed 25 percent and the rate in low-income black communities moved past 50 percent.

We need not rely on the analogy with the black experience. White illegitimacy is also overwhelmingly a lower-cognitive-class phenomenon, as we detailed in Chapter 8. Three-quarters of all white illegitimate births are to women below average in IQ, and 45 percent are to women with IQs under 90.
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These women are poorly equipped for the labor market, often poorly equipped to be mothers, and there is no reason to think that the outcomes for their children will be any better than the outcomes have been for black children. Meanwhile, as never-married mothers grow in numbers, the dynamics of the public housing market (where they will probably continue to be welcome) and the private housing market (where they will not) will foster increasing concentrations of whites with high unemployment, high crime, high illegitimacy, and low cognitive ability, creating communities that look very much like the inner-city neighborhoods that people now tend to associate with minorities.

The white cognitive elite is unlikely to greet this development sympathetically. On the contrary, much of white resentment and fear of the black underclass has been softened by the complicated mixture of white guilt and paternalism that has often led white elites to excuse behavior in blacks that they would not excuse in whites. This does not mean that white elites will abandon the white underclass, but it does suggest that the means of dealing with their needs are likely to be brusque.

As the patience of whites for other whites wears thin, the black inner city will simultaneously be getting worse rather than better. Various scholars, led by William Julius Wilson, have described the outmigration of the ablest blacks that has left the inner city without its former leaders and role models.
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Given a mean black IQ of about 85 and the link between socioeconomic status and IQ within ethnic populations, the implication is that the black inner city has a population with a mean IQ somewhere in the low 80s at best, with a correspondingly small tail in the above-average range.’
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What is the minimum level of cognitive resources necessary to sustain a community at any given level of social and economic complexity? For sustaining a village of a few hundred people in a premodern society, the minimum average level is probably quite modest. What is it for sustaining a modern community? The question is of enormous practical significance yet remains innocent of any empirical investigation whatsoever. Perhaps the crucial feature is the average cognitive ability. Perhaps it is the size of the cadre of high-ability people. Perhaps it is the weight of the population at low end of the distribution. No one knows. Whatever the details, a prima facie case exists that the cognitive resources in the contemporary inner city have fallen below the minimum level. What looked like a rising tide of social problems a generation ago has come to look more like a fundamental breakdown in social organization.

One may look for signs that these communities are about to recover. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s has ebbed, for example, although crack is cheaper than ever, as the savage effects of the drug became evident to younger brothers and sisters. Black grass-roots efforts to restore the family and combat crime have increased in recent years. But counterpoised against these forces working on behalf of regeneration within the inner city is a powerful force working against it:. A large majority of the next generation of blacks in the inner city is growing up without fathers and with limited cognitive ability. The numbers continue to increase. The outmigration of the able continues.

While we can see how these trends
might
be reversed, which we describe in the next and final chapter, let us consider the prospect we face if they do not. This brings us to the denouement of our prognosis.

When a society reaches a certain overall level of affluence, the haves begin to feel sympathy toward, if not guilt about, the condition of the have-nots. Thus dawns the welfare state—the attempt to raise the poor and the needy out of their plight. In what direction does the social welfare system evolve when a coalition of the cognitive elite and the affluent continues to accept the main tenets of the welfare state but are increasingly frightened of and hostile toward the recipients of help? When the coalition is prepared to spend money but has lost faith that remedial social programs work? The most likely consequence in our view is that the cognitive elite, with its commanding position, will implement an expanded welfare state for the underclass that also keeps it out from underfoot. Our label for this outcome is the custodial state.
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Should it come to pass, here is a scenario:

Over the next decades, it will become broadly accepted by the cognitive elite that the people we now refer to as the underclass are in that condition through no fault of their own but because of inherent shortcomings about which little can be done. Politicians and intellectuals alike will become much more open about the role of dysfunctional behavior in the underclass, accepting that addiction, violence, unavailability for work, child abuse, and family disorganization will keep most members of the underclass from fending for themselves. It will be agreed that the underclass cannot be trusted to use cash wisely. Therefore policy will consist of greater benefits, but these will be primarily in the form of services rather than cash. Furthermore, there will be new restrictions. Specifically, these consequences are plausible:

Child care in the inner city will become primarily the responsibility of the state.
Infants will get better nutrition because they will be spending their days in day care centers from infancy. Children will get balanced diets because they will be eating breakfast, lunch, and perhaps supper at school. Day care centers and schools for elementary students will edge closer toward comprehensive care facilities, whose staff will try to provide not only education and medical care but to train children in hygiene, sexual socialization, socialization to the world of work, and other functions that the parents are deemed incapable of providing.

The homeless will vanish.
One of the safer predictions is that sometime in the near future, the cognitive elite will join the broad public sentiment
in favor of reasserting control over public spaces. It will become easier to consign mentally incompetent adults to custodial care. Perhaps the clinically borderline cases that now constitute a high proportion of the homeless will be required to reside in shelters, more elaborately equipped and staffed than most homeless shelters are today. Police will be returned their authority to roust people and enforce laws prohibiting disorderly conduct.