reason.com/9503/dept.bk.HECKMAN.text.shtml
The early r eactions to the book in the popular press have been emotional and denunc iatory, focusing almost exclusively on the authors' discussion of racial differences and the genetic basis for those differences. The book is not devoted exclusively to a discussion of racial dif ferences, although it certainly considers them in detail. It is obvious that most reviewers of the book have not read it as a whole, if they hav e read it at all. It is also clear that in an age of rampant egalitarian ism, discussion of differences in cognitive skills remains taboo. The au thors deserve much praise for discussing a forbidden subject and thereby initiating a public discussion that challenges the egalitarian presumpt ions of our day.
The End of Equality, the authors are concerned about the growth of economic and social inequality in American society, a topic that dominates many cont emporary political discussions. Unlike those authors, Murray and Herrnst ein probe more deeply into the personal sources of inequality, devoting considerable attention to the genetic component of personal differences and presenting fresh empirical evidence about an important relationship between their measure of IQ and success in society at large. Like Reich and Kaus, Murray and Herrnstein worry about the consequences for the soc ial order of the growing inequality in economic and social success betwe en the "haves" and the "have nots," and the social and economic partitio ning of high-skill, high-IQ persons away from low-skill, low-IQ persons. This 845-page book covers an enormous and impressive range of topics. Its numerous tables and charts make close reading a challenge. Indeed, all but trained social scientists will be intimidated by the statistical det ails and by the complicated arguments used by the authors. Even more for bidding to most readers will be the hundreds of pages of footnotes and a ppendix tables that document the statistical analysis underlying the arg uments in the text. Despite all this, the book is organized in easily su mmarized sections. It is accessible at one level to all readers who are willing to skip the details. Part I updates Herrnstein's 1973 book IQ an d the Meritocracy and documents that American society has become more st ratified on the basis of intelligence than it was even one generation ag o Merit--treated here as synonymous with IQ--has become concentrated in schools and the workplace. This increase in cognitive stratification re sults from the realization of the meritocratic vision of access to insti tutions based on individual ability. Social class and parental income pl ay weaker roles in regulating access to education and jobs than at any t ime in American history. The authors go on to note a phenomenon not discussed in Herrnstein's book --that since the late 1970s, the economic returns to measured skills, an d in particular education, have increased. This has created a growing ga p between the wages and employment of the skilled and the unskilled. The authors note a strong, but by no means perfect, relationship between sk ill and IQ. Part II presents original empirical research, combined with a synthesis o f the existing empirical literature, that shows a strong relationship be tween the authors' measure of IQ and social performance. This portion of the book puts empirical flesh on Herrnstein's original bare-bones argum ent. Low-IQ persons are more likely to be in poverty, drop out of school , be unemployed or altogether idle, be on welfare, be bad parents, commi t crimes, and withdraw from political activity than are high-IQ persons. In general, this relationship holds even after adjusting for the author s' measure of socioeconomic background. The authors wish their readers to draw from this exercise the conclusion that nature--not just parental or social environment--plays an important role in explaining a variety of social pathologies. Taken literally, th eir research demonstrates that IQ, rather than socioeconomic background, plays the dominant role in generating differences in a variety of socia lly important outcomes among persons. By proceeding in this way, the authors establish the importance of IQ in accounting for individual differences without getting into the co ntroversial issue of racial bias in IQ tests. In Part III, they mention the unmentionable by directly analyzing the sou rces of ethnic differences in social outcomes and the role of their meas ure of IQ in accounting for these differences. They firmly and rather co nvincingly refute the critics of IQ and aptitude tests who claim that th e tests are racially biased and unrelated to true productivity in school s or the workplace. They discuss the well-documented disparity between t he distributions of IQ for blacks and whites, along with other ethnic di sparities. Their empirical work substantiates the role of IQ in accounti ng for a considerable portion of ethnic differences in socioeconomic out comes and demonstrates the concentration of low-IQ persons (of all races ) in a variety of pathological categories. The higher rate of reproducti on and immigration among the lower-IQ groups also receives attention, al ong with the consequences of this phenomenon for the American gene pool. They claim that the average IQ is declining in the United States. The first section build s on the first three parts of the book and discusses the implications of the authors' findings for social policy. Murray and Herrnstein present a pessimistic summary of efforts to raise cognitive ability through soci al programs.
Losing Ground, except that now the cognitive limitations of individuals rather than perverse incentives created by t he programs lead to their failure. The authors discuss the "dumbing down " of American public education and the shift in educational expenditures away from gifted children. Under the aegis of promoting equality, Rawls ian educational policy has taken resources away from the able and given them to the less able. They also discuss affirmative action in colleges and the workplace. Murra y and Herrnstein make the simple, powerful, and apparently very controve rsial point that disparities in intelligence and abilities among ethnic groups, combined with equality of opportunity at the individual level, w ill produce demographic disparities in college attendance, job hiring, a nd promotion rates. Such disparities often lead to interventions by gove rnments enforcing anti-discrimination laws. Murray and Herrnstein argue convincingly that employment tests banned by the courts as discriminatory at least partly predict productivity and ar e, if anything, biased in favor of minorities. Further, they make the cl aim that prohibitions against using the tests impair economic productivi ty and that "race-normed" adjustments of test scores misclassify workers , create tokenism in the workplace, and often stigmatize the intended re cipients of government beneficence. The press has attacked this section of the book, as well as the section on racial differences in IQ, as raci st in tone and content. In fact, the authors advocate the nonracist poli cy of treating persons as individuals rather than as members of racial g roups. The last two chapters of the book abandon the empirical focus. The penult imate chapter presents a bleak vision of an IQ-stratified meritocracy wi th a cognitive elite increasingly isolated from the rest of society. In this worst-case scenario, the affluent and the cognitive elite merge int erests, in part because many members of the cognitive elite have become affluent. A deteriorating quality of life emerges for the cognitively feeble, who become economically and soc ially dysfunctional. Unable to cope with the complexity of modern societ y, they become wards of the state.
In Pursuit as an al ternative to their bleak vision of a cognitively stratified social order . They harken to a communitarian ideal in which places are found for all persons in cognitively integrated local neighborhoods. Following Murray 's previous book, they suggest that removing power from the center and r eturning it to the community will produce vital neighborhoods th...
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