The Bell Curve

But despite decades of fashionable denial, the overriding and insistent truth about intellectual ability is that it is endowed unequally, for reasons that government policies can do little to change.

They argue against a fair Discussion of popular Prejudices, because, say they, tho' they would be found without any reasonable Support, yet the Discovery might be productive of the most dangerous Consequences.

For white youths, being smart is more important than being privileged in getting a college degree.

The swing in social problems that can result from small shifts in the mean IQ of a population

At the simplest level, it is only about thirty pages long.

The relationships we will be discussing are among the most sensitive in contemporary America—so sensitive that hardly anyone writes or talks about them in public.

The fragile web of civility, mutual regard, and mutual obligations at the heart of any happy society begins to tear.

Gossip about who in the tribe is cleverest has probably been a topic of conversation around the fire since fires, and conversation, were invented.

So began a long and deeply controversial association between intelligence and heredity that remains with us today.

It turned out to be nearly impossible to devise items that plausibly measured some cognitive skill and were not positively correlated with other items that plausibly measured some cognitive skill, however disparate the pair of skills might appear to be.

'Three generations of imbeciles are enough,' Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

I hate the impudence of a claim that in fifty minutes you can judge and classify a human being's predestined fitness in life.

It had somehow become controversial to claim, especially in public, that genes had any effect at all on intelligence.

During the first few years after the Harvard Educational Review article was published, Jensen could appear in no public forum in the United States without triggering something perilously close to a riot.

Psychologists and biologists might consider the possibility that heritability is the first.

The dialogue about testing has been conducted at two levels during the last two decades—the visible one played out in the press and the subterranean one played out in the technical journals and books.

Their careers, family lives, relationships with colleagues, and even physical safety could be jeopardized by speaking out.

Piaget discovered quickly that he was less interested in how well the children did than in what errors they made.

If a person is a wonderful visualizer but can barely compose a sentence, and another person can write glowing prose but cannot begin to visualize the simplest spatial images, what do you really learn about these two people if they are reported to have the same IQ?

If critics were willing to label language and logical thinking as talents as well, and to remove these from the pedestal they currently occupy, then I would be happy to speak of multiple talents.

One of the most insidious but also widespread errors regarding IQ, especially among people who have high IQs, is the assumption that another person's intelligence can be inferred from casual interactions.

This thing we know as IQ is important but not a synonym for human excellence.

But at least we hope that it will help you think of intelligence as just a noun, not an accolade.

Social class remains the vehicle of social life, but intelligence now pulls the train.

Mathematical necessity tells us that a large majority of the smart people in Cheops's Egypt, dynastic China, Elizabethan England, and Teddy Roosevelt's America were engaged in ordinary pursuits, mingling, working, and living with everyone else.

The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960.

In 1900, only about 2 percent of 23-year-olds got college degrees. Even if all of the 2 percent who went to college had IQs of 115 and above (and they did not), seven out of eight of the brightest 23-year-olds in the America of 1900 would have been without college degrees.

At mid-century America abruptly becomes more efficient in getting the top students to college.

The line for students completing the B.A. shows an even more efficient sorting process.

The valedictorian in Kalamazoo and the Kansas farm girl with an IQ of 140 might not even be going to college at all.

What led the nation's most able college age youth (and their parents) to begin deciding so abruptly that State U. was no longer good enough?

Instead of the old screen-woven of class, religion, region, and old school ties-the new screen was cognitive ability, and its mesh was already exceeding fine.

The degree of partitioning off of the top students as of the early 1990s has reached startling proportions.

Suppose you are told that a horse is sixteen hands tall and a snake is quarter of a rod long. Not many people can tell you from that information how the height of the horse compares to the length of the snake.

Most readers of this book are in preposterously unlikely groups, and this reflects the degree of partitioning that has already occurred.

This profound isolation from other parts of the IQ distribution probably dulls our awareness of how unrepresentative our circle actually is.

When people live in encapsulated worlds, it becomes difficult for them, even with the best of intentions, to grasp the realities of worlds with which they have little experience but over which they also have great influence.

The next three decades saw a great social leveling, as the executive suites filled with bright people who could maximize corporate profits, and never mind if they came from the wrong side of the tracks or worshipped at a temple instead of a church.

The biologically related siblings resembled each other in job status, even though they grew up in different homes.

In 1900, the number of jobs in the high-IQ professions soaked up only about one out of twenty of these talented people. By 1990, they soaked up almost five times as many, or one out of four.

But after 1940, the trickle swelled to a flood, shown by the nonlinear upward sweep of the proportion in the top IQ decile who have more recently gone to work in this limited number of jobs.

Many had reached their eminent positions only because they did not have to compete against more able people who were excluded from the competition for lack of the right religion, skin color, national origin, or family connections.

At this point, we are left with startlingly little room for maneuver.

Laws can make the economy less efficient by forbidding employers to rue intelligence tests, but laws cannot make intelligence unimportant.

Places like Stanford and Yale are where you find the coin of cognitive talent.

Witness the prosperity of casinos despite the statistically modest edge they hold over their customers.

Should we then approach the head coaches of the NFL and recommend that they try out a superbly talented 150.pound athlete at offensive tackle?

The problem is that common sense turned out to be wrong.

In restaurants, there are better and worse dishwashers, better and worse busboys.

Even the lowest-validity school, combat, in which training success is heavily dependent on physical skills, the validity was still a substantial .45.

The explanatory power of g was almost thirty times greater than of all other cognitive factors in ASVAB combined.

The point is one that should draw broad agreement from readers who have held menial jobs: Given the other necessary qualities of diligence and good spirits, intelligence helps.

The ploaded items, on the other hand, will reveal whether the applicant will ever become the kind of busboy who will clear table 12 before he clears table 20 because he relates the needed task to something that happened twenty minutes earlier regarding table 15.

The method that many people intuitively expect to be the most accurate, the job interview, has a poor record as a predictor of job performance, with a validity of only .14.

Getting high quality for a complex job can be worth large multiples of what it is worth to get equally high quality for a simpler job.

But the value to the employer of hiring brighter dentists is forty times greater than the value of hiring comparably brighter receptionists.

The dollar value of output is so high that the difference between a new hiree who is two standard deviations above the mean and one who is four standard deviations above the mean on any given predictor measure can mean a huge economic difference.

Getting rid of intelligence tests in hiring--as policy is hying to do-will not get rid of the importance of intelligence.

The irony is that as America equalizes the circumstances of people's lives, the remaining differences in intelligence are increasingly determined by differences in genes.

Cognitive stratification as a central social process is something genuinely new under the sun.

The job market reevaluated schooling during the past two decades: Educated workers, having been devalued in the 1970s, became increasingly valuable in the 1980s, in comparison with less educated workers.

The job market for people lacking the residual characteristics declined, while expanding for people having them.

The magnitude of the economic consequences of ordinary business transactions has mushroomed, and with it the value of people who can do their work at a marginally higher level of skill.

The more complex a society becomes, the more valuable are the people who are especially good at dealing with complexity.

The executives do not spend much time with the janitors or the data entry clerks. They spend almost all their time interacting with other executives or with technical specialists, which means with people drawn from the upper portion of the ability distribution.

The brightest public policy specialists shuttle among think tanks, bureaucracies, and graduate schools of public policy, never having to encounter an angry voter.

Much of the cognitive talent that used to be in the working-class neighborhood is being whisked up and out of the community through an educational system that is increasingly driven by academic performance.

It is the central irony of egalitarianism: Uniformity in society makes the members of families more similar to each other and members of different families more different.

The fact that family members resemble each other in intelligence in adulthood as much as they do is very largely explained by the genes they share rather than the family environment they shared as children.

In this sense, luck continues to matter in life's outcomes, hut now it is more a matter of the IQ handed out in life's lottery than anything else about circumstances.

In such numbers lurk large social effects.

In depressing contrast, we have been envisioning a society that becomes increasingly quiescent at the top, as a cognitive elite moves toward the upper income brackets and runs most of the institutions of society, taking on some of the characteristics of a caste.

What if the cognitive elite were to become not only richer than everyone else, increasingly segregated, and more genetically distinct as time goes on—but were also to acquire common political interests?

It is not that cognitive ability has been considered and found inconsequential but that it has barely been considered at all.

But the mother lode for scholars who wish to understand the relationship of cognitive ability to social and economic outcomes is the NLSY.

In all likelihood, almost all of your friends and professional associates belong in that top Class I slice.

Because intelligence has been such a taboo explanation for social behavior, we assume that our conclusions will often be resisted, if not condemned.

Indisputably, giving nineteen years of education to a person with an IQ of 75 is not going to have the same impact on life as it would for a person with an IQ of 125.

If you have to choose, is it better to be born smart or rich? The answer is unequivocally "smart."

To rephrase the dialogue between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, the poor were different from you and me: They had less money.

The AFQT test scores for the NLSY sample were obtained when the subjects were 15 to 23 years of age, and their IQ scores were already as deeply rooted a fact about them as their height.

Rank hath its privileges, and in the United States one of those privileges is to confer economic benefits on your children.

Despite coming from that solid background, his odds of being in poverty are 26 percent, more than twice as great as the odds facing the person from a deprived home but with average intelligence.

College has economic value independent of cognitive ability, whether as a credential, for the skills that are acquired, or as an indicator of personal qualities besides IQ.

The equation is brutally simple: The higher the proportion of children who live in households headed hy single women, then, ceteris paribus, the higher the proportion of children who will live in poverty.

The conclusion is that no matter how rich and well educated the parents of the mother might have been, a separated, divorced, or never-married white woman with children and an average IQ was still looking at nearly a 30 percent chance of being below the poverty line.

Ethnically and culturally, these are supposed to be the advantaged Americans: whites of European descent. But they have one big thing working against them: they are not very smart.

The very concept of school failure is a modern invention.

As the high school diploma became the norm, the dropouts were likely to become more self-selected for low IQ, and so indeed it transpired.

A closer look at these numbers dispels the stereotype of the high school dropout as the bright but unlucky youngster whose talents are wasted because of economic disadvantage or a school system that cannot hold onto him.

The permanent dropout instead fits the older image, more common among the general public than intellectuals, of the youngster who is both not very smart and from the wrong side of the tracks.

The differences between GED graduates and those with regular diplomas are too great to justify grouping them together.

But while socioeconomic privilege can help if the youngster is reasonably bright, there are limits to what it can do if he is not.

In 1953, the first year for which data are available, more than 86 percent of these young men had jobs. In 1992, it was just 66 percent.

Given equal age and IQ, a young man from a family with high socioeconomic status was more likely to spend time out of the labor force than the young man from a family with low socioeconomic status.

An executive with a limp can still be an executive; a manual laborer with a limp faces a more serious job impediment.

The evidence in the NLSY regarding the seriousness of the ailments, whether a doctor has been consulted, and their duration raises questions about whether the self-reported disability data have the same meaning.

Condescension toward these men is not in order, nor are glib assumptions that those who are cognitively disadvantaged cannot be productive citizens.

Rumors of the death of the traditional family have much truth in them for some parts of white American society—those with low cognitive ability and little education.

The intelligent professional woman is the most visible of this new tribe, rising in her career, too busy for, or not interested in, marriage and children.

The real culprit in explaining marriage rates in a young population is education.

The steep upward sweep of the divorce rate from the mid-1960s through the end of the 1970s represents one of the most rapid, compressed changes in a basic social behavior that the twentieth century has witnessed.

For them, the probability of divorce in the first five years plunged from 28 percent for someone with an IQ of 100 to 9 percent for someone with an IQ of 130.

No matter what the culture might be, 'there runs the rule that the father is indispensable for the full sociological status of the child as well as of the mother, that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is sociologically incomplete and illegitimate.'

The less intelligent the woman is, the more likely that she does not think ahead from sex to procreation, does not remember to use birth control, does not carefully consider when and under what circumstances she should have a child.

The differences among the cognitive classes are large, as if they lived in different worlds.

Among white women in the NLSY who had a bachelor's degree (no more, no less) and who had given birth to a child, 99 percent of the babies were born within marriage.

If she had an IQ at the 98th centile (an IQ of 130 or above), the probability plunged to 8 percent. If she had an IQ at the 2d centile (an IQ of 70 or below), the probability soared to 55 percent.

It is one thing to say that single women with babies are disproportionately poor... It is quite another thing to say that women who are already poor become mothers.

The results we have presented can be interpreted as saying that the welfare system may be a bad deal, but it takes foresight and intelligence to understand why.

It came as a distressing surprise to Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member and a primary sponsor of the legislation, to find that they were.

The smarter the woman is, the more likely she will be able to find a job, the more likely she will be able to line up other sources of support (from parents or the father of the child), and the more farsighted she is likely to be about the dangers of going on welfare.

The other variables swept away all of the connections between welfare and social class that seem so evident in everyday life.

White women with above-average cognitive ability or socioeconomic background rarely become chronic welfare recipients.

Altogether, almost a standard deviation separated the IQs of white women who became chronic welfare recipients from those who remained childless or had children within marriage.

The disquieting finding is that the worst environments for raising children, of the kind that not even the most resilient children can easily overcome, are concentrated in the homes in which the mothers are at the low end of the intelligence distribution.

A middle-class mother may think that one of her friends is far too permissive or strict, but put against the full range of variation that police and social workers are forced to deal with, the differences between her and her friend are probably small.

The middle-class way sounds like 'better' behavior on the part of parents, not just a neutral socioeconomic difference in parenting style.

Abuse is typically episodic and of short duration; neglect is chronic and continual.

People are likely to think the worst of socially unattractive people and give socially attractive people the benefit of the doubt.

Pelton himself blamed social service professionals and politicians, arguing that both of these powerful groups have a vested interest in a medical model of child abuse, in which child abuse falls on its victims at random, like the flu.

The inconsistency can reach mystifying proportions; one study of parent-child interactions found that children in abusing families had ahout the same chance of obtaining positive reinforcement for aggressive hehaviors as for pro-social behaviors.

The failure of scholars and policymakers alike to look at the role of low intelligence in malparenting may properly be called scandalous.

It takes more than love to childproof a house effectively; it also takes knowledge and foresight.

The problem facing pediatricians dealing with children of less competent parents is even more basic than getting them to apply good judgment: It is to get such mothers to administer the medication that the doctor has provided.

A child born to a white mother who was living under the poverty line but was of average intelligence had almost a 49 percent chance of living his first three years in poverty.

Both common sense and much of the scholarly work on child development suggest that children are resilient in the face of moderate disadvantages and obstacles and, on the other hand, that parents are frustratingly unable to fine-tune good results for their children.

What can be said unequivocally is that low income as such does not prevent children from being raised in a stimulating, nurturing environment.

It would be worthwhile for investigators to explore with other data the NLSY's indications that parental IQ is especially important for the home environment from ages 3 to 5, and the peculiar finding that parental IQ is more important for Emotional Support than for Cognitive Stimulation.

The results look like a U-shaped curve, with a big jump in Class V.

The provocative finding was that among those 29, 5 were children of women in Class I (10 percent of the 50 such children tested).

If the indicators that were used in the studies we have reported are indeed ones that you find valid in your own beliefs about what children need, then the conclusion follows: Over the long run and in the broad perspective, based on your best understanding of the realities of child rearing, smart parents tend to be better parents.

The first casualty is not just freedom hut the honds that make community life attractive.

The juvenile delinquents in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story tell Officer Krupke that they are 'depraved on account of we're deprived,' showing an astute grasp of the poles in criminological theory.

A violin is a cultural artifact, no less arbitrary than any other man-made object, and so is the musical scale. Yet few people would argue that the first violinists in the nation's great orchestras are a random sample of the population.

To a person of low intelligence, the threats of apprehension and prison may fade to meaninglessness. They are too abstract, too far in the future, too uncertain.

By the 1960s, the association between intelligence and crime was altogether dismissed in criminology textbooks, and so it remained until recently.

Among these high-risk sons, the ones who had no police record at all had IQ scores one standard deviation higher than the sons who had a police record.

Only 13 percent of white males had ever been convicted of anything, and 2 percent accounted for half of the convictions.

Close to a standard deviation separated those who had never been stopped by the police from those who went to prison.

The youngster who commits assaults on the street probahly gets in fights on the school grounds; the youngster who is undeterred by the prospect of jail time probably is not much motivated by the prospect of getting a high school degree.

Lacking this quality--civility, in its core meaning--a society must replace freedom with coercion if it is to maintain order.

Civility is not obedience but rather 'allegiance' and 'deference'—words with old and honorable meanings that are now largely lost.

The polling place is a sort of civic hearth.

If this be civility, then it is most purely a result of intelligence, at least among the variables examined.

Social scientists do not find it easy to dragoon large samples of adult Americans and make them sit still for the kinds of assessments of political involvement that can be conducted with children.

What is the cynic to make of the fact that an underpaid but well-educated shop clerk is more likely to vote than a less educated, rich businessman?

The more familiar independent variables-education, income, occupational status, exposure to the media, parental interest in politics-had small or no effects, after rated intelligence was taken into account.

Many academic intellectuals hold middle-class values in contempt.

It is this population that forms the spine of the typical American community, filling the seats at the PTA meetings and the pews at church, organizing the Rotary Club fund-raiser, coaching the Little League team, or circulating a petition to put a stop light at a dangerous intersection.

Despite the forbidding air that envelops the topic, ethnic differences in cognitive ability are neither surprising nor in doubt.

If all the ethnic differences in intelligence evaporated overnight, most of the intellectual variation in America would endure.

Intellectual fashion has dictated that all differences must be denied except the absolutely undeniable differences in appearance, but nothing in biology says this should be so.

The smaller the IQ difference, the more questionable its reality, and this has proved to be the case with the East Asian-white difference.

These tests results are matched by analyses of occupational and scientific attainment by Jews, which consistently show their disproportionate level of success, usually by orders of magnitude, in various inventories of scientific and artistic achievement.

Since hlack-white differences are the ones that strain discourse most severely, we will probe deeply into the evidence and its meaning.

To the extent that the difference represents an authentic difference in cognitive functioning, the social consequences are potentially huge as well.

How would a black youngster from the inner city ever have heard of a regatta?

The B/W difference is wider on items that appear to be culturally neutral than on items that appear to be culturally loaded.

How can one be unmotivated to do well during one split-second of a test but apparently motivated during the next split-second?

In assessing test bias, we would have no test or criterion measure that exists independent of this culture and its history.

The trouble is that socioeconomic status is also a result of cognitive ability, as people of high and low cognitive ability move to correspondingly high and low places in the socioeconomic continuum.

One reason for this reluctance to discuss averages is that blacks in Africa, including urbanized blacks with secondary educations, have obtained extremely low scores.

In contrast to Vincent's optimistic conclusions, the NLSY shows a growing rather than a shrinking gap in the next generation of blacks and whites.

In a period as short as twenty years, environmental changes are likely to provide the main reason for the narrowing racial gap in scores.

On the contrary, pessimists can develop a case that the convergence of black and white SAT scores in the last two decades is symptomatic of what happens when education slows down toward the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy.

We have considered leaving the genetics issue at that, on grounds that no useful purpose is served by talking about a subject that is so inflammatory, so painful, and so far from resolution.

Second, we have become convinced that the topic of genes, intelligence, and race in the late twentieth century is like the topic of sex in Victorian England.

Anyone who douhts this assertion may take two handfuls of genetically identical seed corn and plant one handful in Iowa, the other in the Mojave Desert, and let nature (i.e., the environment) take its course.

At this complex intersection of complex factors, the easy answers are unsatisfactory ones.

Any simple socioeconomic, cultural, or linguistic explanation is out of the question, given the diversity of living conditions, native languages, educational resources, and cultural practices.

Spearman's hypothesis says in effect that as mental measurement focuses most specifically and reliably on g, the observed black-white mean difference in cognitive ability gets larger.

Those who argue that genes might be implicated in group differences do not try to argue that genes explain everything.

One obvious criticism of SOMPA is that it broadens the scope of the control variables to such an extent that the procedure becomes meaningless.

Ogbu argues that the differences in test scores are an outcome of this historical distinction, pointing to a number of castes around the world—the untouchables in India, the Buraku in Japan, and Oriental Jews in Israel—that have exhibited comparable problems in educational achievement despite being of the same racial group as the majority.

Whether one looks at the worlds of science, literature, politics, or the arts, one does not get the impression that the top of the IQ distribution is filled with more subtle, insightful, or powerful intellects than it was in our grandparents' day.

The bottom line is that the gap between the adopted children with two black parents and the adopted children with two white parents was seventeen points, in line with the B/W difference customarily observed.

It is as if people assumed that we are faced with two alternatives: either ( I ) the cognitive difference between blacks and whites is genetic, which entails unspoken but dreadful consequences, or (2) the cognitive difference between blacks and whites is environmental, fuzzily equated with some sort of cultural bias in IQ tests, and the difference is therefore temporary and unimportant.

The underlying error is to assume that an environmentally caused deficit is somehow less hard-wired, that it has less impact on 'real' capabilities, than does a genetically caused deficit.

The corn planted in the Mojave Desert that could have flourished if it had been planted in Iowa, wasn't planted in Iowa, and there's no way to rescue it when it reaches maturity.

On two vitul indicators of success--educational attainment and entry into prestigious occupations-the black-white discrepancy reverses.

In some cases, large ethnic differences disappear altogether, or even reverse, with whites having the disadvantageous outcome compared to blacks and Latinos.

After taking IQ into account, blacks have a better record of earning college degrees than either whites or Latinos.

After controlling for IQ, the average black made 98 percent of the white wage.

And yet controlling just for IQ, ignoring both education and socioeconomic background, raises the average black wage to 98 percent of the white wage and reduces the dollar gap in annual earnings from wages for year-round workers to less than $600.

Controlling for age, IQ, and gender (ignoring education and parental SES), the average wage for year-round black workers in the NLSY sample was 101 percent of the average white wage.

With the facts in hand, we cannot distinguish between the role of the usual historical factors that people discuss and the possibility of ethnic differences in whatever other personal attributes besides IQ determine a person's ability to do well in the job market.

For reasons that are yet to be fully understood, black America has taken a markedly different stance toward marriage than white and Latino America.

These data, like those on illegitimacy and marriage, lend support to the suggestion that blacks differ from whites or Latinos in their likelihood of being on welfare for reasons that transcend both poverty and IQ.

The ethnic disparities were not great even before controlling for IQ, and they more than disappeared after controlling for IQ.

This large black-white difference was reduced by almost three-quarters when IQ was taken into account.

Racial and ethnic differences in this country are seen in a new light when cognitive ability is added to the picture.

Whatever good things we can accomplish with changes in the environment would be that much more effective if they did not have to fight a demographic head wind.

Were those huddled masses bringing to our shores a biological inheritance inconsistent with the American way of life?

In 1951, another scholar gloomily predicted that 'if this trend continues for less than a century, England and America will be well on the way to becoming nations of near half-wits.'

The optimism proved to be ephemeral. As scholars examined new data and reexamined the original analyses, they found that the optimistic results turned on factors that were ill understood or Ignored at the time the studies were published.

Foretelling the future about fertility is a hazardous business, and foretelling it in terms of IQ points per generation is more hazardous still.

The conclusion in both cases is that differential fertility is exerting downward pressure on IQ.

A large and often ignored dysgenic pressure from differences in age at birth is at work.

On the face of it, the discrepancies are so dramatically large that the probability of further divergence seems substantial.

If we take the NLSY results at face value, American intelligence is plunging.

Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon, not a biological one.

There are few, if any, other domains where public policy could so directly mold the cognitive shape of things to come.

The United States had going for it a crackerjack self-selection mechanism for attracting immigrants who were brave, hard-working, imaginative, self-starting—and probably smart.

It makes sense for high-ability people to emigrate when they can reasonably think that they are being underrewarded in their home country, relative to their ability, and that the United States rewards the same level of ability more generously.

The observations of everyday life and the statistical generalizations we have just presented can both be true at the same time, however.

Three points in lQ seem to he nothing (and indeed, they are nothing in terms of understanding an individual's ability), hut a population with an IQ mean that has slipped three points is likely to be importantly worse off.

He saw the novel and the cinema as the contemporary means for satisfying it, but he added that 'we have probably not seen the end of its development or begun to appreciate its damaging effects on "reality thinking" habits.'

Our purpose has been to point out that the stakes are large and that continuing to pretend that there's nothing worth thinking about is as reckless as it is foolish.

The figure tells us forcefully that poverty is concentrated among those with low cognitive ability.

Short-term unemployment is not conspicuously characterized by low IQ; long-term unemployment is.

Just as low IQ was increasingly prevalent as the level of male unemployment increased, so also is low IQ more prevalent among mothers as their dependency on welfare rises.

The prevailing notion that separation and divorce are so endemic that they affect everyone more or less equally is wrong as regards cognitive ability, at least in this age group.

Of all the social problems examined in this chapter, poverty among children is preeminently a problem associated with low IQ-in this case, low IQ among the mothers.

Any program is going to fail unless it is designed for a target population half of which has IQs below 80.

Taken together, the story of attempts to raise intelligence is one of high hopes, flamboyant claims, and disappointing results.

The nurturing of the young-including the cognitive nurturing-is one of the central purposes of human society. That, after all, is what families mainly do.

The children who did not benefit were presumably already getting the vitamins and minerals they needed for developing their nonverbal scores in their regular diets.

The performance of those at the bottom might improve, but they could end up even further behind their brighter classmates.

The Coleman report did not prove that educational reform is always futile, but that, on the whole, America had already achieved enough objective equalization in its schools by 1964 so that it was hard to pick up any effects of unequal school quality.

The more uniform a country's schooling is, the more correlated the adult IQ is with childhood IQ.

The greatest support in the various studies was for a simpler 'no effect' conclusion: The gap was about as great after compensatory education as before.

The new minister was convinced that a nation's average intellectual level was fundamental to its well-being, and he set out to see what could be done to raise the IQ of Venezuelan school children.

The tales may even be true, but they need to be averaged with the tales that don't get told about the scores that improve by only a few points—and the scores that drop.

These findings conformed with the intuitive notion that, in the poet's words, 'as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.'

Perry Preschool resembled the average Head Start program as a Ferrari resembles the family sedan.

The Abecedarian Project is the apotheosis of the day care approach.

Experimental and control groups were both one to two years retarded in reading and math skills by the time they reached fourth grade; their academic averages and their achievement scores were similar, and they were similarly rated by their teachers for academic competence.

In the media, the good news is trumpeted as if there were no ambiguity; in the technical journals, the good news is viewed with deep suspicion and discounted.

They seem unable to become fully human despite heroic efforts to restore them to society.

The main lesson to he learned from these better programs has already been learned: It is tough to alter the environment for the development of general intellectual ability by anything short of adoption at birth.

The debate over Head Start should move away from frivolous claims about how many dollars it will save in the long run, none of which stands up to examination.

But let it be said plainly: Anyone seeking an inexpensive way to do some good for an expandable number of the most disadvantaged infants should look at adoption.

For thirty years, IQ has been out of fashion among American educators, and the idea that people with the most capacity to be educated should become the most educated sounds dangerously elitest.

They continue to win positions, money, prestige, and success in competition with their less gifted fellow citizens, but they are less well educated in the ways that make smart children into wise adults.

Fewer than one in three American 17-year-olds in a nationally representative sample could place the Civil War within the correct half-century of its actual occurrence.

Many people are under the impression that the decline was deep and permanent for the entire population of students. In reality, the decline for the average student was modest and recovery was quick.

The improvement has been substantial—on the order of half a standard deviation since the mid-1970s, and about .2 standard deviation above the previous high in 1965.

We are left with compelling evidence of a genuine decline in the intellectual resources of our brightest youngsters.

It may be within the capability of an educational system—probably with the complicity of broader social trends—to put a ceiling on, or actually dampen, the realized intelligence of those with high potential.

The simple and no longer controversial truth is that educational standards declined, along with other momentous changes in American society during that decade.

Sowell compares such timidity to the McGuffey's Readers, the staple text of nineteenth-century children in one-room schoolhouses, pointing out that the Third Reader used words such as species, dialogue, heath, and benighted—intended for 8-year-olds.

A school board runs no risk whatsoever of angry historians picketing their offices.

Banneker was 'elitest,' said an influential school board member, a luxury for parents who 'had their children in private school and can no longer afford it and bring them back to essentially a private school at the public expense.'

At about the same time, educators-and educational critics-stopped thinking hard or openly about variation in intellectual abilities. It is time to reopen the issue.

For every parent who visits the principal to tell him that Johnny isn't getting enough homework are several who visit to complain Johnny is being overworked.

There's close to nothing in it for them in working hard in high school. Ergo, they do not work hard in high school.

It is very difficult for an outside force to accelerate the freight train but comparatively easy for an outside force to derail it.

These gifted youngsters are important not because they are more virtuous or deserving but because our society's future depends on them.

If they cannot grow up knowing how the rest of the world lives, they can at least grow up with a proper humility about their capacity to reinvent the world de novo.

Readers who kept taking mathematics as long as they could stand it know that at some point they hit the wall, and studying hard was no longer enough.

On elite campuses, the average black freshman is in the region of the 10th to 15th percentile of the distribution of cognitive ability among white freshman.

Is affirmative action a temporary expedient to correct past wrongs, or must the American ideal of individualism be permanently modified for the collective needs of members of certain groups?

The difference between black and white scores was less than 100 points at only one school, Harvard.

At selective schools, the median black edge was 180 SAT points, while Asians faced a median penalty of 30 points.

As a result, a number of college officials privately accuse each other of 'stealing' black students.

More than 1,100 registered white law students had scores of 170 or higher on a scale going from 120 to 180, compared to three blacks.

The admissions process is a juggling act, and affirmative action fits squarely in a long tradition.

If it is admissible to augment the presence of some racial or ethnic minorities solely because they serve the interests of the university, is it not also appropriate to limit the presence of minorities for the same reason?

The applicant who overcame poverty, cultural disadvantages, an unsettled home life, a prolonged illness, or a chronic disability to do as well as he did in high school will get a tip from most admissions committees, even if he is not doing as well academically as the applicants usually accepted.

The second point, often expressed by university officials with the words 'everyone we admit can do the work,' is true in the limited sense that students with comparatively low levels of ability can get passing grades.

Considerations of just deserts argue that it is not fair to equate the test scores of the youngster who has gotten the finest education money and status can buy with the test scores of the youngster who has struggled through poor schools and a terrible neighborhood.

Is it appropriate to treat the choice as a toss-up if the student at the 12th percentile happens to be black?

If the percentage of minorities in the incoming freshman class goes up, that is considered good. If the percentage goes down, that is considered bad.

How much harm is done to minority self-esteem, to white perceptions of minorities, and ultimately to ethnic relations by a system that puts academically less able minority students side by side with students who are more able?

The statistical difference that was trivial in the view from above the battle has become a large racial discrepancy at ground level.

Today the same degree from the same university is perceived differently if you have a black face or a white one.

To anticipate our larger conclusion, affirmative action as it is being practiced is a grave error.

At many colleges during that era, applicants were forbidden to enclose a photograph and instructed to avoid any information in the essay that might help identify their race or religion.

Paradoxically, job hiring and promotion procedures that are truly fair and unbiased will produce the racial disparities that public policy tries to prevent.

Few, if any, points of friction in American society have been rubbed so raw as where affirmative action operates in the workplace.

It makes no difference if the rejected male applicants had scores that were twice those of the successful women applicants: All that matters is the bottom line: the 80 percent criterion.

The dilemma is that job hiring and promotion procedures that are truly fair and unbiased in the sense in which everyone used those terms in 1964 will produce the ethnic and group disparities that public policy so vigorously tries to prevent.

If evidence of success is to be found for affirmative action, it must be disentangled from a web of other factors that seem to have been influencing the employment of blacks.

The most plausible explanation for the large gap toward the top of the table is that employers are using dual standards for black and white job applicants.

In both categories of employment, blacks have been hired at higher rates than whites of equal IQ since the late 1960s, and the upward trend lasted at least until the late 1980s.

If cognitive ability is taken into account, the underrepresentation of blacks in professional and technical jobs was gone by 1964, prior to the Civil Rights Act.

The fallacy lies in assuming that people who have lower cognitive test scores will, on average, be better endowed in these other areas than people with higher scores.

I've seen people diagnosed as borderline retarded graduate from the police academy.

There is a great deal of smoke emanating from such accounts. We urge that people start checking out whether there is any fire.

How much degradation of job performance is acceptable in pursuit of the other goals of affirmative action?

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.

The lesson of the last two decades is that ethnic bias in a job test need not be proved. It need only be alleged.

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.

Race norming had few defenders in public, where its unfairness seemed palpable.

By odd happenstance, the people one knows personally are much more fairdminded than the people one doesn't know personally.

But our largest reason for wanting to scrap job discrimination law is our belief that the system of affirmative action, in education and the workplace alike, is leaking a poison into the American soul.

The stratifications may have been stark, even bitter, but people were not stratified by cognitive ability.

I doubt I've had a friend or regular social acquaintance since who scored less than an 1100 on his SATs.

Nixon can't have won; no one I know voted for him.

The very bright have become much more uniformly affluent than they used to be while, at the same time, the universe of affluent people has become more densely populated by the very bright.

Try to envision what will happen when 10 or 20 percent of the population has enough income to bypass the social institutions they don't like in ways that only the top 1 percent used to be able to do.

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.

For many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of the teaching.

An underclass needs a critical mass, and white America has not had one.

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.

The gaping cultural gap between the habits of the underclass and the habits of the rest of society, far more impassable than a simple economic gap between poor and not poor or the racial gap of black and white, will make it increasingly difficult for children who have grown up in the inner city to function in the larger society even when they want to.

In short, by custodial state, we have in mind a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business.

The phrase social justice has become virtually a synonym for economic and social equality.

Only this is evident, that there is a difference of degrees in men's understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings, to so great a latitude that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm that there is a greater distance between some men and others in this respect, than between some men and some beasts.

The 'best geniuses' should be 'raked from the rubbish annually' by competitive grading and examinations, sent on to the next educational stage, and finally called to public service.

People who are free to behave differently from one another in the important affairs of daily life inevitably generate the social and economic inequalities that egalitarianism seeks to suppress.

The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality.

You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone.

Meeting the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood did not take a lot of money and did not take high intelligence.

A strong back isn't worth what it used to be.

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.

American society has erected barriers to individual sweat equity, by saying, in effect, 'Only people who are good at navigating complex rules need apply.'

Everyone has a moral compass, but some of those compasses are more susceptible to magnetic storms than others.

People of limited intelligence can lead moral lives in a society that is run on the basis of 'Thou shalt not steal.' They find it much harder to lead moral lives in a society that is run on the basis of 'Thou shalt not steal unless there is a really good reason to.'

As matters stand, the legal edifice has become a labyrinth that only the rich and the smart can navigate.

But it is not news that the world is unfair.

The technically precise description of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution.

The nation was good at it precisely because of, not in spite of, the freedom that American individuals and communities enjoyed.

It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire.

As an example of how a standard deviation can be used to compare apples and oranges, suppose we are comparing the Olympic women's gymnastics team and NBA basketball teams.

It is worth pausing a moment over this link between a relatively simple measure of spread in a distribution and the way things in everyday life vary, for it is one of nature's more remarkable uniformities.

In a true normal distribution, the distance from the 99th centile to the 100th (or, similarly, from the 1st to the 0th) is infinite.

Take a pencil (literally or imaginarily) and draw a straight, sloping line through the dots in a way that seems to you to best reflect this upward-sloping trend.

There is a statistically substantial relationship between height and weight, but, visually, the exceptions seem to dominate.

Perhaps, if you have been compelled to be around social scientists, you have heard the phrase 'explains the variance,' as in, for example, 'Education explains 20 percent of the variance in income.'

Since imagination can defy gravity, you ask each boy to levitate until the soles of his shoes are at the elevation that reads on the pole at the waist size of his trousers.

The reason for the change was to avoid the numerical operations subtest, which was both less highly g-loaded than the mathematics knowledge subtest and sensitive to small discrepancies in the time given to subjects.

The most intelligent people who take the test have less of an opportunity to get a high score than the least intelligent people have to get a low score.

In no instance did the 1989 version corrected for skew—the version reported in the text—yield significant findings that were not also found when using the 1980 uncorrected version.

To eliminate the most egregiously suspicious cases, we made adjustments.

A baby born five weeks prematurely will probably weigh less than 5.5 pounds and yet be a fully developed, healthy child for gestational age, with excellent prospects.

To see them arising between tests of such different subject matter should alert us to some deeper level of mental functioning.

Why are scores on algebra and geometry more similar to those on word problems than to those on arithmetic?

This is the pattern that betrays what g means-a broad mental capacity that permeates performance on anything that challenges people cognitively.

In this sense, tests of mental ability are not designed to produce normally distributed scores; that's just what happens, the same way that height is normally distributed without anyone planning it.

The relationship of an IQ test score to education and socioeconomic background is a constant and to some extent unresolvable source of controversy.

As far as anyone can tell, there are diminishing marginal benefits of this kind of coaching (taking three intensive SAT coaching programs in succession will raise a score by less than three times the original increment).

The causal importance of the elementary grades in developing a person's IQ is greater than the causal role of, say, graduate school.

Even an inherently strong relationship can result in low values of R2 if the data points are bunched in various ways, and relatively noisy relationships can result in high values if the sample includes disproportionate numbers of outliers.

The implied parameter for the remaining level is the negative sum of the other levels (i.e., the parameters sum to zero over all the effect levels).

zAFQT89"zSES -0.4133224 0.1 187879 12.11 0.0005

DEPENDENT VARIABLE: Divorced within the first five years of marriage.

DEPENDENT VARIABLE: First birth out of wedlock.

The College Sample: Omitted. Included no women who had received Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) within a year after the birth.

The cross-sectional College Sample included no women who were on chronic welfare within a year after the birth.

The College Sample: Omitted. The cross-sectional College Sample included only one child whose mother was beneath the poverty line throughout the first three years.

The college sample: Omitted. The cross-sectional sample included only five cases of children in the bottom decile on the HOME index.

The College Sample: Omitted. No cases of a child age 6 or older in the hottom decile on the PPVT in the cross-sectional sample.

The College Sample: Omitted. No one in the cross-sectional College Sample waj ever interviewed in jail.

A group difference is, in and of itself, evidence of test bias only if we have some reason for assuming that an unbiased test would find no average difference between the groups.

When questions about data come up, cloudier and murkier is usually a safe bet.

But whatever the explanation might be, the results directly contradict the hypothesis that IQ tests give an unfairly low estimate of black academic performance.

The black-white gap, he discovered, was about twice as large on items rated as low in cultural loading as on items rated as high in cultural loading.

Relative item difficulties are essentially the same for both races (by sex). That is, blacks and whites of the same sex come close to finding the same item the easiest, the same item next easiest, all the way down to the hardest item.

That SAT scores declined by almost half a standard deviation from 1964 to 1980 strongly suggests that something coachable--or 'negatively coachable' in this example--is being measured.

To the extent that test anxiety affects performance at all, it seems to help slightly.

This readiness to theorize about what might be true about black-white differences in test scores while ignoring the pertinent data is common.

The black-white difference diminished on two of the three tests, but all of the shrinkage came about because white scores fell, not because black scores rose.

Another positive note is that the narrowing was achieved because black scores rose more than white scores, not because white scores were falling.

However, Rushton's work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot, as many of his critics are given to charging.

This procedure was chosen in preference to a single regression entering ethnicity as a nominal variable so that the relationships would not be constrained to a single slope.

The analysis treats nominal variables differently from the convention in many other regression packages.

Much of the current debate about affirmative action in employment takes place in ignorance of the original objectives of affirmative action and the ways in which antidiscrimination law has evolved.

The stance of the govemment and the courts has increasingly been to distrust tests that produce group differences, as if they presume that, in the absence of illegal discrimination, the groups should be equal.

Said the Court, good (i.e., nondiscriminatory) intentions do not excuse tests "that operate as 'built-in headwinds' for minority groups and are unrelated to measuring job capability."

The first two terms—'designed, intended'—clearly imply discriminatory intent. Must the third? No, said the Supreme Court, 'used' need not.

The Uniform Guidelines held—in contrast to the Court in Albemarle—that the employer has a responsibility for seeking less discriminatory selection procedures, a rather different matter from giving a complaining party the opportunity to do so, as the Court had decreed.

The result of so extreme a requirement, warned the Court, would be 'a host of evils.'

The new law is fraught with ambiguity and will doubtless send lawyers, their clients, and courts back to work to figure out what it requires.

But one of the oddities of the 1950s, discussed in more detail in Chapter 18, is that the SAT means remained constant through the decade and into 1963, even as the size of the test-taking population mushroomed.

We can further be confident that no school was much more selective than Harvard as of 1952 (with the possible exception of science students going to Cal Tech and MIT).

The odds are already so tiny that they are for practical purposes unaffected by further restrictions.

It could, of course, be traits of personality rather than of intellect that tie a family's occupational destinies together.

The correlation of IQ with income in a restricted population such as Harvard graduates could be negative when people toward the top of the IQ distribution are disproportionately drawn into academia, where they make a decent living but seldom much more than that.

He was right, insofar as motivation can make the difference between being a first-rate rocket scientist and a mediocre one—if you start with an IQ of 146.

But how is this knowledge to be captured in objective measures? Ratings by supervisors or peers? Samples of work in the various tasks that a job demands? Tests of job knowledge?

It has been suggested that the various contrived measures of workers tell us more about maximum performance than they do about typical, day-to-day proficiency.

How is it possible for a layperson to decide who is right? The different estimates of mean validity of the GATB—45 according to Hunter, Schmidt, and some others; .25 according to the Hartigan committee—is an instructive case in point.

How much less would they have varied had they entered the course with the same level of g?

No data have yet tested the possibility that productivity diverges (the advantage enjoyed by the smarter employee increases with experience) in very-high-complexity jobs.

A test with a validity of .4 captures 40 percent of the value that would be realized from a perfect test, even though it explains only 16 percent of the variance.

For people who want to drop out as soon as possible, those born in, say, October will spend a year in school more than those born in January.

Until recently, specialists mostly agreed that income was not a strong family trait, certainly not like the family chin or the baldness that passes on from generation to generation, and not even as enduring as the family nest egg.

The extraordinary discrepancy between what the experts say in their technical publications on this subject and what the media say the experts say is well described in Snyderman and Rothman 1988.

That each NLSY subject was paid $50 to take the test helped ensure a positive attitude toward the experience.

Since the best IQ tests have reliabilities in excess of .9, this is tantamount to saying that the stability of scores is quite high.

The correlations between a person's IQ obtained at age 7 and social behavior in adulthood would support the same qualitative conclusions as those based on an IQ obtained at age 20.

Throughout all of these regression analyses, we were also looking at cross-tabulations and frequency distributions to try to see what gnomes might be lurking in the regression coefficients.

In the late 1960s, the Youth in Transition study found a difference of about .8 SDs on the vocabulary subtest of the GATB and the Gates Reading Tests between dropouts and nondropouts.

Continued schooling makes a modest contribution to intellectual capital but not enough to make much difference in the basic relationships linking IQ to other outcomes.

A more fine-grained examination of the data reveals that absence from the labor force and job disabilities is extraordinarily concentrated within a limited set of the lowest-status jobs.

The coefficient relating IQ to likelihood of disability is about four times the coefficient for years of education.

IQ makes a lot of difference in whether high school graduates get married but not in whether they get divorced.

She is not very hright and gets pregnant inadvertently or because she has not thought through the consequences; or she is poor and has a baby because it offers better rewards than not having a baby, whether those rewards are tangible in the form of an income and apartment of her own through welfare, or in the form of having someone to love.

Only two white women with B.A.s in the NLSY had become chronic recipients.

Does a high school education prepare the young woman for adulthood and the world of work, thereby tending to keep her off welfare? Or does the act of getting a high school diploma reflect the young woman's persistence and ability to cope that tend to keep her off welfare?

In the article, data on all the tests are presented in commendable detail, except for IQ.

In a revealing sign of the unpopularity of intelligence as an explanatory variable, Cramer treats years of education as a proxy measure of socioeconomic status.

This divergence between violent and property crimes is in itself a potentially significant phenomenon that has yet to be adequately explored.

The evidence in fact suggests that smart offenders pick crimes with lesser likelihood of arrest and larger payoffs.

At the other extreme, minor offenders brag about their criminal exploits.

Chauvinistic, militaristic, and anticommunistic attitude were inversely related to intelligence.

Except in the South of the Reconstruction, the correlation between education and voting rate was negative from 1876 to 1892, just the reverse of what it is now.

For a useful recent critique of the treatment of race by psychologists, also demonstrating how difficult (impossible?) it is to he detached ahout this issue, see Yee et al. 1993.

The reason why the 'oarsman:regatta' example has been used so often in descriptions of cultural bias is that it is one of the few items in the SAT that looks so obviously guilty.

This logic is as fallacious as the logic behind controlling for SES that ignores the ways in which IQ helps determine socioeconomic status.

Linear trends over short periods of time cannot be sensibly extrapolated much into the future, notwithstanding how often one sees such extrapolations in the media.

Trying to predict trends on the basis of equivalent percentage changes from different baselines is a treacherous proposition.

The Asian increase in test scores has been driven by improvements among the best students, while the black increase has been driven by improvements among the worst students.

Spearman wrote that the mean difference 'was most marked in just those [tests] which are known to be most saturated with g'.

Another set of critics made what could be called meta-critical comments, wondering why Jensen should want to uncover relationships that are not very interesting, hurtful to blacks, inimical to world peace, and likely to distract attention from the possibility of raising people's g by educational means.

If the mean IQ in 1776 had been 30 and the standard deviation was what it is today, then America in the Revolutionary period had only five men and women with IQs above 100.

After controlling for IQ, the unrounded proportions in high-IQ occupations were 10.4 percent for whites, 24.5 percent for blacks, and 16.2 percent for Latinos.

Self-report crime measures have consistently revealed marked differences in the willingness of black and white youths to disclose crimes.

Hence, if fertility is lower at higher levels of intelligence, then assortative mating for intelligence will speed the decline of the population intelligence because it increases the correlation between parents and children.

The argument is densely mathematical, and neither the article nor the two accompanying commentaries lend themselves to easy summary.

In ascribing IQs based on educational attainment, it is important to base them on the final attainment, not just on the years of education at the time of birth.

It is one more useful example of the difference between the world in which most of our readers live and the rest of the country.

That black women without children have a mean of 100 is in itself striking evidence of the low fertility among the top part of the black IQ distribution.

This did not do much to get rid of people who had the problems; most of its effect was to diminish the supply of people without problems.

The basic point is that we have almost no idea of the pathway between diet or food supplements and intellectual development; assuming there is a path, it could be long and winding.

Soon after, school busing itself became a battleground for social researchers, a tale we will not tell here except to say that having a beneficial effect on intelligence is no longer used as an argument in favor of busing.

The consensus is now clear: Cognitive gains vanish before the end of primary school.

It is based on the test's being less than a perfect measure of intelligence (org), so that it is possible to change the score without changing the underlying trait.

To that extent, speaking of home environment as if it were purely an environmental source of variation is incorrect.

As each Korean student's name was called to come to the testing area, that child stood and exited the classroom to loud applause.

We are aware of Simpson's paradox, which shows how scores in each interval can go up when scores in the aggregated group go down, hut in this case the explanation appears to lie in changes either in the way that students report their class rank, the meaning of class rank, or both.

Finally, if highly talented new students were being drawn from some mysterious source, why did we see no improvement on the SAT-Verbal?

This is consistent with a broad theme that the sciences and math improved more in the 1980s than the humanities and social sciences did.

Nationwide Insurance, which in the single year of 1982 sent out over 1,200 requests for high school transcripts and got 93 responses.

A study of ten medical schools by the Rand Corporation found that a minority student with a 50 percent chance of admission would have had about a 5 percent chance of admission if he were white with the same qualifications.

The arguments against admitting Jews were likely to mention that gentile families might not send their children to a college with 'too many' Jews (institutional self-interest) or that anti-Semitism would make it hard for Jewish alumni to use their college education for society's welfare (social utility).

As in so many matters involving affirmative action, this indirect reasoning would be unnecessary if colleges and universities were to open their data on grades to researchers.

Under this ruling, an employer who hires a given number of blacks will be violating the law if the blacks have high ability test scores, but not violating the law if the same number of blacks are hired without recourse to the scores at all.

Second, laws and regulations often institutionalize changes that were already under way for other reasons.

In Pennsylvania, with the highest pass rates, the state commissioner of higher education openly acknowledged that Pennsylvania sought to avoid lawsuits alleging racial bias in the test by establishing a low cutoff score that they would subsequently try to raise.

Not knowing a good reason for a difference is not the same as knowing that there is no good reason.

And the life of man [would be] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.

We decided that the advantages of including low-income whites in the analysis outweighed the advantages of an additional year of data.

People who acquire knowledge about electronics and science also tend to have high mathematics and verbal ability.

There may very well be other studies of similar size (the sample in Montie and Fagan was 86) that are lurking in the literature, but we know of no studies using large-scale representative samples that establish item bias against blacks.

Some courts have expressed concern at the spectacle of trials lasting for weeks, following years of discovery, and involving a multitude of statistical and other experts and seemingly endless testimony about the credentials of a single [job] candidate.

Courts other than the Supreme Court have imposed on the employer itself the burden of seeking less discriminatory alternatives.

Bajema, C. J. 1963. Estimation of the direction and intensity of natural selection in relation to human intelligence by means of the intrinsic rate of natural increase.

Is the test score decline responsible for the productivity growth decline?

Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart.

Brown, A. L., and Campione, J. C. 1982. Modifying intelligence or modifying cognitive skills: More than a semantic uyibhle?

Buss, D. M. 1989. Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures.

Cattell, R. B. 1937. The Fight for Our National Intelligence. London: King & Sons.

Cook, P. J., and Frank, R. H. 1991. The growing concentration of top students at elite schools.

Are black scores on Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices an artifact of method of test presentation?

Elliott, R. 1987. Litigating Intelligence: IQ Tests, Special Education, and Social Science in the Courtroom.

Flynn, J. R. 1987a. Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure.

Galton, F. 1869. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences.

Gould, S. J. 1984. Human equality is a contingent fact of history.

Social inequality and assortative mating: Cause or consequence?

Hilliard, A. G. 111. 1984. 1Q Testing as the emperor's new clothes: A critique of Jensen's "Bias in Mental Testing."

Social deviance and political marginality: Toward a redefinition of the relation between sociology and politics.

Itzkoff, S. W. 1993. America's unspoken economic dilemma: Falling intelligence levels.

Jensen, A. R. 1989. Raising IQ without increasing g? A review of "The Milwaukee Project: Preventing Mental Retardation in Children at Risk."

IQ as a protective factor for subjects at high risk for antisocial behavior.

Kozol, J. 1967. Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children.

Lippmann, W. 1923. The great confusion. New Republic (January 3):145-146.

Lynn, R. 198713. Japan: Land of the rising IQ: A reply to Flynn.

Macphail, E. M. 1985. Comparative studies of animal intelligence: Is Spearman's g really Hull's D?

What is a racially and culturally nondiscriminatory test? A sociological and pluralistic perspective.

Family socialization and the 1Q test performance of traditionally and transracially adopted black children.

Visual memory and motor programmes: Their use by idiot-savant artists and controls.

Olson, W. K. 1991. The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit.

Plomin, R., and Bergeman, C. S. 1991. The nature of nurture: Genetic influence on "environmental" measures.

Estimating the General Cognitive Component of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB): Three Faces of g.

Rossi, P. 1987. The iron law of evaluation and other metallic rules.

White examiners generally do not impede the intelligence test performance of black children: To debunk a myth.

The impact of a low full additive and sucrose diet on academic performance in 803 New York City public schools.

Snyderman, M., and Rothman, S. 1988. The IQ Controversy: The Media and Public Policy.

Chinese youths who reason extremely well mathematically: Threat or bonanza?

Terman, L. M., and Oden, M. H. 1947. The Gifted Child Grows Up: Twenty-Five Years' Follow-up of a Superior Group.

Vining, D. R., Jr. 1986. Social versus reproductive success: The central theoretical problem of human sociobiology.

Werner, E. E., and Smith, R. S. 1982. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of Resilient Children and Youth.

Wednesday's Children: A Study of Child Neglect and Abuse.

Aristotle, 255, 531; Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), 73-74, 120, 277-278, 579-592.

custodial state scenario and, 523-526

Dysgenesis, 341-368; in America in the early 1990s, 348-357; defined, 342; demographic transition and, 343-345.

General factor (g) of intelligence, 3-4; challenges to, 14-15, 18; classicists and, 14, 15, 22-23; defined, 4; job productivity and, 71, 75-79.

economic costs of not testing and, 85-87; economic value of IQ and, 65,8246, 88; experience vs. IQ and, 79-80

The growth of high-IQ professions and the family resemblance in status suggest a deepening cognitive partitioning of the social classes.

The index lists 'cognitive classes and social behavior' alongside 'ethnic inequalities in relation to IQ' and 'regression to the mean.'

To try to come to grips with the nation's problems without understanding the role of intelligence is to see through a glass darkly indeed; to grope with symptoms instead of causes, to stumble into supposed remedies that have no chance of working.

good can come without it.

But despite decades of fashionable denial, the overriding and insistent truth about intellectual ability is that it is endowed unequally, for reasons that government policies can do little to change.

They argue against a fair Discussion of popular Prejudices, because, say they, tho' they would be found without any reasonable Support, yet the Discovery might be productive of the most dangerous Consequences.