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CHAPTER 1: Why Inequality?

 

AS WE WRITE, Americans are engaged in a great debate about the 

inequalities that increasingly divide us. For over twenty years, the 

economic gaps have widened. As the American Catholic Bishops stated in 

late 1995, "the U.S. economy sometimes seems to be leading to three 

nations living side by side, one growing more prosperous and powerful, 

one squeezed by stagnant incomes and rising economic pressures and 

one left behind in increasing poverty, dependency and hopelessness."<1> 

Being prosperous may mean owning a vacation home, purchasing private 

security services, and having whatever medical care one wants; being 

squeezed may mean having one modest but heavily mortgaged house, 

depending on 911 when danger lurks, and delaying medical care because 

of the expense of copayments; and being left behind may mean barely 

scraping together each month's rent, relying on oneself for physical 

safety, and awaiting emergency aid at an overcrowded public clinic. Most 

Americans in the middle know how fragile their position is. One missed 

mortgage payment or one chronic injury might be enough to push them 

into the class that has been left behind.

 

Few deny that inequality has widened.<2> The debate is over whether 

anything can be done about it, over whether anything should be done 

about it. Some voices call for an activist government to sustain the 

middle class and uplift the poor. Other voices, the ones that hold sway 

as we write, argue that government ought to do less, not more. They 

argue for balanced budgets, lower taxes, fewer domestic programs, 

minimal welfare, and less regulation. These moves, they contend, would 

energize the economy and in that way help the middle class. They would 

also help the poor, economically and otherwise. Speaker of the House 

Newt Gingrich in 1995 said of people on welfare: "The government took 

away something more important than . . . money. They took away their 

initiative, . . . their freedom, . . . their morality, their drive, their 

pride. I want to help them get that back."<3> As to the increasing 

inequality of our time, some advocates of circumscribed government say 

it cannot be changed, because inequality is natural; some some say it 

ought not be changed, because inequality drives our economy. At a 

deeper level, then, the debate is about how to understand inequality--

what explains its origin, what explains its growth. That is where we 

shall engage the debate.

 

The arguments over policy emerged from almost a quarter century of 

economic turmoil and disappointment. Middle-class Americans saw the era 

of seemingly ever-expanding affluence for themselves and ever-

expanding opportunities for their children come to an abrupt end in 

1973. The cars inching forward in the gasoline lines of the mid-1970s 

foreshadowed the next twenty years of middle-class experience. Wages 

stagnated, prices rose, husbands worked longer hours, and even wives 

who preferred to stay at home felt pressed to find jobs. The horizons 

for their children seemed to shrink as the opportunities for upward 

economic mobility contracted.<4> What was going on? What could be done 

about it?

 

In the early 1980s, one explanation dominated public discussion and 

public policy: The cause of the middle-class crisis was government, and 

its solution was less government. Regulations, taxes, programs for the 

poor, preferences for minorities, spending on schools--indeed, the very 

size of government--had wrecked the economy by wasting money and 

stunting intitative, by rewarding the sluggards and penalizing the 

talented. The answer was to get government "off the backs" of those 

who generate economic growth. "Unleash the market" and the result 

would be a "rising tide that will lift all boats, yachts and rowboats 

alike."

 

This explanation for the economic doldrums won enough public support 

to be enacted. Less regulation, less domestic spending, and more tax 

cuts for the wealthy followed. By the 1990s, however, the crisis of the 

middle class had not eased; it had just become more complicated. Figure 

1.1 shows the trends in family incomes, adjusted for changes in prices, 

from 1959 to 1989 (the trends continued into the 1990s). The richest 

families had soared to new heights of income, the poorest families had 

sunk after 1970, and the middle-income families had gained slightly. But 

this slight gain was bitterly misleading. The middle class managed to 

sustain modest income growth, only by mothers taking jobs and fathers 

working longer hours. Also, the slight gain could not make up for 

growing economic insecurity and parents' anxiety that key elements of 

the "American Dream"--college education, a stable job, and an affordable 

home--were slipping beyond the grasp of their children. And so the 

phrase "the disappearing middle class" began to be heard.

 

Another puzzle now called for explanation: The 1980s had been a boom 

decade; overall wealth had grown. But average Americans were working 

harder to stay even. Why had the gaps between the rich and the middle 

and between the middle and the poor widened? How do we understand 

such inequality?

 

An answer emerged in the public debate, forwarded for the most part 

by the same voices that had offered the earlier explanation: Inequality 

is a "natural," almost inevitable, result of an unfettered market. It is 

the necessary by-product of unleashing talent. The skilled soar and the 

unskilled sink. Eventually, however, all will gain from the greater 

efficiency of the free market. The reason such wider benefits have yet 

to be delivered is that the market has not been freed up enough; we 

need still less government and then the wealth will flow to middle- and 

lower-income Americans. Sharp inequality among the classes, these voices 

suggested, is the necessary trade-off for economic growth.

 

The strongest recent statement that inequality is the natural result of a 

free market came in _The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in 

American Life_, published in 1994. Richard Herrnstein and Charles 

Murray argued that intelligence largely determined how well people did 

in life. The rich were rich mostly because they were smart, the poor 

were poor mostly because they were dumb, and middle Americans were 

middling mostly because they were of middling intelligence. This had 

long been so but was becoming even more so as new and inescapable 

economic forces such as global trade and technological development made 

intelligence more important than ever before. In a more open economy, 

people rose or sank to the levels largely fixed by their intelligence. 

Moreover, because intelligence is essentially innate, this expanding 

inequality cannot be stopped. It might be slowed by government 

meddling, but only by also doing injustice to the talented and damaging 

the national economy. Inequality is in these ways "natural," inevitable, 

and probably desirable.

 

_The Bell Curve_ also provided an explanation for another troubling 

aspect of inequality in America--its strong connection to race and 

ethnicity. Black families, for example, are half as likely to be wealthy 

and twice as likely to be poor as white families. The questions of how to 

understand racial disparities and what to do about them have anguished 

the nation for decades. Now, there was a new answer (actually, a very 

old answer renewed): Blacks--and Latinos, too--were by nature not as 

intelligent as whites; that is why they did less well economically, and 

that is why little can or should be done about racial inequality.

 

Yet decades of social science research, and further research we will 

present here, dispute the claim that inequality is natural and increasing 

inequality is fated. Individual intelligence does not satisfactorily explain 

who ends up in which class; nor does it explain why people in different 

classes have such disparate standards of living. Instead, what better 

explains inequality is this: First, individuals' social milieux--family, 

neighborhood, school, community--provide or withhold the means for 

attaining higher class positions in American society, in part by 

providing people with marketable skills. Much of what those milieux have 

to offer is, in turn, shaped by social policy. For example, the quality of 

health care that families provide and the quality of education that 

schools impart are strongly affected by government action. Second, 

social policy significantly influences the rewards individuals receive for 

having attained their positions in society. Circumstances--such as how 

much money professional or manual workers earn, how much tax they 

pay, whether their child care or housing is subsidized--determine 

professionals' versus manual workers' standards of living. In turn, these 

circumstances are completely or partly determined by government. We do 

_not_ have to suffer such inequalities to sustain or expand our national 

standard of living.<5> Thus, inequality is not the natural and inevitable 

consequence of intelligence operating in a free market; in substantial 

measure it is and will always be the socially constructed and changeable 

consequence of Americans' political choices.

 

Our contribution to the debate over growing inequality is to clarify how 

and why inequality arises and persists. We initiate our argument by 

first challenging the explanation in _The Bell Curve_, the idea that 

inequality is natural and fated. Then, we go on to show how social 

environment and conscious policy mold inequality in America.

 

If the growing inequality in America is not the inevitable result of free 

markets operating on natural intelligence, but the aftermath of 

circumstances that can be altered, then different policy implications 

follow from those outlined in _The Bell Curve_. We do not have to 

fatalistically let inequalities mount; we do not have to accept them as 

the Faustian trade for growth; and we do not have to accept 

heartlessness as the companion of social analysis. Instead, we can 

anticipate greater equality of opportunity and equality of outcome and 

also greater economic growth.

 

EXPLAINING INEQUALITY

 

Why do some Americans have a lot more than others? Perhaps, inequality 

follows inevitably from human nature. Some people are born with more 

talent than others; the first succeed while the others fail in life's 

competition. Many people accept this explanation, but it will not suffice. 

Inequality is not fated by nature, nor even by the "invisible hand" of 

the market; it is a social construction, a result of our historical acts. 

_Americans have created the extent and type of inequality we have, and 

Americans maintain it_.

 

To answer the question of what explains inequality in America, we must 

divide it two. First, who gets ahead and who falls behind in the 

competition for success? Second, what determines how much people get 

for being ahead or behind? To see more clearly that the two questions 

are different, think of a ladder that represents the ranking of affluence 

in a society. Question one asks why this person rather than that person 

ended up on a higher or lower rung. Question two asks why some 

societies have tall and narrowing ladders--ladders that have huge 

distances between top and bottom rungs and that taper off at the top 

so that there is room for only a few people--while other societies have 

short and broad ladders--ladders with little distance between top and 

bottom and with lots of room for many people all the way to the top.

 

(Another metaphor is the footrace: One question is who wins and who 

loses; another question is what are the rules and rewards of the race. 

Some races are winner-take-all; some award prizes to only the first few 

finishers; others award prizes to many finishers, even to all 

participants. To understand the race, we need to understand the rules 

and rewards.)

 

The answer to the question of who ends up where is that people's social 

environments largely influence what rung of the ladder they end up 

on.<6> The advantages and disadvantages that people inherit from their 

parents, the resources that their friends can share with them, the 

quantity and quality of their schooling, and even the historical era into 

which they are born boost some up and hold others down. The children 

of professors, our own children, have substantial head starts over 

children of, say, factory workers. Young men who graduated from high 

school in the booming 1950s had greater opportunities than the ones 

who graduated during the Depression. Context matters tremendously.

 

The answer to the question of why societies vary in their structure of 

rewards is more political. In significant measure, societies choose the 

height and breadth of their "ladders." By loosening markets or 

regulating them, by providing services to all citizens or rationing them 

according to income, by subsidizing some groups more than others, 

societies, through their politics, build their ladders. To be sure, 

historical and external constraints deny full freedom of action, but a 

substantial freedom of action remains (see, especially, chapters 5 and 6). 

In a democracy, this means that the inequality Americans have is, in 

significant measure, the historical result of policy choices Americans--or, 

at least, Americans' representatives--have made. In the United States, 

the result is a society that is distinctively _un_equal. Our ladder is, by 

the standards of affluent democracies and even by the standards of 

recent American history, unusually extended and narrow--and becoming 

more so.

 

To see how policies shape the structure of rewards (i.e., the equality of 

outcomes), consider these examples: Laws provide the ground rules for 

the marketplace--rules covering incorporation, patents, wages, working 

conditions, unionization, security transactions, taxes, and so on. Some 

laws widen differences in income and earnings among people in the 

market; others narrow differences. Also, many government programs 

affect inequality more directly through, for example, tax deductions, food 

stamps, social security, Medicare, and corporate subsidies. Later in this 

book, we will look closely at the various initiatives Americans have 

taken, or chosen not to take, that shape inequality.

 

To see how policies also affect which particular individuals get to the 

top and which fall to the bottom of our ladder (i.e., the equality of 

opportunity), consider these examples: The amount of schooling young 

Americans receive heavily determines the jobs they get and the income 

they make. In turn, educational policies--what sorts of schools are 

provided, the way school resources are distributed (usually according to 

the community in which children live), teaching methods such as 

tracking, and so on-- strongly affect how much schooling children 

receive. Similarly, local employment opportunities constrain how well 

people can do economically. Whether and where governments promote 

jobs or fail to do so will, in turn, influence who is poised for well-paid 

employment and who is not.

 

Claiming that intentional policies have significantly constructed the 

inequalities we have and that other policies could change those 

inequalities may seem a novel idea in the current ideological climate. So 

many voices tell us that inequality is the result of individuals' "natural" 

talents in a "natural" market. Nature defeats any sentimental efforts by 

society to reduce inequality, they say; such efforts should therefore be 

dropped as futile and wasteful. Appeals to nature are common and 

comforting. As Kenneth Bock wrote in his study of social philosophy, 

"We have been quick to seek explanations of our problems and failures 

in what we _are_ instead of what we _do_. We seem wedded to the belief 

that our situation is a consequence of our nature rather than of our 

historical acts."<7> In this case, appeals to nature are shortsighted.

 

Arguments from nature are useless for answering the question of 

rewards because that question concerns differences in equality _among 

societies_. Theories of natural inequality cannot tell us why countries 

with such similar genetic stocks (and economic markets) as the United 

States, Canada, England, and Sweden can vary so much in the degree of 

economic inequality their citizens experience. The answer lies in 

deliberate policies.

 

Appeals to nature also cannot satisfactorily answer even the first 

question: Why do some _individuals_ get ahead and some fall behind? 

Certainly, genetic endowment helps. Being tall, slender, good-looking, 

healthy, male, and white helps in the race for success, and these traits 

are totally or partly determined genetically. But these traits matter to 

the degree that society makes them matter--determining how much, for 

example, good looks or white skin are rewarded. More important yet than 

these traits are the social milieux in which people grow up and live.

 

Realizing that intentional policies account for much of our expanding 

inequality is not only more accurate than theories of natural inequality; 

it is also more optimistic. We are today more unequal than we have been 

in seventy years. We are more unequal than any other affluent Western 

nation. Intentional policies could change those conditions, could reduce 

and reverse our rush to a polarized society, could bring us closer to 

the average inequality in the West, could expand both equality of 

opportunity and equality of result.

 

Still, the "natural inequality" viewpoint is a popular one. Unequal 

outcomes, the best-selling _Bell Curve_ argues, are the returns from a 

fair process that sorts people out according to how intelligent they are. 

But _The Bell Curve_'s explanation of inequality is inadequate. The 

authors err in assuming that human talents can be reduced to a single, 

fixed, and essentially innate skill they label intelligence. They err in 

asserting that this trait largely determines how people end up in life. 

And they err in imagining that individual competition explains the 

structure of inequality in society. In this book, we use _The Bell Curve_ 

as a starting point for really understanding inequality in America. By 

exploring that book's argument and its evidence, we can see what is 

wrong with the viewpoint that inequality is fated by nature and see 

instead how social milieux and social policy create inequality.

 

Generations of social scientists have studied inequality. Hundreds of 

books and articles have appeared in the last decade alone examining the 

many factors that affect who gets ahead and who falls behind in our 

society, including among those factors intelligence. We will draw on this 

treasury of research. We will also show, using the very same survey 

used in _The Bell Curve_, that social environment is more important in 

helping determine which American becomes poor than is "native 

intelligence" most generously estimated. Then, we will turn to the more 

profound question, the second question, of why the United States has 

the system of inequality it does. We will show that although some 

inequality results from market forces, much of it--and even many 

aspects of market inequality itself-- results from purposeful, and 

alterable, policy.

 

THE BELL CURVE CONTROVERSY

 

In late 1994 a publishing sensation burst upon America. The covers of 

newsmagazines heralded a new study--perhaps the definitive study, the 

articles inside suggested--of the differences in intelligence between 

blacks and whites in America. _The New Republic_ blared "Race & IQ" in 

enormous letters--and sold out all rack copies in Harvard Square. 

_Newsweek_'s cover featured facial profiles of a black man and a white 

man standing back-to- back with the superimposed words "IQ. Is It 

Destiny? A Hard Look at a Controversial New Book on Race, Class & 

Success."

 

Those who went beyond the front covers read of a book claiming that 

blacks are not as smart as whites, most likely because the two groups' 

genes differ. More broadly, they read that intelligence is a gift 

distributed by nature unequally at conception and that this distribution 

explains the inequalities among Americans. The political implications were 

clear: If inequality is natural, then governmental intervention to 

moderate it is at best wrongheaded and at worst destructive.

 

The book was attacked even as it was publicized. Both _The New 

Republic_ and _Newsweek_ bracketed their reports with critical sidebars, 

over a dozen in the first case; the _New York Times Magazine_ published 

a cover- story profile of one of the authors implying that he is a boor; 

an interviewer for National Public Radio delivered almost every question 

to that author with a clear note of skepticism; the _New York Times_ 

published at least two editorials against the book; and so on. And yet 

the book withstood the attacks and sold hundreds of thousands of 

hardcover copies (perhaps a sales record for a book with dozens of 

pages of statistical tables).

 

_The Bell Curve_, by Richard J. Herrnstein (who had long been a 

psychology professor at Harvard University at his untimely death 

shortly before the book's publication) and Charles Murray (a Ph.D. in 

political science, well-known conservative essayist, and resident at 

conservative think tanks), is more substantial than its media 

representations suggest. Its substance is due not merely to its mass, 

about 850 pages cover-to-cover, nor to its imposing array of graphs, 

tables, footnotes, and references. At its base is a philosophy ages old: 

_Human misery is natural and beyond human redemption; inequality is 

fated; and people deserve, by virtue of their native talents, the 

positions they have in society_. From that ideological base, Herrnstein 

and Murray build a case that critics cannot simply dismiss out of hand.

 

Herrnstein and Murray argue--relying on their own analysis of a large 

national survey, supplemented by an array of citations--that individuals' 

intelligence largely decides their life outcomes. Intelligence is 

distributed unequally among people, in a distribution shaped like a "bell 

curve" with a few people at the lower end, a few people at the upper 

end, and most people clumped in the middle. A person's position in that 

distribution heavily influences his or her position in the other 

distributions of life--the distributions of jobs, income, marriage, 

criminality, and the like.

 

The centerpiece of Herrnstein and Murray's evidence is the National 

Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), a massive survey of over ten 

thousand young Americans involving repeated interviews over more than 

a decade. The NLSY administered the Armed Forces Qualifying Test 

(AFQT) to its subjects in 1980. Herrnstein and Murray show that NLSY 

subjects who scored high on that test, which the authors treat as an 

"IQ" test, were usually doing well ten years later, and those who had 

low scores ended up poorly. This is proof, they argue, that intelligence 

largely determines life outcomes. Herrnstein and Murray also contend 

that intelligence is essentially fixed, unchangeable in any significant 

fashion. People's fates are therefore also unchangeable. And so must be 

social inequality itself. Efforts to alter this naturally unequal order 

waste money and undermine its efficiency and justice. (Appendix 1 

summarizes _The Bell Curve_ in detail for those who have not read it.)

 

_The Bell Curve_ is an inadequate explanation of where individual 

Americans end up in the system of inequality. Its answer to the 

question of why some people end up higher than others on the ladder 

of success vastly overestimates the relative importance of aptitude tests 

and underestimates the importance of the social environment. Despite 

Herrnstein and Murray's self-congratulations that, in examining 

intelligence, they have dared to go where no social scientist has gone 

before, scholars long ago established that scores on IQ and IQ-like tests 

were only of modest importance compared with social context in 

explaining individual attainment. We reinforce and expand that familiar 

conclusion by redoing Herrnstein and Murray's analysis of the NLSY 

survey. We show that they made major errors that exaggerated the role 

of the AFQT relative to social factors. For example, the AFQT is largely a 

measure of _instruction_, not native intelligence. (The _Newsweek_ cover 

could just as well read "Grades. Are They Destiny?") Moreover, a 

correct analysis of the NLSY survey reveals that the AFQT score is only 

one factor among several that predict how well people do; of these 

factors, the social ones are more important than the test score.

 

More fundamentally, _The Bell Curve_ also provides an inadequate 

understanding of systems of inequality. Its implied answer to the 

question of why the American ladder is so tall and narrow is that 

natural talent prevails in a natural market. This interpretation is wrong, 

in part because it is historically naive. For example, during most of this 

century Americans became substantially more equal economically, but 

since 1973 they have become substantially less equal. Understanding 

such fluctuations in inequality requires a broader historical and 

international perspective than _The Bell Curve_ provides. We try to 

provide such a broader perspective.

 

Why do we pay so much attention to _The Bell Curve_? Some colleagues 

told us that _The Bell Curve_ is so patently wrongheaded that it would 

be quickly dismissed; that genetic explanations of inequality are old 

news, having gained notoriety and disrepute thirty years ago, seventy 

years ago, and earlier; that we would only further publicize _The Bell 

Curve_; and so forth. But we felt that _The Bell Curve_ is not easily 

ignored. It will not go away. Its ideas and data, at least as transmitted 

by the media and by politicians, will provide a touchstone in policy 

debates for many years. Our Berkeley colleague Troy Duster notes that 

within weeks of _The Bell Curve_'s publication, Charles Murray had been 

invited to address the newly elected Republicans in the House of 

Representatives and that an article in _The Chronicle of Philanthropy_ 

had speculated that charity for "people of lesser ability" might be a 

waste.<8> Shortly afterward, the president of Rutgers University faced 

an uproar when he apparently alluded to _The Bell Curve_ in explaining 

problems of black students.

 

Also, _The Bell Curve_'s perspective on society, which reduces a complex 

reality to little more than a footrace among unequally swift individuals, 

offends us as social scientists. _Social_ reality--for example, how 

societies set up the "race" and how they reward the runners--cannot be 

understood through such reductionist thinking.

 

Nor were we satisfied with the critical appraisals that had appeared 

when we undertook this project in late 1994. Some reviewers, even as 

they castigated _The Bell Curve_, accepted, or were perhaps intimidated 

by, its scientific presentation. Some attacked the authors, the authors' 

funders, or the authors' intellectual friends. Deserved or not, such 

attacks do not invalidate Herrnstein and Murray's claims. Some 

commentators seemed to be grasping at straws, picking one or two 

contrary studies reported in the book without noting that the authors 

had piled on many others to support their arguments. And some just 

admonished _The Bell Curve_ for its political implications. We believed 

that the book deserved neither the deference nor the unfair attacks. It 

could be challenged on scientific grounds. Also, in responding, critics 

generally accepted Herrnstein and Murray's framing of the question: 

why some people finish first and others last.<9> We do not.

 

As academics, we have the impulse to contest every claim and statistic 

in the 850 pages of _The Bell Curve_. There are certainly many errors 

and contradictions in the details.<10> However, there are more basic 

issues to address: What is intelligence? What role do individual talent 

and social environment play in shaping life outcomes? Why is the 

structure of outcomes set as it is? What difference does policy make? 

For resolving many of these issues, the particular statistics usually do 

not matter as much as logic and history. We will show that _The Bell 

Curve_ is wrong statistically, that it is even more profoundly wrong 

logically and historically, and that its implications are destructive.

 

One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is 

less to _The Bell Curve_ than some intimidated reviewers have realized: 

"explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray 

capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful 

bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier 

they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less 

than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in 

how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It 

refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from 

zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set 

of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance 

in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 

percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent 

of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and 

Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences 

in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, 

criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by 

differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could 

magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 

percent of the inequality we see today. What that means is shown 

graphically in figure 1.2.

 

The figure displays the distribution of household income in the United 

States in 1993. Across the bottom are the incomes from zero to $150,000. 

The _Y_-axis represents the proportion of American households. The 

solid line shows that virtually no households had zero income in 1993; 

about .02--that is, 2 percent--had incomes of $25,000, about .01 (1 

percent) had incomes of $75,000; and so on. The solid line displays the 

actual distribution or the _shape of inequality_ in household income. The 

dashed line displays what that distribution would have looked like if 

every adult in the United States had had identical intelligence as 

measured by the AFQT: hardly changed. Because AFQT score accounts 

for, at best, only 10 percent of the variation in earnings, it leaves 90 

percent of the variation unaccounted for.<11> In sum, intelligence, at 

least as measured by the AFQT, is of such minor importance that 

American income inequality would hardly change even if everyone had 

the same AFQT score. (In a response to similar criticisms, Murray backed 

away from explained variance as a criterion for judging the importance 

of intelligence, but _The Bell Curve_ argument depends on that 

criterion.)<12>

 

As some economists have noted in reviewing _The Bell Curve_,<13> the 

issue for policy is neither total explained variance nor even whether it 

is intelligence or the social environment that explains more of the 

variation in individual outcomes. It is whether a given intervention can 

make a positive net contribution to outcomes. In asserting that cognitive 

ability is critical to determining individuals' fortunes but is 

unchangeable, Herrnstein and Murray argue that no intervention can 

pay off. We will see, however, that cognitive abilities are malleable 

(chapters 2 and 7). In asserting that socioeconomic background is of 

trivial importance in influencing individual outcomes, Herrnstein and 

Murray are claiming that working on social conditions cannot be 

effective. We will see, however, that socioeconomic conditions matter a 

great deal, so that policy there can be effective in increasing 

opportunity (see chapter 4). More important yet, Herrnstein and Murray 

do not consider the deeper ways that social policy shapes both 

individual competition and the structure of inequality (see chapters 5 

and 6). There is great leverage for policy there, as well.

 

The claim that intelligence accounts for individuals' locations on the 

ladder of inequality is the central argument of _The Bell Curve_. But 

many discussions in _The Bell Curve_ wander from that argument. The 

major such distraction is the discussion of ethnicity and IQ. It is a 

distraction because the argument over intelligence and inequality is 

unchanged whether or not there are inherent racial differences in 

intelligence. Charles Murray has admitted that, in the end, whether 

genes or environment explain racial differences in IQ scores "_doesn't 

much matter_" (italics in original).<14> We agree (although the genes 

versus environment debate matters a great deal if we want to explain 

racial differences in life circumstances). Because the media featured te 

topic of race and IQ so centrally, we must address the issue (see 

chapter 8). But otherwise we intend to stay on the main line of 

discussion. Finally, we agree with Herrnstein and Murray on some 

matters. (Secondhand readers of _The Bell Curve_ may be surprised to 

learn that in some ways Herrnstein and Murray are not always 

conservative in their policy suggestions.) For example, we agree with 

them that Americans have since 1970 become increasingly polarized 

between rich and poor, and we agree with them that a guaranteed 

annual income ought to be considered as a possible national policy.<15>

 

We raise several arguments against _The Bell Curve_, any one of which 

is sufficient to dismiss it. If intelligence is not single, unitary, and 

fixed; if intelligence can be altered; if test scores mismeasure 

intelligence; if intelligence is not the major cause of people's fortunes; if 

markets do not fairly reward intelligence; if patterns of inequality are 

socially constructed--if any of these arguments holds, _The Bell Curve_ 

case fails.

 

In the end, we respond in detail to _The Bell Curve_ because it affords 

us an opportunity to explain what _does_ account for the inequality we 

see in America today. That explanation stresses the importance of social 

environment and of policies that construct the social environment. That 

understanding, in turn, begins a realistic discussion of how to reduce 

inequality and its harmful effects.

 

OVERVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT

 

If one asks why some people get ahead and some people fall behind, 

answers concerning natural differences in ability are woefully 

inadequate. We can see that by looking closely at "intelligence." One 

reason inequality in intelligence is a poor explanation of class inequality 

is that individuals' abilities are much more complex, variable, and 

changeable than is suggested by the old-fashioned notions of 

intelligence upon which _The Bell Curve_ rests. Concretely, the basic 

measure of intelligence that Herrnstein and Murray use, the AFQT, is 

actually not a test of genetic capacity or of quick-wittedness. It is 

instead a test of what people have been taught, especially in high 

school, of how much they recall, and of how much effort they make in 

the test. Another reason that intelligence is not an adequate explanation 

of individual success or failure is that, as social scientists have known 

for decades, intelligence as measured by such tests is only one among 

many factors that affect individuals' success or failure. In the NLSY, 

respondents' AFQT scores in 1980 do not explain well how they ended up 

at the end of the 1980s. We show that, instead, aspects of respondents' 

social environments explain the outcomes more fully.

 

If one asks the more basic question of what determines the pattern of 

inequality, answers concerning individual intelligence are largely 

irrelevant. Societies and historical epochs vary greatly in the nature 

and degree of their inequality; they differ much more than any 

variations in intelligence, or the market, can account for. Some of that 

variability lies in technological, economic, and cultural changes. But 

much of it lies in specific policies concerning matters such as schooling, 

jobs, and taxes.

 

In the end, we _can_ change inequality. We _have_ changed inequality. 

American policies have reduced inequality in many spheres--for example, 

improving the economic fortunes of the elderly--and have expanded 

inequality in others--for example, with tax expenditures that advantage 

many of the already advantaged. And the experience of other nations 

shows that there is much more that can be done to reduce inequality if 

we choose to do so.

 

Policies also affect where individuals end up on the ladder of inequality. 

Policies help construct social environments. Policies even alter cognitive 

skills, particularly in the ways we structure schooling. The leverage 

here lies not with the episodic compensatory programs over which there 

has been much debate, but with the everyday structure of schools in 

America.

 

Finally, what about race? Arguments that African Americans and Latino 

Americans have done poorly in the United States because they are less 

intelligent than whites are completely backward. The experiences of low- 

caste groups around the world show that subordinate ethnic minorities 

do worse in schools and on school tests than do dominant groups, 

whatever the genetic differences or similarities between them. Whether it 

is Eastern European Jews in 1910 New York, the Irish in England, 

Koreans in Japan, or Afrikaaners in South Africa, being of lower caste 

or status makes people seem "dumb." The particular history of blacks 

and Mexicans in the United States fits the general pattern. _It is not 

that low intelligence leads to inferior status; it is that inferior status 

leads to low intelligence test scores_.

 

THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK

 

Chapter 2 examines how the psychometricians upon whom Herrnstein and 

Murray draw for their psychology have sought to study "intelligence." 

The psychometric concept arises largely from the IQ tests themselves: 

Intelligence is the statistical core (labeled "_g_") of those tests. In 

other words, intelligence is what IQ tests measure. We show how 

problematic that definition is by showing that the AFQT largely measures 

how much math and English curricula teenagers have learned and 

display. But there are other, better ways to think about intelligence. We 

discuss as an example the "information-processing" perspective, one 

which is more realistic.

 

Chapter 3 examines _The Bell Curve_'s specific evidence about 

intelligence: scores on the AFQT. Scores on school achievement tests are, 

of course, important in a society that rewards people according to how 

well they do in school, but they are not what most people would 

consider as "intelligence" per se. We also explore the ways Herrnstein 

and Murray "massage" the AFQT data to fit their arguments. They 

overstate the validity and utility of the AFQT scores. Yet to the degree 

that such test scores measure how well we educate our children, their 

ability to predict life outcomes testifies to how critical educational policy 

is for American inequality.

 

Chapter 4 addresses the fattest section of _The Bell Curve_, its 

statistical analyses purporting to show that NLSY respondents' AFQT 

scores best predict--and so, presumably, the respondents' intelligence 

most determines--what becomes of them. We review critical errors 

Herrnstein and Murray made in their analysis; we reanalyze the identical 

data; and we come--as other scholars have, also--to opposite 

conclusions: Social environment is more, not less, important than test 

scores in explaining poverty, likelihood of incarceration, and likelihood 

of having a child out of wedlock. For economic outcomes, gender, a trait 

Herrnstein and Murray ignored, matters most of all. Other social 

factors--education and community conditions--are at least as important 

as test scores. Stepping back from the specific data, we point out that 

these findings are not news to social scientists. We have long 

understood that a person's economic fortunes are hostage to his or her 

gender, parents' assets, schooling, marital status, community's economy, 

stage in the business cycle, and so on; intelligence is just one item on 

such a list. This chapter settles the issue of why some people get ahead 

of others in the race for success; the next chapter looks at what the 

racers win or lose.

 

Chapter 5 turns attention to _systems_ of inequality, showing how 

greatly they vary across history and among nations. The question of 

Chapter 5 is not whether individuals are more or less equal, but 

whether _societies_ are. We will see how the degree of inequality 

fluctuated in American history, particularly how inequalities widened 

since the 1970s. And we will see how extreme the United States is 

compared with other advanced industrial nations. The inequality in 

America today is not "natural" but in great measure the result of 

policies that tolerate wide inequalities. Ironically, those policies are, 

despite assertions by interested parties, _not_ necessary for economic 

growth; indeed, inequality may well retard economic growth.

 

Chapter 6 turns to several explicit national policies that structure 

inequality in America. Some policies and programs narrow inequality-- 

social security, Medicare, food stamps, etc.--while some widen it--

corporate subsidies, the mortgage deduction, laws concerning 

unionization, and so on. Compared with America's economic competitors, 

we do relatively little to equalize people's economic fortunes--or even 

their economic opportunities. This explains our charge that the 

inequality Americans have is a result of the policies Americans have at 

least tacitly chosen.

 

Chapter 7 turns to policies that shape individual abilities, specifically, 

intelligence. Individuals' cognitive skills--those supposedly fixed talents 

that determine economic inequality--are indeed changeable. We show, 

using the examples of the school year, tracking in schools, and the 

structure of jobs, that learning environments alter how and how well 

people think. Policies help construct those learning environments. Even 

the inequality of ability is subject to social shaping.

 

Chapter 8 turns to race and ethnicity--a topic we believe was a 

distraction, albeit an incendiary one, in _The Bell Curve_. Why do blacks 

and Latinos score lower on standardized tests? This turns out to be not 

a biological question but a social one. Around the world, members of 

disadvantaged groups usually score lower than members of advantaged 

groups, whatever their racial identities. In many cases, both the higher- 

and lower-status groups are of the same race. Also hard to reconcile 

with the racialist viewpoint is the way ethnic groups seemingly become 

smarter _after_ they have succeeded. For example, in Japan Koreans are 

"dull," while in the United States Koreans are "bright"; Jews in America 

were "dull" seventy-five years ago but are among the "cognitive elite" 

today. We describe three ways that ethnic subordination in a caste or 

castelike system leads to poor school and test performance: One, 

subordination means material deprivation for students, which in turn 

impairs their achievement; two, subordination usually involves group 

segregation and concentration, which, by multiplying disadvantage and 

drawing all group members into difficult learning situations, undercuts 

academic achievement; and three, subordination produces a stigmatized 

identity of inferiority, which in turn breeds resignation or rebellion, 

both of which limit academic achievement. The histories of African 

Americans and Latino Americans, as well as their current conditions, 

more than suffice to explain why their members tend to score lower than 

whites on tests and also why they do less well in the race for success. 

The American case fits the global pattern; it is not genes but caste 

positions that explain the apparent differences in cognitive performance.

 

Chapter 9 concludes with a consideration of what the intellectual and 

the practical implications are of understanding inequality in these 

historical and sociological ways.

 

CONCLUDING COMMENTS BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

 

A comment on the "burden of proof": Many readers, by now accustomed 

to contradictory studies about how certain foods do or do not cause 

heart disease or cancer, may feel unable to decide among dueling Ph.D.s' 

claims about inequality. In this book, we contest many specific issues of 

evidence in _The Bell Curve_. But more important is how the basic 

questions are framed and the historical breadth of evidence examined. 

From such a fundamental perspective, we find that intelligence, broadly 

understood, does affect Americans' fates but is just one factor among 

many. It is not the key to American inequality nor to American social 

problems; indeed, differences among individuals altogether are not the 

key. The key is how we, together as citizens, choose to structure our 

society. We do not, of course, have unlimited freedom of action; we are 

constrained by material circumstances, social traditions, and political 

institutions. But we have a lot more freedom to act, this will book will 

show, than admitted by those who counsel acceptance of the growing 

inequalities in our society. The challenge is to make those choices.

 

In thinking about those choices, it may help to go back to first 

principles. This nation draws its moral precepts from its biblical and 

republican traditions. The Bible repeatedly enjoins us to help the needy; 

the Declaration of Independence announces that "all men are created 

equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights."<16> 

Such a nation should presume that its people come equally equipped to 

fulfill those promises. The burden is on those who would contend 

otherwise, who would have us sorted out at birth into the worthy and 

the unworthy. The burden of proof is on those who would contend that 

some of us are hopeless and fated only for piteous charity. Absent 

conclusive proof of that claim, Americans should assume an equality of 

worth and move to expanding every American's horizon.