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The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
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The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Customer Reviews
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"The Bell Curve": A Recipe for Transforming the City on the Hill into the Hills without the City
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There is a good deal of critical literature on "The Bell Curve" treating both its science and its ideology. Here are a few words about the latter.
The stripe is elitist. The banner "against equality" is one you will touch and smell throughout the book. Of course, one wouldn't expect there a plainness of the Nietzschean romanticism in praising the inequality. But something like it, without the moral gigantism of Zarathustra's overman to be sure, lurcks from the background of the book.
In any case, this scholarly dubious, but statistic-generous discourse illustrates both the propaganda expertise of the authors and the fact that the ideology is its quintessential intent.
The news of the book would be its emphasis on the "intellectual partitioning" of American society and on its consequences. Roughly, the story of the "partitioning" is this. Known historical hierarchies of ancient, middle, or modern times, until lately, were anything but IQ sensitive in this sense: smart people were more or less dispersed throughout the social hierarchies (pp. 25-27). The possibility of a wise shoemaker and of a dumb king could have not so little mathematical chance to be a reality.
American educational institutions during the twentieth century have been increasingly changing the picture. Their intense smart-extractive power - the ability of the egalitarian system to collect IQ-efficient from all levels of society -- will result in a social structure where the "cognitive elite" will concentrate exclusively at the top of the social ladder. The education will divide (p.31). For understandable reasons, the cognitive elite will ally with the wealthy already seated there.
This "IQ migration" will mean IQ depletion at the lower strata of the society. The poor, the single mom, the criminal and the homeless - all of them classifiable by mathematical necessity under the category "IQ deficient" - will stay at, or sink below the present bottom. It is most likely that the smart and the dumb will never cross each other's path again, at least in a way that is important for the latter (p. 25). The IQ-partitioning is as natural as anything and can't be stopped (though, it is socially and historically conditioned as you can see).
There are some dangers to the process of the de-equalization. One of them is current policy tendency of placing some artificial restraints to the process itself: by helping not-so-smart to creep into the ranks of the smart at the educational institutions, for example. The Affirmative Action is in point (for anti-affirmative action discourse see chapters 19, 21). Another is the fact that the smart and the dumb will become alienated (--the word the authors are not accustomed to use--) from each other.
A naive reader could ask at this point: if the social-educational institutions are so successful in collaborating with the "nature" - scaling people up and down on the social ladder -- why not allow the same institutions to correct the "nature" a bit -- not much, of course (no Socialism!) -- by letting them practice affirmative action in a more fair way, or by spending some more on the education of the dumb? The answer, one will be informed, is twofold in essence:
a) The governmental intervention may not move the poor (IQ-deficient) somewhere up by educating him/her without the costs to the flights of the smart;
And
b) Even the strongest policies could not help the dumb to change his/her allotted IQ (p. 573).
One definitely needs to remember the wisdom of (a) and (b) while reading propositions like this: "To the extent that the problems of this small segment [i.e. the poor, or IQ-deficient] are susceptible to social-engineering solutions at all, they should be highly targeted" (pp. 549-50). One would be wise as well to spend some time and listen carefully to the word "solutions".
For short, there is a good marriage between the old conservative arguments for "letting government care less about the poor" and the Darvinized IQ-anthropology.
However, the apparent harshness of the picture is not left without a good consoling chapter ("A Place for Everyone"), which would reveal to the reader that the central concern of the book is "how people might live together harmoniously despite fundamental individual differences" (p. 528).
Perhaps, the chapter could be safely summarized like this. In the future, if the policy-advisory the authors recommend is treasured and implemented properly, there will be lot of deserved places for everyone. Deep avenues of American inner cities will deepen further as well as extend to the community sensitive lower suburbs of the areas. They will shelter the dumb and the homeless emancipated from the chains of the governmental welfare. And the heights of the ocean-views will gaze still higher to comfort the smart. And there will be enough spaces in-between to sort out the remaining not-yet-easily classifiable Americans.
That is the end of the story. Then, there will be some more statistics in the book.
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