The "Cognitive Elite"

Matthew Yglesias writes:

TPMCafe || Holds Up Well?: For all I know, the uncontroversial parts of [Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve book] (which I understand to have been the clear majority of the text) hold up just find, but the controversial stuff about race and IQ doesn't hold up at all...

Ummm... No.

The "uncontroversial" parts of the book are a set of claims that:

1. Genetically-inherited intelligence is the really important driver of socioeconomic success or failure in America.
2. American society is or is about to become highly stratified by genetically-inherited intelligence.
3. An important consequence of this is that there is nothing we can do to prevent the children of the rich and powerful from being rich and powerful themselves.
4. Because the reason they are rich and powerful is because they are members of a genetic cognitive elite.

These are all wrong too. As Bowles and Gintis report:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Michael Barone: Intellectual Garbage Scow Edition): If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ball park estimates) and the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income] would be 0.01, or roughly two percent [of] the observed intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income between parents and children].

Yes, America is an increasingly stratified society. Yes, a huge amount of inequality is inherited. No, differences in IQ--acting both directly on job performance and indirectly because higher IQ people get more education--is not a terribly important source of income inequality. No, inheritance of genetic factors shaping IQ is not more than a trivial source of the intergenerational transmission of income inequality.

Comments

[Blissex]

Ahhh, but there is a little catch here: there is now in effect a self-perpetuating ''cognitive elite'' in the USA, just as there has been one for one-two hundred years in the UK.

But it is based not on the implausible (as you point out cogently) "Genetically-inherited intelligence", as the Bell Curve sort of states, but on access to top tier prestige universities, whose degrees are assumed to be proxies for innate intelligence.

For example The Economist when discussing those attending Oxford or Cambridge ritually uses ''the best and brightest''; since around half of them come from extremely expensive ''prep'' schools, this would suggest that wealth correlates with innate intelligence, while I reckon that it correlates with the money needed to go a prep school, who teach non-intelligence based ways to get into top tier universities.

[MarcinGomulka]

Marginal Revolution had something with regard to that over year ago. But I disagree with their conclusion, a socialist system (haha!) can correct a lot of inequality that hurts the middle offspring (better funding for schools, etc.)

----
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/02/the_family_as_a.html

The family as a source of inequality

...differences between families explain only 25 percent of the nation's income inequality; the remaining 75 percent is explained by differences between siblings.

The (provisional) bottom line: Unhappy with your lot in life? It's not the capitalist system or the Bush tax cuts, blame Mom and Dad.

[Derelict]

Certainly the idea of intelligence being hereditary plays quite well with the ambitions of those already in the wealthy and powerful cohort. Think how it appeals on so many levels.

1. It allows people who know in their hearts that they have done nothing to earn their social positions to "merit" those positions by virtue of their genetic superiority.

2. It provides a convenient pacifier for the unwashed masses: "You're poor and downtrodden not because we oppress you, but because your parents lacked the genes to make you successful."

3. It's a great excuse for all kinds of ancilliary excesses. For example, the case can easily be made that Bill Gates deserves to live tax free, as do all of his offspring and heirs, because they are really a different species--a genetically superior form of hominid.

4. If the idea can be made acceptable among the "lower classes," it will help to keep them in lne because it gives them a "ratonal" excuse for their condition: "I'm stuck in this cubicle working 80-hour weeks because I must serve my genetic superiors and masters."

The whole thing is the absolute apex of class warfare.

[Otto Norway]

If said premises are true, then we ought to double the inheritence tax. The offspring of the wealthy obviously don't need to inherit anything, since they are the cognitive elite who will no doubt amass great wealth on their own.

[Aron]

If you get a chance, you should read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, a deeply enthralling history of the (mostly racist) effort to measure intelligence. It has the effect of pre-debunking The Bell Curve before The Bell Curve even came out. Luckily, Dr. Gould lived long enough to debunk it afterwards, too:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html

Some good bits:
He says there are two central premises,
"The first argument rehashes the tenets of social Darwinism as it was originally constituted....
The general claim is neither uninteresting nor illogical, but it does require the validity of four shaky premises, all asserted (but hardly discussed or defended) by Herrnstein and Murray. Intelligence, in their formulation, must be depictable as a single number, capable of ranking people in linear order, genetically based, and effectively immutable. If any of these premises are false, their entire argument collapses. For example, if all are true except immutability, then programs for early intervention in education might work to boost IQ permanently, just as a pair of eyeglasses may correct a genetic defect in vision. The central argument of The Bell Curve fails because most of the premises are false."
The second premise "extends the argument for innate cognitive stratification to a claim that racial differences in IQ are mostly determined by genetic causes ...The central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within–group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation of average differences between groups (whites versus blacks, for example) is now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray ..."

The whole thing - both things - are well worth reading.

[dilbert dogbert]

In America there is a lot of IQ for sale. The rich just have more access to it via their wealth. You can hire a lot of IQ to protect your privleges and justify(explain?) those privleges. Not the same as inherited IQ but the effect can be the same.

[cm]

One fallacy that even well-meaning researcher of society are trapped in is to attribute successes obtained by luck or "connections" to genuine subject-matter virtue. (Another issue is how success is defined -- is there any metric other than financial gain.)

My favorite example is the Rockefeller story (from dishwasher to millionaire). The implied moral is that hard work, sound intellect, and determination lead to success. What is probably closer to the truth is that it's a combination of those factors together with luck (e.g. meeting the right business partners, being in the right place the right time, developing the one out of 20 similar products that will become successful, etc.), and doing one's "networking" with the proper influential people.

The storytellers typically pretend that there were not thousands of others trying as hard and determinedly as well, only success eluded them.

But then this example implies there is indeed something like meritocracy. While there have always been elements of it, I'd say its share has been declining to such extent that today subject-matter brilliance has become nearly irrelevant for financial success.

[Scott Lemieux]

Yes, thank you. At best, even the "non-controversial" parts of the book are meaningless tautologies, and most of it doesn't even rise to that level.

[cm]

Blissex: While the credentialism that you describe is part of the phenomenon, there is more to it.

This reasoning would work if the holders of said top-tier credentials would have to compete with holders of lower/fewer credentials in the marketplace. However more often than not they get a head start by their family's and school's connections, e.g. go right to the board room or an executive office without having to "earn" it by merit.

The "Harvard degree" is mostly just cover to uphold appearances. Of course, in a society where officers of companies and institutions are (still?) subjected to a measure of public scrutiny, such a degree will not cover for undeniable incompetence or underperformance.

In the old days, when an emerging capitalist economy produced a number of newly-rich, this begot the term "snob" (from "sine nobilitate") used for marking them in registers, in an effort to not dilute "true" nobility. Money would not buy you the way into the elite, only money together with background.

This inheritance-based scheme of apportioning social control has since been weakened, in part because it was at odds with economic and social progress, but I suspect it's slowly been making its comeback.

That this coincides with a deterioration of the "real" economy as well as society is not by accident.

[Dale]

I appreciate the irony and ambivalence of the word "inheritance" here. We will see more of this sort of socially constructed inheritance of life opportunities as Congress moves toward the permanent repeal or neutering of the Estate Tax.

I'm sure or elies of money and power will sleep just a bit better if they see themselves as inherently worthy- instead of just lucky, or worse. Then, of course, biological inheritance is just as much a matter of luck but one can more easily imagine that sort of luck as being irreversible in terms of justifying social inequalities.

[Dan Morgan]

Your last two sentences have double negatives so it is hard to know what you are saying. I suppose the first "No" was not meant to be there. So you are saying "Differences in IQ ... is not a terribly important source of income inequality."

To say that people with higher IQs do not make more income is simply to ignore the data. Worse yet, it ignores common sense. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and so on make more because they have more education - but they had to have the threshold IQ to get through the college work. The college work in these fields is very difficult and only a limited number of people in the population can do it.

On the other hand, consider all the people (of any race) with an IQ of 80. At best they can be skilled manual laborers. They are likely to struggle their whole lives to make a decent living.

So to say that IQ is "not a terribly important source of income inequality" is to simply wear ideological blinders.

[Karlsfini]

Brad, nice post, followed by great comments.

Derelict, how come you aren't posting as much these days? Or if you're posting on blogs I don't know about, how about sharing them?

[bambi vs godzilla]

the impression i gained at a mensa social is that anyone who claims the cool quotient is not an important source of natural social inquality is simply wearing ideological blinders because i've never seen so many losers in one place. and i've been to a star trek convention.

[pbg]

This whole thing is baased on the assumption that upper-class 'breeding strategies' select for intelligence--which is nonsense.

Ivana Trump.

Trophy wives.

There is no 'good family' inherent selection process in America's upper class.

Rich businessmen do not marry female college professors.

As a matter of fact, intelligent academics of either sex don't get stalked by the rich elite a whole lot either.

Two factors which completely wash out any stratification for intelligence:
1) inherited wealth, which alllows the stupid and the slow (and I'm not naming any names) to assume positions of advantage and eminence--and breed;

and 2) the constant, overwhelming selection for pretty. Victorian England had bars against it: we do not.

[Singularity]

The idea that the children of the wealthy and powerful are uniformly part of a genetic cognitive elite is easily dispelled by a single viewing of "Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive on E! Channel.

[dms]

If indeed we are talking genetics here, then I have a few questions:

1. Why are various children of one family of varying intelligence?

2. Why did 3/4ths of my family rise way above the ecomonic level into which they were born?

3. Why am I, obviously the most intelligent and liberal member of my family (and I'm not bragging here--it's obvious from test scores, academic success at better colleges, and the intensity with which my siblings try to shut me up), the one whose household makes the least amount of money, and the one who is currently not employed?

[bonbon]

Brad:

Yes, lets use a goofy word ("assortation", indeed) to cover that your argument is based on 0.5*0.2=0.01. The number 0.2 is bullshit. In the universe I live, investment bankers, doctors and CEOs are in general smart and TSA agents and garbage handlers are in general, well, not as smart.

[Big Al]

DMS you are not humble enough to back off when you start to offend people.

[save_the_rustbelt]

There seem to be two issues here, wealth and intelligence.

As I've heard so many times in the estate tax debate, there are very few really rich, so this is more an issue of the upper middle class and the noveau affluent and rich.

So you have two married professionals who can send the kid to an Ivy or close-to-Ivy due to funds and SAT scores. Good heredity, enough money.

You won't see many children of plumbers with mediocre SAT scores going to Harvard --- maybe state college. Many state college kids are first generation in higher ed, some of their parents didn't have what it took, while others just didn't have any opportunity (My father was a high school grad with a very distinguished management career who routinely supervised people with Masters in civil engineering - Dad was a dustbowl Okie so getting through high school was a major accomplishment).

The students at Harvard aren't that much smarter and the education isn't that much better, but the connections and the prestige give them all a leg up.

I'm never been an eminent economics professor, but as humble accounting lecturer during a chunk of my career the impact of IQs has been obvious (and I don't buy Murray's racial thesis for a moment).

[wkwillis]

I am very smart. I am also a security guard. If I sell my solar polder patent I will be rich. So what? If I had wanted to get rich I would have stayed in computers and squirreled away twenty percent of my earnings in stock (I knew about long waves in the stock market in 1974 because I have always read a lot of history) and I would have had to call in rich fifteen years ago.

[johnny]

Clearly anectdotal, but I've met too many rich people to think they've got much of a genetic leg up in the IQ department. Lots of factors go into the accumulation of wealth (see our current President), and I don't think a keen intellect is a requirement... And besides, not all people of high IQs devote their lives to the accumulation of great wealth.

[cm]

Dan Morgan & others: The point is not that intelligence is not correlated to success. It clearly is. But it is not the only determinator. There are other enabling/hindering factors that I contend are becoming ever more important (again).

And IQ is just one particular indicator of intelligence. Heck, scientists do not even have a formal theory of what intelligence is, other than hand-waving, referring to various established tests, and a-posteriori imputation based on observable measures of "successes".

For whatever intelligence actually is in physiological detail, there is good reason to believe that what is determined genetically is the configuration of the brain "hardware" (and thus "physiological potential"), and the largest part is "software" which is determined by social interaction, which imbues the individual with concepts, manners, and provides an environment with opportunities to learn things. Some learn science, or how to take care of themselves, or how to kiss up, or how to take good advantage of others & society, etc.

Of course there are always "outliers" -- kids from bad environments turning out well or kids of "smart people" not getting anywhere seemingly inexplicably, but that's because the involved factors are so subtle and elusive of detailed analysis. They can be as small as reading a particular book, talking once to a particular person, etc.

I'm sure everybody here when they honestly review their past can see how much of what they know has been planted in their heads by others (family, educators, friends, social environment), or how what they have achieved by themselves (based on the former) was because they were embedded in environments that would be facilitating or encouraging, or simply provided the critical means or "food for thought".

The point is not to say those who have worked hard for what they achieved didn't do so by their own merit. But one too easily forgets external enablers.

And here we come back to the original thesis -- genetic theories are put forward to explain what is a mostly phenomenon of economic & social stratification.

[Milo]

I know any number of unemployed and underemployed MAs, MSs, and PhDs with mensa range IQs, especially from generation x.

[Ted]

I guess it's just a personal thing with me, but the message I got from The Bell Curve is summed up by the Austin Lounge Lizards song, "Life is Hard, but Life is Hardest When You're Dumb".

What I got from the book is that low scores on IQ tests correlate with accidents, with being a victim or perpetrator of crime, with lack of social as well as economic success, and with almost anything unpleasant that can happen to people, and that it's just bad luck, not something they can control. Stupid people are not being that way just to annoy me and try my patience.

And over the last thirty years, as we get better at identifying the intellectually talented young people and moving them into positions of influence in the society, life gets more and more needlessly complicated, and difficult for those without that intellectual talent.

[cm]

Ted: Yes, those correlations exist, and my contention is that the degree of intelligence is overall more a social than a genetic phenomenon.

And I decidedly disagree that "we" have become better at identifying people with intellectual potential, developing them, and placing them in positions of influence and/or consequence. Quite the contrary.

And "success" by contemporary metrics is, while not independent from "intelligence", not quite the same either.

[Dog of Justice]

If said premises are true, then we ought to double the inheritence tax. The offspring of the wealthy obviously don't need to inherit anything, since they are the cognitive elite who will no doubt amass great wealth on their own.

My political leanings are conservative-libertarian, but I'm totally in agreement with increasing the inheritance tax. Earned wealth and inheritance are completely different animals.

I know any number of unemployed and underemployed MAs, MSs, and PhDs with mensa range IQs, especially from generation x.

My understanding is that IQ only significantly correlates with economic success up to around 120. Beyond that level, other factors predominate. Nobody is saying that IQ is everything.

The good news is that within a few decades, genetic engineering should be able to advance to the point where all children can be given the genes necessary for ~120+ IQ. Parents of all races should be able to choose genes from whatever other races they want to splice into their children -- THIS is where diversity truly is strength! So, even if Murray is right, he's wrong about the problem being "intractable" -- I'd be really disappointed if we don't solve his problem within my lifetime. Because we are perfectly capable of doing so.

[glenn hefner]

IQ = Inheritance Quotient?

[TheIdiotBoy]

If you're so rich, why ain't you smart?

[obscure]

Plato tried this quite a while ago. He called it the "noble lie" and it involved the tale that a select few were made of gold, then there were those made of silver whose job it was to protect the gold class, then there was everybody else and they got a bronze rating as a consolation prize.

[obscure]

(At least he admitted it was a lie.)

[cm]

obscure: And that opens up the question how much humanity has really moved ahead in those matters.

[tom gallagher]

I always laugh at the supposed Intelligence Income connection, particularly when people equate intelligence with higher education. How many millionaire PhDs do you know? How many millionaire high school (or college) drop outs? In my experience, hard work and determination are much more critical than intelligence in ammassing wealth.

[nmg]

Could it be, rather, that the sclerotic nature of american class mobility is due to an already over-reaching system of centralized top-down economic controls?

If we eliminated things like, say FICA, I imagine that would loosen up the mobility constraints for all these lower income workers who are having a hard time getting ahead....

nmg

[eoin]

Most of this debate is nonsense. Except in talking in a PC manner everybody believes that iQ exists and correlates to intelligence, and that it is inheritable. Remember the brouha about the low IQ red states that all democrats accepted?

Lets get this clear : most Americans get their income at work, and by and large that income correlates to educational achievement. It is true that some people with degrees will do absurdly better than others with the same degrees ( if they become CEO's etc.) but on average degreed people with those useful pieces of vocational paper that prove their intelligence tend to earn most of the income in America. We are not talking about the income of the very rich, but the income of the upper and middle classes - the sum total of which - earned at work - dwarves the income of the inheritance classes. These people eventually blow their money away. In any case if you earn 200K a year at work, the equivalent playboy has to have around 5-10 million in the bank in liquid money markets to guarantee the same income - depending on the interest rates. That's too rare to quantify.

Yes above an iq of 120 other factors come in to play: moxie, for instance.

[cm]

I don't want to say that US society and workplaces have no meritocratic elements at all, far from it, but to suggest that advancement is strictly, or even mostly, by intellectual achievement, is misinformed or perhaps BS.

What I have mostly heard so far is how the meritocracy myth is used to explain why "all those losers" are stuck in shit.

But then maybe I'm wrongly equating intelligence and intellectual achievement. Maybe intelligence is defined as figuring out the rules of the game and using your elbows optimally. Depends on what one considers the goal function of social behavior.

[Dave]

Koerner, in The Pleasures of Counting (not, alas, The Joy of x), has a few chapters in which he explains the rather suspect statistical basis of Sir Cyril Burt's similar argument. In a sidebar, he mentions: "Social Darwinism applies the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest to human society. Rich social darwinists take wealth as the best indication of fitness to survive, academic social darwinists take intellectual achievements as the best indication and so on. They are often haunted by the fear that the unfit do not understand this and may outbreed the fit."

[glenn hefner]

EOIN - you've given me a great idea - the Moxie Quotient!

I'm not sure how to test for it, but I like it! And of course, a high MQ (just like IQ) would be positively related to income, but we won't make the mistake of confusing "a relationship" with "the cause."

[ElamBend]

I've found that high inteligence can often be an impediment for people who were not taught the virtues of humility and patience. Anecdotally, my experience has held true for both the personal and professional fields.

Yes, there are many mediocrities that get a leg up into the high-income world because of family connections. However, I still posit that there are atleast pathways for those without such connections to become comfortably wealthy (or extremely wealthy as in the case of Larry Ellison [though he may be a contra to the above paragraph])

[cm]

ElamBend: That family/social ties often override meritocracy (to some "healthy" degree) is a natural social phenomenon, and perhaps intimately related to the essence of society as such.

What irked me is the hypocritical pretense of offering theories of genetic supremacy for what is very obviously in good part nepotism and corruption.

[ElamBend]

CM,
You mean people who are "born on third and think they've hit a triple?" I agree.

[ElamBend]

Also, in my experience, it's not simply nepotism and corruption, its the passing down of 'how the system works;' which is not always sinister. While attending college, I found that I, a rural bumpkin, had much in common with many minorities at the school in this aspect. Everyone at the school was intelligent, however, not everyone knew how to work the system. The knowledge was useful, whether you had connections or not. The result was the rest of us had to cast about for a longer period of time before we found our standing.
I think a lot of this inherited wealth is passed-on knowledge. There are certainly many things about aquiring wealth that I intend to pass on to my progeny so that they may learn from my mistakes.