Bell Curve, the(Herrnstein and Murray)

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Herrnstein and Murray'sThe Bell Curve(1994) is one of the most controversial and widely debated works of social science in the second half of the twentieth century. Almost instantly upon publication, the book set off a firestorm that took years to die down. What were the authors saying that was so incendiary? Their main arguments can be summarized approximately as follows. The US has increasingly evolved into a society stratified along the lines of intelligence. At the top of this stratification system is a cognitive elite of highly educated professionals, business managers, government officials, and the like who are increasingly set off from the rest of the population by their very high levels of intelligence. The cognitive elite has become increasingly separated from the rest of society by their attendance at elite universities, where they meet other highly intelligent individuals and intermarry, thus producing highly intelligent children who are likely to remain members of the elite intergenerationally. These consequences have resulted substantially from the fact that intelligence is highly genetically heritable, on the order of 40–80 percent. Intelligence is of great social importance. High intelligence is necessary for high levels of educational attainment, social status, and income. By contrast, low intelligence is associated with low levels of these outcomes, and also with a variety of social pathologies, such as higher rates of illegitimacy, poverty, welfare dependency, and crime. There are significant differences among racial and ethnic groups in intelligence, and these differences are largely genetic in origin. Such differences go far in explaining why blacks are overrepresented in the categories of social pathology mentioned above. The situation seems to be worsening, and thus the gap between the cognitive elite and the underclass growing, because of the tendency of poorer individuals of lower intelligence to out‐reproduce the more wealthy and more highly intelligent. Moreover, “Unchecked, these trends will lead the US toward something resembling a caste system, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top” (p. 509).