Inequality on Occupational Status and Income

Abstract

There is no denying the major thesis of Christopher Jencks and his collaborators. In the United States, inequality of educational opportunity is not the major component of inequality in the distribution of occupational status or of income. If the unequal distribution of income is the problem, equalizing opportunities-however worthy an objective-is not the solution. Greater equality of income is only likely to be achieved by governmental policies which will directly alter the distribution of income. Jencks et al. have performed a real service by bringing these facts to public attention. In support of its thesis, Inequality essays an exhaustive review and interpretation of the process of socioeconomic achievement. The relevant causal factors are taken to include socioeconomic background and other familial influences, race, sex, cognitive and non-cognitive psychological traits, and the quantity and quality of schooling. Much less attention is devoted to sex and to psychological factors other than academic ability than to the other causes of achievement. Jencks et al. complicate their task by trying to make Inequality accessible to lay persons without compromising their efforts to arrive at best estimate(s) [p. 14] of a quantitative model of socioeconomic achievement among white nonfarm U.S. males. The text may be viewed both as a pedagogic essay and as a running commentary on the estimates of the heritability of IQ (Appendix A) and the estimates of the model of socioeconomic achievement (Appendix B). This review is directed to the treatment of occupational status and income in Chapters 6 and 7 of Inequality and to Appendix B, Path Models of Intergenerational Mobility, on which the results of those two chapters depend heavily. In turn the results of Appendix B rest to an important degree on the heritability estimates of Appendix A, but for the present purpose we have simply accepted them. Since the authors attach a large margin of error to their heritability estimates, and since Inequality draws sweeping negative conclusions about the import of the heritability of IQ for socioeconomic achievement, it is disturbing that the estimates for the model of socio-