Preface

        Issues about equality stand at the center of American values, but they are highly contested. The United States stresses values of social equality. However, there is considerable conflict over the meaning of these phrases, and the United States has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. At the present time, works such as the Contract with America attempt to justify policies which will increase inequality in terms of values of equal treatment by the law, individual responsibility, limited government and liberty. On the face of it, inequality does not appear to promote responsibility, liberty, opportunity or limited government. Rather, the poor appear to be caught in a vicious cycle in which lack of resources and skills leads to lack of responsibility, autonomy or opportunity, feeding an immese apparatus of police control. Therefore, those who would defend inequality must construct an argument that such problems stem not from inequality but from the innate characteristics of the poor and from the policies which mitigate poverty. Such arguments are essential components of an assault on equality by the new Right.

        While there are many works which try to fill this need of the political right, there is one basic work, and we shall focus on it. Of all the arguments attempting to consolidate this new movement of the right, The Bell Curve is by far the most important. It is enormously more systematic and comprehensive than other works, and it has had a vastly larger audience. The Assault on Equality is a systematic critique of The Bell Curve, that situates it with respect to other works of the new Right, such as Gingrich and D=Sousa. It is organized around the following subheadings, that give a summary of its arguments:

Chapter One Introduction

        Are all men and women created equal?

        The Bell Curve argues that social inequalities are the natural result of inherited differences in cognitive abilities.

        The Matthew Principle (to him who has shall be given) is the dynamic governing a system where the rich are rewarded and the poor are penalized. Systems of cumulative advantage are common in social life. They must be analyzed as dynamic systems, and they produce inequality.

        The argument that reward for individual success drives progress was the center of the Social Darwinist program of the 1870s.

        For the old Social Darwinism, inequality was the engine of progress. For 19^th century theorists such as Spencer, the lower classes and non-European societies were genetically inferior. A happy Providence causes the survival of the fittest, in which disease and Starvation carry off the inferior. Social Darwinists argued that we must not interfere with that law of progress, and somewimes we should help it along.

        The new Social Darwinism of The Bell Curve reunites four distinct political tendencies.

        The central theoretical arguments of The Bell Curve rest on four related reductionisms, which treat complex systems as fully explained by the characteristics of their components.

        1. Individualistic reductionism explains social structures in terms of individual actions, producing identifications such as: social structure = individual actions = rational calculation of rewards and costs.

        2. Cognitive reductionism treats all mental abilities as one-dimensional, ranking people in a single scale which identifies: IQ = g = SAT = WAIS = AFQT89 = cognitive capacity = smartness.

        3. Genetic reductionism treats individual variation as determined by genetic endowment, identifying: heritability = inheritability = genetic = biological = natural = unmodifiable.

        4. Racial reductionism treats visibly different or ethnically constructed groups as distinct genetic populations, identifying: Race = skin color = ethnic group = breeding populations = gene pools.

        The criteria of our analysis: Is the book scientific? Is it fair? Is it honest? Is it compatible with democratic values?

Chapter Two: The History, Biology, and Psychology of IQ

        Policies that increase inequality require scientific legitimation because they would not otherwise have public support.

        The central ideological implications of the Herrnstein syllogism stem from the meritocratic caste paradox.

        The meritocratic caste paradox is internally inconsistent and rests on counter-factual hidden premises.

        The meritocratic caste paradox and The Bell Curve as a whole are based on reductionist analyses which ask the wrong questions for social policy.

        The analysis rests on individualistic reductionism which blames the victims.

        Their one-dimensional and genetic conception of intelligence was the theoretical basis for the political linkage of the     psychometric, eugenic, and racist movements.

        The Bell Curve rests on outdated cognitive reductionism.

        In The Bell Curve, arguments rely on biological determinism or genetic reductionism.

        The simplest genetic model involves individual genetic elements.

        Many traits of fundamental importance cannot be explained with simple genetic models. What we see is the result of genetic elements interacting with each other and with the environment.

        In the genetic model of many genes acting together, the heritability of a trait characterizes the relative importance of genes and the environment in a specific population.

        The norm of reaction is a useful characterization of the relationship of genotype, phenotype, and environment.

        Norms of reaction can help us interpret heritability. That is, when the outcome of a genotype depends on the environment, so that genotypes which are better adapted in some environments are less well adapted in others, then the question which genotype is better adapted (in general) is often nonsense.

        Studies of heritability cannot answer the question of how much IQ is a function of genes.

        Heritability is independent of the average value of a trait.

        "Substantially heritable" does not mean immutable.

        "Substantially heritable" does not mean that the phenotype of any individual is the result of genes.

        The syllogism reexamined; the conclusions of the argument do not follow from its premises or from the data..

Chapter Three A Meritocratic Social Structure?

        The Herrnstein syllogism organizes historical vision of the increase of segregation and inequality in the United States during the Reagan years.

        The first four chapters of The Bell Curve describe an implausible transformation from inherited recruitment to open, meritocratic recruitment, to a caste structure of inherited meritocratic recruitment.

        The argument requires a magical transformation: There is both a leveling (increasing mobility) and partitioning (decreasing mobility).

        The illusion of a great leveling and partitioning is produced by selective focus on individual selection criteria at elite institutions, and those criteria are then misrepresented.

        The occupational transformation: Ability is treated as now sufficient as well as necessary for success.

        Is ability one-dimensional?

        A truer picture: The same people are achieving the same positions; only the legitimating myths have changed.

Chapter Four A Biogenetic View of Schools and Poverty

        Cutbacks in social services and compensatory programs require legitimation because the American public supports governmental approaches to reduce inequalities.

        The New Right legitimizes cutbacks in services and programs by appealing to values of independence, opportunity, and limited government.

        Part II of The Bell Curve develops a rationale for abolishing social programs by purporting to show that low cognitive ability is the major cause of America's most serious social problems.

        The statistical methods of Part II are a textbook case of how to lie with statistics.

        The principal sources of bias are model specification errors due to the effects of reciprocal causation and omitted variables, especially collective ones.

        The individualistic interpretations of Herrnstein and Murray wipe out nearly a century of advances in the social scientific understanding of social problems.

        The interconnected problems of poverty, inadequate schooling, and unemployment are still concentrated in areas with adverse environments.

        In spite of these well-documented findings, The Bell Curve argues that poverty, school failure, and unemployment are caused by lack of intelligence.

        Analysis of who the poor really are greatly undermines these conclusions.

        The real explanation of the poverty trend is found in social and economic changes.

        Herrnstein and Murray build on and reinforce myths circulating in society which vilify the poor and so justify their disadvantaged conditions.

        Structural explanations are, however, more relevant to the question of how many people are in poverty; explanations focusing on individual characteristics address the different question of who is in poverty.

        In recent years, structural changes such as high rates of unemployment and declining wages have contributed heavily to increasing poverty rates.

        Contrary to the Herrnstein and Murray assumptions, Americans do not have equal access to educational opportunities.

        Conclusions The Bell Curve justifieds an elitist view of schooling, in which resources are concentrated on the genetically most fit. But the essential logic of the analysis is that schools are a selective device, in which case tests for innate ability can be substituted for expensive education.

Chapter Five Family Matters and Moral Values

        The analysis of the family and the role of women is central to the connection of The Bell Curve to the popular base of the political Right.

        The analysis rests on a fallacious interpretation of data that do not support the conclusions of the importance of IQ in determining family structure.

        The analysis takes legal marriage as the cornerstone of society in order to conjure away widows, orphans, and unrelated individuals.

        The Bell Curve gives a simplistic and deceptive analysis of divorce rates.

        All the previous errors converge in the analysis of illegitimacy.

        The analysis is in support of a mythical, demonizing view of welfare recipients.

        An increase in shame is unlikely to reduce illegitimate births, while it would exacerbate their negative consequences.

        The alleged poor parenting by poor test-takers then prepares a crucial bolt-hole for the Herrnstein and Murray analysis.

        The coercive character of their analysis of the family is mirrored in their analysis of crime.

        Conclusion

Chapter Six Race Inequalities

        The argument that this is a meritocratic society or that federal interventions are unnecessary, must deal with the issue of race.

        The political strategies of the New Right regarding race leads to a highly contradictory set of arguments.

        Forms of racism

        The Herrnstein and Murray analysis enormously oversimplifies the concept of race and slides illegitimately from the social construct of an ethnic group to the biological concept of race.

        The Bell Curve makes slippery racial arguments.

        The race hypothesis proposed by The Bell Curve is that some unknown fraction of the fifteen IQ points separating black and white Americans is genetic.

        The exact value of the heritability of a trait is irrelevant to discussions about the causes of differences between groups.

        Heritabilities do not and cannot contain any information about the causes of differences between groups.

        Even after environmental manipulations, heritabilities are still irrelevant to any discussion of average group differences.

        The Bell Curve systematically ignores or misrepresents the direct evidence about the presence or absence of racial differences in intelligence.

        Herrnstein and Murray begin their discussion of indirect arguments by suggesting that, given heritability, environmental differences would have to be implausibly large to explain the observed test performances.

        Herrnstein and Murray mainly stress Jensen's analysis of test profiles.

        The Bell Curve dismisses known cultural and environmental factors because its reductionist, individualist model makes those factors irrelevant.

        The practical implications of the analysis are an attack on any program to mitigate inequalities.

Chapter Seven The Assault on Education and Affirmative Action

        Only a portion of the political implications of the earlier analysis is made explicit in Part IV of The Bell Curve.

        Overt commitment to elite, privatized education conceals a covert opposition to all public education.

        The central focus of the policy recommendations of The Bell Curve is an attack on affirmative action defined narrowly as criteria of selection.

        The analysis is a contradictory denial of the broken bucket

        While The Bell Curve argues that compensatory education has been tried and has failed, it has not failed when it has been tried.

        The Herrnstein and Murray argument that the educational system has been oriented to the performance of poor students  leads to policy implications likely to undermine the performance of all students.

        The central policy initiative of The Bell Curve is an attack on affirmative action.

        Conclusion

Chapter Eight The Political Philosophy of Elitism

        The last two chapters of The Bell Curve outline a political philosophy or vision for the New Right: the new communitarianism of meritocratic elitism.

        The castigation of the cognitive elite is a pseudo-populism which responds to a fundamental conflict between The Bell Curve's elitism and egalitarianism.

        The historical analysis on which the rise of the meritocracy argument depends is naive and erroneous.

        Their analysis inflates the cost and minimizes the benefits of social programs directed to addressing social problems.

        In "Confronting the Problems of the Underclass" they evade the discussion of the social policy origins of the underclass.

        As an alternative to egalitarianism, they consider an obsolete and undocumented functionalist model of income inequality.

        Their fundamental justification of increased inequalities is moral.

        The final chapter of The Bell Curve advocates individual responsibility and local control to reconcile "meritocratic caste" with American values. These theories recapitulate Herbert Spencer's justifications of inequality.

        The eclipse of Spencerian theory was accomplished by its political, economic, and social consequences.

        After World War II, Social Darwinist tendencies went into hibernation in elite-funded groups, but they did not disappear.

        Historically, in the United States, race has been the politically decisive structuring issue concerning equality.

        Academic racism and social theory play a role in the transformation of passively racist sentiments into escalating race war.

        A comparison of The Bell Curve with Dinesh D'Sousa's The End of Racism and Gingrich's Contract with America shows the essential basis of the contemporary assault on equality.

Chapter Nine The Assault on Equality

        There is now occurring a radical assault on the basic assumptions concerning social equality that have been consensual during the twentieth century.

        The New Right consists of five distinct and conflicting groups.

        Gingrich represents the coordination of the groups of the traditionalist right and its alliance with the modernist Right represented by Murray.

        Gingrich's concept of an "opportunity society" synthesizes inegalitarian themes from the New Right.

        For all groups on the Right, inherited inequality represents a central problem.

        Conclusion: 1. We are at a time of choice. The Bell Curve and To Renew America describe the current era as a fork in the road and argues that we must choose the fork of self-reliance rather than government programs. We agree that we face a choice, but we believe that it is a choice whether to allow cumulating racial and individual privilege to produce an inegalitarian, segregated, oppressive state.

        Conclusion: 2. The central choice concerns the level of inequality we are willing to accept. There is a threashold of inequality beyond which a fair, open or democratic society becomes impossible. The new Right uses the rhetoric of opportunity and equality to conceal a reality in which industrial workers, women, the poor, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews and other groups, forming the great bulk of the population, are split against each other and Spencerian moral individualism is used to promote conflict.

        The bulk of argument in The Bell Curve is based on the argument that IQ has a powerful effect on social success (e.g. poverty, unemployment, crime, divorce) even after one has controlled social class. This argument is based on a set of logistic regressions comparing the effects of IQ and socioeconomic status (SES) on social success. See replication.

        However, SES and IQ are associated with each other. Social success is measured in young adulthood; IQ is measured in late adolescence; and SES is measured in childhood. The earlier and the more poorly a variable is measured, the weaker its apparent effect will be an young adult social success. The Bell Curve measures SES with an index that not only contains considerable error, but which is dominated by parents= education, achieved prior to respondents= births; but it measures IQ by respondents= score on the Armed Forces Qualifications test, given when respondents ranged in age from 14 to 21. The Bell Curve suggests that IQ is so stable that it will not matter very much when it is measured. Their data set allows us to check whether that is true.

        A replication using mean school IQ shows that the apparent effect of IQ, measred in school, is only half as large as that when IQ is measured later. A small difference in age of measurement appears to make a large difference. The school IQ tests were given when the average age of the respondents was 15; the Armed Forces Qualifications Test was given when the respondents' average age was 17. Moving the time of measurement of IQ a few years closer to that of SES eliminates half of the effect of IQ reported in The Bell Curve. Using mean school IQ, IQ is less important than SES, not more important.

        Replication of Herrnstein and Murray's analysis using IQ measured when          subjects were in school rather than young adults:

        A replication using early school IQ is even more striking. Using the same data, if one measures IQ by the scores in grades 1-6, IQ has no significant effect, independent of SES. The average age of respondents for these early tests was ten years old. When one moves the age of measurement of IQ close to childhood SES, It has no measurable effect net of SES.

    Replication of Herrnstein and Murray's analysis using IQ measured when              subjects were in grades 1-6 rather than young adults:

Appendix 2 The Scholarship of The Bell Curve

        While it purports to give balanced coverage of prior scholarship, The Bell Curve ignores or distorts the great bulk of existing  research in the relevant fields: Race and Ethnic Relations; Genetics; Social Mobility; Social Stratification and Poverty; Education; Divorce, Women, and Illegitimacy; Racism and Discrimination

Postscript