No other book has stirred such strong reaction and debate in this century as did The Bell Curve —Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (H&M) published recently. The reactions have come from scientists, sociologists, psychologists, mathematicians, politicians and from the press. What makes The Bell Curve such a riot is the sobriety with which H&M suggest that some people are genetically more intelligent and whereas this position is debatable, they go on to suggest a new social order to isolate these "inferior" species so that those who are more intelligent can go on living peacefully. And that hit the nerve of grassroot America the wrong way. And they reacted rather explosively. So, here it is the whole story as played in the American journals and newspapers today.

The Bell Curve is a hefty 845 page treatise including about 200 pages of technical appendices to make a scientist out of you. To understand this book one must delve through footnotes and references and of course digest scores of complicated charts that apparently support H&M’s thesis. The authors have impeccable credentials. Richard Herrnstein an Edgar Price Chair professor of psychobiology at Harvard since 1958 died days before the book was released and Charles Murray is a Bradley Fellow at the highly revered American Enterprise Institute.

The story begins in 1969 when a University of California psychologist Arthur R. Jensen was asked by the US Government to analyze why the programs designed to compensate for cultural and economic deprivation have "failed." Jensen wrote an essay entitled, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement" which appeared in Harvard Educational Review and became the sixth most cited social science article in the history. Jensen doubted much could be done and included a bell curve showing the distribution of "intelligence" in the American population. Amid the controversy appeared a lengthy defense of Jensen called "IQ" written by a Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein that appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1971 proposing that indeed intelligence separates the classes in a society and all attempts to ignore it will create more stratification. The timing of this article could not have been worse. In 1971, the US Supreme Court slapped legislation, after considering all issues, to ban the use of "performance" tests such as an IQ test in schools and at work place to classify and hire people; a new legislatiion also required affirmative action toquality for government contracts. These laws were there to provide greater opportunity to "disadvantaged" group of people. And these laws totaly rebugged the Jenses and Herrnstein theory of genetic inferiority of people.

The debate went on if people perform differently because of their genes or their environment. With remarkable discoveries of connecting genes and diseases that appear almost routinely now, the proponents of gene dominance theory for intelligence kept their vigil. The Bell Curve is one such effort that is deja-vu all over again. However, this time the punch is hard and conclusive. The book became a phenomena, a gale in the zeitgeist. It wound up on the front covers of Newsweek, The Republic, and The New York Times Book Review, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and as it goes in the publishing industry, a book garnering big attention is a big book.

To understand the debate, its repurcussions and how we can benefit from this highly intellectual duel, we must first examine the book in detail.

The Bell Curve makes following conclusions:

• With freedom to choose, some of the American colleges throughout the century have selected students with high IQ transforming them into America’s elite colleges. As the brightest of the bright enter these colleges, a stratification of society develops in citizens with different cognitive abilities.
• People in different jobs have different IQs; lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, accountants, architects, teachers, etc. have IQs around 120. The CEOs of American corporations that until 1950s were mostly WASPs born into affluence that have now been replaced by people who could maximize corporate profits, the people with high IQs and better cognitive abilities.
• Prohibition on hiring people with high IQs since 1971 has cost yearly losses of productivity in billions of dollars in the US. (Some say $80 billion per year since 1971). "Laws can make the economy less efficient by forbidding employers to use intelligence tests, but laws cannot make intelligence less important," claim H&M.
• Cognitive partitioning is growing with those of high IQs pulling way ahead in the market place. There is also physical separation; those on or off the shop floors. America equalizes the circumstances of people’s lives and thus the differences in intelligence are genetically driven. Mating among highly intelligent people is producing more intelligent progeny further dividing American classes.
• Low intelligence is a stronger precursor of poverty than low socioeconomic background even when factoring in for effects of sex, marital status, and years of education.
• Students drop out of school because they have low intelligence and not because they come from poor families. Only lowest socioeconomic groups have highest drop out rate but then they also have lower intelligence.
• Men who are either out of labour force or unemployed, the primary risk factor seems to be neither socioeconomic background nor the education but their cognitive ability. Those who've got it are rarely out of work.
• More intelligent people get married at higher rates than the less intelligent ones. High divorce rates are related more to cognitive ability rather than socioeconomic status or education level. Illegitimacy is strongly related to intelligence.
• Welfare recipients are mostly people of low intelligence.
• High IQ is by no means a prerequisite for being a good mother. As a result intelligent people can come out even from homes managed by the inferior class.
• Low IQ is a definite risk factor for criminal behaviour; socioeconomic status is a negligible risk when factored for cognitive abilities.
• Intelligent people are more civilized.
• East Asians whether in America or in Asia are more intelligent than white Americans, who are more intelligent than African-Americans and European-Americans.
• National distribution of intelligence is changing due to lower birth rates, delayed parenting and women entering professions.
• Low cognitive ability is prevalent in the population most affected by social problems; the cause and effect is not clear.
• No foreseeable solution exists to improve intelligence; weaker correlates including improved nutrition, adoption at birth into families with better environment and good schools. It is mostly genetic.
• American public education system could have been in a lot better shape had less attention been given to disadvantaged students and more to gifted students. Greater flexibility should be given to parents in choosing schools and scholarships should reward intelligence rather than need.
• Affirmative action at colleges should be revised to a healthy multiracial society; at work place affirmative action should be abolished.

According to The Bell Curve, there is an increasing isolated cognitive elite, a merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent and a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution. This elite has reached a level of affluence where they have begun to feel sympathy toward, if not guilt about, the condition of the have-nots. Thus dawns the welfare state—the attempt to raise the poor and the needy out of their plight. This elite class will expand the welfare state for the underclass to keep it out from underfoot. Politicians and intellectuals alike will become much more open about the role of dysfunctional behaviour in the underclass, accepting that addiction, violence, unavailability of work, child abuse, and family disorganization will keep most members of the underclass from fending for themselves. It will be agreed that the underclass cannot be trusted to use cash wisely. Therefore policy will consist of greater benefits, in the form of services rather than cash. There will be restrictions placed on this underclass society with following consequences:

• Childcare in the inner city will become primarily the responsibility of the state.
• The homeless will vanish.
• Strict policing and custodial responses to crime will become more acceptable and widespread.
• The underclass will become even more concentrated spatially rather than it is today.
• The underclass will grow.
• Social budgets and measures for social control will become still more centralized.
• Racism will reemerge in a new and more virulent form.

The above scenario is not palatable to H&M and they go on to suggest a solution to the problem of confronting a fast-expanding genetically inferior class. These recommendations take a rather simplistic view:

• Recognize that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life.
• For the inferior class to understand and utilize the various systems, from the tax forms to product labels, things must be simplified since they can't understand things as well as the elite do. Crimes and their punishments should be clearly defined so they can understand and not get bogged down in fine prints; marriages should become the only legal means of recognizing parenthood discouraging unwed mothers. The current policy promotes less intelligent people to procreate faster and be rewarded for it as recients of higher welfare benefits; all such rewards should be stopped. There is also a need to disallow immigration based on nepotism (to relatives to bring families together); it should remain based on competency.
• Federal government should stop dealing with social problems; most Americans can run their lives on their own, those of inferior class should be given targeted assistance not as a group.
• Government policies in education, employment, welfare, criminal justice, or the care of children should make allowance for variation among individuals rather than treating them as group.
• Policies towards raising cognitive functioning of the disadvantaged should be tamed and more attention paid to improving education of those who have the greatest potential.

Finally, The Bell Curve calls upon the reader, whom the author consider the cognitive elite because they are reading this book, to raise voice in changing public policies.

The Bell Curve is a feel-good book for high achievers and those love the idea of withdrawing from corroding society by way of gated communities, private schools and insulated lives. And they want to send the poor misfits to "high-tech" reservations. The American public did not agree with The Bell Curve conclusions. Scientists ripped the book apart accusing H&M for cheating in their statistical analysis, hiding facts, and being unwilling to admit the consequences of their own words. Hundreds of highly literate essays have been published over the past few months to discredit The Bell Curve and more are coming out almost daily.

The most disturbing and perhaps revolutionary coincidence or perhaps a reaction to this book has been the recent rulings by the US Government. In summer of 1995, the US Supreme Court in a historic hallmark decision scraped its own ruling of 1971 for affirmative action. The opinion of the Supreme Court, 5-4, was tilted by the opinion of the only black judge on the bench. In his 150-page opinion, the judge stated that the existence of affirmative action has kept minorities from questioning their low performance; they have accepted it as a matter of fact, sort of an acknowledgment of their inferiority. Had there been no affirmative action, they may have come out of this stereotypical model, added the honorable judge. Also, the summer of 1995 saw a bill placed before the house to eliminate immigration quota for relatives of US citizens who were naturalized. Both of these legislation are exactly what H&M had so strongly proposed in their book. So, after nine months of the publishing of this controversial book, action followed. Is this a result of the "elite with high cognitive ability" recognizing their superiority?

Coming home to see how the thesis presented in the book may apply to our system, we find many parallels. Pakistan is a country undeniably run by an elite, not necessary with high cognitive ability but an inherited elitisism—the feudal lords. This class of people has taken the fears of H&M to reality by "creating" an inferior class, the rest of the population and this "distinction" rests not on the laws of natural selection as proposed by H&M but on sheer human exploitation. And the inferior class in Pakistan is already segregated. What is missing here is the concern, guilt if you will, of the elite class in helping the poor idiots. The welfare society does not exist in Pakistan and that can be a blessing in disguise for it may have forever kept the down trodden, down trodden. The laws made to provide equality in Pakistan were borrowed from the experiments in the West where the economic subsistence is much better.

Take for example the most controversial of our laws—the quota system. The purpose of this tampering in social-engineering was to allow opportunities to those who are economically disadvantaged; to accommodate them, all conditions were relaxed and as a result we produced extremely mediocre stuff, which in turn became a greater burden on the society in terms of inefficient workers who will have little chance of rising to economic stability, as expected from these laws. In light of the US Supreme Court ruling of abolishing the affirmative action, we need to review our position also. There is really no place for affirmative action in education; in work place, we can continue with representation rather than a quota system. This must be on a voluntary basis to represent the ethnic groups that comprise a society.

The Bell Curve raised a storm and the dust hasn’t settled; calling people inferior because they are so programmed genetically is the most racist attitude we can take but the actions of the society that is apparently turned-off by the book are pointing to another direction. The theme of racism is on worldwide and it is about time we take notice of it too, discarding totally and unequivocally the preaching of The Bell Curve. People are alike at birth, our religion tells us and science points to it irrevocably. We must work to provide better survival environment to our populace and that can only come if our feudal lords will begin to believe in their humbleness. It is fascinating how the crux of the problem varies among cultures.

[8 September 1995]