OVO

The Bell Curve is a book published in 1994 worried about an increasingly 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.  The authors documented these claims as something they were against.  Much is claimed in the book, but this blog post concerns exactly one claim and no other.  I think it is true that cognitive partitioning along IQ lines is occurring in the USA, and with it comes some profound threats to liberty.  Replace the word “book” with “blog” in the excerpt below and see if it rings true…

The college population has grown a lot while its mean IQ has risen a bit. Most bright people were not going to college in 1930 (or earlier) – waiting on the bench, so to speak, until the game opened up to them. By 1990, the noncollege population, drained of many bright youngsters, had shifted downward in IQ. While the college population grew, the gap between college and noncollege populations therefore also grew. The largest change, however, has been the huge increase in the intelligence of the average student in the top dozen universities, up a standard deviation and a half from where the Ivies and the Seven Sisters were in 1930. One may see other features in the figure evidently less supportive of cognitive partitioning. Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ – or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, while it is true that their mean IQ is extremely high (designated by the +2.7 [standard deviation]s to which the line points), they are such a small proportion of the nation’s population that they do not even register visually on this graph, and they too are apparently out-numbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all. Is there anything to be concerned about? How much partitioning has really occurred?

Perhaps a few examples will illustrate. Think of your twelve closest friends or colleagues. For most readers of this book, a large majority will be college graduates. Does it surprise you to learn that the odds of having even half of them be college graduates are only six in a thousand, if people were randomly paired off? Many of you will not think it odd that half or more of the dozen have advanced degrees. But the odds against finding such a result among a randomly chosen group of twelve Americans are actually more than a million to one. Are any of the dozen a graduate of Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, University of Chicago, or Brown? The chance that even one is a graduate of those twelve schools is one in a thousand. The chance of finding two among that group is one in fifty thousand. The chance of finding four or more is less than one in a billion.

Most readers of this book – this may be said because we know a great deal about the statistical tendencies of people who read a book like this – are in preposterously unlikely groups, and this reflects the degree of partitioning that has already occurred. [...]

The point of the exercise in thinking about your dozen closest friends and colleagues is to encourage you to detach yourself momentarily from the way the world looks to you from day to day and contemplate how extraordinarily different your circle of friends and acquaintances is from what would be the norm in a perfectly fluid society. This profound isolation from other parts of the IQ distribution probably dulls our awareness of how unrepresentative our circle actually is. [...]  When people live in encapsulated worlds, it becomes difficult for them, even with the best of intentions, to grasp the realities of worlds with which they have little experience but over which they also have great influence, both public and private.