The Bell Curve Prophesy

Bringing up “The Bell Curve” at a dinner party is like suggesting a group selfie at a funeral—awkward and bound to raise eyebrows. The book was a lightning rod for criticism, and justifiably so, for its claims about IQ and race.

One of the authors was Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, but the author whose “scholarship” it was really based on was Dick Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard.

Hernnstein had been a distinguished scholar early in his career. He was a protege of B.F. Skinner and he focused primarily on animal behavior. He was a pioneer in the field.

But in the early 1970s he took a hard turn away from lab research on pigeon smarts and moved into the slightly-more-controversial area of IQ testing. In "The Bell Curve," he covered ground he had trod before, writing about how IQ tests are a good measure of intelligence, intelligence is predictive of success, and, to the surprise of no one, racial differences in IQ. You can guess what he said.

Hence, the controversy.

Let's set aside the incendiary parts that have been dissected ad nauseam. There are some aspects of the book that didn't hog the spotlight, but might be relevant three decades later.

Let’s ask, “What was this book trying to say? What was the point of publishing this book?”

As we transitioned to an information-based or knowledge-based economy, higher education had greater returns to it. So there was going to be increasing inequality of wealth and income. And these people who have high educations are going to be taking a lot of society’s money. And they’re going to start to just associate with one another.

Herrnstein and Murray painted a picture of an emerging "cognitive elite" - essentially highly educated professionals who would concentrate wealth and socialize/marry amongst themselves. The would be isolated geographically and become increasingly isolated from the rest of American society. And they would pass these benefits on to their children, limiting social mobility for others.

Geographic Clustering

Could San Francisco become less known for the Summer of Love are more for the winter of the $4,000 studio apartment? Could we have entire regions that have become wealthy knowledge-worker kingdoms?

Educational Endogamy

"Educational endogamy" is a fancy way of saying "smart people marrying other smart people." It's like a Jane Austen novel, but instead of landed gentry, it's people with graduate degrees swiping right on other people with graduate degrees. We could create a world where an engineer marrying someone without a college degree would be rarer than a Twitter thread without a typo.

Wealth Concentration

The so-called cognitive elite would be accumulating wealth at levels that would make Gilded Age robber barons say "Hey, maybe dial it back a bit?" The knowledge economy could create returns to education that would make traditional wage labor look like collecting pocket change from couch cushions.

Generational Advantage

If you thought getting into an elite college was hard then, the future would require SAT prep courses, private tutors, and parents who can afford to live in districts with good schools. The cognitive elite wouldn’t just pass down their genes; they’d pass down every possible advantage they can stack on their kids' college applications.

The Warning

Herrnstein and Murray weren't just making predictions - they were sounding an alarm. They warned that this increasing social stratification would lead to societal tensions, political polarization, resentment toward elites, and eventually to social instability.

They argued that without government policies to prevent this growing divide, we'd see significant backlash against the educated elite.

Cue nervous laughter from anyone who's been conscious during the past decade.

So... Now What?

Fortunately, the wise leaders of our past heeded the warning and none of these dire predictions came to pass. Everything’s cool.

Or are you reading this on your MacBook Pro while sipping artisanal coffee in a gentrified neighborhood? Oh, dear.