The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (85 page)

What worries us first about the emerging cognitive elite is its coalescence into a class that views American society increasingly through a lens of its own. In
The End of Equality,
which analyzes the stratification of American society from a vantage point different from ours, social critic Mickey Kaus describes the isolation we have in mind. He identifies it broadly with the decline of “the public sphere.”
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The end of the military draft, the social segregation of the school system, and the divisive effects of the underclass are among his suspects, and each has doubtless played an important role independent (to some degree) of the effects of the cognitive stratification that we described in Part I. Thinking about the way these forces had affected his own life, Kaus remarked: “I entered a good Ivy League college in 1969. I doubt I’ve had a friend or regular social acquaintance since who scored less than an 1100 on his or her SAT boards.”
²

Kaus is probably right. The reason why this is a problem is captured
by a remark attributed to the
New Yorker’
s one-time movie critic Pauline Kael following Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in the presidential election of 1972: “Nixon can’t have won; no one I know voted for him.”
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When the members of the cognitive elite (of whatever political convictions) hang out with each other, often exclusively with each other, they find it hard to understand what ordinary people think.

The problem is not simply that smart people rise to the top more efficiently these days. If the only quality that CEOs of major corporations and movie directors and the White House inner circle had in common were their raw intelligence, things would not be so much different now than they have always been, for to some degree the most successful have always been drawn disproportionately from the most intelligent. But the invisible migration of the twentieth century has done much more than let the most intellectually able succeed more easily. It has also segregated them and socialized them. The members of the cognitive elite are likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools, live in similar neighborhoods, go to the same kinds of theaters and restaurants, read the same magazines and newspapers, watch the same television programs, even drive the same makes of cars.

They also tend to be ignorant of the same things. They watch far less commercial television than the average American. Their movie-going tends to be highly selective. They seldom read the national tabloids that have the nation’s largest circulation figures or listen to the talk radio that has become a major form of national communication for other parts of America. This does not mean that the cognitive elite spend their lives at the ballet and reading Proust. Theirs is not a high culture, but it is distinctive enough to set them off from the rest of the country in many important ways.

The isolation of the cognitive elite is by no means complete, but the statistical tendencies are strong, and the same advances in transportation and communication that are so enhancing the professional lives of the cognitive elite will make their isolation from the rest of the public that much greater. As their common ground with the rest of society decreases, their coalescence as a new class increases. The traditional separations between the business world, the entertainment world, the university intellectuals, and government are being replaced by an axis of bright people that runs through society. They already sense their kinship across these spheres of interest. This too will increase with time.

The trends we have described would not constitute a threat to the republic if the government still played the same role in civic life that it played through the Eisenhower administration. As recently as 1960, it did not make a lot of political difference what the cognitive elite thought, because its power to impose those values on the rest of America was limited. In most of the matters that counted—the way the schools were run, keeping order in the public square, opening a business or running it—the nation remained decentralized. The still inchoate cognitive elite in 1960 may have had ideas about how it wanted to move the world but, like Archimedes, it lacked a place to stand.

We need not become embroiled here in a debate about whether the centralization of authority since 1960 (or 1933, for those who take a longer view) was right or wrong. We may all agree as a statement of fact that such centralization occurred, through legislation, Supreme Court decisions, and accretions of executive authority in every domain of daily life. With it came something that did not exist before: a place for the cognitive elite to stand. With the end of the historic limits on the federal reach, everything was up for grabs. If one political group could get enough votes on the Supreme Court, it could move the Constitution toward its goals. If it could get enough votes in Congress, it could do similarly with legislation.

Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the battle veered back and forth, with groups identifiably “liberal” and “conservative” bloodying each other’s noses in accustomed ways. But in the Bush and Clinton administrations, the old lines began to blur. One may analyze these trends conventionally in terms of the evolution of party politics. The rise of the New Democrats and the breakup of the Reagan coalition are the conventional way of looking at the evolution. We think something else is happening as well, with potential dangers: the converging interests of the cognitive elite with the larger population of affluent Americans.

For most of the century, intellectuals and the affluent have been antagonists. Intellectuals have been identified with the economic left and the cultural avant-garde, while the affluent have been identified with big business and cultural conservatism. These comfortable categories have become muddled in recent years, as faculty at the top universities put together salaries, consulting fees, speeches, and royalties that garner
them six-figure incomes while the
New York Review of Books
shows up in the mailbox of young corporate lawyers. The very bright have become much more uniformly affluent than they used to be while, at the same time, the universe of affluent people has become more densely populated by the very bright, as Part I described. Not surprisingly, the interests of affluence and the cognitive elite have begun to blend.

This melding has its limits, particularly when the affluent person is not part of the cognitive elite. The high-IQ Stanford professor with the best-selling book and the ordinary-IQ fellow who makes the same income with his small chain of shoe stores are hardly allies on everything. But in looking ahead to alliances and social trends, it is still useful to think in terms of their increasing commonalities because, as any good economist or politician will point out, there are theoretical interests and practical interests. The Stanford professor’s best-selling book may be a diatribe against the punitive criminal justice system, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t vote with his feet to move to a safe neighborhood. Or his book may be a withering attack on outdated family norms, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t acting like an old-fashioned father in looking after the interests of his children—and if that means sending his children to a lily-white private school so that they get a good education, so be it. Meanwhile, the man with the chain of shoe stores may be politically to the right of the Stanford professor, but he is looking for the same safe neighborhood and the same good schools for his children. And even if he is more likely to vote Republican than the professor, he is unlikely to be the rugged individualist of yore. On the contrary, he is likely to have become quite comfortable with the idea that government is there to be used. He and the professor may not be so far apart at all on how they want to live their own personal lives and how government might serve those joint and important interests.

Consider the sheer size of this emerging coalition and how quickly the affluent class as a whole (not just the cognitive elite) is growing. What is “affluence”? The median answer in 1992 when the Roper Organization asked people how much annual income they would need “to fulfill all your dreams” was $82,100, which indicates where affluence is thought to start by most Americans.
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For purposes of this exercise, we will define affluence as beginning at an annual family income of $100,000 in 1990 dollars, about three times the median family income. By that definition, more than one out of twenty American families is
affluent, roughly double what it was a decade earlier.
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Furthermore, this growth has accompanied stagnant real income for the average family. Here is the last of the many graphs we have asked you to examine in this book. In some ways, it is more loaded with social implications than any that have come before.

In the 1970s, economic growth began to enlarge the affluent class

Sources:
Median family income: U.S. Bureau of the Census 1991, Table B-4, supplemented with U.S. Bureau of the Census 1993, Table B-11. For families with incomes over $100,000, data from 1967-1990 are taken from U.S. Bureau of the Census 1991, Table B-3; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1993, Table B-6. Figures for 1947-1964 are estimated from U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975, Series G 269-282, adjusted for differences in definition of the family.

The graph illustrates the reason for the intense recent interest in American income inequality. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, average family income rose. Then in 1973, median family income hit a peak. Part of the reason for the subsequent lack of progress has been the declining real wages for many categories of blue-collar jobs, described in Chapter 4. Part of the reason has been the decline in two-parent families (economic progress continued, though modestly, for families consisting of married couples). In any case, the average American family has been stuck at about the same place economically for more than twenty years.

For the affluent, the story diverges sharply. Until the early 1970s, the proportion of families with $100,000 in 1990 purchasing power increased slowly and in tandem with the growth in median family income. But after progress for the average family stalled, it continued for the affluent. The steepest gains occurred during the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan’s policies of the 1980s are commonly thought to be an important force (in praise or blame) for increasing the number of affluent. But economists know that there is a difficulty with this explanation, as you will see when you compare the 1970s with the 1980s. The rising proportion of families with incomes of more than $100,000 since the early 1970s does not seem to be a function of any particular political party or policy, except insofar as those policies encourage an expanding economy. It has gone with gains in real per capita GNP (indicated by the unshaded bars in the graphic) whether those gains occurred under Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, or George Bush.
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There is no reason to think that this trend will be much different under Bill Clinton or his successors, if the economy grows. The net result is that the affluent will constitute a major portion of the population in the relatively near future, and they will increasingly be constituted of the most talented.

Try to envision what will happen when 10 or 20 percent of the population has enough income to bypass the social institutions they don’t like in ways that only the top 1 percent used to be able to do. Robert Reich has called it the “secession of the successful.”
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The current symbol of this phenomenon is the gated community, secure behind its walls and guard posts, but many other signs are visible. The fax, modem, and Federal Express have already made the U.S. Postal Service nearly irrelevant to the way that the affluent communicate, for example. A more portentous development is the private court system that businesses are beginning to create. Or the mass exodus from public schools among those living in cities, if they can afford it. Or the proliferation of private security forces for companies, apartment houses, schools, malls, and anywhere else where people with money want to be safe.

Try to envision what will happen to the political process. Even as of the early 1990s, the affluent class is no longer a thin layer of rich people but a political bloc to be reckoned with. Speaking in round numbers (for the precise definitions of both groups are arbitrary), a coalition of the cognitive elite and the affluent class now represents something well in excess of 5 percent of families and, because of their much higher
than average voting rates, somewhere in the vicinity of 10 to 15 percent of the voters.
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The political clout of this group extends well beyond its mere voting size because of its financial contributions to campaigns and because this group contributes a large proportion of local political organizers. The combined weight of the cognitive elite and the affluent is already considerable. But we asked you to envision tomorrow, not today. Do you think that the rich in America already have too much power? Or do you think the intellectuals already have too much power? We are suggesting that a “yes” to both questions is probably right. And if you think the power of these groups is too great now, just watch what happens as their outlooks and interests converge.