Bell Curve

5 10 Living Together The Way We Are Headed 5 1 1ucated, often not even high school educated, and they lived their livesscattered almost indistinguishably among the rest of the population.Their interests were just as variegated. Many were small businessmen orfarmers, sharing the political outlook of those groups. Many worked onassembly lines or as skilled craftsmen. The top of the cognitive abilitydistribution probably included leaders of the labor movement and ofcommunity organizations. Among the smart women, a few had professionalcareers of their own, but most of them kept house, reared children,and were often the organizing forces of their religious and socialcommunities.People from the top of the cognitive ability distribution lived nextdoor to people who were not so smart, with whose children their ownchildren went to school. They socialized with, went to church with, andmarried people less bright than themselves as a matter of course. Thiswas not an egalitarian utopia that we are trying to recall. On the contrary,communities were stratified by wealth, religion, class, ethnic background,and race. The stratifications may have been stark, even bitter,but people were not stratified by cognitive ability.As the century progressed, the historical mix of intellectual abilitiesat all levels of American society thinned as intelligence rose to the top.The upper end of the cognitive ability distribution has been increasinglychanneled into higher education, especially the top colleges andprofessional schools, thence into high-IQ occupations and senior managerialpositions, as Part 1 detailed. The upshot is that the scatteredbrightest of the early twentieth century have congregated, forming anew class.Membership in this new class, the cognitive elite, is gained hy highIQ; neither social background, nor ethnicity, nor lack of money will barthe way. But once in the club, usually by age eighteen, members heginto share much else as well. Among other things, they will come to runmuch of the country's business. In the private sector, the cognitive elitedominates the ranks of CEOs and the top echelon of corporate executives.Smart people have no doubt always had the advantage in commerceand industry, but their advantage has grown as the harriers againstthe "wrong" nationalities, ethnicities, religions, or socioeconomic originshave been dismantled. Meanwhile, the leaders in medicine, law,science, print journalism, television, the film and publishing industries,and the foundation world come largely from the cognitive elite. Almostall of the leading figures in academia are part of it. In Washington, thetop echelons of federal officialdom, special interest groups, think tanks,and the rest of Washington's satellite institutions draw heavily from thecognitive elite. At the municipal level, the local business and politicalmovers are often members of the cognitive elite.GIVING MERITOCRACY ITS DUEPart I mostly described a success story-success for the people luckyenough to be part of the cognitive elite but also a success for the nationas a whole. Before turning to the dark side, we should be explicit aboutthe good things that flow from the invisible migration.Chief among them is the triumph of an American ideal. Americansbelieve that each person should he able to go as far as talent and hardwork will take him, and much of what we have described is the realizationof that conviction, for people with high IQs. The breadth of thechange was made possible by twentieth-century technology, which expandedthe need for people with high IQs by orders of magnitude. Butthe process itself has been a classic example of people free to respond toopportunity and of an economic system that created opportunities inabundance.Life has been increasingly good for the cognitive elite, as it has displacedthe socioeconomic elites of earlier times. We showed in Part Ithe increasing financial rewards for brains, hut money is only a part ofthe cornucopia. In the far-from-idyllic past when most of the people atthe rop of the cognitive distribution were farmers, housewives, workers,and shop owners, many of them were also frustrated, aware that theyhad capabilities that were not being used. The graph on page 56 thattraced the steep rise in high-IQ jobs over the course of the century wasto some important extent a picture of people moving from unsatisfyingjobs to lucrative and interesting ones.Technology has not just created more jobs for the cognitive elite butrevolutionized the way they may be done. Modem transportation has expandedthe realm in which people work. Beyond that, ~hysical separationis becoming irrelevant. A scientist passionately devoted to the studyof a certain protein or an investment analyst following a market can bein daily electronic conversation with people throughout the world whoshare the same passion, passing drafts of work back and forth, calling updata files, doing analyses that would have required a mainframe computerand a covey of assistants only a few years ago-all while sitting