Bell Curve

520 Living Together The Way We Are Headed 5 2 1dating job benefits) may backfire by making alternatives to human labormore affordable and, in many cases, by making the jobs disappearaltogether. People in the bottom quartile of intelligence are becomingnot just increasingly expendable in economic terms; they will sometimein the not-too-distant future become a net drag. In economic terms andbarring a profound change in direction for our society, many people willbe unable to perform that function so basic to human dignity: puttingmore into the world than they take out.Perhaps a revolution in teaching technology will drastically increasethe productivity returns to education for people in the lowestquartile of intelligence, overturning our pessimistic forecast. Butthere are no harbingers of any such revolution as we write. And unlesssuch a revolution occurs, all the fine rhetoric about "investingin human capital" to "make America competitive in the twenty-firstcentury" is not going to be able to overturn this reality: For manypeople, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of theteaching.The Emerging White UnderchsThe dry tinder for the formation of an underclass community is a largenumber of births to single women of low intelligence in a concentratedspatial area. Sometime in the next few decades it seems likely thatAmerican whites will reach the point of conflagration. The proportionof white illegitimate births (including Latinos) reached 22 percent in1991.~'~' There is nothing about being Caucasian that must slow downthe process. Britain, where the white illegitimacy ratio, which was muchlower than the American white ratio as recently as 1979, hit 32 percentin 1992 with no signs of slowing down.When 22 percent of all births are to single women, the proportion inlow-income communities is perhaps twice that. In the NLSY, 43 percentof all births to white women who were below the poverty line wereillegitimate, compared to 7 percent for all white women anywhere abovethe poverty line.'"' In the nation at large, we know from the 1992Census Bureau study of fertility that women with college degrees contributeonly 4 percent of white illegitimate babies, while women with ahigh school education or less contribute 82 percent. Women with familyincomes of $75,000 or more contribute 1 percent of white illegitimatebabies, while women with family incomes under $20,000contribute 69 percent.'2 White illegitimacy is overwhelmingly a lowerclassphenomenon.In the past, whites have not had an "underclass" as such, because thewhites who might qualify have been too scattered among the workingclass. Instead, white communities in America had a few streets on theoutskirts of town inhabited by the people who couldn't seem to copeand skid rows of unattached white men in large cities, but these scatteringswere seldom large enough to make up a neighborhood. An underclassneeds a critical mass, and white America has not had one. Butif the overall white illegitimacy ratio is 22 percent-probably somewherein the 40 percent range in low-income communities-and risingfast, the question arises: At what point is critical mass reached? Howmuch illegitimacy can a community tolerate? Nobody knows, but thehistorical fact is that the trendlines on black crime, dropout from thelabor force, and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward as the overallblack illegitimacy ratio passed 25 percent and the rate in low-incomeblack communities moved past 50 percent.We need not rely on the analogy with the black experience. Whiteillegitimacy is also overwhelmingly a lower-cognitive-class phenomenon,as we detailed in Chapter 8. Three-quarters of all white illegitimatebirths are to women below average in IQ, and 45 percent are towomen with IQs under 90.~"~ These women are poorly equipped for thelabor market, often poorly equipped to be mothers, and there is no reasonto think that the outcomes for their children will be any better thanthe outcomes have been for black children. Meanwhile, as never-marriedmothers grow in numbers, the dynamics of the public housing market(where they will probably continue to be welcome) and the privatehousing market (where they will not) will foster increasing concentrationsof whites with high unemployment, high crime, high illegitimacy,and low cognitive ability, creating communities that look very muchlike the inner-city neighborhoods that people now tend to associatewith minorities.The white cognitive elite is unlikely to greet this development sympathetically.On the contrary, much of white resentment and fear of theblack underclass has been softened by the complicated mixture of whiteguilt and paternalism that has often led white elites so excuse behaviorin blacks that they would not excuse in whites. This does not mean thatwhite elites will abandon the white underclass, but it does suggest thatthe means of dealing with their needs are likely to be brusque.