Bell Curve

550 Living Together A Place for Everyone 551lutions at all, they should be highly targeted. The vast majority of Americanscan run their own lives just fine, and policy should above all beconstructed so that it permits them to do so.Our second answer, also implicit, has been that just about any policyin any area---education, employment, welfare, criminal justice, or thecare of children--can profit if its designers ask how the policy accordswith the wide variation in cognitive ability. Policies may fail not becausethey are inherently flawed but because they do not make allowancesfor how much people vary. There are hundreds of ways to framebits and pieces of public policy so that they are based on a realistic appraisalof the responses they will get not from people who think likeRhodes scholars but people who think in simpler ways.Our third answer has gone to specific issues in raising the cognitivefunctioning of the disadvantaged (Chapter 17) and in improving educationfor all (Chapter 18). Part of our answer has been cautionary:Much of public policy toward the disadvantaged starts from the premisethat interventions can make up for genetic or environmental disadvantages,and that premise is overly optimistic. Part of our answer hasbeen positive: Much can and should be done to improve education, especiallyfor those who have the greatest potential.Our fourth answer has been that group differences in cognitive ability,so desperately denied for so long, can best be handled--can only behandled-by a return to individualism. A person should not be judgedas a member of a group but as an individual. With that cornerstone ofthe American doctrine once again in place, group differences can taketheir appropriately insignificant place in affecting American life. Butuntil that cornerstone is once again in place, the anger, the hurt, andthe animosities will continue to grow.In this closing chapter, we have focused on another aspect of whatmakes America special. This most individualistic of nations containsone of the friendliest, most eager to oblige, neighborly peoples in all theworld. Visitors to America from Tocqueville on down have observed it.As a by-product of this generosity and civic mindedness, America hashad a genius for making valued places, for people of all kinds of abilities,given only that they played by a few basic rules.Once we as a nation absorbed people of different cultures, abilities,incomes, and temperaments into communities that worked. The nationwas good at it precisely because of, not in spite of, the freedom thatAmerican individuals and communities enjoyed. Have there been exceptionsto that generalization? Yes, predominantly involving race, andthe nation rightly moved to rid itself of the enforced discrimination thatlay heh~nd those exceptions. Is the generalization nonetheless justified?Overwhelmingly so, in our judgment. Reducing that freedom has enervatedour national genius for finding valued places for everyone; the genluswill not be revitalized until the freedom is restored.Cognitive partitioning will continue. It cannot be stopped, becausethe forces driving it cannot be stopped. But America can choose to preservea society in which every citizen has access to the central satisfactionsof life. Its people can, through an interweaving of choice andresponsibility, create valued places for themselves in their worlds. Theycan l~ve in communities-urban or rural-where being a good parent,a good neighbor, and a good friend will give their lives purpose andmeaning. They can weave the most crucial safety nets together, so thattheir mistakes and misfortunes are mitigated and withstood with a littlehelp from their friends.All of these good things are available now to those who are smartenough or rich enough-if they can exploit the complex rules to theiradvantage, buy their way out of the social institutions that no longerfunction, and have access to the rich human interconnections that aregrowing, not diminishing, for the cognitively fortunate. We are callingupon our readers, so heavily concentrated among those who fit that description,to recognize the ways in which public pol~cy has come to denythose good things to those who are not smart enough and rich enough.At the heart of our thought is the quest for human dignity. The centralmeasure of success for this government, as for any other, is to permitpeople to live lives of dignity-not to give them dignity, for that isnot in any government's power, but to make it accessible to all. That isone way of thinking about what the Founders had in mind when theyproclaimed, as a truth self-evident, that all men are created equal. Thatis what we have in mind when we talk about valued places for everyone.Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Tryingto pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Tryingto eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes hasled to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality,as life is lived: understanding that each human being hasstrengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not