Bell Curve

50 The Emergence of a Cognitive EliteSAT-Vs in the 700s and another 48 percent had scores in the 600s.~~~'It is difficult to exaggerate how different the elite college population isfrom the population at large-first in its level of intellectual talent, andcorrelatively in its outlook on society, politics, ethics, religion, and allthe other domains in which intellectuals, especially intellectuals concentratedinto communities, tend to develop their own conventionalwisdoms.The news about education is heartening and frightening, more or lessin equal measure. Heartening, because the nation is providing a collegeeducation for a high proportion of those who could profit from it.Among those who graduate from high school, just about all the brightyoungsters now get a crack at a college education. Heartening also becauseour most elite colleges have opened their doors wide for youngstersof outstanding promise. But frightening too. When people live inencapsulated worlds, it becomes difficult for them, even with the bestof intentions, to grasp the realities of worlds with which they have littleexperience but over which they also have great influence, both publicand private. Many of those promising undergraduates are never goingto live in a community where they will be disabused of their misperceptions,for after education comes another sorting mechanism, occupations,and many of the holes that are still left in the cognitivepartitions begin to get sealed. We now turn to that story.Chapter 2Cognitive Partitioning byOccupationPeople in different jobs have different average IQs. Lawyers, for example,have higher lQs on the average than bus drivers. Whether they must havehigher IQs than bus drivers is a topic we take up in detail in the next chapter.Here we start by noting simply that people from different ranges on the IQscale end up in different jobs.Whatever the reason for the link between IQ and occupation, it goes deep.If you want to guess an adult male's job status, the results of his childhood IQtest help you as much as knowing how many years he went to school.1Q becomes more important as the job gets intellectually tougher. To beable to dig a ditch, you need a strong back but not necessarily a high IQ score.To be a master carpenter, you need some higher degree of intelligence alongwith skill with your hands. To be afirst-rate lawyer, you had better come fromthe upper end of the cognitive ability distribution. The same may be said of ahandful of other occupatioru, such as accountants, engineers and architects,college teachers, dentists and physicians, mathematicians, and scientists. Themean IQ ofpeople entering those fields is in the neighborhood of 120. In 1900,only one out of twenty people in the top 10 percent in intelligence were in anyof these occupations, a figure that did not change much through 1940. Butafter 1940, more and more people with high IQs flowed into those jobs, andby 1990 the same handful of occupations employed about 25 percent of allthe people in the top tenth of intelligence.During the same period, IQ became more important for business executives.In 1900, the CEO ofa large company was likely to be a WASP borninto affluence. He may have been bright, but that was not mainly how he waschosen. Much was still the same as late as 1950. The next three decades sawagreat social leveling, as the executive suites filled with bright people who couldmaximize corporate profits, and never mind if they came from the aurong side