Bell Curve

60 The Emergence ofa Cognitive Elite Cognitive Partitioning by Occupation 61high-IQ professions. The constraints leave no other ~ossibility. Here arethe constraints and the arithmetic:In 1990, the resident population ages 25 to 64 (the age group in whichthe vast majority of people working in high-IQ professions fall) consistedof 127 millionpeople.25 By definition, the top IQ decile thus consistedof 12.7 million people. The labor force of persons aged 25 to 64consisted of 100 million people. The smartest working-age people aredisproportionately likely to be in the labor force (especially since careeropportunities have opened up for women). As a working assumption,suppose that the labor force of 100 million included 11 million of the12.7 million people in the top IQ decile.We already know that 7.3 million people worked in the high-IQ professionsthat year and have reason to believe that about half of those(3.65 million) have IQs of 120 or more. Subtracting 3.65 million from11 million leaves us with about 7.4 million people in the labor forcewith IQs of 120 or more unaccounted for. Meanwhile, 12.9 million peo.ple were classified in 1980 as working in executive, administrative, andmanagerial positions.'261 A high proportion of people in those positionsgraduated from college, one screen. They have risen in the corporatehierarchy over the course of their careers, which is probably anotherscreen for IQ. What is their mean IQ? There is no precise answer. Stud*ies suggest that the mean for the job category including all white-collarand professionals is around 107, but that category is far broader than theone we have in mind. Moreover, the mean IQ of four-year college grad*uates in general was estimated at about 115 in 1972, and senior executivesprobably have a mean above that average.27At this point, we are left with startlingly little room for maneuver.How many of those 12.9 million people in executive, administrative,and managerial positions have IQs above 1201 Any plausible assumptiondigs deep into the 7.4 million people with IQs of 120 or more whoare not already engaged in one of the other high4Q professions andleaves us with an extremely high proportion of people of the labor forcewith IQs above 120 who are already working in a high-IQ profession orin an executive or managerial position. One could easily make a casethat the figure is in the neighborhood of 70 to 80 percent.Cognitive sorting has become highly efficient in the last half century,but has it really become that efficient? We cannot answer definitely yes,bur it is difficult to work back through the logic and come up with goodreasons for thinking that the estimates are far off the mark.It is not profitable to push much further along this line because theuncertainties become too great, but the main point is solidly establishedin any case: In midcentury, America was still a society in which a largeproportion of the top tenth of IQ, probably a majority, were scatteredthroughout the population, not working in a high-IQ profession and notin a managerial position. As the century draws to a close, some very highproportion of that same group is concentrated within those highlyscreened jobs.