The Bell Curve.do Our Genes Make Us Rich?

In 1994,sociologists Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein published a book called The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.The bell curve is a bell-shaped line on a graph showing income distribution in the USA.Ity starts low earnings,rises to show the number on middle incomes,then drops to illustrate the majority earning high incomes.Because a line measuring the distribution of IQ in the USA fits over the income  line,Murray and Hernstein claimed it proved a link between IQ and income,that rich are also an intellectual elite.

The Bell Curve argues that poverty and the division of society into ranks are not caused by economic factors but innate differences in intelligence.Intelligence decides a person’s education,businesses hire smart people,educated people get the best jobs.People with a low IQ fall behind.Because low IQ causes poverty and unemployment,government policies to alleviate them actually create a dependency culture – a circle of unemployment,family breakdown,crime and reliance on state benefits.The Bell Curve argues that birth rates should be encouraged among intelligent families,and discouraged among those with a low IQ by ending measures to help them,such as state benefits.

The authors also claim that black people have lower IQs.Racism,they said ,has little to do with inequality.When people of similar IQ are compared,blacks are more likely than whites to be doctors,lawyers,teachers and engineers.Differences in income and employment is due to IQ immigrants threaten American society,and low-IQ migrants should be barred.Unless ‘inferior people’ stop having so many children,they argued,developed nations will become states where tyrannical elites rule urban reservations of the low-IQ underclass.Opponents of Herrnstein and Murray’s ideas claim they are recommending a policy of eugenics (selective breeding).

A FLAWED THEORY

Other social scientists have discovered thast IQ scores in children have risen sharply over the past 50 years,and gaps in scores between all ethnic groups are closing.It has also been shown that Herrnstein and Murray chose statistics that fitted conveniently with their theories in The Bell Curve.IQ measurement has also been disputed since the early 20th century,because many supporters believed that intellectual development and social standing were fixed at birth.

The science is also not at all exact.In a reformatory (youth custody centre) in America,for example,every new inmate was tested from the 1930s on.In the 1940s,the average IQ jumped up,not because inmates became more intelligent,but because a different IQ test was introduced!For years in the Czech Republic,tests labelled gypsy children ‘retarded’.But the tests did not accept cultural and language differences- most intelligent people would fail a test in a language they do not understand.

IN THE GENES

However,the more we learn about genes and how they affect us,the more likely it seems that there is some genetic foundation to character,personality and intelligence.It seems equally unlikely ,however,that they are solely the product of our genes.Learning from others as we grow up is a crucial part of making us who we are,and every one of us has opportunities we can make us of.As we will see,education is a very good example of these opportunities.

• At the end of the 19 century,the theory of eugenics was developed.It claimed that humankind could be improved by selective breeding.Since then,it has been used to justify policies based on class or race.Those who believed in eugenics blamed Britain’s slow progress in the Boer War (1899-1902) on the ‘degeneration decline of the Imperial Race.’Others realize that the frailty of British soldiers was a result of childhood poverty so free milk was introduced in schools.In the 1930s,Hitler used the eugenics  theory to justify the  sterilization and murder of disable and mentally ill people,gypsies,Jews and the Slavs of the east.It was not just Nazi Germany.By 1943,30 US states allowed sterization until the late 1960s.The former South Africa government fol;lowed a policy of ’separate development’.