Conclusion: Addressing Inequality

Abstract

Although it was Herrnstein’s writing in the early 1970s that began widespread discussion of the concept, and The Bell Curve, which he co-authored with Murray that continued it, the truth is that the notion of a “meritocracy” has become an abiding conviction across much of the political spectrum in the United States. The belief that society’s “winners” deserve their hugely disproportionate share of resources because they are better—i.e., smarter—than others is not unique to conservatives and libertarians like Murray; it is also an article of faith for much of the so-called “New Democratic” establishment that has controlled the party from the Clinton through the Obama administrations. For both conservatives and many liberals, the meritocratic faith is not so much a way to explain inequality as to rationalize it; high-ranking officials involved in economic policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations have considered inequality not only inevitable but the appropriate reflection of people’s economic value.

Although it was Herrnstein’s writing in the early 1970s that began widespread discussion of the concept, and The Bell Curve, which he co-authored with Murray that continued it, the truth is that the notion of a “meritocracy” has become an abiding conviction across much of the political spectrum in the United States. The belief that society’s “winners” deserve their hugely disproportionate share of resources because they are better—i.e., smarter—than others is not unique to conservatives and libertarians like Murray; it is also an article of faith for much of the so-called “New Democratic” establishment that has controlled the party from the Clinton through the Obama administrations. For both conservatives and many liberals, the meritocratic faith is not so much a way to explain inequality as to rationalize it; high-ranking officials involved in economic policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations have considered inequality not only inevitable but the appropriate reflection of people’s economic value. As John Snow, George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, bluntly put it, “people will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise.” And Obama’s first Director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, who had earlier served as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, declared that inequality had increased only because “people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”¹ (In his former capacity, however, Summers had fought to deregulate Wall Street, presiding over enactment of the Financial Services Modernization Act—the “Graham-Leach-Bliley” act—which, by removing the Glass-Steagall safeguards on banks, led to the Great Recession, which did so much to exacerbate inequality.)

Ultimately, then, The Bell Curve constituted a natural ideological traveling companion for the neoliberalist consensus dominating policy circles across party lines, providing data-based support for a radically individualist agenda seeking to crush organized labor, drive down tax rates on the wealthy, deregulate business, and privatize much of the public sector. Four decades of this approach have transformed the American economy, resulting in a minimalist welfare state, an erosion of the relationship between social role and financial reward and a dramatic increase in inequality.

Neoliberalism is based on two interrelated assumptions. First, it reflects a view of the society and the economy, in which the market functions rationally, selecting for greater income and status those who deserve their position by virtue of talent, natural ability, or hard work. As a consequence, inequality becomes solely the result of individual differences, whether in specific abilities, amount of education, or various personality traits; The Bell Curve’s insistence on intelligence as the single most important such variable represented merely a special case of this argument. Indeed, in an even more extreme version, not long after the book’s publication Murray found it “almost certainly” the case that the poor were burdened by a “genetic makeup that is significantly different” from the configuration in the rest of the population.² This focus on individual differences, some of them viewed as unalterable, implies a view of dramatic inequality as fair in some sense. Some people do well, while others do not, but in either case they get what they deserve, based on the market’s determination of their value. Success is due to those with the right constellation of traits, while failure becomes a consequence of personal defect or character flaw for others, who are lacking in some fundamental respect—intelligence, ambition, drive, determination. And just as Michael Young predicted, the former, who have no doubt that their status has been earned and is thus deserved, have reason to be proud, while the latter feel humiliated, all the more so as increasing equality of opportunity deprives them of any explanation for their plight other than their own shortcomings.

The second assumption, almost a corollary of the first, is best encapsulated by Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that “there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves.” Public institutions, in this view, are inappropriate mechanisms for responding to private difficulties. The Bell Curve’s argument converted Thatcher’s claim of contradiction from the abstract to the empirical. After all, if IQ scores accounted for much of the variation in individual outcomes—not only economic success but a host of other variables related to quality of life—then social democratic reforms and other collective protections for the less fortunate could not change what was essentially a state of nature: innate human differences.

This emphasis on individual differences as both explanation and justification for massive economic inequality hinders our ability to understand and respond to more significant sources of the problem. Indeed, social psychologists studying how people behave in specific contexts refer to the tendency to over-emphasize the importance of personal traits and underestimate the role of situational factors as the “fundamental attribution error”; rather than being a characteristically impatient Type A personality, for example, the person speeding past other cars in traffic may be responding to a genuine emergency. However, this often-erroneous focus solely on individual characteristics as the determining factor for behavior is no less an attributional error in explaining the kind of more enduring life outcomes studied by The Bell Curve, where the more significant variable is not some ephemeral situational element but the underlying social structure—the rules of the society and the economy. Given the history of discriminatory practices in the United States, this omission is particularly egregious in any attempt to explain racial differences in income and wealth.

Of course, individual differences in drive and ability account for some portion of the variation in people’s economic outcomes, but they pale in comparison with the explanatory power of structural variables. To cite but one example, consider the effect of the decline in unionism. Through the first three decades after the war, a thriving union movement was instrumental in helping to create the world’s largest middle class. At one point, more than a third of workers in the private sector enjoyed the benefits of collective bargaining; at present that figure is 6.3 percent. And representation produced gains for non-union workers as well, putting pressure on employers to improve their treatment, lest the company face an organizing drive. A 2014 study by three economists from non-profit institutes called it “possible to explain the entire rise of inequality since the late 1970s as the outcome of an array of economic policies,” with de-unionization alone as the cause of “a third of the entire growth of wage inequality among men.”³

In a parallel analysis, half a century ago the psychologist William Ryan distinguished between two approaches to social problems. The “exceptionalist” approach assumes that there are “specially defined categories of persons,” who “‘have’ social problems as a result of some kind of unusual circumstances—accident, illness, personal defect or handicap, character flaw or maladjustment—that exclude them from using the ordinary mechanisms for maintaining and advancing themselves.” Even a quite common problem in this view suggests only a large number of instances of these individual deviances. Especially on issues such as income or health, this approach “concentrates almost exclusively on the failure of the deviant,” the ways in which, as a result of individual imperfections, the person who “has” the problem is unable to adapt appropriately to the circumstances or the system. And if the problem originated as a result of individual defect, then the remedy too had to be individualistic, tailored to the specific case. Thus, the exceptionalist approach, which Ryan called “Blaming the Victim,” led to solutions that were “private, voluntary, remedial, special, local, and exclusive”; the person with the problem had to be “fixed.”⁴

In contrast, what Ryan called the “universalist” approach attributes social problems to “defects in the community and the environment rather than in the individual.” This view “see[s] social problems, in a word, as social”—as a “function of the social arrangements of the community or the society.” And since, he argued, these arrangements were often “quite imperfect and inequitable, such problems are both predictable and, more important, preventable through public action.” Thus, the universalist approach implied solutions “that are public, legislated, promotive or preventive, general, national, and inclusive,” focusing not on individuals but on “the development of standard generalized programs affecting total groups.”⁵ Curing pica—the tendency for some young children to consume harmful substances like lead paint chips—is exceptionalist; enforcing the housing laws that prohibit the use of lead-based paint in residential facilities is universalist. Also universalist is a program like unemployment insurance, which protects people from the vagaries of the business cycle, while carrying no implication that those individuals who benefit from it are defective or abnormal.

To the extent that neoliberalism considers extreme inequality a problem to be ameliorated rather than an inescapable reality to be embraced, its preferred solutions are all exceptionalist, focusing exclusively on the presumptive flaws of those who have struggled economically: they don’t have enough education; they need a different kind of education; they need a different skill set for the postindustrial economy; their cognitive skills (i.e., IQ) must be improved. Even the emphasis on equal opportunity as a response to inequality is ultimately an exceptionalist approach. As the Harvard philosophy professor Michael J. Sandel notes, “Enabling people to compete solely on the basis of effort and talent would bring market outcomes into alignment with merit,” ensuring that people receive what the market determines as “their just deserts”; such an emphasis accepts the fact “that the rungs on the income ladder were growing farther apart” and seeks merely “to help people compete more fairly to clamber up the rungs,” thereby exacerbating rather than reducing inequality.⁶ This is not to derogate the importance of attempts either to improve people’s abilities or to dismantle arbitrary barriers to achievement like race, class, or gender; both of these are worthy goals for practical as well as moral reasons. But such exceptionalist responses to what the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom calls “the ‘skillification’ of the U.S. economy” will do little to reduce inequality resulting from structures and institutions; not everyone can become what Robert Reich called a “symbol analyst.” And to tell people who are struggling after their factory was moved abroad that their salvation lies in more education, which will better enable them to compete, is more of a provocation than a solution.⁷

A universalist attempt to address inequality would focus on programmatic measures designed to ensure that everyone who makes a contribution to the common good can be assured of certain essentials necessary for a decent quality of life: income sufficient to provide reasonable shelter and food, access to appropriate health care and education, and the ability to retire with dignity. Although this is not the place to explore the kind of policies that would achieve such goals, there has been no shortage of proposals for doing so: substantially increasing the minimum wage, a negative income tax, a universal basic income (UBI), some form of universal health care, a federally supported, guaranteed retirement account, etc. Indeed, 58 mayors, including those from 6 of the 10 largest cities in the United States, have joined Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, an organization “based on the truth that financial instability is not the failure of individuals, but rather policies.” The schemes for funding these proposals typically shift the tax burden from work to wealth; Sandel, for example, suggests raising revenue through a “financial transaction tax on high-frequency trading, which contributes little to the real economy.”⁸ Numerous Western European democracies, no less industrialized or technologically advanced than the United States, have managed to provide such benefits and even more, such as parental leave and a minimum number of vacation days, undeterred by the inevitable range of personal characteristics in their populations.

Long after The Bell Curve, Murray himself announced his support for a modest UBI for people at the lower end of the income spectrum, though only under a draconian condition that would leave most recipients worse off with this benefit than without it. In exchange for a $3000 grant to be applied specifically toward the cost of health insurance and then a monthly payment of $833 dollars (i.e., $10,000 per year), every other form of federal assistance would be terminated: “Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program.” The fact that, as a result of eliminating these programs, “the wealth in private hands would be greater than ever before” Murray considered an advantage, leading, he anticipated, to “restoration, on an unprecedented scale, of a great American tradition of voluntary efforts to meet human needs.”⁹ In place of universalist measures to address inequality, Murray offered the ultimate example of the exceptionalist approach: widespread reliance on private charity.

The pandemic has provided a painful reminder of the gap between what the market rewards and what actually contributes to the public weal. It is not just the fact that the wealthy have enjoyed enormous financial gains since spring 2020, while so many others have suffered: the 15 richest Americans have added more than 400 billion dollars to their net worth, the total wealth owned by American billionaires has grown 55 percent, and a survey of CEOs “revealed some of the biggest pay packages on record,” even as their companies laid off thousands of employees, forcing them to turn to government assistance for food and housing. But in addition, the pandemic has produced the sudden realization that the tasks performed by so many modestly compensated workers—care givers, cleaners, transportation workers, waste collectors, drug store workers, grocery store clerks, delivery workers, and others—make essential contributions, without which the society could not function. In a particularly cruel irony, the meat- and poultry-processing industry lobbied the Trump administration, successfully, to have its line workers—composed substantially of immigrant labor, much of it undocumented and all of it miserably paid—classified as “essential,” ensuring that the plants remained open, even as covid spread rapidly through the ranks of people required to work elbow-to-elbow even while lacking health insurance; a number of governors enacted measures granting these companies immunity from civil liability, protecting them from any claim for compensation filed by the families of those who died after workplace exposure to the virus.¹⁰

It is not only logically contradictory but morally offensive to claim that certain activities are so vital to the functioning of the society that the workers who engage in them should endure risks from which others are shielded, while at the same time disparaging what they do as so “low-skilled” that they are not entitled to decent wages, based on the market’s rational analysis of the value of their efforts. And to tell these “essential” workers and so many others in traditional working-class jobs–people who may not be members of the cognitive elite but who produce the truly useful goods and services in the economy—that their economic struggles result from a lack of intelligence or education is insulting. They don’t need better jobs; they need better compensation and more respect for the underpaid and underappreciated jobs they already have.

While some degree of inequality in a free society is to be expected, the extreme mismatch between social contribution and financial remuneration in the United States is the result of policy decisions, not the inevitable consequence of individual differences, whether or not genetic. As The Bell Curve’s subtitle—“Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life”—indicates, the book sought to argue otherwise, promoting an emphasis on individual cognitive differences that effectively thwarts consideration of any real solutions to the problem of inequality. That is its greatest danger.

FormalPara Notes

• 1. On Snow, see Editorial Board, “Let’s Talk About Higher Wages,” New York Times, November 28, 2020, SR8. Summers is quoted in R. Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 197.

• 2. C. Murray, “Deeper into the Brain,” National Review, January 24, 2000, 48.

• 3. “Union Members—2020,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 22, 2021. L. Mishel, J. Schmitt and H. Shierholz, “Wage Inequality: A Story of Policy Choices,” New Labor Forum (August 4, 2014): 1, 3, https://files.epi.org/charts/wage-inequality-a-story-of-policy-choices.pdf.

• 4. W. Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage, 1971), 14–17.

• 5. Ibid.

• 6. M.J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 63, 85.

• 7. T.M. Cottom, Lower Education: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: New Press, 2017), 20. R. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1992).

• 8. For example, N. Zewde, K. Strickland, K. Capatosto, A. Glogower, and D. Hamilton, A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century (New York: The New School Institute on Race and Political Economy, May 2021); T. Ghilarducci and T. James, Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). M. Carter, E. Garcetti and M. Tubbs, “Most Americans Support Guaranteed Income,” Time, July 8, 2021; for a list of the mayors, see https://www.mayorsforagi.org/. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, 219.

• 9. C. Murray, “A Guaranteed Income for Every American,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2016.

• 10. On gains by the wealthy, see D. Markovitz, “We Need to Tax Wealth,” Time, May10/May 17, 2021, 28; H. Olen, “As wealthy CEOs rake in money, an ugly trope about Americans needing help reemerges,” Washington Post, May 19, 2021; and P. Eavis, “They’re Cashing In Like Never Before,” New York Times, June 13, 2021, BU1. A. Driver, “Their Lives on the Line,” New York Review of Books, April 29, 2021, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/04/27/their-lives-on-the-line/.