The odds of educated friends

There is nothing to expose the anti-science mind-set of the postmodernist, intersectionalist left than to query their opinion of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

Published a quarter-century ago, the science behind the book has by-and-large become increasingly replicated and confirmed. Yet, because it was linked in their minds with race, rather than the point of the book which was class, virtually everybody on the left is religiously opposed to the book. It is moral contagion to them. A book packed with replicated science triggers a virulent anti-science response.

Regrettably, Murray's originating concern, what are the class implications of the bell-curve given an increasingly complex and challenging global environment have been completely ignored. It remains as pertinent and unresolved today as then.

One theme I keep returning to is the bubble syndrome where different classes of people effectively live in entirely different worlds and are unable to comprehend the rest of the world and their fellow citizens outside their bubbles. It manifests in many ways but certainly the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a revelatory event.

For those in the urban Mandarin Class, graduates of elite universities, high income, relatively income stable, completely and only familiar with the service economy, agnostic, multiculturalist, passively socialist, etc., the world represented by Trump - patriotic, religious, traditional values, constitutionalists, blue collar, suburban, etc. was both alien and incomprehensible.

I was in Silicon Valley the night of the election and the stunned incomprehension of what had just happened was widespread.

In conversations in the following days, the question I kept returning to in order to make the point of the strength of bubbles was, "How many of your neighbors and/or friends do not have a college degree?" The facts are pretty straightforward. Roughly 30% of Americans have a college degree (of any sort.) About 10% have an advanced degree.

If populations are randomly distributed, among you friends and among your neighbors, that is what you would expect to see. 70% with no degree, 20% with a terminal bachelors degree and 10% with an advanced degree.

And of course that is not what happens. We self-select. In the instance of the client with whom I was working, I was able to show them that in the neighborhoods in which they lived, 97-99% of their neighbors had college degrees versus the statistical 30%. And not just any degrees - their neighbors had the best and hardest degrees from the most selective of schools.

Nothing wrong with any of that but the discrepancy between high income, high cognitive, and high status attainment is too marked to ignore. The reality is that most of us live in the bubbles most conducive to our own beliefs and goals and interests. The indictment is not about living in bubbles. The indictment is 1) not being aware of the bubble, 2) not being aware that there is anything outside the bubble, 3) not acknowledging the variance from those outside the bubble, and 4) not respecting the equal validity of beliefs, goals and interests of those outside the bubble.

All of which is background to this passage I had forgotten and came across in The Bell-Curve.

Americans with and without a college degree as of 1930

Sources: Brigham, 1932; Learned and Wood, 1938
Click to enlarge

It is easy to see from the figure above why cognitive stratification was only a minor part of the social landscape in 1930. At any given level of cognitive ability, the number of people without college degrees dwarfed the number who had them. College graduates and the noncollege population did not differ much in IQ And even the graduates of the top universities (an estimate based on the Ivy League data for 1928) had IQs well within the ordinary range of ability.

The comparable picture sixty years later, based on our analysis of the NLSY, is shown in the next figure, again depicted as normal distributions. Note that the actual distributions may deviate from perfect normality, especially out in the tails.

Americans with and without a college degree as of 1990

Click to enlarge.

The college population has grown a lot while its mean IQ has risen a bit. Most bright people were not going to college in 1930 (or earlier)—waiting on the bench, so to speak, until the game opened up to them. By 1990, the noncollege population, drained of many bright youngsters, had shifted downward in IQ While the college population grew, the gap between college and noncollege populations therefore also grew. The largest change, however, has been the huge increase in the intelligence of the average student in the top dozen universities, up a standard deviation and a half from where the Ivies and the Seven Sisters were in 1930. One may see other features in the figure evidently less supportive of cognitive partitioning. Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, while it is true that their mean IQ is extremely high (designated by the +2.7 SDs to which the line points), they are such a small proportion of the nation’s population that they do not even register visually on this graph, and they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all. Is there anything to be concerned about? How much partitioning has really occurred?

Perhaps a few examples will illustrate. Think of your twelve closest friends or colleagues. For most readers of this book, a large majority will be college graduates. Does it surprise you to learn that the odds of having even half of them be college graduates are only six in a thousand, if people were randomly paired off? Many of you will not think it odd that half or more of the dozen have advanced degrees. But the odds against finding such a result among a randomly chosen group of twelve Americans are actually more than a million to one. Are any of the dozen a graduate of Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, University of Chicago, or Brown? The chance that even one is a graduate of those twelve schools is one in a thousand. The chance of finding two among that group is one in fifty thousand. The chance of finding four or more is less than one in a billion.

Most readers of this book—this may be said because we know a great deal about the statistical tendencies of people who read a book like this—are in preposterously unlikely groups, and this reflects the degree of partitioning that has already occurred.
In some respects, the results of the exercise today are not so different from the results that would have been obtained in former years. Sixty years ago as now, the people who were most likely to read a book of this nature would be skewed toward those who had friends with college or Ivy League college educations and advanced degrees. The differences between 1930 and 1990 are these:

First, only a small portion of the 1930 population was in a position to have the kind of circle of friends and colleagues that characterizes the readers of this book. We will not try to estimate the proportion, which would involve too many assumptions, but you may get an idea by examining the small area under the curve for college graduates in the 1930 figure, and visualize some fraction of that area as representing people in 1930 who could conceivably have had the educational circle of friends and colleagues you have. They constituted the thinnest cream floating on the surface of American society in 1930. In 1990, they constituted a class.

Second, the people who obtained such educations changed. Suppose that it is 1930 and you are one of the small number of people whose circle of twelve friends and colleagues included a sizable fraction of college graduates. Suppose you are one of the even tinier number whose circle came primarily from the top universities. Your circle, selective and uncommon as it is, nonetheless will have been scattered across a wide range of intelligence, with IQs from 100 on up. Given the same educational profile in one’s circle today, it would consist of a set of people with IQs where the bottom tenth is likely to be in the vicinity of 120, and the mean is likely to be in excess of 130—people whose cognitive ability puts them out at the edge of the population at large. What might have been a circle with education or social class as its most salient feature in 1930 has become a circle circumscribing a narrow range of high IQ scores today.

The sword cuts both ways. Although they are not likely to be among our readers, the circles at the bottom of the educational scale comprise lower and narrower ranges of IQ today than they did in 1930. When many youngsters in the top 25 percent of the intelligence distribution who formerly would have stopped school in or immediately after high school go to college instead, the proportion of high-school-only persons whose intelligence is in the top 25 percent of the distribution has to fall correspondingly. The occupational effect of this change is that bright youngsters who formerly would have become carpenters or truck drivers or postal clerks go to college instead, thence to occupations higher on the socioeconomic ladder. Those left on the lower rungs are therefore likely to be lower and more homogeneous intellectually. Likewise their neighborhoods, which get drained of the bright and no longer poor, have become more homogeneously populated by a less bright, and even poorer, residuum. In other chapters we focus on what is happening at the bottom of the distribution of intelligence.

The point of the exercise in thinking about your dozen closest friends and colleagues is to encourage you to detach yourself momentarily from the way the world looks to you from day to day and contemplate how extraordinarily different your circle of friends and acquaintances is from what would be the norm in a perfectly fluid society. This profound isolation from other parts of the IQ distribution probably dulls our awareness of how unrepresentative our circle actually is.

What is often characterized as polarization is in reality, I suspect, a function of the normal population rejecting the heavy hand of the self-anointed Mandarin Class.