This disturbing and much-reviled 845 page blockbuster (which has sold 400,000 copies in the States) ends by concluding that a return to the neighbourhood is the single reform that offers the best hope of saving a society from the ravages of its underclass and the best hope of providing an opportunity for all to feel valued. The authors regret that, in our increasingly meritocratic and efficiency-oriented societies, those with the least 'cognitive ability' - which has to be distinguished from musical ability, kinesthetic ability, personal skills, sensitivity, charm, persuasiveness, insight, sense of humour and other equally important factors that make up a rounded human being - are consigned to an underclass, living in the equivalent of urban ghettoes and suffering disproportionately from unemployment, poverty and other handicaps.
Those with below average cognitive ability (at least in so far as it can be measured by an IQ test) suffer from multiple problems in our over-complex and over-centralised meganations: they have 13 times more chance of falling below the poverty line than those with high IQ; as a group, their low IQ is three times more relevant than their home environment in determining their high school drop-out rate; they are 15 times as likely as average IQ people to be prevented from working due to health problems; their group's illegitimacy rate is 32% as against an average for society as a whole of 8% (and their babies are more likely to have a lower birth weight); and those with low IQ are four times more likely than average to be sent to prison.
The authors argue for a society where people are treated as individuals rather than group members, but the chapters of the book that have caused most clamour present findings that IQ varies between ethnic groups. On average, or so the authors argue, Ashkenazi Jews of European origin tend to have higher IQ than Chinese people, who tend to have higher IQ than Japanese people, who tend to have higher IQ than whites, who tend to have higher IQ than blacks.
The authors estimate, controversially, that IQ is 40 to 80 per cent genetically inherited rather than environmentally determined, although they accept that around the world, IQ has been tending to go up by about 1 point a year.
In my view, these chapters on racial differences could with advantage have been omitted from a book intended for wide circulation, with any debate remaining within academic journals, as the authors are naive in the extreme not to realise that their inflammatory findings (which have been much disputed by fellow academics) could be used as a tool by racist groups, as happened in Hitler's time.
In the concluding chapters of the book the authors turn to the social consequences of their findings: How should social policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in cognitive ability for reasons that are not their fault and that cognitive ability has such a powerful bearing on how well people do in modern life? They argue (and most convincingly) that the goal of politicians should be to help create a society in which all people, whatever their cognitive ability, feel that they have a valued place.
You can tell how valued your place is by how many would miss you if you were gone, and how much.
Their principal policy prescription is that a wide range of social functions should be restored to the neighbourhood when possible and otherwise to the municipality. For in a neighbourhood there are a myriad of ways to stitch people into the fabric of family and community. But governments have reduced neighbourhoods into mere localities and dormitories, not communities of people tending to their communal affairs. They have taken the social welfare system out of the hands of neighbours and voluntary organisations. They have stripped neighbourhoods of their traditional functions. For those with low cognitive ability, this is a disaster. For those with high IQ, although they can escape by moving or by forming intellectual friendships outside their neighbourhoods, or by finding friends even in cyberspace, it is also potentially a disaster, as the resulting alienation among the underclass will affect them too, leading as it will to an increasing crime problem or to increasingly illiberal methods of dealing with crime.
The complexity of modern societies can be reduced by returning power to the neighbourhood. It can also be reduced, the authors argue, by dismantling the complex rules and licences surrounding running businesses, which unfairly militate against those with low cognitive ability. The laws surrounding criminal behaviour should be simplified, so that no great sophistication is required to know right from wrong. Birth out of wedlock should be discouraged by giving the unmarried father no legal standing regarding the child, and by allowing the unmarried mother no legal basis for demanding that the father provide support to the child.
Those who work full time should not be too poor to have a decent standard of living, whatever their cognitive ability. The authors argue that the lowest earned incomes need augmenting. But they urge the ending of the extensive network of incentives and services for low-income women to have babies. They also believe that 'affirmative action' in the workplace and in universities is leading only to an increasing underswell of racial tension and white resentment at losing jobs or college places to sometimes less qualified black people. Affirmative action should be limited, they say, to its original declared goal of ensuring that those applicants who come with equal qualifications have an equal shot at being taken on, with a slight permissible bias towards the candidate from an ethnic minority.
If their recommendations are not taken to heart by policy makers, the authors believe that there will be an increasing 'secession of the successful', of the meritocracy, who will have their own schools, commercial court systems and secure estates guarded by their own security forces. Racism will re-emerge in a virulent form and a substantial proportion of the lower IQ population will be relegated to a high-tech version of Indian reservations, with their lives circumscribed by a custodial state.
This taboo-breaking book is deeply disturbing, and affronts many of my liberal assumptions. I would still prefer a society that accepted the theory of multiple intelligences, even at the cost of stretching the definition of intelligence. Instinctively I accept Howard Gardner's theory that IQ is merely one type of intelligence. There are seven in all - linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal. Surely a sane society would value all seven. But, if all the academic research this book draws on can be relied on (a big if), it does seem to indicate that IQ, however accurate a measurement it may or may not be, and whatever it is that it actually measures, and whether we like it or not, happens to have a central role in our high technology societies in determining everything from children's behaviour problems to divorce rates (half as likely amongst high IQ people). I wholeheartedly support the book's conclusion that only a massive decentralisation of power to the neighbourhood can improve the quality of life not only for those in danger of joining the underclass but also, I would stress, the quality of life for every one of us.
If I were prime minister, my most urgent priority task would be to reintroduce parish councils to urban areas, with real taxation and other powers, with money for innovatory cultural and employment initiatives, and control, within guidelines, over welfare payments. Anyone who thinks that this is an unrealistic proposal, should read this book and foresee the dangers that could otherwise lie ahead.
In one of the early IQ tests, they found that women tended to outperform men. So they simply changed the questions until men did as well as women. Similarly, I believe that each race could save its pride by devising an IQ test that responds to its own background and interests, and in which it tends to perform at least as well as any other race.
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