Mental Ability and the Just Meritocracy

I just completed the recently released book, The Just Meritocracy: IQ, Class Mobility, and American Social Policy by Paul Kamolnick, 2005. The author begins, “Class, sex, and race are commonly recognized within sociological science as the most significant causal variables explaining contemporary patterns of social stratification and inequality. It is one thing to agree on the importance of these variable, however, and quite another to properly conceptualize them and identify the mechanisms by which they are made effective. In stark contrast to the extreme socioenvironmental determinism found in many standard sociological textbooks, The Just Meritocracy: IQ, Class Mobility, and American Social Policy takes up the first of these variables—class, or socioeconomic status—and defends the following thesis: Individual-level variation in class mobility is significantly mediated by inherited variations in individual mental ability. Therefore, if contemporary social policy is to adequately address differential class-mobility patterns, the nature of this heritable component must be taken into account. A revised humanistic public policy will result that does empirical justice to the scientific discoveries regarding variation at the individual level, and, by suggesting new types of environmental and genomic intervention, we may more fully realize our ethical ideals. The just Meritocracy and its sequelae now in progress arose as part of my own effort to analyze, clarify, and refortify the ethical foundations of distributive justice and equal opportunity in contemporary American society.” (Italics in the original.)

I will not comment on the first two chapters, as they deal with the IQ debate and the improvement in life’s outcomes when one has a higher rather than a lower mental ability. Chapter three deals with policy implications where stratification in economic success based on both nepotism and merit, and how these may interact in the future. Kamolnick notes that “Here we focus exclusively on an abilities-based ideal whereby individuals are entitled to rewards strictly commensurate with their actual abilities and work-effort, and not as was the case before the liberal-democratic revolution, on the basis of socially assigned privileges and status assignments.” We tend to forget that until the middle of the 20th century, prestigious universities were still recruiting most students based on their parents’ status, not on the individual intelligence of applicants. Today, these legacy admissions are condemned as being affirmative action for Whites, even though non-Jewish Whites are now underrepresented at the most prestigious Ivy League universities.

A truly meritocratic society then links ability and effort to entitlement to valued goods. There are numerous distortions of this principle of course, such as unions, minimum wage laws, illegal patronage in government work forces, welfare, the powerful lobby of schoolteachers that refuse to allow for competition from the private sector. Almost everywhere one looks, people try to circumvent a meritocratic society, with the most egregious distortion being that the only reason some minorities do not succeed is due to racism. Again, this phenomena is recent.

Our founding fathers, “described and championed the rise of this new ‘natural’ aristocracy based on merit and genuine individual ability. Espousing a doctrine of philosophical inegalitarianism, they asserted that unequally endowed individuals whether that unequal endowment be manifest as innate propensities, gifts, talents, intelligence, risk tolerance, or motivational drive are morally justified in receiving rewards commensurate with their unequal endowment-mediated achievements. Inequality of reward per se (in modern parlance, ‘inequality of outcome’) was not conceived by them as unearned, but rather quite deserved or at the very least an inescapable consequence of a free society.”

Kamolnick also notes however that after elimination of the European aristocracy, that a new artificial aristocracy can easily arise—and has arisen in the United States. Dynasties now are formed and the rewards passed on to offspring where they make policy and direct the nation with far greater influence than deserved. This includes movie stars, religious leaders, media magnates, politicians, etc. The media exposes a few to the vast majority, and we humbly follow them. However, this blind submission to authority is a remnant that has been hung around our necks by our tribal evolutionary past, and will get in the way of any true meritocracy until it is recognized and resisted by a more intelligent and scientifically enlightened public. (Stanovich, 2004)

Kamolnick’s interpretation of a just meritocracy questions the empiricism of the liberal-democrats: “Apparently convinced by extreme anti-innatist environmentalist doctrines, in place of the classical theory of innate inegalitarianism, liberal-democrats claim that individuals are in all relevant respects innately identical in their potentials, aptitudes, capabilities, and intelligence….[however,] despite an ideology of abilities-egalitarianism, liberal democrats in practice differ significantly from communists/socialists in their willingness to tolerate, as a matter of apparent necessity, the existence of the privately constituted familial mode of lineal inheritance and the existence of a private capital market governed by the profit motive and individual choice.”

He then goes on to try and explain his case for multiform differential environmentalism (MDE). Based on the observed fact that people differ widely, we should then tailor environments to individual’s personal attributes and talents. For example, the No Child Left Behind program assumes that all children are equally educable, so there is little in the way of singling out special needs beyond just intensifying the expenditures for educational egalitarianism in outcomes (which must in the end fail miserably).

In fact, as he points out, our Western culture is based on the erroneous assumption that children are shaped by the shared environment (nurture) and grudgingly more and more by each individual’s nature. Over the last few decades however, behavior geneticists now know that the shared environment fades to zero as we reach adulthood in a number of behavioral traits, and to 80% with regards to intelligence. The other 20% is attributed to the non-shared environment that individuals find themselves in due to gene-environment interaction, but the details how the non-shared environment shapes us is unknown. It includes such uncontrollable factors as the friends we have, the lucky date with a beautiful bimbo or a beautiful intellectual, etc. Everyday events shape what path we will follow, and that path can change our expressed intelligence (somewhat) or other behavioral traits (usually 50% genetic and 50% non-shared environment in adulthood).

Kamolnick’s argument for a multiform differential environmentalism as the solution to a future increase in stratification between the haves and the have-nots seems rather weak or impractical. A simpler solution would just let children progress through the educational system for example at their own pace, with each child given the same resources as any other child.

Kamolnick does echo Salter’s observation that homogenous societies are more willing to provide welfare for others when they are more similar as in the Scandinavian countries (Salter, 2004). Kamolnick states, “Moreover, the significant revisions in means-tested entitlements that have occurred over the last decade also indicate that the political battle-lines are being drawn more clearly between a non-tax-paying, formerly entitled population and a tax-paying population no longer fully convinced of its moral obligation. These battle-lines easily extend into a range of social policies designed to provide so-called needy and disadvantaged persons with transfer payments in the forms of housing and rent subsidies; food and energy subsidies; tax subsidies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); and health-care subsidies (for example, Medicaid, public clinics).”

We can only hope that this trend will continue, in Europe and in the United States and Canada, as increasing numbers of non-tax-paying parasites move us into a more hardened inegalitarian stance against those who cannot fulfill their expected potentials genetically. But Kamolnick is even gloomy where nepotism interferes with a pure meritocracy: “Unless we consent to the obliteration of human lineal-inheritance and its attendant glue—namely, genetic selfishness and inclusive fitness—a pure meritocracy will forever elude our species. This is essentially a conflict between the value of efficiency with its long-term benefits accruing to kin and nonkin alike, and the value of one’s own genetic posterity regardless of efficiency for nonkin or kin. Put another way, it is a conflict between the advantages arising from the nepotistic promotion of one’s own, and the advantages arising from the support of more productive nonkin whose innate endowments may or may not benefit one’s own kin. This, it appears to me, is an inescapable conflict arising in a nation-state and an economic system such as ours that is based on a nonkin social contract.”

In short, he contends that say for a small business, nepotism will lead to inefficiencies because the best workers based on merit will be displaced by nepotism. I see little basis for this pessimism. There are all kinds of inefficiencies built into any organization. When nepotism and patronage diminishes the effectiveness of government organizations, a merit system can be set up to prevent abuse. Large corporations have their nepotism and their good-old-boy networks to take advantage of the wealth generated, but in the end, the stockholders and the market place will correct the abuse when it becomes too costly. And in small businesses, the overly nepotistic will lose out to the more efficient meritocratic system. Merit versus nepotism can be kept in a sustainable balance, especially in a market based, libertarian oriented type of economy.

Kamolnick then warns, “Far more radical interventions can be imagined, however, that would shatter the existing consensus and push social policy into heretofore uncharted, highly morally and politically charged, and indeed taboo, territory. Specifically, the question must be raised whether in order to truly achieve an equal-opportunity-based meritocratic society it is ethically permissible, if not ethically required, to alter actual DNA. In short, does contemporary behavior-genetic research and meritocratic ethics support the case for policies deliberately designed to alter the actual molecular biology of individuals at the germ-line level or by using non-germ-line technologies—in order to ‘level the genetic playing field’ and equalize the opportunities associated with the inheritance of differential [mental ability] and its role as a dominant causal factor in the g-nexus?”

And later, “Human mental ability functions as an inherited ascribed status that undermines the liberal revolution’s permanent revolution against unearned privilege. Yet as a natural evolutionary product, human beings are governed by a nepotistic logic that unites one’s genetic and economic capital into possessive and private institutions whose good and evil are both part of the deal…. It is not too far-fetched to imagine a future subspeciation event that pits H. sapiens naturalensis against H. sapiens genenhancis in a fight to define the terms of competition and expectations demanded within future meritocracies, and for this event to mark a permanent segregation of our species in its quest forward.”

I found Kamolnick’s arguments unconvincing as regards to ethics, morality, and what is taboo. In the future, like all things in a free market, genetic or pharmaceutical enhancements will be embraced by the futurists, shunned by the traditionalists, and as the technology advances the Left will both try to stop it along with trying to make it available to all equally. Fortunately, the medical profession has always been willing to provide us with what we want for a price, especially in a highly mobile world. The more restrictions that are attempted, the more the elite will merely fly to another country where they can get the genetically enhanced child that they desire, including perhaps selecting for the best eggs, the best sperm, and the best surrogate mother to carry the super-child to term, and all for the same price as adopting a healthy blue-eyed blond child.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Wednesday, October 5, 2005 at 05:55 PM in Race realism
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