488
PHILIP ROSENBERG
most comfortable. Nowhere is this more clear than in the averagf American 's
faith that our socioeconomic system is largely meritocratic. The rich, on the
whole, can congratulate themselves on having earned their riches and the poor
are made to feel that they are deservingly poor. To be sure, only case-hardened
reactionaries imagine that the cream is perfectly free to rise, but in general we
tend to believe that, insofar as the system is working well,
carrieres
are
ouvertes
aux talents.
Inequality,
by Christopher Jencks and seven coauthors, all of whom are
associated with Harvard University's Center for Educational Policy Research,
examines the American system of distributive justice in considerable detail and
concludes that the allocation of rewards in our society is appallingly random
relative to the things Americans believe our system is geared to reward. To a
startlingly large extent, Jencks shows, inequality in America cannot be ex–
plained by differences in inherited intelligence, cognitive skills, quality of
schooling, extent of schooling, or any other factor that could give our system a
reasonable right to call itself a meritocracy.
Consider inherited intelligence, for example. Although the most geneti–
cally advantaged fifth of the population, taken as a group, earns 35 to 40 per–
cent more than the most geoetically disadvantaged fifth, the amount of income
inequality among individuals with the same genetic endowment is only mar–
ginally less than the inequality found in the population as a whole. "Our best
estimate," Jencks writes, "is that we would find on ly about 3 percent less in–
come inequality in genetically homogeneous subpopulations than in the en–
tire American popu lation." This means that even if one could equalize the
intelligence of all members of our society, one wou ld thereby reduce inequal–
ity by no more than 3 percent.
It
is important to be scrupulously careful about what this sort of analysis
means , for in the year since the publication of
Inequality,
Jencks's work has
been the target of a torrent of abuse, most of it from people who have not
understood what he was saying. Jencks examines inequality by focusing on
inequalities between individuals rather than inequalities between groups.
This approach, he says, "accounts for much of the discrepancy between our
conclusions and those of others who have examined the same data."
It
is, of
course, these conclusions that have occasioned the controversy surrounding
the publication of
Inequality.
For the most part, those offended fall into two
classes: educators, including educational "reformers," and blacks, a long with
their white allies in the fight for black civil rights. This is unfortunate, espe–
cially in the laner case, because in fact Jencks is on their side far more deeply
than they seem yet to have rea lized.
Educators have taken issue with Jencks for what they take to be his proc–
lamation of the inutility of education and educational reform . Jencks 's dis–
covery that differences in schooling fail to account for individual inequality in
