Arthur Jensen
PhD, Columbia University
For years, many of America’s elite private schools used the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-R) as an admissions hurdle for four-year-olds. (No, not fourteen. Four.) Perhaps some still do. The schools justified this IQ test by saying it was a good predictor of academic success and therefore a valuable guide to who should or shouldn’t be invited in. Indeed, years of tracking showed the WPPSI-R to correlate fairly well with future academic success, from elementary school performance right up through college and beyond. Little kids who did well on the test tended to become successful, well-compensated adults.
However, as some experts in the field pointed out, there’s a simpler, more effective way to judge whether a four-year-old will be a paragon of achievement: just look at the parents’ tax returns. It turns out that parents’ income is more highly correlated than the WPPSI-R—or any test—with a youngster’s odds of succeeding in life. It’s not about money per se. It’s about what people with adequate resources can provide a child—materially, intellectually, maybe even spiritually—to set that child up for a successful life, and how those lacking the resources often cannot. Since the schools were not about to demand prospective parents’ tax returns,* the test was a good, seemingly anodyne, scientific-style substitute.
What is it that IQ tests test? The simple, if jejune,* answer is: IQ tests test your ability to take IQ tests. Since these tests are written by highly educated members of the dominant culture, with little thought to what members of less dominant subcultures might or might not know, a more substantive answer might be: IQ tests gauge how well various elements of the dominant culture are integrated into your consciousness. Books are written on this subject, but this isn’t one of them. Instead, let us segue to Berkeley prof Arthur Jensen, PhD.
Focusing on educational psychology, Jensen made his bones by unambiguously coming down on the side of nature in the perennial nature vs. nurture debate. It’s a profoundly conservative stance: if nature—genetics—conquers all, then belief in the whole hopey-changey thing (a.k.a. “progress”) is pointless. You are the way you are because of your ancestors. Live with it. And shut up.
Perhaps that’s a bit overstated. Jensen didn’t say that nature conquers all. He said that nature conquers 80 percent of all. In a 1969 paper in the Harvard Educational Review that caused a considerable amount of drooling among fair-skinned reactionaries, he concluded that Head Start programs had failed in their quest to boost the average IQ of dark-skinned schoolchildren. This, he said, was because 80 percent of the variance in IQ scores was attributable to the genetic endowments of the test population. In other words, their genes are encoded for stupidity and they are therefore 80 percent condemned to be stupid, regardless of how much preschool “enrichment” they’re exposed to.
Jensen’s work was widely criticized; there were protests outside his office at Berkeley.* But away from coddled-liberal enclaves, his material killed. The Pioneer Fund, founded by a rich crackpot* who was devoted to eugenics, and was once presided over by Harry Laughlin, contributed more than $1 million* to further Jensen’s “research.”
One way to tell whether you are an actual scientist rather than a scientific racist is to ask yourself: “Would I take grant money from an entity whose sole purpose is to promote racism, or would I eschew such an unsavory source, soldier on in my attempts to gain less tainted funding, and occasionally complain bitterly and publicly that my work is being misunderstood by racist assholes?” Whether or not Jensen asked that question of himself, what he said to the Pioneer Fund was: “Thank you for your kind contribution.”*
And so, back to IQ testing. Jensen’s premise—behind all the sciency noise about the sad, sad state of African Americans’ IQs—was that IQ is a real thing that really means something, really. He even concocted a make-believe genetic component, which he laughably christened “the g* factor,” and which he claimed had a lot to do with the difference between the IQs of blacks and whites. Think of it this way: the g factor is to IQ what IQ is to tax returns. To put it scientifically:
IQ2 = (the g factor)(tax returns)
So, solving for IQ:
Finally, a clear definition of IQ! It is shocking and surprising that Arthur Jensen did not devise this brilliant, enigmatic formula himself, considering that those who did, the authors of the present volume, know next to nothing about the subject. On the other hand, if Jensen had promulgated such a formula we probably would never have heard of him, he would not have caused near riots at Berkeley, and he would not have become a grant magnet and icon of the racist right.