Facing Reality by Charles Murray

Author:Charles Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Differences in the Hiring Pools for Extremely High-IQ Jobs

I turn now to an issue that involves only a tiny proportion of the workforce but has high visibility: the rarity of Africans and Latins in the most prestigious jobs in the private sector. That rarity is often used as undeniable evidence of systemic racism in the job market.

Many of those high-prestige jobs are filled by people not merely in the top few percentiles of cognitive ability, but well into the top percentile. Recall the discussion of the “width” of the top percentile of a bell curve in Chapter 3 – LeBron James is in the same percentile as starting players on ordinary college teams. The same phenomenon applies to an oncologist in an ordinary practice and the chief of oncology at a major research hospital. The former may be an excellent oncologist, but the latter has undergone a severe winnowing process that among other things has selected specifically for evidence of intellectual brilliance. Other examples of positions that select for extremely high cognitive ability are:

A full professorship at an elite university

A senior position in the financial industry

A senior position in the IT industry

Law partner in a major firm in a major city

CEO of a major corporation

This is not to say that intellectually brilliant people typically have important jobs in a society – on the contrary, few do – but that a characteristic of people who rise to the top in every cognitively demanding profession in elite academia and elite organizations in the private sector is exceptionally high cognitive ability. I will operationalize exceptionally high as a minimum IQ of 135. High-prestige jobs in government and the nonprofit sector are also sometimes filled by exceptionally able people, but the rigor of the screening process varies a lot by job and organization.

Why are there so few minorities in these high-prestige jobs? It’s a numbers game in which the odds against a Latin achieving one of those positions are high and the odds against an African are prohibitive, even if we assume that there is no racism whatsoever among the employers for high-prestige jobs.

To illustrate, I’ll use the cohort of young Americans ages 25–29, the age at which the potential candidates for such jobs are coming out of law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate STEM departments. In 2019, there were 23.2 million Americans in that age group. About 228,000 people in that age group can be expected to have IQs of 135 or higher.

The racial distribution of Americans ages 25–29 in 2019 was more multiracial than among the older population. Only 54 percent were European while 20 percent were Latin, 15 percent were African, and 6 percent were Asian. But that reduced dominance of Europeans in the total population doesn’t make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool that contained only about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins compared to 50,700 Asians and 160,100 Europeans. (Uncertainty about these numbers arises because the standard deviation for each race must be estimated.

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