AEI: But there are certainly going to be politicians, even if Trump should lose badly, who present a cleaned up version of the Trump agenda and say “I can sell that.” So you’re going to have a populist, Trump-like candidate, and then some candidates pushing a more conservative, free-market agenda.
Well, Jim, maybe I’m a good example of the positives that can come out of the Trump phenomenon, because it’s forced me to rethink. You know, I’ve never really wrote about immigration, never published much on it. But my own attitudes have always been that government has to be able to secure its own borders, and if controlling our borders meant building a fence, that’s OK with me. And I just don’t love immigration but I especially love high-skill immigration, and I’ve been sympathetic to the notion of low-skill immigration creating problems for working-class Americans but I haven’t been energized enough about that to actually write anything about it. Well, I think that was a mistake on my part.
I am now prepared to support extreme restrictions on low-skill immigration, whereas I wasn’t before and I’m not doing it because I’m scared of the Trump phenomenon, I’m doing it because I’m saying to myself I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to a really legitimate grievance. Now, what I’d like to see is a lot of people on the right embracing that kind of appropriate response to Trump and then redoubling our efforts to explain why free trade is such a good thing — because there you can explain this is a win-win situation, protectionism is a lose-lose situation, and I think that we have to stick by our guns in something like that.
On immigration, my concern is that I see that a lot who say “We need to build a wall” or “We need to deport illegal immigrants”, and they move from that to “We need to stop even legal immigrants if they’re low skill”, and then they move to, “we can’t let in the high-skill immigrants either” and “We can’t let foreign students study here.”
I think you’re being too pessimistic there, Jim. I think that there is no constituency out there for stopping high-skill immigration…
Got you. I asked the Twitterverse what I should ask you. One question is, of course, do you still stand by “The Bell Curve”?
Duh. Of course I do. Look, Jim, the dirty little secret about “The Bell Curve” is that it did not push the scientific envelope at all. We were in the scientific mainstream. Every single significant statement we made — scientific statement we made — has not only not been refuted; they have been confirmed by subsequent research. Now, if you’re saying do I stand by the things that people said, “The Bell Curve” said, no, because we never claimed those things in “The Bell Curve.” The rap on “The Bell Curve” was that Herrnstein and Murray wanted to prove the genetic inferiority of blacks to whites in IQ, which is not even an issue in “The Bell Curve,” let alone not a major issue. But unfortunately that’s the way the book has been characterized. Do I stand by “The Bell Curve” as it was actually written? Sure, totally.
What should policymakers know or understand about IQ?
That it is an all-purpose resource that has, because of our economy and the improvements in our educational system, allowed people of high-ability who disproportionately earn a lot of money, to create a new class in the United States, a class that did not exist 60 years ago. A cognitive elite. And unless you take into account all of the effects of that class at the top and a class at the bottom that has gotten the short end of the stick in this very valuable general resource called intelligence, unless you understand the dynamics of that, you are going to pursue solutions in social policy that don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of working.
If you don’t buy that theory and you think people’s intelligence quotients are very malleable, then what are policy solutions that you’ll pursue?
You’ll go around saying things like, “Everybody should go to college.” The reality is the percentage of 18-year-olds who can thrive in college — I’m not saying get through college, I’m saying thrive in college — is actually about 10-12% of the population. Now insofar as we have about 35% of the population with B.A.s, obviously a lot more people can get through it, but the actual cognitive demands are such that it is actually and educational experience that a relatively small proportion of the population can really profit from.
