Behavior: Is Equality Bad for You?

In every age, egalitarians have pursued the ideal of a classless society achieved through freedom of opportunity. Now a Harvard professor of psychology has branded the ideal a chimera. On the contrary, says Richard Herrnstein, educational equality and unrestricted social mobility will lead to a stratified society of hereditary castes.

Reviewing a century of research, Herrnstein concludes in the September Atlantic that intelligence is largely hereditary, that I.Q. influences social status, and that the nation already has a high-I.Q. ruling class and a lower class with I.Q.s below average. He believes, moreover, that...

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