Neoliberalism and IQ: Naturalizing economic and racial inequality

Inequality, poverty, and early mental testing

Nearly three decades before neoliberalism emerged, the pioneers of mental testing were also deeply concerned over the nature of inequality and socialist “threats.” ³ Henry Goddard, in his 1920 Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence, wrote:

We may perhaps be permitted to apply the principle to another problem that looms up rather large at the present time, namely, socialism and especially its extreme form of Bolshevism… These men in their ultra-altruistic and humane attitude, their desire to be fair to the workman, maintain that the great inequalities in social life are wrong and unjust. For example, here is a laborer who is wearing $8.00 shoes; why should I spend $12.00 while he can only afford $8.00? I live in a home that is artistically decorated, carpets, high-priced furniture, expensive pictures and other luxuries; there is a laborer that lives in a hovel with no carpets, no pictures and the coarsest kind of furniture… Now the fact is, that workman may have a ten year intelligence while you have a twenty. To demand for him such a home as you enjoy is as absurd as it would be to insist that every laborer should receive a graduate fellowship. How can there be such a thing as social equality with this wide range of mental capacity? … As for an equal distribution of the wealth of the world that is equally absurd. The man of intelligence has spent his money wisely, has saved until he has enough to provide for his needs in case of sickness, while the man of low intelligence, no matter how much money he would have earned, would have spent much of it foolishly and would never have anything ahead … Socialism is a beautiful theory but the facts must be faced. (pp. 99–102)

As described by Zenderland (1998), Goddard imagined a utopian state, modelled on the Vineland School, in which benevolent leaders of superior intelligence arranged the conditions of social and economic life according to the science of mental levels. All would be satisfied with their assigned lot in life. Pauperism and class differences, not racial difference, were his focus. “Feeble-mindedness” was a major source of poverty, and the feeble-minded were highly likely to become paupers or criminals (Goddard, 1914). The spread of feeble-mindedness would be eliminated by appropriate eugenic measures, guided by intelligence testing. Goddard did not support the mass sterilization favored by many early 1900s eugenicists. He emphasized the importance of education and training to “cure” feeble-mindedness, but heredity, especially the hereditary quality of families, remained the basis of social and economic inequality.

These views on poverty were largely shared by Lewis Madison Terman, who considered himself a progressive and a liberal, and by many others in the optimistic heyday of the American Eugenics Society, pre-1930s. Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, Edward L. Thorndike, Robert Yerkes, Clark Wissler, and Carl Brigham were all still members of the American Eugenics Society Advisory Council in 1928, according to the society letterhead. For Terman (1916), “high-grade morons” could become “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” but, speaking of the test results for two young boys of Portuguese descent, “no amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens” (p. 91). Organizing society to face these challenges would not only involve universal intelligence testing in the schools, but substantial government regulation, eugenic planning, and adjustments to democracy (see Carson, 2007; Minton, 1988; W. H. Tucker, 1994). Despite the objections of Walter Lippmann and others, the proponents of mental testing in the interwar period hoped to transform schools, business, and government. Such regulation and programming would have been anathema to most founders of the Mont Pelerin Society.

IQ and libertarian neoliberals

As noted earlier, Mont Pelerin participants varied widely on the role of government regulation, from the more “statist” view that government was necessary for ensuring the money supply, creating competition, and guaranteeing free markets, to the libertarian view that except for guaranteeing property rights, government was inherently evil and always a threat to freedom. Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) represented the strongest example of the libertarian end of the neoliberal spectrum. ⁴ A child of East European Jewish immigrants, Rothbard grew up with his father’s ideas of free enterprise, private property, and loathing of socialism in all forms. His neighbors in New York City were often communists (Rothbard, 1994a). His PhD in economics from Columbia University was held up for a number of years over disagreement with economist, and later Federal Reserve Chair, Arthur Burns, but was eventually granted in 1956. Working in the early 1950s as an independent scholar with support from the highly conservative William Volker Fund, Rothbard attended a seminar held by Mises, who praised his work highly. Starting in 1966, he taught part-time at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute until age 60 when a libertarian benefactor created a chair of economics at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, a position Rothbard occupied up until his death in 1995. Rothbard helped found the Cato Institute (the libertarian think tank funded by Charles Koch) in 1978, and he founded a Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976, a Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977, The Ludwig Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama in 1982, and its Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He had a substantial influence on both Ron Paul and Rand Paul, members of the Tea Party, as well as the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, despite their disagreements.

Rothbard developed a version of libertarian neoliberalism in which not some, but all functions of the state, including the courts, would be taken over by private, capitalist enterprises. All taxation was theft. This position came to be known as anarcho-capitalism, a political program based on Misian economics. Although Rothbard’s views were widely rejected by mainstream economists, they developed a significant, if cult-like, public following. Rothbard considered the Chicago School “statists,” and he hated Milton Friedman, whom he called a “little bastard” in private correspondence (J. P. Jackson, 2017). Rothbard combined these economic views with highly traditional social values, and his position is sometimes known as “paleo-libertarianism.” This melding of economics with “traditional morality” was shared by many libertarian economists, although Rothbard was particularly vituperative on feminism and gay rights (e.g., Rothbard, 1973). ⁵ Rothbard (1992) and his followers at the Mises Institute were clear that their aim was a radical political transformation through destruction of the modern state: slash taxes, slash welfare, abolish affirmative action, crush criminals by having police administer instant punishment, clear the streets of “bums and vagrants,” abolish the Federal Reserve, stop all foreign aid, end public education, and return religion to the schools. Goldwag (2017) described how this program encouraged and enabled coalitions with right-wing populists and promoters of hatred, including White nationalists, historical revisionists of WWII, Holocaust deniers, apologists for the Confederacy, and even leading White supremacist David Duke.

A core position of Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism is that inequality is a fact of nature (Rothbard, 1971, 1973, 1995; Sciabarra, 2000). Like his mentor and inspiration, Ludwig Mises, Rothbard maintained that the truths of human behavior and economic life were to be deduced from basic axioms, such as “individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals” (Rothbard, 1997, p. 58) by the method Mises termed “praxeology.” ⁶ Mises had argued that economic inequality was absolutely necessary to provide incentives for competition, and that the rich functioned to encourage the production and desire for luxuries that would gradually become necessities, a position that Hayek also supported. Early on, Mises (1922/1951) made it clear that inequality extended to ethnicity, although he rejected Gobineau-style racial theory:

It may be assumed that races do differ in intelligence and willpower, and that, this being so, they are very unequal in their ability to form society, and further that the better races distinguish themselves precisely by their special aptitude for strengthening social cooperation. (Mises, 1922/1951, p. 325)

During WWII, Mises (1944) strongly criticized Nazi racial policies and persecutions, although inequality among individuals remained central to his economic theories (see J. A. Tucker & Rockwell, 1991).

For both Mises and Rothbard, inequality was axiomatic and therefore required no empirical demonstration. But for purposes of demolishing “egalitarianism,” which he termed “a revolt against nature,” Rothbard (1973) also invoked data:

The genetic basis for inequality of intelligence has also become increasingly evident, despite the emotional abuse heaped upon such studies by fellow scientists as well as the lay public. Studies of identical twins raised in contrasting environments have been among the ways that this conclusion has been reached; and Professor Richard Herrnstein has recently estimated that 80 percent of the variability in human intelligence is genetic in origin. Herrnstein concludes that any political attempts to provide environmental equality for all citizens will only intensify the degree of socioeconomic differences caused by genetic variability. (p. 355)

On ethnicity, Rothbard (1994b) took inherent and ineluctable differences in intelligence and temperament to be self-evident, and praised Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) The Bell Curve for telling:

the home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private … the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups and races differ among themselves in intelligence and many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary … Other scientists, here and abroad, including such intelligence experts as Belfast professor Richard Lynn, have confirmed these doctrines over and over. Philippe Rushton, a heroic professor at University of Western Ontario, has literally not been able to teach any of his classes in person, because of continued disruption by thugs. (Rothbard, 1994b, pp. 1–5)

Rothbard opposed all civil rights legislation as an evil intrusion on property rights. He was clear about the uses to which alleged evidence of inequality should be put:

Why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists? … Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors. (1994b, p. 10)

Here, Rothbard made clear the key discursive role for IQ in the naturalizing of inequality and in the service of the only rights that matter to anarcho-capitalists: property rights.

Deploying The Bell Curve

Rothbard’s use of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), despite his preference for a deductive approach, shows how Charles Murray’s work could be deployed as the scientific/empirical answer. Many academics treated The Bell Curve as serious scientific work, to be judged without reference to the ideological context and commitments that Murray brought to his collaboration with Herrnstein, commitments outlined in Murray’s (1984) earlier work, Losing Ground. Murray was, in fact, clear that he was “more libertarian than conservative” in the afterword of the The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, p. 555), and was even more explicit in his What it Means to be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (Murray, 1997).

I will not review the history of The Bell Curve, which quickly sold nearly half a million copies and produced extensive public discussion, thus weakening the repeated claim that its subject was taboo. Despite many careful critiques (e.g., C. S. Fischer et al., 1996), the book and Murray have survived, with revived presentations on conservative and neoliberal think tank websites, such as the American Enterprise Institute. Of interest here is that Murray was quite clear on how inequality can be accepted and a peaceable kingdom restored: end affirmative action, end government attempts to distort the natural order of inequality, let “neighborhoods” take back control over social functions from government. These recommendations were a step beyond the widely publicized conclusion of Arthur Jensen (1969) that compensatory education had failed. The vast but highly selective array of data Murray and Herrnstein assembled led them to the same conclusion of many early 20th-century eugenicists: poverty, crime, divorce, children “out of wedlock,” and other social ills were greatly, but not solely, the result of innate, largely ineluctable differences in intelligence. America was threatened by immigration of people from lower IQ groups and the dysgenic effects of higher breeding rates among those with lower cognitive ability, as discussed below. But for Murray the libertarian, the solution was less government, not more, with leadership provided by a “natural aristocracy” of the cognitive elite. If “we” (the White reader of relatively high IQ) would only accept the natural state of affairs and the evidence that ethnic groups differ in average cognitive ability, differential outcomes for these groups would not be a matter of racism, but of “reality.” The implication for Murray and others was that if we failed to accept the evidence, racism will increase from growing White resentment and Black frustration.

Undeterred by his critics, Murray (2002) reanalyzed some the of the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience of Youth (NLSY) data used in The Bell Curve to show that in “advantaged” families, compared to their higher IQ siblings, those with lower IQ scores had much lower income and higher rates of “out of wedlock” births. Although he suggested that quite opposite policies might be derived from these data, he was clear that: “It is time to face the reality of human inequality in abilities as a driving force behind inequality in the distribution of social and economic goods” (2002, p. 343).

Despite 23 years of denial by Murray that any differential treatment of ethnic groups would follow from his conclusions, it is important to note that Murray encouraged and supported the PhD dissertation of Jason Richwine (2009) at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The research was carried out while Richwine was at the American Enterprise Institute, a neoliberal think tank, where Murray is a Fellow (Redden, 2013). While acknowledging that the group differences might not be entirely due to heredity, Richwine treated “Hispanics” as a biological entity and concluded that the alleged lower IQ of Hispanic undocumented immigrants, compared to “native Whites” posed a threat to the economic future of America. As in Herrnstein and Murray (1994), the solution was the use of IQ tests to select immigrants, but to call the tests an assessment of “skills” to make their use more palatable. When Richwine moved to a position at the Heritage Foundation and published his findings under their banner (Richwine & Rector, 2013), he now claimed, using detailed tables and calculations, that unlawful Hispanic immigrants and their offspring would cost US taxpayers 6.3 trillion dollars. The neoliberal Heritage Fund distanced itself from these conclusions and Richwine quickly resigned, but the report remained on their website for at least the next five years.

Neoliberals and libertarian neoliberals were by no means united on the issue of immigration. For some, free movement of people was an ideal allied with free markets, free trade, and the free movement of goods, capital, and ideas across borders. Certainly, this view was enshrined in the neoliberal foundations of the European Union under Article 45 of the Treaty. In addition, some neoliberals feared that immigration restrictions to protect specific groups or industries would constitute a form of “rent seeking,” increasing wealth by political manipulation of regulations, rather than by increasing productivity. But for some American neoliberals, the immigrants are the rent seekers, resulting in welfare or other costs to the nation (e.g., see Powell, 2012). For the libertarians of the Mises Institute, immigration restriction was simply a matter of property rights (e.g., Rockwell, 2015). For others, selecting the “best” rather than “worst” people for admission was the obviously sound economic choice, much like making a wise purchase.

Milton Friedman on inequality

Neoliberal economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) praised The Bell Curve on its back cover: “This brilliant, original, objective, and lucidly written book will force you to rethink your biases and prejudices about the role that individual difference in intelligence plays in our economy, our policy, and our society.” As a quantitative economist, Friedman would have looked at The Bell Curve as a scientific demonstration of empirical truths, in contrast to Rothbard’s a priori approach and his focus on the rhetorical use of the IQ data. Friedman, a founding member and past president of the Mont Pelerin Society, had addressed the issues of ethnicity, discrimination, and inequality much earlier. His position in Capitalism and Freedom (1962), a foundational text for the neoliberal thought collective, was that capitalism and the free market render racial discrimination irrelevant and self-defeating, for in a truly free market there will be a price to pay for discrimination, such as higher wages:

A businessman or an entrepreneur who expresses preferences in his business activities that are not related to productive efficiency is at a disadvantage compared to other individuals who do not. Such an individual is in effect imposing higher costs on himself than are other individuals who do not have such preferences. Hence, in a free market they will tend to drive him out. The man who objects to buying from or working alongside a Negro, for example, thereby limits his range of choice. He will generally have to pay a higher price for what he buys or receive a lower return for his work. Or, put the other way, those of us who regard color of skin or religion as irrelevant can buy some things more cheaply as a result. … It is hard to see that discrimination can have any meaning other than a “taste” of others that one does not share. We do not regard it as “discrimination” or at least not in the same invidious sense if an individual is willing to pay a higher price to listen to one singer than to another, although we do if he is willing to pay a higher price to have services rendered to him by a person of one color than by a person of another. (1962, p. 94)

This analysis was strongly influenced by Gary Becker’s (1957) The Economics of Discrimination. Becker (1930–2014), a PhD student under Friedman, went on to be an important Chicago economist and a President of the Mont Pelerin Society. Although Friedman “deplored the prejudice and narrowness” of those who discriminate on the basis of color or religion, he argued that “the appropriate recourse is for me to seek to persuade them that their tastes are bad and that they should change their views and their behavior, not to use coercive power to enforce my tastes and attitudes on others” (1962, p. 95). For Friedman, racial discrimination in housing or employment was thus a matter of “taste,” and he vigorously opposed all civil rights legislation as interference in the free market. He opposed both school segregation and school integration by governments, and famously initiated the school voucher movement to provide “free choice” and competition among schools. And, it was Friedman who popularized the core neoliberal narrative that government intervention, not the evils of capitalism, caused and prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The neoliberal solutions to crime and racism are the same as for all other social problems, as summarized so clearly by Cato Institute writer Doug Bandow (1997):

What can we do? Some of the answers, as noted earlier, are better policy. Crime must be detected, punished, and deterred, especially in poor neighborhoods, where residents are so vulnerable. The government’s educational monopoly must be broken, giving disadvantaged students a chance to receive a real education. The economy needs to be deregulated and opened to help everyone, rather than controlled to enrich special interests, such as labor unions, which back laws like the Davis-Bacon Act, which restrict the hiring of minorities … Racism is harder to address, especially through government. Some race-based decisions, like those of cab drivers who pass by blacks, reflect reasons other than prejudice. Are we really prepared to penalize people who, even if wrongly, believe their lives might be in danger—especially when today’s anti-discrimination laws have misfired, creating a quota mentality and encouraging disappointed job-seekers to routinely scream racism? (p. 143)

Bandow did not mention IQ testing as part of the solution. If IQ testing were to play an important role in the neoliberal world, it would necessarily be the choice of private companies and private schools to discover whether testing and sorting yielded economic benefits. But some anarcho-capitalists and libertarians object in principle to making IQ an explanatory concept for economic life. Libertarian author Jeffrey A. Tucker (2016) argued that IQ tests were the tools of central planners like Terman, and therefore the enemy of freedom. Success in the marketplace may or may not require high intelligence, and it is the marketplace that decides what is of value. Encouraging the idea that prosperity is the result of individual genius rather than a proper free market was a dangerous path. Similarly, Rothbard follower Predrag Rajsic, argued on the Mises Institute website that Lynn and Vanhanen’s (2002) use of IQ data to explain the differing wealth of nations (see below) was irrelevant and inappropriate to the Austrian economic vision (Rajsic, 2010). These objections from the extreme libertarian community do not appear to reflect the views of “mainstream” neoliberals.

A free market/IQ synthesis

Recently, a new synthesis of free market ideals with “national IQ” variations has emerged. Chicago School economist Gary Becker popularized the concept of “human capital” as a way of incorporating an individual’s skills, knowledge, intelligence, creativity, and other characteristics that contributed to the ability to produce economic value. In categorizing human abilities along with machinery as forms of capital, social capital fit well with the neoliberal conception of homo economicus. Becker (1964) was primarily interested in how education raised economic output, and his broad concept of human capital gave no special place to IQ. In contrast, psychologist Heiner Rindermann (e.g., 2007, 2008, 2012) claimed that IQ is the most important form of social capital, and constitutes a major explanatory factor in the economic progress and differing wealth of nations. In a stance that acknowledged the effects of social and educational environments on test performance, Rindermann nevertheless argued that there is substantial evidence for the role of genetic factors in IQ differences across nations and ethnic groups. Rindermann was cautious about the difficulties of aggregating data from convenience samples collected with varied tests in varied decades, but still presented such data for many countries, often using school performance tests as a substitute for IQ tests.

Of most relevance here is that Rindermann argued for an interaction between economic freedom of the neoliberal kind, intelligence, and the wealth of nations. Using “smart fraction theory,” Rindermann and Thompson (2011) carried out a path analysis comparison of 90 nations with the mean IQ of the “cognitive elite,” or “smart fraction,” operationalized as the top 95th percentile of IQ, as the main interest. They concluded that higher elite IQ predicted higher STEM achievements (patents, Nobel prizes in science, number of scientists, and exportation of technology), which in turn predicted greater wealth and GDP. They argued that these effects were mediated by the degree of “economic freedom,” which was defined as “property rights, rule of law, low customs, taxes, government-spending ratio, and trade restrictions [emphasis added]” (p. 758). Their country-by-country ratings of economic freedom were taken from those of the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute, two important neoliberal think tanks. Measures of wealth inequality or social justice were notably absent. They concluded:

Our central thesis is that national wealth depends mainly on a nation’s internal attributes, predominant among which is national cognitive ability and, specifically, the intellectual level of the cognitive elite, which facilitates cultural and social progress generally … Wealth in modern times is the result of cognitive capitalism. Cognitive capitalism refers to the idea that the cognitive ability of society as a whole, and of its cognitive elite in particular, is the prerequisite for the development of technological progress, for the historic development of modern society with its increasing cognitive demands and complexity, and for the wealth furthering norms and institutions that form the core of the capitalist system (economic freedom, free markets, rule of law, property rights). (p. 762)

Rindermann also suggested that the cognitive elite are more likely to support and promote policies of economic freedom, and that the causality is therefore bidirectional. This synthesis of neoliberal economics and the psychology of individual differences, “cognitive capitalism,” should not surprise us, given the growth of Economic Psychology, Behavioral Economics, and Cognitive Economics as sub-disciplines with their own journals (see the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology’s website: www.iarep.org). Nevertheless, it is unusual to see Ayn Rand’s (1957) Atlas Shrugged cited in a psychology journal as a source on the role of the cognitive elite, as in Rindermann (2012).

Rindermann’s work may be viewed as an extension of the less nuanced work of Richard Lynn, perhaps the most tireless promotor of the hereditary basis of racial differences in IQ, aside from the late Philippe Rushton (1946–2012). Like Rushton, Lynn served on the Board and as President of the Pioneer Fund, which provided his financial support (see W. H. Tucker, 2002). Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) provided IQ data on nearly all countries by using the dubious procedure of estimating missing countries using the IQ of nearby countries of similar ethnic composition. Their work is perhaps best known for the claim that the mean IQ of (Black) sub-Saharan Africa is no higher than 70, and that this deficiency is the major factor in the poor economic conditions of Africa. While serving on the Editorial Board of the mainstream journal Intelligence, Lynn is also the associate editor of the premier journal of modern scientific racism, the Mankind Quarterly (see Winston, 1998). Lynn’s most recent books (e.g., 2015) are published by Washington Summit Publishers, which is the publication arm of the White nationalist organization, the National Policy Institute. The NPI is run by the overtly White supremacist Richard Spencer, who was the featured speaker at the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017. In this tragic case, the academic epistemological violence of race science (Teo, 2008) and the fatal physical violence in Charlottesville are inextricably joined. ⁷

Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) received many, severely negative reviews across a number of disciplines, including economics (e.g., Nechyba, 2004) and psychology (e.g., Wicherts, Dolan, & Van der Maas, 2010), with particular attention to the use of unrepresentative convenience samples. Lynn attempted to address his critics in later work, while maintaining his basic conclusion that due to ineluctable, hereditary racial differences, Black Africans and Black Americans will never be as successful as Whites, and eugenic intervention was needed. Noting the many methodological difficulties in Lynn’s work, economist Garret Jones nevertheless made extensive use of Lynn’s and Rindermann’s data in Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters so Much More Than Your Own (Jones, 2016) as well as in numerous articles. Emphasizing the importance of evolved cooperation for success, Jones argued that higher IQ was associated with more cooperation, more patience, better citizenship, and therefore more national wealth and economic progress. It is too early to tell whether this “new” literature on IQ and economics will become a major force in the mainstream of neoliberalism, but it is clear that the new literature often revives much older arguments regarding intelligence and birth rates.

IQ and the management of reproduction

A core belief of many early 20th-century eugenicists was that the more intelligent, educated, and higher social classes had lower fertility rates, threatening a decline in “national intelligence.” Negative correlations between family size and IQ provided the evidence, but data showing that, overall, IQ was rising rather than falling (later termed the “Flynn Effect”) did not deter those convinced that degeneration and national decline were at hand (see Ramsden, 2007). Kline (2001) has shown that by the 1920s, the persistent belief that “fitter” women were failing to reproduce became entwined with popular anxieties over morality, gender, women’s education, domesticity, and family life, with particular blame attached to middle and upper class women’s interest in education and careers. Although the post-WWII baby boom period appeared to celebrate motherhood and ideals of suburban domesticity, the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s renewed fears that the “natural” social order and the heterosexual family were under threat.

These dysgenic fears of differential fertility rates were revived by Herrnstein and Murray (1994), Lynn (1996), and Rushton (1995). Using a much-discredited version of “r /K theory,” Rushton argued that due to climate, Africans had evolved an evolutionary strategy with a higher rate of reproduction and lower level of parental care, compared to White Europeans, who were intermediate compared to Asians. The same evolutionary process was used to explain his claims of smaller brains, lower IQ, higher crime rates, greater sexual promiscuity, and larger penis size in Africans. ⁸ Lynn (2013) has continued to support these ideas with new data. All of the old and vicious racial stereotypes of the 20th century were thus wrapped in a new, scientized package. This view of Black deficiencies was a good fit with popular concerns over the role of welfare and the welfare state in promoting social decay. Murray’s (2002) analysis of elevated “out of wedlock” births among lower IQ women of all ethnicities suggests that that the concerns of early eugenicists over reproductive control and the monetary burden of the “unfit” were alive in a new social context, one in which “families” now had much more varied meaning and structure.

For the neoliberals, the problem was how to address the costs of over-breeding of the unfit and under-breeding of the cognitive elite without government intervention. One answer lay in the development of an alliance during the 1970s and 1980s between neoliberals and social conservatives. In Cooper’s (2017) cogent analysis, this alliance employed the banner of “family values” to address the threats to the “male breadwinner, suburban stay-at-home mother, and two children” model of the family posed by both social and economic changes. By resurrecting and promoting the mythologized middle-class family, condemning pre-marital sex, single motherhood, feminism, and homosexuality, neoliberals and Rothbard-style libertarians could argue for a shift in moral and financial responsibility for poverty and social problems from the welfare state to the traditional family. In contrast to the usual framing of neoliberalism in terms of extreme, Ayn Rand-style individualism, Cooper (2017) and Self (2012) emphasize the importance of the family in neoliberal biopolitical projects. As Friedman (1962) put it, “The ultimate operative unit in our society is the family, not the individual” (p. 35). By implication, the family should be the focus of social policy.

Conclusion

Despite diversity and animosity across the neoliberal spectrum, there remains a common and deeply held theme regarding human differences: economic inequality is a necessary state of nature. In contrast to many progressivist early mental testers, post-WWII neoliberals and libertarians vowed to address this state of nature by reduction rather than expansion of government. If the marketplace would be allowed to operate properly, unconstrained by rent controls, welfare, incentives not to work, subsidies, anti-discrimination laws, government control of education, and endless government programs, then differences in intelligence and other traits will produce a natural division of labor and a natural inequality. In this vision, each individual would be free to engage or not to engage in the unhampered exchange of goods and services, according to their tastes, talents, and interests. Traditional families would thrive. Differences in power would be magically erased. The pursuit of self-interest, often of the Ayn Rand variety, was a fundamental feature of the human condition and a fundamental right. For neoliberals, the Marxist argument that oppression by those in control of the means of production produced inequality was a lie promoted to seize private property, the greatest of crimes.

The use of IQ as a discursive weapon by neoliberals was dependent on the stubborn persistence in the Psychology literature of three scientifically dubious and repeatedly challenged ideas: (a) variability in intelligence test scores can be meaningfully partitioned into hereditary and environmental sources, with heredity accounting for a stable 75–80% of the variability in adults; (b) intelligence test scores are highly resistant to change and largely unaffected by schooling; and (c) the 19th-century racial categories are biologically meaningful. ⁹ Without this seemingly respectable peer-reviewed literature to draw on, the discussions of IQ and race in regard to public policy would be much less credible. The way in which even staunch hereditarians acknowledged some role for environment helped to provide a rhetorical veneer of careful scientific balance. As a protection against charges of racism, Jensen, Rushton, Murray, Richwine, and others generally inserted a disclaimer with some variation of “individuals should not be judged on the basis of group membership” or “individuals should be treated as individuals.” For them, the disclaimer meant that judging (and hiring) individuals by their IQ scores could not possibly be racist in intent or effect. This discourse of individuals and detachment of the IQ score from group culture and history provided a good fit with the neoliberal dichotomy of “individualism” vs. “collectivism,” where “collectivism” stands for the evils of communism, socialism, and the welfare state, or generally “The Left.”

In academic psychology, the resurgence of hereditarian themes regarding intelligence, race, and success began during roughly the same period as the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and the Reagan–Thatcher revolution. It is tempting to see both changes as part of a larger set of cultural shifts regarding social stratification. However, the relationship between neoliberalism and ethnicity may be considerably more complex than I have outlined. Hohle (2012, 2015) argued that the rise of neoliberalism as a political movement in the United States did not begin with the financial and economic crises of the 1970s, but with the 1950s–1960s upheaval and resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. As public services desegregated and demands for full civic participation increased, Southern Whites abandoned their previous support for public schools, public works, and welfare programs and shifted to support for privatization, school vouchers, austerity, and the creation of private spaces that could remain segregated. For Hohle, this regional neoliberalism involved a coding of the racial hierarchy within the language of private vs. public, and a changed vision for the role of the state. Psychological data played a role in these events. As shown by J. P. Jackson (2005) and W. H. Tucker (2002), the “massive resistance” against school integration also involved wide distribution of pamphlets showing racial IQ comparisons, carried out with the help of the Pioneer Fund.

Many neoliberals have embraced ideas of color-blindness and a post-racial America. They may no longer need the rhetorical weapons that contemporary race science in psychology still provides. But race-blindness leaves in place what cultural critic Henry Giroux (2004) has termed “neoliberal racism,” in which the color-blind marketplace produces success or failure, discrimination is a personal choice, and the impact of structural racism and its terrible history in America are entirely hidden or denied. Even if a race-blind discourse gains traction, the recent interest in “cognitive economics” and “cognitive capitalism” suggests that the long entanglement of IQ with the biopolitics of inequality and neoliberalism is not yet over.