IQ of Italian Americans: Implications for Nuclear Weapons

The following letter is an addition to three of my original chapters,  It is a personal communication from Professor R. J. Herrnstein of Harvard University responding to an earlier version of my paper on the IQ of Italian Americans. Because Professor Herrnstein achieved the status that he did as one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of IQ as the coauthor of The Bell Curve  I thought it might be an interesting addition to the site.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Department of Psychology and Social relations

                                          William James Hall

                                          33 Kirkland Street

                                         Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

                                         May 9, 1975

Mr. Richard Peppe

5 Ray Street

Manchester, New Hampshire

Dear Mr. Peppe:

        
    Mostly I agree with you, but not entirely. I.Q. tests of the typical verbal and culturally loaded variety are severely biased against immigrants. Consequently, those early studies that used the Stanford-Binet and tests like them are indeed open to question. Also, though social status in America is highly correlated with I.Q. (even on culture-fair tests), it may have been less so at other times and in other countries. Disregarding test bias, social class is correlated with I.Q. when society tends to reward those in intellectually demanding positions with high status. If a society instead rewards people for the color of their skin or the shapes of their noses, the correlation between I.Q. and status will be reduced or eliminated.

                                     Sincerely,

                                     R.J. Herrnstein 

Nuclear Weapons and the Blue-eyed People

A Sociobiological Analysis

Richard R. Peppe

Glassworks Publishing,  PO Box 208, Pembroke, NH 03275

Copyright © 2004 by Richard R. Peppe.  All rights reserved

Library of Congress catalog card number:

ISBN

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

 

Chapter 1  Peasant Societies as Learned Behavior                              

Chapter 2  Morality as Stategy by Control                                       

Chapter 3 Urbanization and the 11th Grade                                     E

 

Chapter 4  The Blond Invasion of Asia                                          38

 

Chapter 5  Sociobiology and Niuclear Weapons                            E.

 

Chapter 6  Blonds and Slavs:  Theory Meets  Reality                    E.

 

Chapter 7  SDI:  The Blonds Safe?                                                 E

      

Chapter 3

Urbanization and the 11th Grade

There are at the present time two quite different modes of approaching the behavior of organisms which are hard to distinguish theoretically but which are clearly different in practice.  The statistical approach is characterized by relatively unrefined methods of measurement and a general neglect of the problem of direct description.    

B. F. Skinner[1] 

As a rule, traits as complex as human behavior are influenced by many genes, each of which shares only a small fraction of the total control.  These "polygenes" cannot ordinarily be identified by directing and tracing the mutations that alter them.  They must be evaluated indirectly by statistical means.        

Edward O. Wilson[2]

                                    Italian Immigration to the United States:

 
   Probably no large European national immigrant group has experienced a more diverse academic literature about their economic adaptation to North America than Italians.  The reports range from "poor" to "affluent."  How the academician regards the history depends, I think, on how smart the writer thinks Italians are.  Here too, the reports are diverse.

   
   H. J. Eysenck cited Italians as an example of an immigrant population where circumstances forced the less intelligent to emigrate, and where they achieved significantly lower IQ scores than a random sample of the original population would have demonstrated.[29]  It is clear that there is a broad consensus among educational experts that the IQ test is an effective predictor of academic success.[30]  There is also a substantial consensus about the correlation of IQ scores with financial, social, and business success, and the experts who favor biology make extremely broad claims.[31]

 
  Arthur Jensen is the name most readers will probably associate with the claim that IQ scores reflect capacities that are, to some degree, determined at conception. He makes the claim that the class divisions that characterize America, and every other industrial society, are explained in part by differences in native abilities.      These observations about genetics, IQ and educational performance did not start with Professor Jensen. They have been part of the IQ discussion for much of the 20th century. 

   The heart of the theory presented here is precisely the claim that the blond intellectuals were right about the predictive power of IQ tests.  And that because the blond political leadership ignored or misinterpreted what the IQ data reflected they have made their own children vulnerable to nuclear weapons for countless future generations.

   
    While intermarriage finally will break down the singularity of most European ethnic groups, ethnic differences are still big enough and visible enough to warrant study.  Some of the better known reports on Italians have not simply documented differences between them and the majority; they have traced the differences to cultural and biological deficiencies. 

    The Stanford-Binet test, the first major American IQ test was introduced to the public as part of the effort to screen draftees for World War I.  The results indicated that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe had not done well, and that information caused concern.[32]      

     Now, in fact, the if one reads the blond literature on racial and ethnic issues prior to the early 20th century, IQ data was nothing new.  It simply underscored what the blonds had known for generations:  I would argue that there was not a day in two millennia when the blonds were not convinced that they were superior to Latins, Slavs, Asians, Africans and a whole stew pot of other populations.  Aesthetics mean something.  

 
   If one simply toted up all the places where the blonds, at one time or other, had established prohibitions, formal or informal against different groups intermarrying with blonds, the conclusion would be inescapable.  Professor Terman's warning that the continuation of existing reproductive rates for 200 years would mean that 1000 Harvard graduates would have 50 descendants, while 1000 Italians would have 100,000 reflected the sensibility of a man who was committed to his society, and a sensitivity about what his society was all about.[33] 

    
     College texts as recently as the 1940's presented data which showed the median IQ scores of Greeks, Italians and Portuguese at 87.8, 85.8 and 82.7, respectively.[35]  Given a white American median IQ of 100, one sees that the difference is about 15 points.

     Two Stanford professors state that a 1923 scientific paper included IQ data that established that Italian-Americans have a median IQ of 84, 16 points below the national average. They ask, rhetorically, whether the National Academy should be petitioned to institute a national research project on the intellectual inferiority of Italian-Americans, and whether the hereditarians believe that Italian-Americans have improved genetically in just a couple of generations.[36] 

    Now, Arthur Jensen has addressed the implications of a 15-point difference in IQ scores at various points in the distribution.  Add 15 points to someone with an IQ of 70, and one moves from dependency, and possible institutionalization, to someone who is self-sufficient.  Add the 15 points to someone who is average, and one sees someone who can succeed in college.[37]

    A difference of 15 points in the IQ scores of two different groups would make some dramatic differences.  Jensen focuses on the lower end of the distribution as the most important area of concern.  In any population with a mean score of 85, between one-sixth and one-fourth of its members would score below 70, which is about seven times the percentage for the American majority.  The American Association on Mental Deficiency has changed part of its definition for mental retardation from two standard deviations to one standard deviation below the mean (which would mean about 85), because of the increased demands modern societies place on the work force.[38]  

             

       

      The Mobility of Italian-Americans

   

The Other Bostonians:  Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970[39] is a study of various immigrant groups, including Italians, into the City of Boston during the period 1880 to 1970.  The book tracks the progress of original migrants and their children, and then makes comparisons between the different groups.  Although the data is restricted to the Boston area, Professor Thernstrom appears to claim that he has identified characteristics which operate in a much larger social universe, and many reviewers appear to accept his claims.  The cover carries a quote from the American Historical Review that labels the study as the best analysis of social mobility in America.  The New York Times went beyond that, and called it the best quantitative historical study to be published. 

 
    Professor Thernstrom offers an explanation for what he believes he found, which would have national, perhaps international, implications. He stresses that Italians and Irishmen moved ahead economically in a sluggish and erratic fashion. He cites factors that they appear to have brought from Europe for the poor social mobility of Irishmen and Italians.  More than readily available measurable European background handicaps were involved; certain features of the cultures the people brought with them were also responsible.[40]  Religious affiliation appears to be one, perhaps the major, factor responsible.  The parochial school system is an institution that he believes may have contributed toward the creation of a certain alienation from the host society, and dampened ambitions for conventional success.[41]  

     There are two major mistakes in Thernstrom's work.  The first concerns his use of immigrant groups to locate those cultural factors that he clearly associates with success in a modern economy.  The second has to do with his use of the term, "mobility."

     Thernstrom follows a well-worn path in using data from Northern European immigrant groups to reveal certain features of American society.  Further, he has not compared Protestants and Catholics, but immigrant groups representing both religious traditions. 

 
   Although he does not pursue it, Thernstrom tells the reader that he is aware of an anomaly.  The data clearly indicate that the American migrant into the city of Boston has done better than the native for one hundred years.  His samples for 1880, 1910, 1930, and 1960 all show that American migrants into the city were more likely to achieve upper white collar status than the native born.  An incredible 32 percent of American migrants into Boston were professionals in 1960, more than double the percentage for nonmigrants.[42]  There is evidence, then, that the American migrant into the city of Boston, has not been a random sample of the American population, since, if anything, Boston was relatively more white collar, professional and educated than the American population, as a whole. 

   The process would have been just the reverse for the Catholic immigrant populations.  It is a truism that the more able left the city and the ethnic neighborhoods first, for suburbia.

 
   The evidence supports the position that the English immigrant to Boston was like the American migrant, an unusual representative of his culture.  The evidence does not support the view that, compared with the majority American Protestant population, who represents the norm for American white IQ, Italian Catholic immigrants were at an economic disadvantage.

   To pursue the point I will limit the review to two groups: Englishmen and Italians.  There are enough similarities between England and Italy in the size and sophistication of the their economies for the comparisons to be useful.  Second, their different travel times to their present economies help reveal what the process is all about.

  Industrialization involves a number of changes, and the most critical change concerns behavior.  The change from an agricultural peasant economy requires that increasing numbers of people develop skills to handle more complicated tasks.  There is no doubt that industrial economies develop larger professional and managerial classes as they mature.[43]

    Thernstrom data indicates that in 1910 35 percent of the male labor force of Boston was classified as white-collar.  Of this group, 5 percent were professionals and 30 percent were other white-collar workers.  By 1970, the white-collar category had increased to 51 percent with 21 percent working as professionals, and 30 percent as other white-collar.[44]  Thernstrom's data also shows that 53 percent of second generation British men born in the period 1860-1879 were in white collar occupations: 13 percent high white collar and 40 percent low white collar.[45]  Now, one can assume that the 1910 data would reflect the occupational status of the native Bostonian born in the period 1860-1879 since they would have been between 30 and 50 years old at the time of the census, long enough to have established themselves as white-collar.  We can then draw the following conclusions:

    -The sons of British immigrants were over 50 percent more likely to be white-collar workers than Bostonians as a group in 1910.

    -Indeed, the British immigrant's son born about 100 years ago and entering the work force before or around the turn of the century was more likely to have achieved white-collar status than the average Bostonian in 1970.[46]

    While Thernstrom says that the data used for the norm of the Boston work force in 1910 and 1970 is different in some respects to his other data, the disparity is so large, it simply has to call attention to the British sample.  What can explain the totally disparate level of achievement of British immigrants, compared with native white Americans?  National per capita income figures show that  England has a lower per capita income than America for most of the century.  This should suggest a proportionally smaller technical and professional class.

    While the two economies may have been more equal in 1900 than they are now, certainly 53 percent of Englishmen born in the period 1860-1879 did not become white-collar workers in England.  It is clear that Boston has continued to attract a very unusual English immigrant throughout the 20th century. 

    Thernstrom presents an "Index of Representation" to show the proportion of different immigrant groups in various occupational categories compared to the proportion of the entire labor force of the City of Boston in the same category.  Male British immigrants, 45 or older in 1950, were only 43 percent as likely to be unskilled workers, as chance would indicate.[47]  The score for Italian immigrants of the same age was 273 percent.  Second generation British men in the 25-44 age category were somewhat more likely than their fathers to be unskilled laborers, but their score of 61 percent was still far below the norm,[48]  What Thernstrom found for British immigrants, is true nationally.  The lifetime earnings of British immigrants to the United States are about 20 percent higher than natives. [49] 

   Data from Canada support this analysis.  Canada has a per capita advantage over England. But the same anomaly that characterized the record of English immigrants in Boston followed them in Canada.  The post-war Canadian immigrants from the United Kingdom represented the immigrants with the smallest proportion with a below average educational background.[50]  Approximately half of post war British immigrants enjoyed white-collar status, and the group as a whole was remarkably different from other immigrant groups in that they contained very few unskilled workers, and they were unlikely to come from families where the father had a low status job.[51]   One researcher concludes that lower working class Englishmen did not immigrate to Canada.[52]  

White-collar positions are quite often filled through informal contacts.  Certainly an immigrant group which can equal or surpass the host populations in cities like Boston, Vancouver or Toronto must be gifted.  However, English immigrants simply do not constitute a reasonable sample to form the basis for generalizations about religious or cultural factors within an American setting.

     Thernstrom's use of the term "mobility" consistently favors arguments that reinforce his perception that Catholics are low achievers.  The children of British immigrants, like their parents, were only about half as likely to be in the unskilled group as the Boston native.  By contrast the Italian participation which had been almost three times the norm for the immigrants had been reduced to 131 percent for their children, not much different than the city norm.  And the city of Boston, without unskilled agricultural labor, is certainly more skilled than the U.S. average.  Certainly this means that Italian unskilled workers were much more mobile than the national sample of unskilled laborers of native descent, who would have been Protestant.  No national economy reduces its unskilled work force by over half in a single generation.      

   It is interesting that Thernstrom deals with Lipset's and Bendix' study which found no difference in the occupational mobility of Catholics and Protestants with the observation that since more Catholics have been raised in big cities where there were more professional positions, they should have been much more mobile than Protestants.[53]  If the issue is mobility, however, and not simply percentages, there are clearly powerful economic forces which should favor Protestant mobility.  By all accounts the South and West are growing more rapidly than the Northeast and should be developing their professional and managerial sectors faster than the heavily Catholic cities.  Moreover, to the extent Thernstrom is right when he notes that the development of truly large cities of over three million is associated with a higher percentage in the professional and managerial categories, the rate of development of such cities should work to the advantage of the Protestants.[54]  To be sure, there may still be more professional positions in the North as a percentage of the total work force.  However, in order for this to benefit Catholic mobility the Catholics would have to take the positions, from Protestants, since the total professional pool is not growing as fast as in the Protestant sectors of the country.

Given a large enough city, one can see the dynamism of the adjustment to industrialization within Italian populations in the same city.  In Bensonhurst, a traditional little Italy in New York, one-fifth of the population is 65 or over and more than 10 percent of women workers are blue collar. In South Richmond, on Staten Island, where over one-half the population is Italian, less than 8 percent of the population is 65 or over, and less than 2 percent are blue collar.[55]   

    Thernstrom's data indicates that there was a much higher degree of mobility by Italians in Boston than his comments suggest.  Italians were the most overrepresented on the non-English speaking immigrants in the very lowest occupational category, unskilled labor.  Yet we have seen that in a single generation they nearly reduced their participation in that category to the city-wide norm.  While it may represent a dramatic change in some particulars, it occurs at a social level which is really not of interest to most academicians. Their underlying assumption is that white Protestant America is upper-middle class.  Accordingly, Thernstrom merely notes that Italians moved up a notch without attempting to analyze what really happened.

    Someone who attempts to account for what happened within the confines of the IQ theory, however, sees a puzzling problem.  In order for Italians to have lowered their representation in the very lowest unskilled labor cohort so dramatically, they greatly outperformed the native white population in the same labor category.                 

   Now, IQ psychologists maintain that the argument for the genetic basis of the IQ score is inextricably tied to the bell curve.  "Intelligence" follows a certain distribution.  Why did Thernstrom not find that Italians made fairly rapid advance into white-collar occupations?  He did but his terminology blurred the reality.

 
   Thernstrom's use of words like "rate" and "trajectory" is as misleading as his use of "mobility."  For example, he notes that only 10 percent of Italian men employed in Boston in 1910 held white-collar jobs, approximately the same as the Irish 20 years earlier (12 percent).  In 1910 65 percent of the Italians were unskilled or semiskilled workers, again, the same percentage as the Irish in 1890.[56]  Thernstrom then notes that Italian immigrants increased their representation in the middle class from 12 to 35 percent during a generation, while British immigrants of an earlier period, had enlarged their representation in the white-collar world from an already large 26 percent, to 53 percent.  The text suggests that the mobility of the Italians was less than that of the British, but the figures indicate the reverse.  The British doubled their representation in white collars while the Italians tripled their membership.  The success of the Italians in putting about a third of its members in white-collars within a single generation suggest a very rapid acculturation when one realizes that in 1940, when practically everyone in the 1910 sample would have achieved his final occupational level, only 39 percent of the male labor force of Boston wore white collars.[57]

     Thernstrom's confusion on mobility is even more obvious when he applies the concept to the achievements of the sons of the original immigrants.  Only 18 percent of first generation Italian men 45 or older were white-collar workers in 1950, compared with 52 percent of first generation British immigrants.  Second generation Italian men in the 25 - 44 age bracket (the "sons" of the older group)  had increased their representation in the white-collar category to 31 percent, while the second generation British figure remained roughly the same at 49 percent.[58]  Yet Thernstrom suggests that Italians made slow progress between generations compared to Englishmen.

     Thernstrom mistakenly assumes that he found that Catholics had a low occupational mobility because he began his research with preconceived notions about Catholics.  While he is skeptical about Greeley's findings, he enthusiastically embraces Herbert J. Gans', The Urban Villagers:  Group and Class in the Life of Italian Americans,[59] which contains very little data.  Gans' report on Italians' attitude toward work could not be clearer.  They do not like the stuff: It leads to ulcers, heart trouble, and early death.[60]  They would find tough sledding in the future as automation decreases employment opportunities in simpler jobs.  However, they will be able to sustain tough times because their ethnic and cultural background allows them to accept job loss and unemployment as inevitable.[61]  This sounds something like Jensen's prediction that the most serious problems associated with an IQ deficiency will be found at the lower end of the distribution.  As work becomes more demanding, there will be increasing numbers who will be able to find any employment.     

One should find then that the unemployment rate among Italians is higher than that of the majority.  What if one does not find that? How one locates an "attitude" toward work by different ethnic groups is a very difficult matter.  The blonds have, for a very long time, had an appreciable advantage in per capita wealth over most of the planet. But did that reflect an attitude about work or something different?

    In English speaking Australia, the host population found a very different attitude about work among Italian immigrants than Gans found.   A Committee of Enquiry established in 1931 by the Australian government caused some alarm precisely because the Italians worked hard.  In spite of government sanctioned preferences in favor of blond Australians, farms were passing to Italian owners.  The problem appeared to be that the Italians would put in longer hours than the host population.  "We found impartial northern Queenslanders genuinely alarmed at the steady Italian penetration, which is still in progress.  The Italian works harder and for longer hours than the British Australian."[62]

   As I noted, there is a literature that finds that Italians made a rapid economic acculturation.  A European sociologist writing about Italians in Montreal found a high commitment to work.  Almost half of his sample had been small farmers or agricultural laborers in Italy.  But through extremely hard work they were able to dramatically improve their position.  "Thus, while only 14 per cent of the immigrant generation work in white-collar occupations, 57 per cent of the second and third generation Italians do.  This is a striking commentary on the social mobility of persons of Italian descent."[63]   

   College age Italian Americans should probably read some of the literature about them with a certain amount of skepticism.  It has only been in recent years that  scholars of Italian American background, and other turn of the century Catholic immigrant groups, have begun to describe themselves in the academic press. 

 
  I have a kind of litmus test to determine whether the anthropologist or sociologist was actually looking for information about Italians, or was "reporting back" to the host culture what the blonds thought they knew anyway.  The test is how the report deals with savings. 

 If there is one hard, objective, numerical economic generalization one can make about Italians, it is that they can save money.  At every level of income, Italians can be characterized as savers; often saving much more than their neighbors, whether at home in Italy,[64] in Protestant Australia,[65] Catholic French Canada,[66] the United States,[67]   Argentina,[68] and Brazil[69]  While I disagree with some of Samuel L. Bailey conclusions, his data confirm the ability of Italian immigrants to save money.

  The most telling evidence in the blond Protestant academic canon that the anthropologist had pre-judged Italian immigrants is in William Foote Whyte's classic Street Corner Society[70] discussion of savings.  He finds an enthusiasm for gambling that periodically allows for display and popularity, but finally must prove harmful.[71]  He thinks that he has evidence that Italians share an inability to appreciate money and the centrality of its importance in the modern world, and a willingness to sacrifice the steady day by day discipline of savings for a momentary increase in status on the corner.[72] 

 
  Gans' description of Italians attitude toward savings is predictably similar:  The Italians' need for display destroyed their ability to save and eventually purchase their own homes.[73]

 Even though Italians had one of the lowest family incomes in New York City in the early 20th century, of the groups studied they had the lowest percentage of households with a budget deficit, and the one with the highest budget surplus.  The director of the 1909 study concluded that while Americans, Germans and Irish did not save until they had yearly incomes in the $900 or $1,000 range, Italians and some other southern and eastern European groups began saving at $700 or $800 levels.[74]  After spending some time on this issue I am convinced that there are no objective studies that suggest Italian Catholics save less money at various income levels than blond Protestants.

Perhaps locating "attitudes" about work and savings make a simple story unduly complex.  Assume that one finds that Italians go from having a per capita income of about a fourth of England's, to roughly the same as England's; or the Japanese from one-half of the U.S. norm to about the same as the U.S., in just two generations.  Have attitudes changed?  Or did something very simple, and very easy to measure, occur?

    

                  The Mobility of Italian-Americans: A Sociobiological Analysis

    Apart from the issue of comparisons between Italian and English immigrants, the curious close similarities between the Italian experience and the history of the Irish in Boston demonstrate the hard biological ledge beneath the reality the sociologists see and report.  On virtually every social and educational measure: Appearance, linguistic background, family structure, size, familiarity with the host Protestant population, independence of women; there was simply no comparison between the two groups.  Italians were "foreigners" in a way the Irish never were.  The fact that second generation Italians were reflecting roughly the same occupational and income experience as the Irish, about 20 years earlier, when they were second generation, points to something about the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society which has its own integrity, its own potency, operates across ethnic boundaries, ignores class, and is not much affected by the collection of qualities usually bundled under the label "cultural."   Something is moving people around the chessboard.   

    I know of no study that claims to have reliably compared the intellectual potential of whole nations.  Such a study may be impossible since language and behavioral experiences are so different across ethnic boundaries.  Nevertheless there is some evidence that suggests that the IQ distribution for Italians is not much different than for the white American majority.

 There is a close correlation between the IQ test and several other types of examinations that have been used to predict occupational and educational achievement.  Practically everyone in America takes one or more such exam during his or her educational and working lives.  Because the tests are often administered to groups under less than optimal conditions by non-psychologists, a score for any particular child may not be as good an indicator for that child's ability as a score on an individually administered test.  Nevertheless, when one compares the performance of very large groups, one might assume that imperfections would creep in randomly and that mean scores of the groups would be more or less accurate.

     In the 1960's the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement began a study of reading comprehension which included England, the United States, Italy and twelve other countries.[75]  It would not be possible to make fine comparisons of national intelligence from the survey.  Some countries have wealthier, and superior school systems.  Some languages may allow for more precise and more difficult distinctions, in different areas.  Also, different percentages of the total age cohort were in school systems.  Still, the report itself suggests that large differences in ability would have been found, had they existed.  The differences among the industrialized countries were small and somewhat inconsistent from age level to age level.[76]  There was a report in the academic press which does not address the issue of Italian intelligence directly, but does present data which indicates that the IQ of Italian children in the study did not differ significantly from the U.S. or English average.[77]

    Recent economic history shows a more decisive break with the 18th 19th and early 20th century experience than most intellectuals realize.  It is interesting that both Greeley and Thernstrom make respectful nods to Weber's thesis of the Protestant ethic.  Greeley notes that Weber himself was dubious whether the differences in economic wealth between Catholics and Protestants would survive a lengthy period of industrialization.[78]  Thernstrom states that while the attacks on the thesis in America have been heavy, he does not find them persuasive.[79] 

     The place to examine the theory is not America, however, but where it was promulgated:  Europe.  While it may seem strange today, there was a voluminous literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that assumed that the British were the highest representatives of capitalists as financiers, engineers, organizers, and merchants.  An American geography text in 1933 reported that the British had a higher per-capita wealth than any population in the world outside of North America.[80]  A careful analysis might have revealed some problems in the productivity trends of the British economy; certainly the impression that the English enjoyed some innate superiority in dealing with an industrialized order was understandable enough.  They had enjoyed a sizeable advantage in consumption since they gave birth to industrialization.  Catholic Southern and Eastern Europe remained backward and poor for a very long time.  Weber's thesis must have simply put an academic stamp on what most people already knew.

    In fact, however, Europeans had known something about the English and the blonds generally, for a long, long time prior to industrialization.  It may be anyone's guess when a really substantial advantage in living standards was established, but there is anecdotal non-quantitative literature that would locate the advantage generations, centuries even, and prior to industrialization.[81]  Adam Smith, writing around the time of the American Revolution, in the last quarter of the 18th century, favored a tariff for England to protect her work force from imports made by cheap foreign labor.[82]      

     There can be no doubt that by 1900, after approximately a century and a half of industrialization, England had an overwhelming economic advantage over Italy.  One estimate placed the United Kingdom's share of world manufacturing output at 18.5 percent, while Italy's share was 2.5 percent; and the Italian per capita level of industrialization was about one-eighth of the U.K.[83] By 1914 per capita income in Italy was only 45 percent of Britain's.[84]

     But by the 1950's a change was becoming visible which would make a dramatic difference in the long-standing ratio between the living standards of the average Englishman, and the average Italian.  A study of over 100 industries in different nations estimated that real per capita compound annual growth in Italy's GDP from 1950 to 1987 was 3.9 percent in Italy, and 2.2 percent in the United Kingdom.[85]  By 1968 the Italian per capita GNP was about two thirds of the U.K. figure.[86]  Wages and benefits in Italy were approximately equal to Britain's in the late 1980's,[87] and the CIA reported that by 1988 the Italian and British GNP were virtually identical.[88]  One commentator opined that Italy had a higher standard of living than Britain,[89] which may or may not be the case.  While there continues to be a division in consumption between the Italian north and south, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the matter.  The two sections have traveled in tandem.  The ratio of the South to the North in yearly per-capita income was about 60 to 70 percent in the 1980's.[90]  While large, the difference is not much different than the ratio between the northern Atlantic states in the United States, and many Southern states; a ratio which has also remained reasonably stable across generations. 

     It is clear that a tremendous advantage that Britain had enjoyed for centuries essentially ended in the last half of the twentieth century.  Certainly there were institutional political "environmental" forces which played a role in the change.  The most obvious and dramatic difference between the economic policies of the Italian and British governments dealt with the Common Market.

 The difference in the way the two populations received the Common Market surely reflected the difference in the ways the respective populations felt about Roman Catholicism and Catholic Europe at a very basic visceral level.   The city which was chosen to identify the initial treaty in the evolution that led to an economically integrated Europe, Rome, was probably indispensable in bringing together the two peoples which would be responsible for the market succeeding or failing: French and German.  Rome may not have been able to play this role if a heavily Protestant East Germany had been part of the equation at the time. 

   England, predictably, was not enthusiastic about the market, and tried, over a number of years to find alternative trading structures to join.  But, in retrospect, one sees that the alternatives the U.K. tried just could not have worked.  On the continent, a few miles away, an enormous economic reality was coming into existence.

   
   However, basically, the change that allowed Italians for all practical purposes to catch up with England was not a trading arrangement.  The change that enabled Italians to consume as much as Englishmen in Europe was the same change that enabled the children of Italian immigrants to earn as much as the white average in America.                   

  
  When one compares the economic history of Italian immigrants and their offspring in America with the census population that most closely represents the IQ distribution for the American white norm, one sees the same behavioral change that occurred in Europe.  The reason for the disparity between Greeley and Thernstrom becomes immediately visible.  The population category that reflects the white American IQ distribution is "native white of native parent."

   The Bureau of the Census has published data on various groups indicating occupational distribution, education, unemployment rate, entrepreneurial activity, rate of institutionalization, income and percentage living in poverty.  Table 1 and Table 2 at the end of this chapter compare first and second generation Italians with native born white Americans for 1970, roughly the time of Thernstrom's study.  Table 1 assumes that the native whites of native parents in the 25 to 44 year old cohort are children of people included in the 45 to 64 year old cohort.  Similarly, Table 2 assumes that foreign born Italians in the 45 to 64 year old cohort are parents of the population listed as American born ethnic Italians of foreign or mixed parentage in the 25 to 44 age cohort.  While these assumptions are obviously not true in each instance, the 20-year difference should enable us to spot major changes between the generations.  Thernstrom uses a very similar procedure to buttress his findings, although he restricts his sample to immigrant groups in the Boston area.[91]

  Behaviorism plays a large role in explaining the activities of populations in centuries old agricultural villages of a few thousand souls, but when it is time to explain what happens to populations that encounter industrialization, behaviorism must be wrong.  If one looks at the tables with the background noise turned off, what is really striking is the "orderliness" of it all.

 The key is the change in the locus of the experiments.  If the experiment is conducted in the modern city, instead of the pre-modern agricultural village, one sees a curious fit between people, and school.  On the narrow issue of economics, it is virtually certain that by the second generation transfer payments move funds from ethnic Italians to native born whites of native born parents.

    There are probes in the domestic U.S. that are analogues for international reading scores: They can substitute as kind of IQ tests for certain large populations.  The Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) was given nationally to over a million potential white servicemen.  While the AFQT is not precisely an IQ test, its correlation with standard IQ test is about as high as the correlation among the various tests.[92]  Rhode Island is emphatically a state with a non-British, non-Protestant stock.  A majority of the state was either foreign born, or the children of immigrants as recently as 1910.[93]  It is the most Catholic State in the union, has a majority Catholic population, and Italians may be as much as one fifth of the total population.[94]  In 1968, the last year for which data is available, Rhode Island had the highest pass rate of any state in the continental United States.  Jensen suggests that the sample is good enough to indicate that the mean IQ of white Rhode Islanders is somewhat above the national white average.[95]

  By 1968 the overwhelming majority of Italian, Irish and French Canadian (a Catholic population heavily represented in Rhode Island) youngsters registering for military service, had grown up speaking English.  It was very different from the situation that had prevailed in the first third of the century.

  I sent an earlier version of this paper to Dr. Eysenck, and he was gracious enough to respond.  A copy of his letter is attached as an appendix at the end of this book.

 
    For some reason the two Stanford professors cited did not pursue Pintner's writing on Italian-Americans.  They clearly left the impression that Pintner was comfortable with the conclusion that there was about a 16 point difference between the white average and Italian Americans.  When one actually looks at what Pintner wrote, one has a very different impression.  He pointed out that Italians scored much better on non-verbal IQ tests, and discounted the notion that there could be a 16 point difference between them and the majority.[96]  Indeed, some of the test results he presents seem to indicate that Italians were performing at national norms. In a 1923 paper he characterizes the difference between the Italians and the national average on non verbal tests as "not very great."[97]  One wonders whether the place where the sample was taken would have made a bigger difference than Pintner suggests.  He notes that, for native-born Americans, IQ scores from urban groups were higher than for rural ones, and scores of children from the largest cities were about 10 points above scores of children from the smallest.[98]

     Psychologists have attempted a finer grained analysis of the country versus city deficit, by dividing the country children into two groups: those living in a district where the land was hilly and the soil inferior, and those in districts with good soil.  In the poorer areas only about 20 percent scored above the median for the city pupils, versus 36 percent for the children from the superior farm areas.[99]  The authors interpreted the results to show that the more intelligent farmer would find the greater opportunity.  Whatever the merits of the conclusion, the data reveals striking difference between the rural and urban child, among native born whites.  Again, this demonstrates that test results that compared Italian youngsters with urban white Americans students, rather than the native born whites as a whole, dramatically overstate the American norm.  The states that performed the worst on the AFQT were states that are heavily white rural and protestant.      

    Certain psychologists recognized this at a very early stage in the development of IQ tests.  As early as 1926, some psychologists used Armed Force data as indicia that the blonds did not have the dramatic IQ advantage that the majority apparently believed.  They pointed out that states with heavy representation of Southern Europeans were scoring higher than many states of the Old Confederacy.[100]           

    Mexican-American youngsters in the American Southwest may represent a parallel to Italian children in the Northeast three of four generations ago.  The children do poorly in verbal tests, but their scores on IQ tests utilizing drawings or designs were not much different from the white American norm.  The fact that Spanish as well as English was spoken in over 80 percent of the Mexican-American homes was largely responsible for low scores on the language tests.[101]  In Toronto very similar results were obtained from tests of children of Italian immigrants.  They did poorly on tests that relied on language skills, but their mean score fit within parameters established by Canadians of other European ancestry on the more culture free tests.[102]  While language tests may be the preferred type of IQ test for certain purposes, they present an obvious problem to children from households that do not speak the test language well.

    There is a parsimonious explanation consistent with IQ theory which can account for the fact that second generation unskilled Italians left the unskilled work force much faster than their age cohort among native born whites, for the advantages that English born immigrants maintained over their American born cousins, and for the fact that Italy has basically reached parity with the British economy.  Greeley is more right than Thernstrom, but he is not convincing when he attempts to use economic statistics to locate psychological types, albeit somewhat at odds with Weber's analysis.

  The great economic advantage that the blonds, particularly Englishmen, enjoyed for centuries was primarily due to behavioral differences.  A very wealthy agricultural society from the beginning, it became differentiated along educational dimensions very early.   

 Until the very recent past Englishmen and Italians lived within very different behavioral/economic systems.  In 1904 one observer claimed that 85 percent of Italian immigrants to America had been peasants in Italy.[103]  A source from 1911 stated that 67 percent had engaged in agricultural labor in Italy.[104]  Immigration records of the United States Government indicate that the occupational distribution of Italian immigrants who gave Louisiana as their ultimate destination during the period 1899-1903 was as follows:  33.7 percent were farmers or farm laborers, 12.5 percent were laborers, and 36.4 percent (including women and children) had no occupation.[105]  Those listed as having no occupation probably spent at least part of the time doing unskilled agricultural labor.  The figures not only indicate that Italian emigrants were agricultural workers; they suggest the nature of the society the emigrant left behind. 

    Danilo Dolci states that in 1953 47.7 percent of Sicilian breadwinners were agricultural workers.[106]  A Danish sociologist writing in 1965 reported that about 29 percent of the Italian labor force were engaged in agriculture versus only about 5 percent for Great Britain.[107]  Indeed one text states that only about 7 percent of the British labor force were engaged in agriculture as far back as the 1930's.[108]

    An Italian publication reported that in 1963 about 38 percent of employed workers in the Italian South were engaged in agriculture.  Over the next 20 years the percentage of the Southern workforce engaged in agriculture was cut in half to about 20 percent.  This was about the percentage that had been engaged in agriculture in the Center/North in the early 1960's.  Between 1950 and 1985 the average per capita productivity tripled in the South.[109]     

    By 1983 the percentage of the Italian work force in agriculture had been reduced to 15 percent.[110]  The change was accompanied by a dramatic improvement in living standards.  By the late 1980's economically Italy had roughly caught up with Great Britain.  While the history, in certain particulars, is a specifically Italian story, the theme is general.  Removing agricultural labor from the national work force, via a school system is an economic improvement, always.          

   Weber's analysis is pre-IQ.  That is its great handicap.  I believe that emigrants from backward agricultural villages probably do carry a mindset into the industrialized world that is a handicap.  The overwhelming thrust of the data, however, is that if the IQ scores are roughly comparable with the host population, it does not much matter.

      Peasants from agricultural villages moving into the great urban slums that inevitably accompany industrialization are forced to perform at that seam between the behavioral monotone of the agricultural village, and the relentlessly differentiating city.  What happened within the population of Italian immigrants to the U.S. has to happen within every large, newly industrialized work force.  In a nutshell, the kid that can do more does more, and he gets paid for it  There is no way to subject this hypothesis to an experimental analysis, but if economic figures continue to show that certain national economies, particularly in Asia, gain ground on Britain or the U.S., it  is inevitable that it will attract attention.    

 Baily posits a kind of continuum representing Italian adjustment with Buenos Aires at one end, New York and Toronto at the other, and San Francisco and Sao Paulo in intermediate positions.  In a sense five different stories.[111]  Certainly one thinks that on the social level there is something to it.  Like most minorities, Italians probably live in a somewhat limited social universe in Toronto, exhibiting a more or less defensive style.  But on economic issues, my position is that there is only one big story, a story that is at the heart of economic development generally, and, in an intense and dangerous way, at the heart of nuclear weapons.

  That is, even if Toronto is more different than Italy than Argentina or San Francisco the larger economic reality should not be much different if the playing field is more or less fair.  I sent an earlier version of the paper to Professor A. H. Richmond, one of Canada's most recognized authorities on European immigration, and he too graciously replied.  His response is included as an appendix.

 
   What one has then is a dispute among academicians concerning Italian economic advance.  Thernstrom and Gans report slow advance; Boissevain, Greeley and Richmond find an impressive ability to play the economic game; and Baily suggests that "it depends."       

  
    I am proposing a model of economic development that utilizes the data that indicates IQ scores follow a more or less normal distribution. A schematic representation of the difference would show agricultural societies by a behavioral curve that is skewed to the left against a normal distribution.  The tasks are simple and do not tap the mental abilities of most of the work force.  Industrialization tests the intelligence of the population in a new way.  It pushes the behavioral reality to a closer fit with the IQ distribution. 

No one else is saying this.  Everyone else is wrong.

  Besides being original the concept has some advantages over traditional accounts which make use of "class" or "culture."  It is consistent with a great deal of IQ data and it can be disproved.  Agricultural workers are moving into industrializing urban centers around the globe.  If the theory is right, the children of the newly arrived peasantry should be more mobile than the host population, everywhere.  Differentiation is the behavioral spine of the modernization process.

  
   The theory could also account for the fact that British immigrants were more successful than native white Americans.  Workers in industrialized countries have had an opportunity to realistically assess their abilities.  After nine or ten years of education, most people probably have a sense of the kind of work they could do.  People who are factory workers in England, and do not think that they could do much more in the U.S., stay home.  They are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and have a certain degree of affluence.  Peasants in backward agricultural villages are faced with a very different option.  Anyone who can leave does.       

 
   Now, to be fair to Thernstrom, his method of identifying economic performance is the accepted norm of labor economics.  One identifies various ethnic groups, makes comparisons across these groups within middle age cohorts, and identifies more and less productive groups.

    Professor George Borjas of Harvard University, identified as America's leading economist on immigration issues[112] presents data showing that between 1940 and 1979, the typical immigrant went from having more education than the typical native, to having less.[113]  Similar trends are found with labor force participation, unemployment rates, and earnings.  He abstracts various economic data such as income inequality and skill levels in source country to provide a functional explanation for the lower economic performance in the U.S.  But income inequality is not a variable that can be separated from behavioral issues.  Tremendous inequality is inherent in a country compressed into three classes:  peasants, administrators and owners.  The only possible avenue of change leads through the 11th grade, which is to say the peasantry disappears into the urban slum.  There will still be income inequality, but there will also be the beginning stirrings of an educated middle class. 

     For some, that trip to the city takes place across an ethnic seam.  They emigrate.  It is bound to cause some problems for the relatively unskilled native.   Intuition and data point to the same conclusion.  The immigration pattern of the 1980's, which saw the foreign born share of the U.S. work force move from 6.9 percent to 9.3 percent in 1988, created disproportional competitive burdens for Americans who were already struggling to hold their own.[114] 

     Borjas presents a model that identifies the quality of immigrant as a function of how certain data of the host country match up with data of the U.S.  The "quality" issue is a matter of positioning the immigrant in the upper or lower tail of his native country.  He says that the U.S. insures a poor result in its immigration policies because it insures the poorly paid and low skilled worker against disasters, while it taxes highly skilled professionals[115]    

    The argument may be more misleading than helpful.  The fundamental issue is not income inequality, political freedom or ethnicity, but behavior. Income distribution in a peasant society is not related to political equality: It is an unbundled feature of the behavioral monotone.  My response to Borjas is that the income distribution of a source area can not perform the discriminatory function he assumes it performs, if the population has not been in the 11th grade, or in the 11th grade long enough.  The conclusion that the immigrants will remain a permanent disproportional burden is not warranted.  The children of that immigration cohort may become as productive, which is to say as differentiated, as the native population. 

    Parsimony is the test arena.  Does the theory handle the data with a simpler theoretical structure? 

    The U.S. share of world production is a place to test the theory.  There is no doubt that the American/Great Britain share of the world economy shrunk in the second half of the 20th century, while the share of newer industrialized states, particularly East Asian states, increased.   According to one estimate, between 1950 and 1992 the Japanese share of world gross economic product went from slightly over 3 percent to 8 percent.  In 1950 the West created about 64 percent of the world's economic product; in the 1980's the percentage had shrunk to 49 percent.  By 2013 the share will have decreased to 30 percent [116]

    Lester Thurow sees the wage pressure on that portion of the American work force with low skills as an inevitable result of "factor price equalization."  Very large international trade flows have forced the American worker to compete with the foreign worker.[117]  Unskilled American workers began the 1980's with wages far above the unskilled foreign worker.  Competition forced wages for unskilled Americans toward a more appropriate alignment.  Practically all of the U.S. improvement in GNP in the 1980's went to the top one-third of the work force. 

    Thurow does not treat IQ data, but clearly it is germane to the discussion.  As more foreign workers leave peasant villages, and join the industrial work force, the pressure on wages for the low skilled work that that former peasant can do must increase.

  The American unskilled laborer was receiving wages above what he "deserved" in a competitive market place, because the skilled American engineer was giving the American worker an opportunity to be the first low skill participant in an activity which was far more productive than agricultural labor.  That protected status can not continue, once foreign peasants, with more or less equal IQ levels, are brought into an industrialized economy.

   Thurow suggests that recent trends in technological development and test data reflect that Americans are not smarter than other populations.  He tells us that when the rest of the globe puts in more effort, it receives higher returns.[118]  But effort is really a peripheral issue.  The important question is the locus of the effort.  Effort expended in maintaining a peasant-based agriculture can not measurably alter wages, consumption or technology.  It can only hide a potential.  While traditional economics accounts for development changes through "sectors," learning operates throughout every economy, all the time.    

  It is not helpful to approach agriculture as just another sector for economies that have 60 or 70 percent of the work force in the direct production of food.  A true peasantry behaves as a member of a system within separate villages, outside the reach of the national government.  The central governments of most peasant-based societies played a much smaller role inside the village than the blond critics thought.  The central government can create a new economy only where it can force the village to support a school.    

  
     The school and the slum are not enemies of agriculture: They are the places where the village is converted and rationalized: The man with a shovel, writ large, has to consume like a man with a shovel.  A handful of intellectuals and idealists can not deliver a modern living standard to millions of men armed with only shovels.

   
    Economists who call the peasant condition "poverty" miss the reality of the system: The controls at the heart of that condition maintain the balance, and keep true poverty, that murderous year, at bay.  The industrial worker or intellectual, experiencing a recession, or even a depression, has experience and abstraction available to him.  He knows something is going wrong.  The peasant, faced with the bad year, has no such awareness.  He has been through these before.  The verities got them through before, they will work again.  And, often enough, they do.

    I suspect most intellectuals would be surprised how many European nations have experienced the same development changes as Italy.  Between 1965 and 1993 the European farm population was halved.[119] Between 1950 and 1972 the proportion of the Soviet population classified as urban, went from 39 to 59 percent.[120]

    The migration of agricultural workers to the major cities of South America has been well publicized in the past few years, but the movement has a long history.  Japanese immigrants told their children to leave the farm and the agricultural life, for life in the city and opportunity, decades ago.[121]  In Canada, the fact that the French province has more or less reached economic parity with the mid-point of English speaking Canada reflects a very large, and mostly unexamined change. An industrialized Quebec is a very different part of the mix than it was when it was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural.[122]

    I argue that the move from the peasantry to the urban slum must always involve the differentiating effect that the IQ distribution demands, but that the move also vastly improves the material lives of everyone involved.  Consumption issues for very large populations must involve productivity issues for the same population.

   One wonders when it was that people first thought that a society could consume what it could not produce.  One wonders when it was that people first made the assumptions that because people have some power to manipulate the environment, they have all the power they need to manipulate their society.

  
  Theodore Parker's celebrated sermon in 1846, A Sermon on the Perishing Classes in Boston,[123] concerned the Irish and may have been the earliest attempt by an intellectual to grapple with the problems posed by the entry of a non-Protestant peasantry into an industrializing America.  His observations would fit comfortably on the op-ed page of the Boston Globe today.  Among the points: Any society that can engineer a canal system to harness the power of the mighty Merrimack River could certainly prevent poverty and delinquent behavior.  A nation that could expand across a continent could abolish crime, intemperance, and pauperism.

  Between June 9, 1845, and June 2, 1846, over 1200 people were committed to the house of correction: one of every fifty-six residents of Boston over the age of 10.  Education would be the answer.  If Catholics would not attend public schools, perhaps it would be possible to for them to have separate schools, as was done for the Africans.  

    Now, Parker was addressing the problems presented by the first great wave of foreign agricultural workers to enter America.  And he was fairly sympathetic. Still, he did not see what no one could have seen without IQ data.  If some of the Irish had problems, some of the Irish were very, very smart, and were going to do very, very well.  And there would be a population in the middle.

  

                             TABLE 1

 

    Native White Males of Native Parents

                45-64             25-44                           

               years old         years old   

 

% classified as

professional,

technical,

managerial &

administrative       27.1              31.0

 

median school

years completed    11.4              12.5

 

% unemployed        2.6               2.7

 

% self-employed

workers                  15.2                 8.8

 

% institutionalized   1.1                .93

 

             Family Income of Native White

             Population of Native Parents

                                                        

                   45-64             25-44

                 years old       years old

 

median income      $11,149        $10,559   

 

% below

poverty level       6.8            7.3

U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970, National Origin and Language.

 

 

                      TABLE 2

                  Italian Males

     

                   45-64          25-44 

                 years old       years old

                 foreign born    native of

                                       foreign

                                       born or

                                       mixed

                                       parentage

% classified as

professional,

technical,

managerial &

administrative        15.1             31.8

 

median school

years completed      8.4              12.4

 

% unemployed        3.3               2.4

 

% self

employed

workers                  13.6               9.7

 

% institutionalized  .45               .51

 

        Family Income of Italian Americans     

  

                   45-64             25-44

                years old        years old

              foreign born       native of

                                 foreign

                                 born or

                                 mixed

                                 parentage

median  income     $11,360        $11,832

%  below

poverty level       4.6              4.6

 

U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 National Origin and Language. 

Appendix A

 

        University of London

British Postgraduate Medical Federation    INSTITUTE OF PSYCHIATRY

                                                           De Crespigny Park

The Bethlehem Royal Hospital                         Denmark Hill

                         and                                                 LONDON, SE5 8AF

     The Maudsley Hospital                                                     01-703 5411

 

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

Professor H. J. Eysenck, Ph.D., D.Sc.

 

Mr. R. Peppe,

5 Ray Street

Manchester, NH                                         5th. May 1975

 

Dear Mr. Peppe,

 

     Thank you for your interesting letter of April and the enclosed data.  I think the problems you have are not problems for the theory at all, and the findings could have been predicted from genetic theory.  The phenomenon of regression to the mean ensures that even if you start out with a specially selected low scoring sub-population, future generations resulting from an inter-breeding of this sub-population will regress more and more to the mean of the total population which one imagines would be 100 for Italians, Greeks, etc.

  Author's Note:  Sentence not pertaining to Italians deleted.

I discuss the problem of regression in my book The Measurement of Intelligence in some detail; I think it is a most fascinating and intriguing aspect of the theory and one that is not widely known or well understood.  If this explanation does not satisfy you perhaps you could write to me again.

 

    With best wishes,

 

                                                         Yours sincerely,

 

                                                         H. J. Eysenck.

Appendix B

 

INSTITUTE FOR BEHAVIOURAL RESEARCH         YORK                    

   SURVEY RESEARCH CENTRE                            University

           667-3022 Area Code 416                          4700 Keele Street,

                                                              Downsview, Ontario M3j 1p3

 

                                                      December 4, 1980

 

Mr. Richard R. Peppe

25 Birch Street

Derry, New Hampshire

U.S.A.  03038

 

Dear Mr. Peppe:

 

               Thank you for sending me a copy of your article on "Italian Emigration and Economic Productivity".  I find your conclusions interesting and in no way incompatible with the Canadian experience of immigration from Italy and other southern European countries.

 

              I enclose a reprint of a recent article which may be of interest to you. (Anthony H. Richmond and Ravi P. Verma, "Income Inequality in Canada: Ethnic and Generational Aspects," Canadian Studies in Population 5, 1978.)  You would find further relevant materials in the following publications:

 

A. H. Richmond and W. E. Kalbach, Factors in the Adjustment of Immigrants and their Descendants (Ottawa Statistics Canada 1980).

 

A. H. Richmond, Ethnic Variation in Family Income and Poverty in Canada (Toronto:  York University, Ethnic Research Program, 1978).

 

            I hope you will find these materials useful.

                                                                        Yours sincerely,

 

                                                                        A. H. Richmond

                                                                         Director

                                                                         York - IBR