CHAPTER 8

Quantity and Quality
liTEDICAL FINDINGS ABOUT BIRTH, SEX, DISEASE, AND IVL death form one of the main bases for demographic predic- tions, though demographers usually treat all this information far less carefully than the doctors who supply it. The data are simply fed into giant calculating machines from which they emerge as vital statistics. In addition to these, demography also investigates economic, social, political, legal and religious data — in short a huge and complex conglomeration of most varied phenomena. But rather than sort them out, demographers prefer to apply their ill-assorted facts to the future. While doctors as a whole may be said to be reluctant prophets, demographers are prophets for the sheer joy of it. True, some of them are a little shy in this respect and prefer to consider demography as a purely historical science, but they are a very small minority. Thus, leading demographers have drawn up most elegant graphs about population increases in Europe during the next fifty years, and claim they can tell you precisely how many men will people the earth in a.d. 2000. Unfortunately the magnitude of their audacity is equalled only by that of their errors.
Pastor Siissmilcb's "divine" order
This love of far-reaching prophecies has good historical reasons, for the first demographic successes did, in fact, border on the miraculous. While other sciences had to undergo a long period of trial and error, demographers made their greatest and most momentous discovery right from the start: an examina- tion of church records at the beginning of the 17th century con- vinced them that the number of annual baptisms, marriages and deaths was as regular as the motion of the planets. Where they had expected chaos, they found what one of the past masters of
218 CHAPTER 8
demography, the German clergymen Johann Peter Siissmilch (1707 to 1767) described as "divine order. "^
Life and death, marriage and birth, and all other apparently unpredictable events of family life, became as predictable as the calendar when they were considered not as family matters but, say, as affecting a large town like London. Here one man might have been married three times and have sired fourteen children of which eight had survived, another might have contracted only one marriage to father ten children of which only four had survived ; a third man might have no children at all, and a fourth might have been a confirmed bachelor, but all the same the num- ber of marriages and births followed a regular pattern over the years, and so did the death rate, except during epidemics, of course. Even the causes of death or the sex ratio remained surprisingly regular.
It did not need the first British census in 1801^ to tell most people that the population had been increasing ever since the Great Plague, though the fact that this increase followed a regular rhythm was an unsuspected discovery. For the first time, future population figures could be estimated accurately, and those concerned could make exact provision for, say, an adequate number of cribs and hearses, for grain imports to feed the growing population and, last but not least, for tax assess- ments. In short, ethnography, which one of its founders, Sir William Petty (1623-1687), had called political arithmetic, proved a very useful science, and its exponents earned great honours.
According to governments and economists alike, the bigger the population the better off a given country was, not so much for military reasons (foreign mercenaries were ten a penny at the time), as for economic. The greater the population, the greater the number of workers, the cheaper their labour power, and hence the cheaper the manufactured articles and the greater the revenue from exports. Densely populated countries like Holland were rich, while sparsely populated countries like Russia were poor. Clever statesmen naturally based their policies
^ J. P. Siissmilch: Die gottlicbe Ordnung in den Verhdltnissen des menschlichen Gescblechts (Berlin 1741).
2 General Register Office: Matters of Life and Death (London 1951), p. 3.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY 219
on the example of the rich countries and tried to persuade their compatriots to have as many children as possible. They also encouraged immigration.
Maltbus' forebodings
As time went on, however, at least some economists began to realise that something had gone wrong with this calculation, for while countries as a whole certainly grew wealthier with increases of population, the majority of their inhabitants grew poorer the while. The French Revolution was to show that such large-scale poverty was a direct threat to the luxury of the rich, and that population increases were no unqualified blessings. The man who formulated this new attitude most uncom- promisingly was Robert Thomas Malthus, an English curate. In a small anonymous essay (1798)^ and later in his famous Principles (1820)^ a work full of statistical data, he put forward the thesis that poverty, disease and war were all the direct results of man's concupiscence, which led him to produce more children than he could feed. Higher wages would do little to alter man's misery, for the better off they were the more children the workers would be able to support, and the more vicious the circle would become. According to Malthus, it was a natural law that if men were allowed to follow their sexual inclinations without let or hindrance, mankind would multiply much more quickly than would the natural resources needed to support it. While the former increased in geometric progression the latter could, at best, be stepped up in arithmetic progression. Malthus's thesis was at first considered downright scandalous, since the idea of enforced sexual abstinence for the poorer classes seemed to run counter to all the tenets of morality and decency. With time, however, Malthus became a household name even outside England — ^not with the masses, of course, but with the upper classes who now had every reason to underpay their
^ T. R. Malthus: Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society.
* T. R. Malthus: Principles of Political Economy with a view to their Practical Application.
220 CHAPTER 8
workers even further. But Malthus made his greatest hit with the economists who discuss his theories to this day, even though his ideas of mathematical progressions have clearly been shown to be false, and his statistical approach to be based on false premises. Thus his investigations had convinced him that the population of Europe would double every 25 years unless there were plagues or particularly bloody wars. Had he been right, there would have been 12,000 million Europeans in 1950, when, in fact, Europe, including the Soviet Union, has a total population of just under 600 million. Thus in the 150 years which have passed since Malthus wrote his gloomy prophecies, the population has only just more than trebled instead of in- creasing by 60 times, and this despite the fact that plagues and war casualties took a far smaller toll of human lives than they did before.
But we do not have to look at modern times to prove Malthus wrong. His mathematical notions did not even apply to the 1 8th century, from which he took most of his statistics. As far as we can tell from the sparse and unreliable statistical data of that period, the population of Europe barely doubled from 1 700 to 1800.^ In fact, only very young immigrant countries ever double their population in 25 years, and not even the United States managed to maintain this rate of increase after 1880.
Depopulation by prosperity
Still, all these arithmetical arguments do not weaken Malthus 's crucial point, viz. that for purely economic and agricultural reasons men can never maintain as many children as they could produce. It is an incontestable fact that mankind is more prolific than Mother Earth who, despite all advances in agronomy still fails to feed all her children properly. Nor have chemists managed to synthesise sufficient quantities of digestible proteins to alter the picture to any large extent, and what talk there is of supplying mankind with all the calories it needs from coal, water, and air is meanwhile purely Utopian.
^ Article on Population in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (N.Y. 1948).
QUANTITY AND QUALITY 221
On the other hand, our propagative capacity is such that man- kind could, in fact, double its numbers in much less than 25 years. The male of our species whose every ejaculation liberates some hundreds of millions of sperms has an almost unlimited reproductive capacity, and only the female places some restric- tion on the rate of propagation. But during the SO years of her sexual maturity, every healthy woman can produce up to fifteen children, and even more if she does not breast-feed them. Because of the great decrease in the incidence of venereal diseases which contributed so greatly to sterility in the past, and also because of advances in pre-natal care, man's potential repro- ductive capacity has become far greater than it was in Malthus's day. Fortunately, men use this capacity to only a limited extent: in the richest and most civilised countries they have only a third or a quarter the number of children they could have. Reproduc- ion has largely become a voluntary act.
This is precisely what Malthus could not have predicted, nor could he have had the slightest inkling of how voluntary parent- hood would affect the social composition of modern societies. In his day, the upper classes produced roughly as many children as the poorer classes, though many more of the rich children survived. But by the second half of the 19th century a reverse trend set in, first in France, then in England and finally in the rest of Europe: birth control was increasingly being practised by the upper classes, i.e. precisely those people, who according to Malthus, had least reason to do so.
Somewhat overzealous ethnographers immediately turned this new trend into a principle: poverty led to higher, and wealth to lower birth-rates. And since poor countries with the most appalling hygienic conditions still had a higher birth than death-rate, they concluded further that poverty led to increased populations, while growing wealth led to smaller populations or at best to a state of equilibrium. This theory^ which was ex- tremely popular in the first third of the 20th century became the basis of the most daring prophecies, so much so that some pessimists predicted that the whole of Europe would be turned into one large cemetery, while others were convinced that the black and yellow races, who had not yet fallen victim to the
^ Julius Wolf: Die Theorie der sozialen Entwicklung in Grundlagen und Kritik des Sozialis?nus (Berlin 1919), Vol. II, pp. 299-319.
222 CHAPTER 8
degenerate doctrine of birth control, would soon drive the white man out of his every preserve.
When the 1929 crisis made its sudden and untoward appear- ance, demographers everywhere waited with bated breath for its expected repercussions on the birth-rate. If the new theory was correct, a steep increase in the birth-rate had to be expected in all great industrial countries, now that sex was the only pleasure left to millions of unemployed men. Clearly these millions could not afford to pay for contraceptives, let alone for abortions. As it turned out, however, all demographic speculation proved to be fallacious — ^poverty failed to go hand in hand with complete irresponsibility. Even the poorest men seemed to take the necessary precautions, realising as they did that the cupboard was bare enough already.
Thus the birth-rate in Europe, America and even in Japan declined during the thirties. The one exception was Germany, where the Hitler regime drove the birth-rate up by government incentives and propaganda. While the number of births in Ger- many had fallen from 1,810,000 in 1901 to 971,000 in 1933, it was up to 1,277,000 in 1936. The democracies looked on in astonishment, but refused to make equally far-reaching inroads into the private lives of their citizens.
Hence things looked very black for them on the eve of the Second World War. The gradual depopulation of Europe seemed inevitable, for no matter whether things became better or worse, people refused to have enough children. The only consolation was the "discovery" of a birth-rate cycle — ^periodic increases and decreases in population, alternating with periods of stability. While the evidence for the existence of such a cycle was regrettably sparse, demographers could point to a great 19th century precedent, and precedents are always grist to the prophetic mills. It appeared that, though the North and West European birth-rate had dropped for some 20 years after the Napoleonic wars, it had subsequently picked up to increase again about 1880.^ Now, if this development were to be repeated after the First World War, a long period of growth could be expected from 1945 onwards. Other observations and reflec- tions led to the conclusion that, if only because of existing age
^ R. R. Kuczinski: The International Decline of Fertility in Political Arithmetic trans. Lancelot Hogben (London 1935), p. 50 f.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY 22S
distributions, the long decline in the birth-rate was bound to be followed by a period of stability. Shrewd ethnographers were quick to apply these considerations to the next three centuries. 1
Those who remained pessimistic even in the face of such brilliant statistical prognoses, were consoled by being told that, in any case, a gradual decline in the birth-rate was far better than a steep rise. For instance, at the time of the Holy Roman Empire, Europe counted only about thirty million inhabitants.* Had the population increased as rapidly as it did in the 19th century, Europe alone would count ten trillion inhabitants, and every spot on earth would be as densely populated as the City of London. This kind of argument is reminiscent of the story about the provident sailor who two thousand years ago put by a penny and whose modern descendants could turn the accumu- lated compound interest into a nugget of gold the size of the earth. In other words, mankind was much better off, whichever way you looked at it.
Europe, 1970
Still, people continued to worry about the depopulation of Europe so much, that, in January 1939, the League of Nations felt impelled to investigate the problem fully. Though the war had started a few months later, the organisers of this laudable enterprise did not permit this trifling incident to interfere with their monumental task. After almost five years of arduous work, which was largely carried out by a group of Princeton ethno- graphers, the task was completed and the results were published while the war was still going on. The very title — The Future Population of Europe and the Soviet Union^ showed that it was a truly prophetic work. In fact, it predicted tjie future for 30 years ahead though, if the truth be told, no errors of such magnitude had ever been committed in any "objective" international
1 R. R. Kuczinski, op. cit., p. 101 f.
* Article on Population in Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften
(4th ed. Jena 1924).
^ League of Nations, Geneva 1944.
224 CHAPTER 8
survey before or since. What the experts had done was simply to apply yesterday's yardstick to tomorrow's cloth. It was taken for granted that, since the birth-rate in some Western countries had barely kept up with the death-rate before the war, the war itself would produce sufficient casualties to decrease the ratio further still. This trend would continue until 1970, by which time Britain would have a population of only 46-8 million inhabitants — 7% less than in 1940 — while the population of France would drop by as much as 10% to 31 million inhabi- tants. Things looked somewhat brighter for Germany, and, although by 1944 it must have been plain in Geneva and in Princeton that the Hitler regime and the Nazi birth drive were unlikely to survive for long, the experts nevertheless assumed that the population of Germany would increase to 72-2 million by 1955, and drop to 69-8 million by 1970.
The population of Southern and Eastern Europe, too, would take a leap upwards: that of belligerent Italy by 10%, and that of neutral Spain by a similar amount which, however, would drop off slightly by 1960. Greater increases still would occur in Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia (20%) and in the U.S.S.R. which would hold the record with an increase of 44% (from 174 million to 251 million).
To-day, it has already become quite obvious that the pro- phecies for the year 1970 have very little chance of being con- firmed by events: they are far too low for Northern, Western and Southern Europe, and far too high for Eastern Europe. While this double error balanced things out to some extent, the total population of Europe was nevertheless over-estimated by some 15,000,000.
Most striking of all was the miscalculation of the figures for the Soviet Union, and this despite the fact that the "prophets" could have had no illusions about Russia's tremendous war losses. Thus the League of Nations and later the United Nations experts calculated that the Soviet population would increase by 15 million from 1940 to 1945, and this, together with miscon- ceptions about the subsequent birth-rate, led them to over- estimate the annual population increase by 2-3 million, so much so that by 1955 the Soviet Union was expected to have 216 million inhabitants.^ Then came the great surprise: in June 1 United Nations: Monthly Bulletin of Statistics (N.Y.) March 1956.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY 225
1956 the Soviet Union lifted the veil over her own census figures and it appeared that the Soviet Union including Soviet Asia had a mere 200-2 million inhabitants — 60 million less than the experts had calculated. In fact, the total population had grown by only 8-5 million since 1940, and while the increase had been most marked in Soviet Asia, White Russia and the Ukraine had fewer inhabitants than sixteen years before. In the table that follows we have contrasted League of Nations and United Nations predictions with actual developments in the leading European countries (with the exception of those whose terri- tories have been so drastically revised as to make direct com- parisons impossible).
Population of Europe 1940 — 1955 (in millions)
1940
1
945
]
1955
Country
Actual
Predicted
Actual
Predicted
Actual
Gt. Britain
50-2
50-6
48-2
50-2
51-0
France
40-2
40-8
39-8
39-7
43-3
Belgium
8-3
8-3
8-3
8-3
8-8
Holland
8-8
9-2
9-2
9-8
10-7
Switzerland
4-2
4-3
4-4
4-2
5-0
Denmark
S-8
3-9
4-0
4-0
4-5
Sweden
6-5
6-4
6-6
6-S
7-3
Norway
2-9
3-0
3-1
3-0
3-4
Spain
25-6
26-4
26-8
27-5
29-0
Portugal
1-6
8-0
8-0
8-5
8-8
Clearly, the estimates for 1945, i.e. for 1-2 years ahead, were relatively correct for most countries, and this despite unpre- dictable war losses. All the more surprising, therefore, are the discrepancies in the post-war figures, which are partly due to an unforeseen recession in the death-rate but must be mainly attri- buted to increases in the birth-rate. While an increase in births had been expected for the immediate post-war period, no one suspected that this trend would continue. Precisely sixty years after the decline in the European birth-rate first began, the pendulum had begun to swing in the opposite direction. Was this, after all, the proof that the birth-rate was, in fact, a cyclic phenomenon?
226 CHAPTER 8
True, in some countries the change had not come about quite naturally, and, particularly in France, the state helped to accelerate the process by generous family allowances: workers with four children were paid about twice the wages of bachelors. But even in countries that were not so open-handed, the birth- rate raced ahead by leaps and bounds. This trend was most marked in the United States where people had begun to speak of a baby boom,^ and where the annual birth rate between 1946 and 1954 was 60% up on the corresponding figures during the pre-war recession, and this despite the fact that the number of potential mothers had increased by only 33^%. Since this increase coincided with a period of extraordinary prosperity, the old notion gave way to a new demographic theory: economic boom — many children, economic crisis — ^few children.
Europe, 2000
Convinced of this truth, the prophets could set to work with renewed vigour. The table below lists three leading ethno- graphers' forecasts for a.d. 2000, the first dated 1945 when the post-war trend was still uncertain, and the others dated 1953 and 1956 respectively, by which time the new trend in the Western world had been appreciated.
The increase in world population during the second half of our century is therefore expected to be S5'^/q, 40% or 47% respec- tively— a little less than the increase during the first half of the century (50%). All in all, it would appear that the world popu- lation will have doubled from 1900 to 2000, just as happened in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, though, in future, Europe will apparently lag behind the rest of the world. Even the most optimistic modem estimates do not consider that Europe (excluding the Soviet Union) can count on a population increase of more than 55% by a.d. 2000.
The population of Asia, on the other hand, which only a few decades ago was periodically stricken by plagues and famine to such an extent that the average increases were often smaller
1 Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Statistical Bulletin (N.Y.) May 1955.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY
227
than they were in Europe — and this despite the far higher Asian birth-rate — is expected to increase by leaps and bounds in the future. The mortality rate is declining in even the most hygienically and economically backward countries, and while it still exceeds the European rate by far, the gap is being narrowed year by year. In China, for instance, the annual mortality rate is said to be 0-08% as against the annual birth-rate of 0-45%, ^ so that there is an annual population increase of 22 million inhabitants. Admittedly this enormous increase will not con- tinue for ever, since a declining mortality rate usually brings a declining birth-rate in its wake.
tVorld Population in A.D. 2000^ ( in millions )
Area
Actual Estimate for A.D. 2000
Population Notestein Woytinsky Fourastie and Vimont in 1950 (1945) 1953 1956
World
2400
3345
3250
3550
N. America
166
176
220
220
S. America
162
283
280
280
Europe (excldg.
U.S.S.R.)
S96
417
440
450
U.S.S.R.
193
298
260
275
Asia (excldg.
U.S.S.R.)
1272
1900
1750
2000
Africa
198
250
280
300
Oceania
13
21
20
20
Moreover, this development is being encouraged by the governments themselves. Japan and India, and more recently China, are actively propagating birth control and rational family planning. Everyone may have as many children as he wants but no more. While birth control has not so far managed to capture the imagination of the illiterate Chinese masses, modem means of mass communication are sure to sway them in the end.
1 United Nations Monthly Bulletin of Statistics (N.Y.) August 1957. ^ Jean Fourasti^ and Claude Vimont: Histoire de demain (Paris 1956), p. 17.
228 CHAPTER 8
This influence must, in any case, not be ignored in population forecasts, for it has already played a large, if not decisive, role in the decline of the Western birth-rate. When, as seems possible, 19th century birth-control techniques are superseded by harmless chemical preparations, the repercussions may be such that all demographic predictions may once again go by the board.
The weaker sex
Demographic predictions come up against another major obstacle as well: the sex ratio. Everywhere in the Western world, women outnumber men, and not only in countries whose male population has been decimated by wars. Thus, in Western Germany, there is a surplus of women over men of three million, i.e. of 12% and in Britain of two million (8%). In many large cities, this surplus is such that a woman's chances of marriage are appreciably reduced, and, in Vienna for instance, women outnumber men by almost 30%.
This phenomenon is particularly strange, since, in the West at least, the number of new-born boys always exceeds that of new-bom girls. This fact has long been appreciated and was first mentioned in John Graunt's Natural and Political Observation upon the Bills of Mortality ( 1662). The common belief that an excess of boys is born exclusively during wars, when nature, as it were, makes up for her losses, is a fallacy. In peace time, too, the sex ratio remains fairly constant, 104 boys being born for every 100 girls, though with marked regional, and apparently even greater social differences.
Previously it was believed that racial factors, too, were involved, because the Negro sex ratio in the United States is smaller than that of the whites. However, it has since appeared that whenever hygienic conditions were improved the Negro sex ratio approaches that of the rest of the population. The upper classes in the United States have a particularly high male to female ratio (125 : lOO),^ and the ratio is therefore a
1 M. E. Bernstein: Changes in sex ratio, upper social strata in Human Biology, December 1948.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY 229
kind of economic index, explaining, for instance, why more girls than boys are born in poor countries like India and China.
The embryonic male to female ratio is far greater still. Mis- carriages have shown that it is about 3 : 2, and that it can be as much as 4 : 1 during the first months of pregnancy. ^ Thus the male death-rate begins to exceed the female death-rate in the womb, and this process is continued after birth when the infantile mortality rate of boys is universally greater than that of girls.
Thus, though more boys are conceived, more girls survive, so much so that during the 19th and early 20th centuries the number of five-year-old boys and girls was approximately equal in Western Europe, In much higher age-groups, puerperal fever tended to kill off the mothers so that males often predominated, but since both puerperal fever and also births (and hence their danger to the mother's life ) have declined, and since men, more- over, tend to die earlier than women, women have begun to gain the (numerical) upper hand.
A surfeit of women
The future consequences of this tendency have been the subject of keen speculation among demographers, some of whom have held that, since male survival depends on environmental factors (which are constantly being ameliorated) the present excess of women over men is only a passing phenomenon.
The facts, however, do not seem to bear out this hypothesis. Better conditions of life, and particularly social health measures have tended to weight the balance even further in favour of women. Thus among teenagers, who were not affected directly by the last World War, women exceed men by 3-5%, and the time when a large number of men will be relegated to enforced bachelordom seems very far off indeed, if it will ever come at all.
Geneticists, too, have had their say on this subject, and their
^ C, Stem: Grundlage der menschlichen Erblehre (Gottingen-Berlin- Frankfort 1955), p. 351.
230 CHAPTER 8
pronouncements go along way towards reassuring womankind. According to them, the sex ratio can be controlled within the predictable future by direct medical intervention.
Though these hopes, which are based on successful animal experiments some 30 years ago, have not yet shown any signs of being fulfilled, biologists have not allowed themselves to become discouraged. Thus Curt Stern, a German-born geneticist working at Berkeley University (California), is convinced that sex determinations of human beings will be voluntarily controlled one day,^ and another leading expert, the American biologist Laurence H. Snyder feels that, though none of the present methods have been tested sufficiently, voluntary sex deter- mination in human beings is a theoretical possibility, at least.''
Opinions about successful methods are largely divided, though two procedures seem to be the most promising. In the first, electrical or chemical techniques are used to isolate "male" from "female" sperms, and the desired sperm is introduced into the uterus by artificial insemination. This procedure involves practising the strictest birth control since a single careless slip might upset it.
The second procedure involves conditioning the uterus in such a way that it becomes receptive either to male or to female sperms alone. In other words, the sperms would not have to be isolated at all, but one type would be "sterilised" in utero, prob- ably by hormone treatment. There would therefore be no need for artificial insemination. For that reason alone, this method is preferable in practice. In any case, it is now realised that sex can only be fixed before, and not, as was previously thought, after conception.
However, as we have seen, the whole subject is still in its theoretical stages and no one can say with certainty whether either method will lead to practical results. Should it do so, the social repercussions would be tremendous, though, unless family life as such were to disappear completely, there is little chance of an Amazonian super-state, or an all-male race of warriors, being set up.
1 C. Stem, op. cit., p. 367.
^ Laurence H. Snyder: Grundlagen der Vererbung (Frankfort-Berlin)
p. S23.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY 231
Comparing I.Q-s
So far we have discussed populations quantitatively, and we shall now look at their qualitative aspects. Clearly mere numbers are not enough, and parents and governments alike are concerned with producing the best possible human material. However, qualitative predictions prove even more difficult to make than those dealing with quantity.
In 1883, Sir Francis Galton coined the term "eugenics" for the science which deals with scientific breeding to determine the quality of the offspring. Galton himself was much too rational and liberal a man to have looked upon human beings as mere breeding animals but unfortunately many of his disciples turned his doctrine into just that — even during his own lifetime. The American sterilisation laws — under which fifty thousand Americans were compulsorily sterilised for eugenic reasons from 1911-1950 — and the excesses of the Hitler regime have given eugenics so bad a reputation that it will have to wage a long battle to wipe out the blot on its name.
Eugenics is a prophetic science by definition, for its aims are to control the future. This is perhaps one of the reasons why its disciples have made so many promises unsupported by any known genetic facts. While European eugenics stresses the physical development of the offspring, in America and also in Scandinavia the emphasis is placed on mental health, and eugenic measures are here (and particularly in 28 of the United States) directed at eradicating congenital mental deficiencies and criminal lunacy. The strictest laws exist in California, where thirty thousand "inferior" men have been sterilised, though strict proof that this measure has appreciably increased the mental health of Californians is still wanting.
In America there is also a more "positive" form of eugenics. Many American psychologists and teachers have made it their chosen task to determine intelligence, to classify human beings accordingly, and to encourage particularly promising children, who are sent out into the world not only with school certificates but with an I.Q. (intelligence quotient) certificate as well. I.Q.s are established on the basis of answers to a long question- naire and are graded according to a fixed scale. Thus a ten-year- old boy of average intelligence is given an I.Q. of 100; if his
232 CHAPTER 8
intelligence is that of an eight-year-old boy he is given an I.Q. of 80, and if he is as bright as a normal twelve-year-old boy he is given an I.Q. of 120. Modern Americans carry their I.Q.s with them as other people carry Identity cards, unless of course the I.Q. is low, in which case they often lose it.
This inherently dangerous game with numbers, which may lead to arrogance on the one hand and feelings of inferiority on the other, is now put to large-scale prognostic uses. Even though I.Q. tests have revealed little else that is remarkable, they have shown that intelligence expresses itself rather early and remains almost constant for decades. In school-children below the age of ten the tests are admittedly of small prognostic value, but thereafter they are taken as criteria of suitability for given jobs, and general suitability. And, in fact, in a large control experiment with 1500 formerly gifted school-children, it appeared that their I.Q. had not changed greatly after 25 years. Men who had been found to have a high I.Q. at school, con- tinued to show their prowess in professional life and usually managed to obtain good positions^ not only in intellectual spheres but also as businessmen and technicians.
In other countries, people are inclined to be a little more sceptical about using particularly pre-adolescent I.Q. tests as prognostic criteria, though few would deny that general intelligence tests are better standards of judging subsequent professional performance than the old-fashioned system of examinations and reports which tell us more about what know- ledge a given pupil has attained than about his ability to gain and to apply new knowledge — the very things that matter in professional life.
Much more debatable is the relevance of I.Q. tests to eugenic prognoses, i.e. it is by no means certain that parents with high I.Q.s will necessarily have more intelligent children than parents with low I.Q.s. Though a great deal of research has been done to determine to what extent intelligence is in- herited, and to what extent it is modified by environmental factors,'' the results are far from conclusive.
The only thing that seems certain is that, since the children of
1 L. M. Terman and M. A. Merrill: Measuring Intelligence f Bost New York-Chicago 1937).
2 Anne Anastasi and J. P. Foley: Differential Psychology (N. Y. 1949).
QUANTITY AND QUALITY 233
intellectual parents generally have higher I.Q.s than children of unskilled workers, general eugenic prognoses can be made for one generation ahead, but not for subsequent generations. The fact that children of mentally undistinguished parents may nevertheless be geniuses must, in the present state of eugenics, be considered the happy exception rather than the rule.