Braverman quotes govt reports from the 1930s that conclude that mechanization will have the effect of raising the average skill required. Stephen Best, Martin Kenney and Richard Florida and others argue that a factory operative's tasks have been so diversified of late that the average skills required of the workforce have indeed taken a leap. Then the question becomes whether the workforce is presently or potentially skilled enough to assume such multi-tasking. Others argue that creative destruction unleashed by new technologies require workers to be skilled enough not only to use new technologies but also to move continuously from declining to ascending firms or branches; and this too requires a highly skilled, highly mobile workforce. Or to put it another way, a workforce that is skilled enough to be fully mobile, of sufficient "general intelligence" truly to become abstract labor in practical terms.
Murray and Herrnstein's argument is that not all human labor is potentially abstract labor in a technologically advanced economy. Without even a glance at the evidence from molecular biology on the question of human genetic diversity (a blind spot shared even by critical economists and sociologists), they imagine there exist groups of people like plots land of successive fertility, suggesting that the education of the lowest groups is like ploughing the worst lands: declining marginal returns. That is, they think the educational costs of rendering the lowest groups productive are prohibitive. They cannot become part of this mobile, abstract labor force. In Victorian England, this group was called the residuum; now they are referred to as the cognitive underclass.
Murray and Herrnstein argue for elimination of any affirmative action for these groups, a cut back on any public educational monies for substandard people, selective immigration laws against substandard groups, the elimination of welfare on the grounds that it may encourage more reproduction among these groups. Social scientists laughed at their argument; Pete Wilson has attempted to implement every one of their recommendations. And has been wildly successful so far. Social scientists haven't been so good at figuring out why these laughable arguments become public policy or, to put it another way, why the public policy these laughable ideas support is implemented.
Best, Rakesh