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The examination of coinciding advantages versus disadvantages is extended in chapter 6 to encompass multiple inequalities. Specifically, we examine the degree to which parental income, parental education, respondent’s education, and respondent’s test scores coincide, using multiple calibrations of these four conditions. We again show that the intersectionality of these inequalities has a distinctly racial pattern. We first demonstrate that the coincidence of advantages is much higher for whites than for blacks, with whites registering a higher coincidence of four advantages than blacks register for two advantages. In parallel fashion, we show that the coincidence of disadvantages is much higher for blacks than for whites, with blacks registering a higher coincidence of four disadvantages than whites register for two disadvantages. We show further that whites’ high coincidence of advantages is coupled with a low coincidence of disadvantages, while the opposite is true for blacks. Chapter 6 also examines the set-theoretic connections between combinations of advantages and avoiding poverty and between combinations of disadvantages and experiencing poverty. By far, the strongest and most consistent connection is between multiple advantages and avoiding poverty, a connection that is especially strong for whites.

The Bell Curve focuses on the competition between two independent variables, family background and test scores. Chapter 5 addresses the Bell Curve directly, assessing the set-theoretic connections between family background--especially parental income--and test scores, on the one hand, and poverty, on the other. Our results reveal a distinct pattern of racial confounding that is hidden in conventional analyses, namely a strong connection between advantages and avoiding poverty for whites and a strong connection between disadvantages and experiencing poverty for blacks. Specifically, we document very strong connections for white males and white females between not-low-income-parents and not-low-test-scores, on the one hand, and avoiding poverty, on the other. These same connections for blacks are much weaker. However, blacks exhibit a strong shared-antecedent connection between not-high-income-parents and not-high-test-scores, on the one hand, and experiencing poverty, on the other. Our findings are thus fundamentally different from the insights offered in the Bell Curve, suggesting a clear pattern of racial differences in the connection between family background and poverty.