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Smarter or dumber?
Is humanity getting smarter or dumber? It’s a question that has bugged Intelligence Quotient researchers for years. And the jury has not yet rendered a definitive verdict.
The prevailing view has been that we are getting smarter. A recent ‘study of all the studies,’ that measured four million people in 31 countries found an average gain of about three IQ points per decade. So seemingly entrenched was this view that it had its own name—the “Flynn Effect”—named after a New Zealand professor who described the phenomenon in the 1980s.
But not so fast. A recent study of some 700,000 Norwegians found that intelligence— assuming you are prepared to accept that IQ is an appropriate measure of intelligence— has not only not grown over the past 40 years, but actually declined. Other studies of Scandinavian countries have yielded similar results. Before we go any further, we must note the supreme irony in the study’s finding. It wasn’t that long ago that US Great Helmsman Donald Trump was fretting to his advisors that it was too bad his country had to take immigrants from the cesspool countries of Africa, instead of from—Norway. Now it’s true that Norway did finish first in the medal count at the recent Winter Olympics in South Korea, compared to the US fourth place finish. (A friendly reminder: Canada came in third—what would appear to Mr. Trump with hindsight to be another stab in the back of his country by Canada, thereby proving that Canada is indeed a threat to US national security and further justifying those huge tariffs). Yet it was the Norwegian Olympic team that earned itself press coverage by planning to order 1,500 eggs and being delivered what they in fact ordered:15,000 eggs. Not even calorie, protein and carbohydratehungry Norwegian cross country skiers could eat their way through that mistake
Two red flags go up about the reliability of the study. First, the subjects were all male— a gender not known for its accomplishments, that routinely finishes a distant second to the female of the species in areas such as common sense, multitasking, nurturing, determination and self-awareness. It may be that men are getting dumber, but women could equally be getting so much smarter. Second, the subjects were armed forces recruits. Studies in the US show its military officers—its career hires—are doing worse on IQ tests than they did a generation ago. You can insert your own joke here about military intelligence.
But assuming that intelligence has declined over the past couple of decades, why would it have done so? Have we reached ‘peak intelligence’ in the developed western world? The authors suggest that it might have something to do with education, media exposure, nutrition, health or immigration. That covers almost all the bases. It’s also a powder keg; we can feed our own biases to our hearts’ content.
Some will say it just proves that technology has rendered us such slaves to specialized knowledge that our general problem-solving capacity has diminished. Others will say it goes to show that more money needs to be spent on education. Maybe Donald Trump will seize on the immigration explanation, and insist he was talking about ‘real’ Norwegians, not first-generation Norwegians. And some will say it proves that the Scandinavian social experiment has failed.
It may also inflame the debate about whether these are the best of times or the worst of times. Celebrity academic Steven Pinker has just published a second tome (Enlightenment Now, following on The Better Angels of our Nature) to argue that by all broad measurements, society is growing a heck of a lot safer, smarter, healthier and more civil over the centuries and the decades. He would no doubt see the study of Norwegian intelligence to be a blip on the horizon. But then he never had to digest his share of 13,500 surplus eggs along with the Norwegian ski jumping team.
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