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Thursday, June 6, 2019

Vox Popoli: The dysgenic civilization (When reading Vox Popoli , ALWAYS read his reader comments - you will understand when you do! - CL)


I've been warning about the decline of human intelligence for some time now. And contra the uninformed assumptions of the author of the piece, the average intelligence of the residents of the United States has been dropping precipitously for 50 years:

People are getting dumber. That's not a judgment; it's a global fact. In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline.

Though there are legitimate questions about the relationship between IQ and intelligence, and broad recognition that success depends as much on other virtues like grit, IQ tests in use throughout the world today really do seem to capture something meaningful and durable. Decades of research have shown that individual IQ scores predict things such as educational achievement and longevity. More broadly, the average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation.

So if IQ scores are really dropping, that could not only mean 15 more seasons of the Kardashians, but also the potential end of progress on all these other fronts, ultimately leading to fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future....Details vary from study to study and from place to place given the available data. IQ shortfalls in Norway and Denmark appear in longstanding tests of military conscripts, whereas information about France is based on a smaller sample and a different test. But the broad pattern has become clearer: Beginning around the turn of the 21st century, many of the most economically advanced nations began experiencing some kind of decline in IQ.

There are two reasons. First and foremost, immigration. Second, dysgenic social policies discouraging the most intelligent quintile from propagating. The 20th century involved more than a rejection of eugenics across the West, it also witnessed an active and enthusiastic embrace of dysgenics.