At NBC News Evan Horowitz is worrying about this article at ScienceAlert that IQs are declining in the countries of Western Europe:
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.
Now, some will leap to the conclusion that the reason for the drop is that dumber people are having more children or the very large migration of people from countries with relatively lower average IQs to those with relatively higher average IQs. Those may be factors but they’re not the only factors as this quote from the second link makes clear:
In the new study, the researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons – meaning the effect likely isn’t due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society.
Instead, it suggests changes in lifestyle could be what’s behind these lower IQs, perhaps due to the way children are educated, the way they’re brought up, and the things they spend time doing more and less (the types of play they engage in, whether they read books, and so on).
I would like to propose that IQ tests measure specific cognitive skills related to reasoning and perception, those skills are cultivated by reading, and reading as the primary method for acquiring information has been declining in favor of video, graphics, and so on, the modality I have referred to here as “visualcy”. I have made a number of predictions about the likely implications of that and we seem to be realizing all of them.
As to what to do about it I think the changes are likely inevitable and irreversible. We could try dumping the screens and reading books instead but I doubt that’s likely to catch on.
You should probably add mathematical manipulation skills, or at the very least, arithmetic skills. There is a certain benefit to being forced to fiddle around with variables, and becoming skilled at understanding simple to complex equations.
Today so many kids just pull out a calculator.
Whether there’s a benefit or not there’s a difference. I would speculate that using a calculator cultivates different cognitive skills than performing calculations long hand does. For one thing it encourages thinking algorithmically, in terms of a series of steps executed in a specific order.
For me the bottom line is that we don’t really know how much of our society assumes the skills cultivated by reading or figuring manually. There may be an increasing mismatch between our cognitive abilities and the way things have been organized that could be hard to transcend.
I’m not sure what “within actual families, between brothers and sons” means, but I think the conventional view is that IQ regresses toward the mean btw/ generations. IOW, two parents, each with an IQ of 130, are more likely to have an IQ of 120 or lower, than an IQ of 140 or higher. I don’t think intra-family differences would be informative at all for these issues.
The other piece is the Flynn effect, which found that the mean of the population IQ increases by a point every several years. I think there are a lot of theories out there, but probably increased caloric intake, better public health and education. There is some suggestion that the Flynn effect has stopped in Western countries, presumably because at least for now, Western countries have maxed-out environmental improvements.
If average IQ is declining, then its most likely due to a change in population. If lower IQ people are coming to a country, the mean would drop, though over-time that same immigrant population would show the benefits of whatever is “the Flynn effect” even if the effect is loss.
It could be that some of the causes of the Flynn effect have gotten worse enough to create a reverse Flynn effect, education has gotten worse (visualcy, but I would add pressures from adding non-native speaking students), public health declines (drugs), and maybe there is such a thing as too many calories (I’m skeptical from an IQ standpoint)?
Yet the Flynn effect dominated until recently. I dont think there was any evidence that this was due to more reading or better math skills. Has this decrease also been seen in the US? I also find it a bit unlikely that reading is the factor here, since I think the big drop in reading probably came with the introduction of TV, though I confess I haven’t looked for that data and am just assuming people read less when it was introduced. You would have to assume some threshold effect I think.
Steve
I think this may be the information you’re looking for:
It’s a bit hard to interpret. The sharp drop in the consumption of print media (books, newspapers) began in 2000.
According to a Wikipedia entry on the Flynn effect:
“A 2017 survey of 75 experts in the field of intelligence research suggested four key causes of the Flynn effect: Better health, better nutrition, more and better education, and rising standards of living. Genetic changes were seen as not important. The experts’ views agreed with an independently performed meta-analysis on published Flynn effect data, except that the latter found life history speed to be the most important factor.
The expert survey explained the possible end or decline in the Flynn effect by asymmetric fertility by means of genetic effects, migration, asymmetric fertility by means of socialization effects, declines in education, and the influence of media.”
the solution will be most likely a rejigger of the tests, new norms etc, to show this isn’t happening while loudly anathematizing and ostracizing any who say otherwise. After all, 50 years hence any college grad will be able to recite the alphabet, with the acquisition of a graduate degree, able to able to flawlessly use the various gender, ethnic group labels, and prepare coffee.
Just an observation. As an engineer (and I suspect it must be similar in medicine, or the complex architecture of serious legal documents) I found that analysis of complex equations (or some sort of modeling) developed an intuitive sense of how real world phenomena work, and very importantly, the concept of first, second and third order effects (aka a sense of proportion). That last concept I rarely find in everyday discourse.