The Stupidity Epidemic by Joel Best

Author:Joel Best [Best, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136164682
Google: ShoSGZ9tLPsC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-08-06T05:43:27+00:00

IQ Scores

Level of education, standardized test scores, and surveys of general knowledge are all indirect measures of societal stupidity; if there is a Stupidity Epidemic—if people are getting dumber or we’re raising the dumbest generation—we ought to expect these measures to decline. But isn’t there a more straightforward way of assessing overall intelligence (or stupidity)? Isn’t that exactly what IQ tests ought to tell us? If we’re getting dumber, we would expect IQs to be falling.

Intelligence testing emerged in the early 20th century, at a time when many people were enamored with the ideas of eugenics—that social policy should encourage reproduction among the healthiest people and discourage it among the least healthy. Eugenicists argued that intelligence was inherited, and that people of low intelligence (at the time, the polite term was feebleminded) were disproportionately responsible for crime, drunkenness, and other social problems. Moreover, the feeble-minded were thought to reproduce at higher rates than people of higher intelligence; eugenicists warned that the feebleminded threatened the future, that humanity was headed toward “race suicide.” These fears became justifications for sterilizing many feebleminded people. Since the poor, immigrants, and members of ethnic minorities tended to have lower IQ scores, the “menace of the feebleminded” was associated with those disadvantaged sectors of society (Trent 1994).2 Eugenics fell out of favor after the world recoiled in horror from the policies of its most enthusiastic advocates—the Nazis.

This does not mean that eugenic arguments have vanished from our popular thinking. Consider the opening scenes of Idiocracy, a movie comedy released in 2006, where we see a yuppie couple—sincere, highly educated, socially concerned—who keep finding reasons to delay parenthood and eventually die without having kids, and a trailer-trash couple—dim-witted hedonists—who proliferate like mad. The bottom line: smart people have fewer kids than stupid people, with the result—the futuristic society portrayed in the movie—that society grows ever dumber. Idiocracy plays this idea for laughs, but the fear that the least intelligent sectors of society have higher birthrates, and that we must as a result be growing dumber, turns up in popular thought.

It is, therefore, somewhat surprising to discover that this fear is completely misplaced, that IQ scores have been steadily rising, not falling. This is the so-called Flynn effect, named after the New Zealand political scientist James R. Flynn, who drew it to scholars’ attention (Flynn 2009). The process went largely unnoticed because psychologists who measure intelligence continually recalibrate how IQ tests are scored. This is because psychologists think of IQs as being normally distributed along the familiar bell-curve distribution; they define the average score as an IQ of 100. In other words, 100 is not some number of correct answers to IQ test questions; 100 is whatever turns out to be the average number of correct answers. Thus, the average IQ in 1950 was 100; so is the average IQ today. However, that does not mean that those two apparently equal scores represent the same number of correct answers on an IQ test. Frame the question differently: take

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