Richard Gray, Telegraph (London), February 8, 2009
Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period.
Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.
The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called “Flynn effect” which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.
Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect and the author of the latest study, believes the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having “stagnated” or even dumbed down.
He used data gathered in IQ tests on UK children to examine how the country’s cognitive skills have changed over time.
He found that while children aged between five and 10 saw their IQs increase by up to half a point a year over the three decades, teenagers performed less well.
“It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers,” said Professor Flynn. “While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched.
“Other studies have shown how pervasive teenage youth culture is, and what we see is parents’ influence on IQ slowly diminishing with age.
“Up until the age of nine and ten, the home has a really powerful influence, so we can assume parents have been providing their children with a more cognitive challenging environment in the past 30 years.
“After that age the children become more autonomous and they gravitate to peer groups that set the cognitive environment.
“What we know is that youth culture is more visually orientated around computer games than they are in terms of reading and holding conversations.”
He added that previous studies have shown that IQ increases as teenagers move into adulthood, entering university or starting work.
Professor Flynn also believes that the larger drop in IQ among the upper half of the ability range could be due to effects of social class.
He said: “IQ gains are typically correlated by class, but the results in this case are very mixed. Maybe the rebellious peer culture of the lower half of British society has invaded the peer culture of the upper half.
“It could be the classes in the upper half were insulated from this rebellious peer culture for a time, but now it is universal.”
His research, which is presented in a paper published online by the journal Economics and Human Biology, also refutes the commonly held belief that increases in IQ over time are a result of improving nutrition.
Previous research has suggested that using text messages and email causes concentration to drop, temporarily reducing IQ by 10 points, while smoking marijuana has been associated with a four-point drop in IQ.
IQ, or intelligence quotient, is normally expressed as a single numerical score, with 100 being the average.
Professor Flynn’s study was conducted using a respected IQ test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Questions involve matching a series of patterns and sequences, so that even people with no education can take the test.
Dr John Raven, the Edinburgh-based psychologist who invented the test, said he was surprised by the fall in teenage IQ.
He said: “IQ is influenced by multiple factors that can be dependent upon culture, but the norms tend to be very similar across cultures even in societies that have no access to computers and television.
“What we do see is that IQ changes dramatically over time.”
He cautioned that since the study did not record the social class of participants, “it is very difficult to make inferences about how changes within social classes can impact on these changes in IQ”.
Richard House, a senior lecturer in therapeutic education at Roehampton University and a researcher into the effects of television on children, said: “Taking these findings at face value, it appears that there is something happening to teenagers.
“Computer games and computer culture has led to a decrease in reading books. The tendency for teachers to now ‘teach to the test’ has also led to a decrease in the capacity to think in lateral ways.”
[Editor’s Note: The full text of “Requiem for nutrition as the cause of IQ gains Raven’s gains in Britain 1938 to 2008,” by James R. Flynn, is available in both PDF and HTLM formats here.
Original article
(Posted on February 10, 2009)
James R. Flynn, Science Digest, February 2, 2009
University of Otago, Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand
Received 10 January 2009;
The hypothesis that enhanced nutrition is mainly responsible for massive IQ gains over time borrows plausibility from the height gains of the 20th century However, evidence shows that the two trends are largely independent. A detailed analysis of IQ trends on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests in Britain dramatizes the poverty of the nutrition hypothesis. A multiple factor hypothesis that operates on three levels is offered as an alternative instrument of causal explanation.
The Raven’s data show that over the 65 years from circa 1942 to the present, taking ages 5 to 15 together, British school children have gained 14 IQ points for a rate of 0.216 points per year. However, since 1979, gains have declined with age and between the ages of 12 to 13 and 14 to 15, small gains turn into small losses. This is confirmed by Piagetian data and poses the possibility that the cognitive demands of teenage subculture have been stagnant over perhaps the last 30 years.
Keywords: nutrition and IQ; recent IQ gains in Britain; intelligence; causes of IQ gains over time; Raven’s Progressive Matrices
JEL classification codes: I10; I312
Corresponding Author Contact Information Tel.: +64 3 479 8668; fax: +64 3 479 7174.
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Original article
Comments
In today’s multicultural Britain, up is down and down is up, the truth cannot be spoken out loud, logic is defied, and nature is hammered on the forge of political correctness.
The population of Britain has been altered since 1980, and so has its ability to use logic and critical thought.
My guess is this would be true in America too. Go to any blog site and see what these kids write, how they spell, their use of grammar. They have been bombarded with all that Ebo-Jive-Talk and now they can’t even speak or write in an intelligent manner, it’s mostly like a black rapper (as they call them).
On the other hand, Britain is a LOT more black and brown and LESS White today then it was thirty years ago. I wonder to what extent this affected the results (not that the British authorities would ever tell us).
Perhaps this drop might be explained in the changing demographics of the sample groups. What was the racial make up of English children in 1980 and what is the current make up after the wave of non-white immigration? What were the races of the majority of children studied then and what are the races now?
Delve a bit deeper and Mr. Flynns’ findings my prove the point he so desperately wanted to disprove in the first round; IQ and race are undeniably linked. That would be an irony for the ages.
If the racial data is contained in the sample, I hope someone looks into it.
James Flynn is a dolt. I remember viewing a video debate online between him and Charles Murray on IQ, heredity and the Black-White gap. So shocking was Flynn’s pitiful argument against Murray‘s mound of data and reasoning. His only crutch was the tired study done over three decades ago on the IQs of mulatto children born to abused, needy post-WWII German women.
The study showed equal mulatto IQs to actual German children IQs-actually… no it didn’t. Even when US army recruiters were highly selective with Black GIs serving- their half Black offspring were still a handful of points away from the mean of German children.
This new study of his further confirms my opinion that Flynn’s work is a distraction and inconsistent with the tenets of biology and cognitive research and his own purported beliefs as well. The environment, once nutrition is taken care of, has little if any impact on a person’s intelligence. Lower IQ mothers and fathers begets lower IQ children just as brown eyed parents produce brown eyed children. Its that simple and do not let Flynn or any other distraction corrupt your ability to understand this.
It’s not clear from the article whether the teens were differentiated by race. If they’re just testing everyone regardless of race, then there’s no surprise. 1/5 children in Britain is now a non-white minority. That could easily bring IQ averages down.
A very large part of the “dumbing down” can be attributed to poor parenting, poor schools, poor political leadership and representation and poor media both print and television.
To a large extent many people are quite sheep like and when the role models are poor the result is what you see.
Few independent thinkers have a hopeless chance to upset the liberal leftist marxists and feminazis.
To get a consensus of how others felt about this find, I typed in the title of the article into Google. To my dismay, many people blamed lower IQs on the dumbing down of British youth culture. Like Flynn, they felt too much ‘telly,’ McDonalds, and PC “if it feels good” education caused the poor scores. No it doesn’t.
Twin studies and adoption studies consistently find intelligence and temperament are highly hereditable-meaning it is fixed at birth and not so malleable. Children adopted into high IQ, white collar families have a lower intelligence then the biological children of these white collar families. Which is not to say people should stop adopting unwanted children, however.
Like the rest of the Anglosphere, upper class White couples find it economically stupid to have lots of tots even if they could afford to do so. Or they don’t mind having less disposable income but the careers of these smart women(and men) derail them from their most fertile years.
This actually is nothing new, the issue of lower class people having a lot of children was what gave fuel to early eugenics movements in the US and W. Europe. Both socialist and capitalist agreed in Britain on breeding better people. Richard Lynn in his book “Dysgenics” argued that the downward spiral has gone on for some time in Western countries with almost 5 to a full 8 IQ points gone b/c of the most intelligent derailed by their careers.
Sadly the same thing is happening in the US. Kid’s at 16, test where they did at 14, 30 + years ago.
Some of the decline can be attributed to recent immigration, while the rest is,in my opinion, because of the rise of chav culture in the UK. A culture that places more emphasis on materialism and status than on intelligence and being a productive member of society.
This raises an interesting point which AmRen would do well to pursue: it is well known that the combination of European slaveowner genes and the benefits of growing up in a largely white environment have given African-Americans a substantially higher average IQ (85) than their African counterparts (70). However, I would be interested to know if there is any evidence to suggest that white Americans have lost any IQ points by growing up in an environment where black presence is increasing.
Incidentally, many readers of this article - who are aware that genetics play a greater role in determining IQ than environmental factors - may be puzzled by the dichotomy between a moderate rise in the IQs of 5 - 10 year-olds and a substantial decline in intelligence among adolescents, and skeptical of Prof. Flynn’s explanation regarding the ‘dumbing down’ of white adolescent culture. Rightly so: a more logical explanation for this dichotomy is the fact that black children mature more rapidly than white children mentally and physically, and reach their intellectual peak earlier than white children reach theirs. Thus whilst the intelligence of the population would be declining overall due to increasing black demographic influence, this would not be noticeable in the 5 -10 year-old age group as at this age the black population would be performing at an intellectual level higher than their normal (lifetime) distribution curve.
Of course, changing the population mix couldn’t possibly be a factor.
If a hostile domestic or foreign entity wishes to take control of a country, it must first lobotomize its population. The formula seems to be working quite well in Britain and the United States.
This is tough news for the genetic determinist crowd. So what is it? Now that whites are showing a remarkable drop in IQ, are views on black IQ changed? Are you ready to accept the substantial cultural factors that shape IQ?
The alarming thing about this is that as White nations become less White, the aggregate intellectual potential of our societies is reduced. As our education system becomes less effective, we aren’t able to educate the children who do have the potential to cure new diseases and invent the next generation of spacecraft, nuclear power plants, and alternative energies. This is the pricetag of black and brown-ness. Be as offended as you like, nonwhites, but you cannot point to any society which has improved in ANY measure by increased black and brown populations. I can demonstrate a number of societies that have declined rapidly with dimished White population and power, however. There is no way to argue the point. It is simply the truth, but they insist that 2+2=5 regardless.
Once we lose the power to educate those who have potential, and genius of our race has been diminished, our societies will resemble Africa in many ways. Confused, furrowed brows trying to understand how the big machines used to make the mojo for lights, food, and healing. Western Europe and the USA are what you get with nearly all-white populations and strong White political and economic control. Africa is what you get with the reverse.
Put on Beethoven and read the Illiad with a some Scotch whiskey. The lights are going out.
Anonymous wrote:
“This is tough news for the genetic determinist crowd. So what is it? Now that whites are showing a remarkable drop in IQ, are views on black IQ changed? Are you ready to accept the substantial cultural factors that shape IQ?”
I can see why you would want to remain anonymous, with this straw- man posting. There are no genetic determinists - all hereditarians acknowledge an environmental contribution to IQ. Only environmentalists are deterministic, refusing to admit the role of genetics. If you think otherwise, name either a hereditarian who says environment doesn’t matter or an environmentalist who says that genetics also plays a role.
Al Boyd
In time we all sink to the lowest common denominator!
Yet the British government assures us that educational attainment (as measured by GCSEs, ‘A’ Levels and university students) has never been higher.
Most upper class (i.e., many policymaking) Germans are closet eugenicists, and there is a boomlet of babies among that class.
The (false, nonsensical) association of eugenics with Hitler keeps them silent in public, but I believe they are trying to find ways to guide things without much public fanfare.
Why? Because immigration aside, the Germans who have the most children are lower class and fairly stupid.
If this continues, Europeans will eventually be on par with 3rd world immigrants.
Its much worse in England, where the yobs are multiplying.
Ultimately, even of immigration were definitively solved, then Europe would still need a robust eugenics program to reverse this decline.
Anonymous @ 10:16 PM:
This study shows a remarkable drop in the IQs of British teenagers as a whole, not just white teenagers; and of course the British teenage demographic group has a much greater proportion of non-whites than it did 30 years ago. Based on what we know of race and IQ, it is entirely logical that the intelligence of a population group would decline as it becomes progressively ‘blacker’. Prof. Flynn’s explanation about adolescent culture ‘dumbing down’ is interesting and may be relevant to some degree; however, as genetic factors player a greater deterministic role in intelligence than environmental ones, it is unlikely that this will have affected the average teenage IQ as much as the changing racial makeup of the teenage demographic has.
I would posit the high birth rate of the lower end of the white IQ spectrum as a factor in this national drop. There are many white “welfare moms” here who have been enabled by Marxist social policies.
I agree with James Y that growing up in a largely non-white society will make you more stupid than growing up in a white society.
There really can be no doubt that our society is stupider than the America of the 1950s, although I hardly consider that a golden age (except by comparison to now).
The time-horizon in these societies is lower, the tendency to use abstract ideas and appreciate nuances is greatly diminished. Actually, people start to act completely differently when non-white culture is considered legitimate. Just consider the emphasis on being “cool” and promiscuous sex - we didnt use to be like this.
I’m always surprised when folks insist that IQ is strictly a function or either genes or environment. The fact is that both play a role.
Just as a person who is genetically predisposed to be an elite athlete must train to develop, so it is with the intellect. The genetic component sets the potential basement and roof for the intellect. Environment influences the actual level of development.
Speaking of a decline in critical reasoning skills and reading comprehension—about half of the posters here missed the point that the isolated IQs of the WHITE population have gone down, so the changing racial makeup of Britain could only be argued to have a cultural influence on these numbers. Incidentally, there’s some interesting IQ testing that was done by the US army in 1917 that found urbanized black northerners had higher IQs than rural white southerners. The scientists involved were not liberal multi-culturalists (this being 1917) and the data was not in any way massaged, (as there was no reason to—blacks and whites were segregated) so I’d like to hear some theories on why this might be and why people are so adamantly opposed to the idea that it’s possible to raise black IQ to an acceptable norm? The simplest way to do this, culture aside, would seem to be pairing some high IQ whites with low IQ blacks to produce average IQ mulattoes who would be no less intelligent than the majority of whites. This would also settle some of our racial issues as black resentment towards whites would be undermined. In fact, if a mulatto then marries someone white in the next generation, the children are at least 3/4ths white and the very oppositional “black” identity which discriminates and is discriminated against goes away. Why should we not advocate this?
Translation: There are more non-white teenagers in Britain.
There was an article a while ago stating that the population of America is shrinking in terms of height. The reason? Look no further than the burgeoning offspring of 12-30 million five-foot-tall Mexican illegals.
” The pollution of non-European, non-assimilating , alien invaders ” via self-destructive pogrom immigration policies since the mid 1960’s(by coincidence (?) like all other white-Christian countries) is the ” reason for the ” dumbing down ” of all Western Educational systems.No surprise but not talked about.
“British Teenagers Have Lower IQs Than Their Counterparts Did 30 Years Ago”
That finding is hardly surprising.
Anonymous poster wrote:
There was an article a while ago stating that the population of America is shrinking in terms of height. The reason? Look no further than the burgeoning offspring of 12-30 million five-foot-tall Mexican illegals.
And another one about how the average gestation period for expecting American mothers is decreasing, by the March of Dimes. I think it’s just a matter of a higher percentage of “American” expecting women to be black and Hispanic, and Rushton has proven that their expecting women have slightly shorter gestation periods.
“The scientists involved were not liberal multi-culturalists (this being 1917) and the data was not in any way massaged, (as there was no reason to—blacks and whites were segregated) so I’d like to hear some theories on why this might be and why people are so adamantly opposed to the idea that it’s possible to raise black IQ to an acceptable norm?”
Not adamently opposed-simply unconvinced. Also note that the study you cite also had shown Blacks in the South to have lower IQs then their Southern White peers. Why is that?
The good prof is obviously a light weight. Either that,
Some of the other posters touched on this: what are the
Schadrach:
The test mentioned in the Telegraph article did not control for race, which is why I think changes in racial makup will have been the most important factor.
The research from 1917 you mentioned is suprising: on its own, it could support the case for environmental over hereditary factors. However, all other data collected over this field overwhelmingly supports the genes over environment view. For instance, programs like Head Start failed to improve black intelligence despite the fact that the black children involved received the best education money could buy. Looked at in the context of all the other data on race and intelligence combined, the 1917 study you mentioned seems erroneous. Perhaps the researchers were lucky enough to unwittingly carry out IQ tests on blacks who would all have fitted comfortably into W. E. B. DuBois’s ‘talented ten per cent’. The fact you have to go back to a single test in 1917, despite all the attempts by the establishment to ‘prove’ the race-egalitarian conclusions that you have drawn from this data, says it all. I consider the results anomalous.
Finally, the miscegenation you put forward as a solution is deeply undesirable: there is no benefit at all for the white race in dumbing down through interbreeding with less intelligent races. An intellectual retardation of future generations of our descendants is too high a price to pay for an end to ethnic strife - which would be resolved better by peaceful seperatism and co-existence in different social spheres.
The comments on this piece are truly absurd, as usual. I am acquainted with Mr. Flynn and correspond with him regularly. Note: The IQ’s British teens are apparently 14 points higher than they were in 1942. They’re also higher than the Brits of the 1950’s, 1960’s and even 1970’s. Ok? After, 1979, there seems to have been a 2 pts drop at the high end of age range of the sample. So there must have been a 16 pt. rise from 1942-1979. From 29-66 years ago, British IQ’s rose at a very high rate. The British of today have higher IQ’s than the Brits of 29-66 years ago.
Now, since 1979, there has been a very modest drop of less than 1 pt per decade in the very oldest teens.
And! In the last 30 years, IQ’s of 5-10 yr old Brits have risen 15 full points!
Britain is 2% Black. British Blacks are 12% White. So much for the “Britain is turning Black” nonsense. Racial factors cannot possibly explain this slight decline, nor can miscegenation. Increasing Blacks in the population could not explain rising IQ’s among 5-10 yr old’s due to early maturation, since Black IQ is lower than Whites at all ages.
This leaves us with Flynn’s explanation, which seems to explain things well. British teen culture is dumbing down, and race has nothing to do with it.
Flynn readily acknowledges that Blacks have lower IQ’s than Whites. Some of you said he does not admit this. Wrong.
Robert Lindsay is correct. There are not enough Black people in Britain to make such a difference-especially for the middle class loss in IQ.
Its the Chavs-plain and simple. Woe to the tribe of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton-your time as a successful, respectable self-governing race is gone.
The “facts” you cite are very sloppy, Robert Lindsay. You really need to do more research. The study referenced in this article involved the testing of inclusive samples of “British” school children sorted by age-group. The percentage of minority CHILDREN is significantly larger than the percentage of minority ADULTS in British society because of the significantly-higher fertility of non-white minorities (i.e. the “Muslim Effect”).
In other words, if Britain is 10%-15% non-white/minority in terms of overall population (including amnesty-seekers, guest-workers, and illegal immigrants), then non-white “British” school children would be closer to 25% or 30% of the sample group. (thus skewing results downward to a significant degree)
Think, Robert, think! Don’t let your brain turn into a potato!
To Schadrach who posted at 3:54 PM on February 11
Speaking of a decline in critical reasoning skills and reading comprehension—about half of the posters here missed the point that the isolated IQs of the WHITE population have gone down..
No perhaps you should be more careful when you throw stones.. the article and the excerpt from the abstract linked do not even have the word white or for that matter any mention of race.
Incidentally, there’s some interesting IQ testing that was done by the US army in 1917 that found urbanized black northerners had higher IQs than rural white southerners.
I’d like to hear some theories on why this might be
I have a few thoughts…
1) Selectivity.. Black urban Northerners (which in 1917 were not very numerous..) ancestors (or themselves..) had the wherewithal to improve the lives by moving to a more benign (and challenging..) region. The large migrations of Southern Blacks towards the North occurred in the years following WWI. Currently 12.5% of US Blacks have IQs which exceed the White average IQ. If you set up a system that would select for the types of Blacks, you get results that would indicate that Blacks are smarter than Whites.
2) Nutrition. Urban Northerners at that time had a better diet. Iodine deficiencies and various vitamin deficiencies were rather common in the South until the fortification of flour, salt, milk, and butter were widely introduced:
“Nutrient supplementation of foods was mentioned for the first time in the year 400 B.C. by the Persian physician Melanpus, who suggested adding iron filings to wine to increase soldiers’ “potency.” In 1831 the French physician Boussingault urged adding iodine to salt to prevent goitre. However, it was between the First and Second World Wars (1924-1944) that supplementation was established as a measure either to correct or prevent nutritional deficiencies in populations or to restore nutrients lost during food processing. Thus, during this period the adding of iodine to salt, vitamins A and D to margarine, vitamin D to milk, and vitamins B1, B2, niacin, and iron to flours and bread was established.”
Iodine and folic acid deficiencies in infants and children can cause mental impairment:
http://www.sph.emory.edu/PAMM/iodine.htm
Mild iodine deficiency has been reported to reduce intelligence quotients (I.Q.) by 10-15% (15, 25, 81) and cause increased rates of stillbirths, perinatal mortality, and infant mortality (36, 54). There is good evidence from community-based assessments and iodine intervention trials that IDD can leave entire populations with below average intelligence and impaired motor functions. Iodine prophylaxis given before or during pregnancy has resulted in improved cognitive functioning in offspring in Ecuador (25-27, 81). Iodine supplementation given to school-age children can improve performance on tests of intellectual functioning (5, 21).
3) Literacy - Southern rural whites had high rates of illiteracy which would give them low scores on an IQ test constructed in 1917, I am sure higher than Northern urban Blacks who could not rely on welfare, farming, or share cropping to support themselves. The Raven’s matrices (the test used in Flynn’s study which can be taken by illiterate people..) didn’t exist in 1917.
Did the same figures hold true for draftees for the Korean conflict or the Vietnam war..? I very much doubt it.
and why people are so adamantly opposed to the idea that it’s possible to raise black IQ to an acceptable norm?
I assume you mean people posting on Amren and not people in general. I am not opposed to raising the black IQ (or any population’s IQ..) I would very much like to see everyone’s IQ rise but I don’t trust the various solutions proposed. As for raising the mean black IQ in the US…. well it’s been tried for decades with such programs like Head Start… which have had the positive effect of producing children who are less inclined to become criminals as adults (compared to a control group..) but at adulthood do not show any difference in cognitive abilities than controls. So we have better socialization but not higher IQ. However, I think there is strong evidence that vitamin and mineral enrichment of staple foods can markedly increase IQ. (As I already noted vitamin fortification was introduced on a wide scale in this country more than 6 decades ago..) I think such a policy would have a positive effect on many developing countries and it’s one program in the UN that I could support.
Stillwarm, it to is not correct to say that there all efforts to raise Black IQ are futile. Black IQ has risen by 20 pts in the US in the past 80 yrs. Blacks today are smarter than the Whites of 1950, at least as measured by IQ tests. And you guys *do* love those IQ tests, do you not?
The problem with the argument that it is non-Whites in the UK that are causing the IQ drop is not that it is an unreasonable theory. It is quite reasonable. UK Blacks have IQ’s of 86 at adulthood. UK East Indians have IQ’s of 96 at adulthood. Both are lower than the UK White norm.
However, like so many things, a reasonable theory does not seem to pan out in reality. Please read the study carefully. *IQ’s of 5-10 yr old’s have continued to rise at up to .5 pt per year since 1979*. That means that IQ’s of British 5-10 yr old’s have risen by up to 15 pts since 1979. This is not possible if there is a non-White dysgenic effect on British IQ. This dysgenic effect would work on British kids of all ages, I believe.
Furthermore, a dysgenic effect of non-Whites on British IQ causing a 2 pt drop over 30 yrs is not compatible with a eugenic effect of these same non-Whites of 15 pts over 30 yrs. In other words, dysgenic effects cannot cause a 15 pt rise in a younger group and a 2 pt decline in high school freshmen. Forget it!
So clearly, the 2 pt decline in young teens is not caused by changing racial makeup of British teens. Something else must be going on. Like *Idiocracy*.
To Robert Lindsay who posted at 4:00 PM on February 13Stillwarm, it to is not correct to say that there all efforts to raise Black IQ are futile. Black IQ has risen by 20 pts in the US in the past 80 yrs. Blacks today are smarter than the Whites of 1950, at least as measured by IQ tests.
Actually I thought it was implicit in Schadrach’s post that he was talking about narrowing the IQ gap between Blacks and Whites and not just raising the Black IQ. (Since the White IQ per Flynn has also risen since 1950..) I know Flynn states that the IQ gap has narrowed but he seems to rely on figures for children and teenagers. By the time Blacks reach their early 20s their IQ gap with Whites is almost as pronounced as it was 45 years ago. (Flynn alludes to this in a paper but focuses on the data for children and teenagers..) However, Murray thinks there is some evidence that the gap is now around 14, if I remember correctly a narrowing of 2.5 points from the beginning of the civil rights era. Considering how much money has been thrown at the Black community in the past 45 years, I consider that change rather marginal and quite possibly may have occurred any way as Blacks entered the mainstream of American society.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/slate-says-blacks-are-dumber-than.html
And you guys *do* love those IQ tests, do you not?
Well not really.. I have read that there are other cognitive tests (such as for mechanical ability..) that show a marked decline in the last 40 years. From a Steve Sailer article:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/070903_flynn.htm
And indeed, some non-IQ tests suggest that people are becoming less competent at dealing with old-fashioned physical objects in the real world rather than with images on glowing screens. One study found that British children had lost the equivalent of 12 points from 1975 to 2003. Richard Tomkins reported in the Financial Times:
“The results achieved by 11-year-olds had fallen to the level that children aged eight to nine had been achieving 30 years ago … A sample question involved pouring all the water from a tall, thin beaker into a short, fat one, refilling the tall, thin beaker to the same level and asking which contained the greater volume of water.”[Are children getting cleverer? August 12, 2006]
Similarly, the Vineland test of “daily living skills” has found a decline in basic ability to cope.”
Discipline and academic rigor among US (and apparently British) students has largely gone out the window since 1950. Although, yes IQs as reflected by the test have gone up.. I question whether their have been such advances in broad based intelligence in the past 50 years.
As for your comments about race and the British results for IQ, I am assume you addressing another poster since I didn’t bring up the study directly. I found the Telegraph article really too vague to draw many conclusions. If there is a pdf of the Flynn’s abstract available for free I would be willing to look at it.
I agree with Murray and I think that the gap has lowered to around 13.5 pts, though that is very controversial. It’s not true that we have “thrown money at Blacks.” That’s just ridiculous. All we have done is try to give them a decent education like everyone else. I taught in the LA area for many years, and White suburban schools are far better funded than heavily Black schools, the worst of which are just out and out nuked. The Flynn Effect is very mixed. In some areas, there has been no progress. In areas like mathematics, analytical math, reading comprehension, vocabulary or general knowledge, there has been no little to no progress. That’s how we can have rising IQ’s and stagnant school scores.
There have been some strong gains in visual intelligence, visual analytical thinking, verbal analytical thinking and problem-solving. I deal with a lot young kids who live around me, mostly young Hispanics and some Blacks who you would not think are very smart. My first reaction when I meet them is a racist one - I figure, well, obviously they are not very smart. But they keep on surprising me - they are way smarter than I expect them to be. OTOH, there really is little to nothing in their minds other than the latest rap lyrics. But their brains do move awfully fast. I think that the Flynn Effect is real, but that’s just subjective thinking.
“…If there is a pdf of the Flynn’s abstract available for free I would be willing to look at it…”
Posted by Stillwarm at 3:28 AM on February 14
Glad you asked:
“…Dickens and Flynn had to sidestep our citation of
Also from Rushton:
“…race differences are most pronounced on the more
http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushtonpdfs/2006%20PSnew.pdf
Robert:
You write:
“…It’s not true that we have ‘thrown money at Blacks.’…”
‘We’ (meaning the government) have certainly thrown money at blacks in the form of Title 1, busing, and other so-called enrichment programs in a futile attempt to create equality and close the so-called achievement gap.
Murray writes in Real Education:
“…Title 1 originally authorized more than $6.7 billion in today’s dollars to upgrade the schools attended by children from low-income families. The program [disposed] (some would say threw away) of some $12.7 billion in 2007….”
The results:
…no amount of Title 1 from the 1970s onward has found credible evidence of a significant positive impact on student achievement…”
Meanwhile, my middle daughter’s ‘upper middle class’ school district that you claim is better funded, has sent me a letter, unfailingly, twice a year for 12 years straight begging us parents for supplies such as computers, ink for the computers, printers, office supplies, copier and notebook paper, art supplies, along with tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, pens, pencils. For many of her classes, I had to pay a large mandatory fee for materials, including textbooks.
I worked in a Title 1 school for nine years and money was firehosed and helicoptered in. Supplies were copious. I received brand new textbooks every single year (as the old ones were continually destroyed) the school had several state-of-the art copiers, the latest modular desks, new library books every year, two new kilns, security guards and paid aides were available (I had two per each class). I attended conferences and siminars and took students on expensive field trips.
I was always told Title 1 paid for these things.
There were special PHABO counselors, college and career counselors, special therapists and ‘teams’ that would come in to work with students.
The school district my middle daughter attends has none of these things—in fact, there was a battle royale a few years ago to eliminate AP and honors classes due to ‘lack of funds.’
You also write:
“…In areas like mathematics, analytical math, reading comprehension, vocabulary or general knowledge, there has been no little to no progress…”
This is exactly why NCLB is educational fraud—the lefty bureaucracy that runs the schools and USG assume everyone has equal ability and MUST be placed on a track to college. The LAUSD now requires that ALL students take and pass ALG II to receive a diploma. This is an insane expectation that no amount of money will make possible. Half of all children are below average and will never make sense of Alg I, let alone Alg II.
The NAEP is a test designed to measure academic achievement, what has been learned, as opposed to academic ability (where there has been no change). This is why the educational beast can claim ‘test scores are rising.’
As Murray reports:
“…The lie is that every child can be anything he or she wants to be…but we approach education’s problems as if this were possible….”
And lastly, this:
“…And you guys *do* love those IQ tests, do you not?..”
Yes, as a matter of fact, a lot of us here do. IQ explains a lot of how the world works and why Africa is a hell-hole and the Industrial Revolution and British Common Law came from England.
As Lynn and Vanhanen explain:
“…national differences in wealth are explained most importantly by the intelligence levels of the populations. They calculate that mean national IQ correlates powerfully—more than 0.7—with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP)…”
http://www.vdare.com/misc/rushton_iq.htm
I could also present evidence showing that brain-size correlates strongly with IQs, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
Bon
It’s not true that we have “thrown money at Blacks.” That’s just ridiculous.
Washington DC School System, Number is number 1 per in capita for expenditures on students in the nation (when going by states) of which around 86% of students are Black ranks but dead last on the NAEP tests:
Rank for spending per capita - first:http://www.epodunk.com/top10/per_pupil/index.html
Ranking on the NAEP test - dead last:
http://www.nc-f.org/shorty/38949/
There’s even a program to compensates students at $100 a month for “good behavior”
http://dc.about.com/b/2008/08/22/cash-for-good-grades-in-dc-schools.htm
That’s what I mean when I say throwing money….
Then there is the article on the Kansas City schools:
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/05/catastrophe_in_1.php
Granted an Amren article which you might find biased.
Then there is the experience with Headstart:http://vdare.com/sailer/bell_curve_5.htm the worst of which are just out and out nuked.
My question would be, nuked by whom..? By the very same students I suspect. I know that California led the nation in the 60s and 70s in trying to bring Blacks into the fold so to speak with high levels of funding and “innovative” programs. I think the reaction after droves of money was spent was to basically give up and let things run on autopilot. Nevertheless look at places like at places like South Dakota which is 41st in the nation for spending per capita but ranked 7th on the NAEP or New Hampshire which is 18th in per capita expenditures but is basically tied for 1st with Massachusetts.
