Is America smart enough? IQ and national productivity

National Review, April 15, 1991 by Daniel Seligman

The data are puzzling, to put it mildly. If intelligence were in some broad secular rise of the kind showing up in IQ scores, we would expect to see a world far richer in geniuses, colleges bursting with young prodigies, lower schools with far higher proportions of gifted children. Instead we have explosive demands for remedial reading courses, dismal SAT scores, and those disappointing NAEP findings. How can it be?

Several solutions have been proposed. James R. Flynn, a New Zealand academic who did much to collect and publicize the data on secular gains, believes the gains mean mainly that IQ tests are not worth much as gauges of intelligence. But this "solution" only leads to other difficulties-a major one being that the tests continue to retain their predictive power. Which has to mean that they are measuring something, whether or not it is called intelligence," that incorporates mental abilities in demand in developed countries.

Another approach has been to argue that intergenerational differences are meaningless: that intelligence is necessarily culture-bound and we therefore prove nothing by administering IQ tests from the past to children growing up in the Nineties. The import of this position is that each generation has its own learning, reasoning, and problem-solving challenges, and that it would be absurd to view Thomas Jefferson as unintelligent simply because a magically resurrected Jefferson would have trouble with much of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. "IQ simply cannot be used to compare individuals who have grown up in different eras," says Charles Locurto, a psychologist based at Holy Cross.

Richard Lynn has weighed in with a different answer. As noted above, he believes that the IQ gains are real and that intelligence levels are genuinely rising. Lynn believes the rise has been masked by academic declines reflecting poorer teaching and, perhaps, students less motivated to learn. He also believes that the IQ rise is attributable mainly to improved nutrition.

Like many of the academic scholars, I found his evidence on nutrition at once surprising and compelling. In addition, his hypothesis about the secular IQ rise seems to account for today's non-existent multitudes of prodigies. Lynn believes that earlier generations included much higher proportions of uneducated, malnourished, and generally retarded individuals with IQs around 60 or 70, while the individuals who accomplished anything were a relatively small elite. Today, Lynn believes, the IQ distribution is much less variable, reflecting the fact that nutrition-based gains have disproportionately benefited the low-scoring population-which would explain why the rising average IQ has not translated into an abundance of genius.

Richard Herrnstein of Harvard says his own hunch is that the rising scores may be a one-time gain, concentrated in the lower half of the IQ distribution and reflecting a) mass education in developed countries and b) the emergence of much more pervasive media. The idea is that children today get far more intellectual stimulation than they would have received earlier in this century-but not the kind of stimulation that translates into higher-level reasoning abilities (which, remember, the NAEP studies find to be in decline).