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Good morning, Roca Nation. Here are today’s four need-to-know stories:
Researchers reversed Alzheimer’s disease in mice using nanoparticles (free)
Independent data estimated that the US private sector eliminated 32,000 jobs in September
Bill Burr responded to criticism surrounding his appearance at Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival
Apprehensions of migrants illegally crossing the US-Mexico border dropped to their lowest annual level in more than half a century
By Max Frost
In the 1980s, James R. Flynn – a New Zealand political scientist – noticed a trend: When IQ tests were re-administered to new generations, average scores kept going up. This meant that if you took an IQ test designed in 1950 and gave it to people in 1990, they’d score significantly higher than those from the original testing period.
Flynn’s finding became known as the Flynn Effect. In essence, it meant that we were getting smarter by around 3 IQ points per decade.
Then, something changed.
In today’s deep-dive, we look at the great IQ plateau – or even decline – to understand whether we have surpassed peak intelligence and are now becoming dumber by the day.
One of the most-cited studies to suggest that we’re getting dumber stems from one of the world’s best-educated countries: Denmark.
All Danish men must appear before a draft board when they turn 18 in order to evaluate their suitability for military service. The men can either be declared fully eligible, limitedly eligible, or ineligible, based on the results of an intelligence test and a medical examination. The system has produced an unusually comprehensive set of intelligence data, which scientists have studied for trends.
In one influential study, published in the journal PLOS One in 2021, researchers at the University of Copenhagen looked at the intelligence test scores of all men who were born between 1940 and 2000 and appeared before a draft board. The study analyzed these statistics to see how “intelligence” had changed in Danish men over time.
They found that the Flynn effect – the sustained increase in IQ scores over time – had once existed, but no longer did.
A chart from the paper, “The secular trend of intelligence test scores: The Danish experience for young men born between 1940 and 2000”
The results showed that people born from 1940 to 1980 had higher IQs, while those born after 1980 had lower IQs.
The researchers explained the pre-born-in-1980 IQ rise through improvements in education, nutrition, and smaller families, noting that “intelligence test scores have been found to decrease with increasing birth order because parents have less time and resources to spend on each child.”
Yet they didn’t fully explain the drop.
Other studies have since corroborated this trend of declining IQs in the last three decades, identifying similar ones in Norway, the UK, Finland, Austria, France, the Netherlands, and other countries. A 2016 review of 62 studies identified seven countries that met strict criteria for reporting negative Flynn effects (Denmark, the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, Estonia, France, and Finland).
A 2015 meta-analysis of IQ scores across 31 countries identified a decline in IQ scores. Some of these findings are widely accepted; others are more contentious or limited, for example, applying only to military-aged men. Yet it’s clear that the once-expected trend of consistently climbing IQ scores has stopped in the Western world.
Data in the US is harder to come by than in Europe, yet studies have identified a similar trend in America. One, published through Northwestern University in 2023, “found evidence of a reverse ‘Flynn effect’ in a large US sample between 2006 and 2018 in every category except one.”
It noted:
Ability scores of verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies), and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period, but scores of 3D rotation (spatial reasoning) generally increased from 2011 to 2018, the study found.
In Asia, it’s a different story: Neither China, Taiwan, Japan, nor South Korea has experienced a reversal of the Flynn effect.
That being said, comparisons aren’t necessarily valid. There often isn’t the same level of research into their populations or data as in Western European countries. Perhaps more importantly, the Asian countries started from a much lower level of development than the European ones, meaning they may be experiencing the same effect as the West but on a lag. The data suggests these countries’ IQs are still rising, albeit at a diminishing rate. That’s what happened in the West before the declines set in.
The studies suggest that IQ declines in the West began around 1980. That means the declines predated smartphones, social media, Covid, and the other factors that have been attributed to making people less intellectual in the modern era.
A huge amount has changed in the period since that happened, including jumps in the amount of processed food consumed and the time spent on videos and video games, with drop-offs in reading and the consumption of other longer-form content. Demographers have also put forward explanations ranging from dysgenic fertility (smarter individuals having fewer children) to immigration from lower-scoring regions.
Yet the combination of modern technology with declining IQs may be a perfect storm: In 2022, a majority of Americans did not read a book in the prior year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. The US National Assessment of Educational Progress recently found that the share of American teenagers who “hardly ever” read for fun is now around half, with the share who read “almost every day” down to ~15%, a decline from nearly 40% in 1996. Reading is highly correlated with intelligence-related metrics, both in terms of factual knowledge and comprehension.
In the US, the share of teens reading daily peaked in 1996 – reflecting those born around 1980, the year in which IQs may have peaked.
All of this is to say: It’s unclear why the Western world’s IQs are falling, or, at a minimum, why their growth has plateaued. But if you made it this far – 900 words! – you may have done your brain a service.
Editor’s Note
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Thanks for reading. We’re interested to hear your takes on this one: What do you think is the cause for the declining IQ rates in the West? Are other countries doomed to follow suit? Send in your thoughts here.
Tons of replies to yesterday’s article on Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thank you all for writing in. Here are some of those emails.
Levi from VA wrote:
My quick bit of research suggest that this "stoning of gay people" accusation is not factual. Kirk belittled homosexuals and homosexuality, and this is something I disagree with, but he did not call for their death. One could say belittling or telling people that they were sinners was somehow "harming" them in some way, but this gets to the crux of Coates' and others arguments around speech - that it can inherently harm people and should be considered a form of "violence" - this is probably why so many young people believe it is ok to use ACTUAL PHYSICAL violence against people who use words they find "harmful." So I think this is the crux of the my problem with Coates and the form of political wokism that has pushed the idea that ideas that are "offensive" should be silenced, whether that's by official means of laws or vigilantly violence. They people who believe this have already lost their ability to argue their case, they've given up, which suggests to me that either their opinions are misguided themselves, or at least their arguments around those opinions lack nuance and coherence.
Coates also uses the same trope that many of these folks do - that anyone who suggests engaging should be criticized not only for their "platforming" a harmful ideology, but because their opinions shouldn't hold weight because they are white/male/sisgender/heterosexual. Your opinion is only valid if it is aligning with theirs of course, but when it doesn't, your physical attributes are called out to invalidated the argument. When even those can't be called out (when black/gay/women/etc.) hold views that differ, well, you're then labeled a "traitor" or "uncle tom" etc. Ultimately it's a game of "I have my beliefs and I don't want anyone to challenge them, I don't want to engage because I'm unwilling to understand the other side." I think that's ultimately destructive. Even if we initially despise what we take to be those beliefs, we can learn from the other side why those beliefs persist, and by doing so, we have a MUCH better chance of changing people's minds then just throwing up our hands and telling ourselves that there is no way we will ever be able to converse.
Mercedez wrote:
Despite being one of the leading voices on race issues in America, Ta-Nehisi Coates is espousing a profoundly intellectually lazy argument. Essentially, he's saying that holding certain viewpoints makes you a bigot or racist, and the progressives who are morally superior don't even have to engage with you on the issue because bigots and racists should be instantaneously convinced they are bigots and racists when they are accused. Following Coates' line of thinking, I cannot even espouse my religious based beliefs about marriage and abortion without accepting the moniker of "bigot." In the year 2025, a leading academic voice is actually debating whether people, like me, who hold a Christian worldview, which formed the basis of western civilization, gave us democracy, and eventually led civilization that came to understand the fundamentally immoral nature of chattel slavery, leading to its abolition in the west, should even be allowed to engage in political debates because my worldview is THAT dangerous. Does anyone else see sheer ignorance wrapped up in Coates' intellectually superiority complex? Slavery would literally still be around if individuals with Christian points of view were discouraged from engaging in public debate with people who held slavery as sacred and economically necessary. Martin Luther King, Jr. would not be progressive enough for Coates.
Ultimately, the problem with Coates' position is that no one will ever be progressive enough in his worldview. There will always be another more historically-oppressed population seeking that progressives have to uphold as right no matter what and undebatable. What happens with that population is not black Americans? What happens with that population's liberation leads to the oppression of other historically-oppressed populations? This cannot be how we structure society and lay out policy in America.
Brian wrote:
I typically don't like to speak in absolutisms, but Klein is absolutely correct. The only way forward is communication, if we sit in our own silos only hearing from others that completely agree with our position already how does anyone grow, how do we learn. I think it is ignorant of Coates to assume that his position is the absolute right position and that anyone that disagrees is not only wrong but evil. Does he truly believe that he is all knowing. I have softened on many positions simply by speaking with people with other views as they may see things in a way that I do not or cannot not. I know a number of friends which have also moved toward my positions as they understood where I came from and my perspective on matters. Kirk came from a religious position, he held beliefs that some may not, he even acknowledged that. But he was not an angry guy, he did not hate, he certainly was not a nazi. I worry that this entrenched position that Coates and his ilk take is leading the Country to violence and further division. When you say that those you don't agree with are Nazis or compare them to Hitler aren't you dehumanizing them. Coates is doing exactly what he is accusing others of doing. He is the part of the problem not the solution.
And Carolyn wrote:
To me, Coates and Klein are on the same, albeit divided, side of the democratic party. Where do actual moderates fall? Those who believe transpeople EXIST but that gender identity politics don't belong in elementary schools. Those of us who are for government reform but still want our vaccines to be covered by insurance? Klein and Coates are radicals in my view and the Democratic party has no hope if those are the only sides of it.
And check out our five most recent stories below if you haven’t read them yet:
See you tomorrow,
Max and Max
