 The topic is Mankind Getting Dumber, some empirical evidence. This is just the outline. And it is dedicated to the memory of our good friend Richard Lin. He should be the one giving the talk, not me, but given that he's no longer with us. And it's an important topic. I guess somebody had to do it. And let me preface it, as usual, by saying that this is a satire of how political incorrect people talk about this topic. So we'll start with the Flynn effect, the so-called Flynn effect. And indeed, it was named like this in a book by Hernstein and Murray in 1994 called The Bell Curve, which was extremely influential, especially in concertist circles, but even in liberal circles because there were many refutations of it. In any case, big debate. And what they did there, it was not their main point. Their main point was essentially about the gap between blacks and whites in America. But in order to do that, they had to measure IQ over different periods of time. And they noticed that there was a Flynn effect, which is due to these two papers, 84 and 87, that showed an increase in IQ over time. So they're the ones who called it the Flynn effect because they had read only these two papers on the topic. What they hadn't read is that it's Richard Lin who had invented the Flynn effect. So it should be called the Lin effect in a 1982 paper. Once again, the purpose of Lin's paper was not exactly to document a rise in IQ. It was more to compare the IQ of Japanese versus Americans. And he found that the Japanese had a higher IQ than Americans. But in doing so, he had to combine different studies from different dates and he found out that there was a rise in IQ. Probably, I don't know Jim's Flynn myself, but it's probable that he read Richard's paper from 82 and picked the one thing that was politically correct in the paper because it's a progressive thing. There's progress because actually it's going up. It's great. But anyway, it's called the Flynn effect. Some people call it like between pantheses the F and then the put Lin afterwards to give the dual authorship. So the IQs are going up. And by the way, Richard agrees with these conclusions. But the beauty of it is that a long time has passed since 1984. So we can actually reproduce the results of Flynn using the same methodology using the more recent data, the more recent decades. And there are eight countries where we can do that or it has been done. So this is more like a meta-analysis, if you want. Let's start with Australia. In Australia, we see that the trend after World War II was about 0.34 IQ points per year. Yes, I'd like to remember this order of magnitude, 0.3 points per year. That's sort of really like the golden number that most people would agree on. And that's from the Flynn paper, 87. Now we can redo it. So it's going to be a bit of a Flynn versus Lin kind of thing here. We can redo it over the more recent past, so post 1975. And there we find a negative 0.1 instead. So 0.3, 0.1. Yes, that's the order. Another paper, it's a bit more interesting because it's the same authors. It's Richard and Dutton. So it's the same paper, so we can really say that it's comparable, the 0.4 IQ points in the past and the 0.2 in the recent past, they're comparable because they use the same methodology. And also because in Finland you have the draft, you have conscription. So every 18-year-old male gets an IQ test. So it's a really massive amount of data. This is very convincing kind of evidence. So once again, order magnitude 0.4, 0.2. And then you're going to ask maybe, does it really matter, 0.4, 0.1, 0.2 here, 0.3. And the answer is yes in the long run. So this is from Linda Godforson, who is also like a very famous psychometrist. And it shows you what IQ really means. So the average is at 100 here. So if you have 0.3 per year over two generations, so over my lifetime or during the Cold War, so that's 50 years, then you get 15 points over 50 years. Now 15 points is the difference between a normal person, so somebody who keeps up with the rest of society, as Linda would say here, for example a clock, a teller, a police officer, a machinist or a salesperson, versus somebody for whom life is an uphill battle, because cognitively they just can't keep up. So for example an assembler, somebody in the food service industry or the aid of a nurse, maybe a clean nurse, something like that. And on the other side, if you go plus 15 basis IQ points from the middle, then you get people who go to college and they're out ahead of the rest of society. They're superior human beings, so to speak. And for example then there would be a manager, a teacher or an accountant. So 15 basis points is called one standard deviation. That's what they call it the bell curve. It looks like a bell. And 15 IQ points is kind of the width of the curve. So that's what you get with 0.3 per year over two generations. Now let's look at some other countries. Let's look at Great Britain for example. So we have a Flynn effect of 0.18 IQ points per year. So once again it is pretty substantial. And then it's more like Flynn versus Flynn. Because Flynn then re-did his same study with more recent data and he found that there was a drop of almost the same amount but with a negative sign. And so the funny thing here is that he was actually attacking Richard Lin in this paper because Richard Lin believes that nutrition of the pregnant mother and also of the infant up to four years old is a huge determinant of IQ rises over time and he was just sort of attacking Richard. But nonetheless it supports our point that there's been a bit of a trend change. One thing that Flynn likes to use, he looks to use the Raven test. So I'll say a bit more about that later. And the main reason that James Flynn likes it is because it remained essentially unaltered. So it was not recalibrated, it wasn't re-changed, it's the same test. So if you give it in 1940 or 1979 you're going to get very comparable results that can enable you to say there's a 0.18 gain. In France, the magnitude here is just too big to be credible but still it was published and apparently there was a 1.00. So that's 10 points per decade or 50 points over two generations. Sounds a bit dodgy to me but I had to put it here and suddenly Flynn believes in it because that's what he said in his 87 paper. Then Richard did something a little bit clever. He looked at the full scale IQ that was normed to 100 over the French population of 1999. So that's one test. And then there was another test that was normed to the French population of 2009 at 100. Two tests and they both at 100 over the whole population. And then he took 79 people and gave them both tests. And it turned out that one test was easier than the other. And so that's how Richard concluded that there was a negative trend because the new test, which was normed to 100 over all France, was easier than the old one. So just a bit more about Raven's test. So this is what it looks like. It's beautiful because it is completely culture-independent. You don't need to know Shakespeare to do this. That was one of the big issues with IQ initially. People criticized it for being a bit meaningless because it just says, oh, have you been to college? Something like that. So culture-free tests were at the premium. And Raven definitely cornered the market there. So which one is it? Yeah, okay, so we've got two here. But it's a progressive test. So this is probably one of the easier questions. And this is a harder question. So here you have to pick one of the eight 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 shapes to complete the pattern. You can see it's culture-independent. You want more time? Excellent. Okay, so that's the test. That's an IQ test. Then let's move on to other countries. And so in Norway, we had a, oh yeah, so this should be 0.043. Now 0.43 points per year. I didn't change that. But 0.43, yes, in a distant past. But in the recent past, it's slightly negative. So it's not very negative, just a little bit. And once again, you have a huge data set because you have conscription in Norway, so all 18-year-old males get an IQ test. That's sort of interesting because it's a bit predictive in the sense that if you have somebody in the Army, whether he's an officer or he's a cook or whatever, a nurse or something like that, within their chosen profession in the Army, the ones that had a higher IQ when tested at 18 actually performed better down the road over the years. So it serves, even within each affectation, whether in artillery or something else, IQ is predictive of your future path. Denmark, thanks the Scandinavians for their draft again. So this is the same paper for both trends. For once, it's not Richard Lin. So Richard Lin doesn't have a monopoly on saying that, oh, these trends are changing here from positive to negative. There are a bunch of other people who agree with that. One thing that I want to draw your attention to is that the IQ was known to be 100 in 1988. So it is a bit arbitrary when you know it, but once you know it, if you want to do this exercise, you have to keep the same norm so forever after that. So the test was invented by a Frenchman named Alfred Binet in 1905 and it was mostly to identify children who were having difficulties at school and who were not capable of following. Then later it was taken by Louis Terman, this guy who was a psychologist at Stanford University and at the time the president, the first president of Central University was a eugenist. So he really believed that you had to improve the race by giving opportunities to those who IQ was high. So that's why he hired Louis Terman for this project and this legacy is so strong that even today there's a school at Palo Alto named the Terman High School, which has been, the name had been changed because Terman was such a eugenist and he believed that high IQ people are superior, that they had to change it to, you know, I don't know what the name is, but something else. So Terman is a little bit toxic guy even though I think that he is a huge contributor. You can see that to translate the test was done very quickly. It was also adopted by the US Army in 1917 when they sent some men to fight in World War I. I think it's probably fair to say that Stanford University to a large degree is built on this man's IQ test and that's who they admit. And then you go to Silicon Valley, well, they come out of Stanford. So maybe Alfred Binet is responsible for Silicon Valley. Okay, we've got a few more countries, two more countries to go. In the Netherlands, the Flynn effect was pretty strong until 1982 at 0.7 IQ points per year and recently Woodley and Meisenberg found that there was a reversal. So once again, it's not just Richard. Lots of people agree with him over the more recent past. Okay, finally, finished with West Germany. So in West Germany, after World War II, there was an IQ trend of 0.7 points per year. Pretty strong. But then subsequently, Roy Weynand found that in the 90s, the IQ trend was now negative at minus 0.16 per year. Okay, so that's a lot of numbers. That's all the numbers that I found. I don't think there's really much more than this. But now that I have inundated you with numbers, we have to make sense of them somehow. So let's do some analysis. I could go very heavy on the statistics, but I'll keep it as simple as possible because I don't want to lose anybody. So here I have cut away all the verbiage and collated all the numbers that have given you in the past eight slides. Okay, so you can see not only what the trend is. So in green is the Flynn effect, and in red could call it the Anti-Flynn effect, if you want. So it's not only the trend of IQ points changed per year, but it's also the period during which these trends were recorded. Okay, so I think there's a bit more condensed way to look at it, but I'm still not capable of making sense of this without further analysis. But this is going to be the basis for everything. So what do we have? Yes, okay. So this is the same data as here, but put in a graphical form because I believe that graphical illustration is really the easiest way to make sense of such huge amount of data. So here in green we have the Flynn effects, and I took away the names of the countries because it's irrelevant at this point, and in red we have the Anti-Flynn effects. Okay, and so for example, if you look at the top one, the green at the top, at the one, that was France. You remember France had one point per year? Okay, so that was over what period? It was between 49 and 1974. So I put the one per year over as I spread it over the whole period during which this was observed. And similarly, you know, here, if you have like a minus 3.8 points per year, so that was Richard's contribution for France again, and that was over a 10-year period, and these are the 10 years. Each dot is one year. So we see we have a lot of points, and now we can start to see if we squint our eyes a little bit. You see some pattern, okay? So remember, this is a trend of IQ. It's not the level of IQ, it's a trend. So think of it as a speed in kilometers per hour, but the speed could be either positive, if you're going forward, or negative, if you're going backwards, which over here, the speed is negative. Anything below zero is in red. So now we do some statistics, and this is the statistics. That's it. That's all. So basically, I put a blue line which fits everything. It's the best fit that you can have. I'm not going to tell you how I did it, but I used the most standard method that they teach in statistics 101. So this is not voodoo. It's been around for hundreds of years, at least 100 years for sure. So this is the blue line. It's the best fit. So obviously it looks pretty, but there's a lot of power behind it. So let's look at the analysis that we can now do thanks to the blue line. So the first point is that the blue line is actually very good. If you look at the correlation of the trend in IQ per year versus the year in which it was recorded, it's 69%. And I remember in the introduction, opening remarks, Hans said that in the social sciences, Richard Lin and Tatu Van Hanen approved in IQ and the Wealth of Nations that there was a 70% correlation between the IQ of a nation and its GDP per capita. So I'm not as good as Richard. Only 69%. But nonetheless, for social sciences, it's pretty good. Like in finance, 5% correlation is huge. So we have a pretty good fit and those here, basically, the points deviate from the blue line but not by much. So the second point is that we can see where the blue line crossed the zero and the blue line crossed the zero on the 1st of September 1992. So where were you on the 1st of September 1992? That's a momentous event in history which went a bit unnoticed at the time but now we can safely say that that's when it happened. Let's be a bit modest here. One thing that comes out of the statistics is that you have a confidence interval around this estimator. So yes, the best estimate is September 1992 but it could be anywhere between January 1990 or May 1995. So with 95% confidence, you can say that IQ peaked, at least in these eight countries, somewhere in the early 90s. So then we have the slope. So slope is this. If you have a speed in meters per second, the acceleration is meter per second squared. So I never thought in my life I would use this unit of IQ points per year squared but I just did and it's pretty hard to interpret. The only thing that I want you to take from this is the confidence interval is very much in the negative. So even though the slope itself is pretty hard to interpret, the fact that it's negative is beyond doubt. So it means that the trend of IQ was strong going up and now it's not anymore. So in conclusion, probably I was probably too fast, but in conclusion we can say that the IQ started after World War II around 85, if you know me to 100 at the peak. So 100 is 1992 in this case and that's certainly very much what Flano was saying. Basically there was about 13.8 points gains over two generations. So that peaked in 1992, you can see it here, and now it's 2023, so I actually peaked the exact date of today and we are here, we are at 92.5, so half of the gains post-World War II have been given back and we are going to give back the rest of the next 20 years. So it's a cheerful conclusion. But yes, so in conclusion, let me say how Richard Lin would explain this picture. So what he would say is that he would interpret it as a tug of war between two positive forces and two negative forces. So the two positive forces that pull up the IQ, they are number one, better nutrition, as I said, especially of the pregnant mother and of the young child up to four years old, because then if you have excellent nutrition, then the genetic potential of the IQ which is written in your genes is realized. But if you have inferior nutrition, you can always sort of go down from that. The second point, which when Richard started talking about it at the PFS, he didn't really mention that, I don't think he believed it, but in his later years he changed his mind, is that there is a certain benefit to intellectually stimulating children through cognitively demanding tasks, such as the ones that are found in a school environment. So schooling is good. So these are the two positive forces and then there are negative forces. The first one is Dysgenic Fertility, and Richard wrote a book about eugenics, eugenics revisited or something like that. So Dysgenic Fertility means that smart people have fewer children than dumb people. So that's a very general effect you can really observe pretty much in every country. And knowing that the IQ of adults is 80% heritable for young children, you can cheat a little bit, but eventually it reverts by the age of 18 to genetic potential. Then obviously that's a problem. It's basically how you see in the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy, but that's exactly what it's about. And then the second negative force is mass immigration into those eight countries, coming from countries with lower IQ on average than those eight countries are presented. And obviously I think it's really what Richard is known for, for documenting the list of IQ per country. It's maintained now by a becker, but it's upgraded every year, and it's obviously been attacked a lot by that for that, but nonetheless I think that it's sort of pretty clear, and even if you have not seen the list or have not seen the map, which I'm not going to put here, but whatever prejudices you may have or preconceived notions are probably validated by the data. So yes, positive or negative. And so what Richard would conclude is that there was a time until 1992 where the positive forces, better nutrition and more education were overwhelming, even though the negative forces existed a little bit, but since 1992 it's the opposite. Basically you can't feed the people in those eight rich countries more than they are already eating. So the mother's nutrition and infant is already as good as it's ever going to get. And second, in terms of education, everybody is going to school until they're 18. So you can't do much more than that. But obviously now the positive forces have plateaued, and it's the negative ones that are taking over. Possibly, I mean, I stopped at 2043, but you know. Okay, so if I was going to conclude on a upbeat note, very hard to do, but I'll give you a shot. Basically if you look at the world as a whole, which was the title of the presentation, there's actually no empirical evidence, but Richard would say, he did say actually, he thinks that most of the developing countries, which is where people are, they populous countries like India and so forth, they're still in that phase where they're benefiting from better nutrition. That's why they're developing. So they're currently getting better nutrition than their parents. And there's probably more education for everybody too, so more mental stimulation for the children. So I think the world as a whole, in the absence of empirical evidence, I would tend to say that it's over there. So still in the up. Okay, that's it.