Iq Books

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Can the United States really have been experiencing falling IQ? Would not we be able to see the consequences? Maybe we have. In 1938, Raymond Cattell, one of the most illustrious psychometricians of his age, wrote an article for the British Journal of Psychology, “Some Changes in Social life in a Community with a Falling Intelligence Quotient.” The article was eerily prescient.

In education, Cattell predicted that academic standards would fall and the curriculum would shift toward less abstract subjects. He foresaw an increase in “delinquency against society” – crime and willful dependency (for example, having a child without being able to care for it) would be in this category. He was not sure whether this would lead to a slackening of moral codes or attempts at tighter government control over individual behavior. The response could go either way, he wrote.

He predicted that a complex modern society with a falling IQ would have to compensate people at the low end of IQ by a “systematized relaxation of moral standards, permitting more direct instinctive satisfactions.” In particular, he saw an expanding role for what he called “fantasy compensations.” He saw the novel and the cinema as the contemporary means for satisfying it, but he added that “we have probably not seen the end of its development or begun to appreciate its damaging effects on ‘reality thinking’ habits concerned in other spheres of life” – a prediction hard to fault as one watches the use of TV in today’s world and imagines the use of virtual reality helmets in tomorrow’s.

Turning to political and social life, he expected to see “the development of a larger ‘social problem group’ or at least of a group supported, supervised and patronized by extensive state social welfare work.” This, he foresaw, would be “inimical to that human solidarity and potential equality of prestige which is essential to democracy.”
― Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life