A recent study suggests that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, Americans’ average intelligence quotient (IQ) is declining.
Reverse Flynn Effect in Full Swing
The average IQ of the US population is in decline. I am not just talking about the inhabitants of the White House in Washington, D.C. or the members of the press. Unfortunately, the US is losing its “smart fraction” of people who solve the most difficult problems.
Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning.
The Great Decline
Dysgenic mating accounts for a growing portion of new births, and dysgenic immigration provides further momentum to the decline in average population IQ. How long has this decline been going on? For at least 100 years, although the “phantom Flynn effect” caused the decline to be obscured for a time in the late 20th century and early 21st.
The US Has a Higher Order Advantage Providing Momentum
Despite the ongoing decline in average population IQ, the US has a natural advantage which draws high-IQ persons from other nations and which allows for higher productivity despite marginal drops in average IQ.
Another view on the American advantage
This US advantage is on a higher logical level than mere natural resource deposits — such as you find in Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Congo. Natural resource wealth is subject to the “natural resource curse,” The US has abundant natural resources, but it has much more. The added advantages discussed in the video above, reveal why the US can leverage its natural resources into greater wealth and power.
In addition, the US had a highly intelligent and resourceful “founder population,” which was not averse to large scale procreation. During the 1800s, the US went from a poor, weak colonial conglomerate to being the world’s wealthiest nation — despite a ruinous civil war in the middle of the century.
But now the US is experiencing a decline in average population IQ, due to low birth rates in its most intelligent and resourceful people. All of the advantages of US geography, climate, and founder population cannot overcome the disadvantages of declining IQ, declining executive function, declining resourcefulness and curiosity, and destructive governmental and societal trends that grow directly out of a less intelligent population.
But all of that is in the manner of discussing some of the handicaps in the upcoming global game of thrones. It in no way determines the outcome of the game. The game must be played out. America’s enduring strengths are many, and in some ways America is still the only game in town [in the world].
Decline of great American cities
Future Conflicts Will Be Mostly Urban and Very Bloody
… future armed conflicts will be long, bloody, and destructive affairs of attrition.
Conflict Realism
The 20th century saw a huge wave of urbanisation in the US and many other parts of the world. Cities are locations of wealth, production, innovation, and commerce. When an enemy wants to attack a nation, it often focuses on the cities. But urban conflicts are “long, bloody, and destructive affairs of attrition.” This is what we have to look forward to, at least most of the people who are living in or near cities.
We see this in Ukraine, where Russian invaders have demolished multiple Ukrainian cities in the name of liberating them. It is true that Russia’s leaders believed they could add almost 45 million people to the population of Russia in a “bloodless coup.” But instead, Russia is getting a “long, bloody, destructive war of attrition.” Russia’s military is beginning to pay a significant price for this miscalculation, and the overall society back home is beginning to feel the pain as well.
Russia is a nation experiencing rapid dysgenics — probably much faster and larger in scope than the US. Perhaps leaders in the Kremlin could not imagine a better way to solve their problems than a war of mutual cataclysm, and that might reflect a loss of Russia’s smart fraction as well as any other measure.
China has many similar problems as Russia — particularly a top-down personality cult leadership that attempts to exert too much control over sectors of society that perform best when left alone by ham handed bureaucrats and dictators. And a demographic crisis, of course. In addition, China’s air-water-soil-food resources are so badly poisoned and contaminated that future generations of mainland Chinese will be badly damaged by the greed for power of contemporary Chinese leaders. If China goes to war over Taiwan, its home-grown problems will manifest in hundreds of destructive ways.
The US and the west have dysgenics, climate apocalypse, and green energy transition delusions to deal with. These “problems” will handicap the productivity and real-problem solving capacities of the US and the west for decades to come. But China and Russia have genuinely real and crippling problems caused largely by dysfunctional governments, problems such as those that led ultimately to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. With Putin’s war in Ukraine, and possibly Xi’s war in Taiwan, those two superpowers in waiting will meet their worst enemies: themselves.
Danger Close
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