Intelligence of Norwegians and Danes on the wane, say researchers
It *seems* that IQs were on the rise from the 1950’s until about 1995, when the rise stopped and started to reverse, with an annual average decrease of 0.21%. Assuming that’s accurate (IQ testing is notoriously handwavy… it’s supposed to be more or less fixed, but my own tested IQ score went up by twenty or so points between junior high and college. On the whole I trust IQ scores about as much as I trust polygraph testing), the researchers believe that the reason for the dumbening of the Scandihoovians comes down to the fact that schooling changed. Essentially life got easier and less challenging, both in the classroom and in the welfare state as a whole; as a result, brains weren’t challenged and smarts atrophied.
This is not a new idea. Say what you will about the fascists, their idea that life was all about a constant struggle of strong vs. weak should, at least in principal, lead to constant improvement. Of course, the death squads and ever-present sense of DOOOOOOM probably work against actually improving the breed. Soft living has long been seen as not as good as strenuous living when it comes to survivability… not of the individual, family, tribe, nation, race or species. There could well be a lot of truth in that. Being challenged – physically, “spiritually,” intellectually – is almost certainly a good thing. The Moon, Mars, asteroids, moons of Jupiter and beyond won’t be successfully colonized by the lazy, either physically or intellectually, but by those who are willing and able to rise to the inevitable challenges.
An interesting experiment would be to take a statistically valid number of these new, dumber Danes and Norwegians and put them into a rigorous and challenging educational environment and see if that smartens ’em up.
