Are people dumber than they used to be? Were previous generations mentally sharper than us? You may have suspected that people are getting stupider for quite some time, but now we actually have scientific evidence that this is the case. As you will read about below, average IQs are dropping all over the globe, SAT scores in the U.S. have been declining for decades, and scientists have even discovered that our brains have been getting smaller over time. So if it seems on some days like you woke up in the middle of the movie “Idiocracy”, you might not be too far off. Much of the stuff that they put in our junk food is not good for brain development, our education system is a total joke and most Americans are absolutely addicted to mindless entertainment. Fortunately we have a lot of technology that does much of our thinking for us these days, because if we had to depend on our own mental capabilities most of us would be in a tremendous amount of trouble.
Sadly, this appears to be a phenomenon that is happening all over the planet. As a recent
Daily Mail article explained,
IQ scores are falling in country after country…
Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential.
He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.
Dr Lynn predicts that if this trend continues, we could lose another 1.3 IQ points by 2050.
One IQ point does not sound like a lot, but when you go back even further in time the declines become a lot more dramatic. For example, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam named Jan te Nijenhuis has calculated that we have lost
a total of 14 IQ points on average since the Victorian Era.
And we don’t need a professor to tell us that this is true. Just go back and read some of the literature from that time period. Much of it is written at such a high level that I can barely even understand it.
There is other evidence that people are getting stupider as well. For instance, SAT scores in the United States
have fallen significantly in recent years…
There appears to be a disturbing trend in American high schools. If we judge the quality of education by the scores that students get on their SATs, then it appears that things are getting worse.
Since 2006, the overall average SAT score has fallen by 20 points, dropping from 1518 to 1498 in 2012. Scores are also down in each of the three categories tested, with reading dropping 9 points, mathematics dropping 4 points, and writing falling 9 points. It’s a fair bet that students aren’t becoming less intelligent, so exactly what is going on?
And this decline in SAT scores is not just limited to the past few years. As the following chart from Zero Hedge demonstrates, SAT scores have been declining in America for decades…