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> Eugenics aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising

The Flynn effect has probably reversed recently for the developed world[0]. It's probably still occurring in the developing world due to better access to nutrition (among other things, but nutrition is probably most important).

[0]: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674

Interestingly, though, your PNAS article says the recent downtrend in IQ is environmentally caused and claims to rule out dysgenic fertility as the driver:

> the large changes in average cohort intelligence reflect environmental factors and not changing composition of parents, which in turn rules out several prominent hypotheses for retrograde Flynn effects.

People are getting smarter on ever narrower domains. This is convenient for industrial and commercial processes, because how to break them down is again one such specialization and thus increasingly well understood.

We are however not encouraged, and often discouraged, from transposing skills of discernation and thinking. "I'm an engineer, not a politician" and such. "IANAL". In an ever more complex human world, we are ever less able to understand or even see the big picture. We're quite happy to stay in our niches, especially when they pay well. Some of the best minds in computer science are working for companies doing tremendous damage to our minds and societies, without even seeing that they do, let alone understand.

> People are getting smarter on ever narrower domains

Sorry to border on nitpicking, but since it gets to the very heart of the discussion:

Idiocracy and the discussion at large is about people getting dumber, AKA less smart/intelligent, over time due to one or more compounding dysgenic effects. This concept is also what most people believe IQ tests to measure.

What I believe you meant to say is "people are focusing their knowledge on ever narrower domains", which is also a very important discussion to have, but a different one.

My problem with Idiocracy is the assumption that working class and poor breed only more dumb people. This is untrue, as many of our brightest people came from humble backgrounds. The quote evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould is most know for is “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” The progeny of smart people are not always smart. I enjoyed Idiocracy for it's commentary on dumb and vulgar culture taking over.

To me Idiocracy is a disgusting classist assault on the poor. Whenever I hear someone praise it my opinion of them drops like an aeroplane with a broken wing.

There known occurences of airplanes landing after losing a wing, especially during WW2.

High-powered acrobatic airplanes produce more lift by engine than wings, they can basically descend like a helicopter.

Also, poor people reproduce like there’s no tomorrow and kids usually follow the path.

The movie isn't making the assumption that poor=idiot anywhere (one of the dumbest characters in the movie is a lawyer, the other works for the POTUS) but especially at the beginning, that if you have the resources to raise, cure and send to school say two kids, and you make 8, in today's society you just made six or more potential homeless or criminals, assuming they don't die sooner for starvation and absence of cures. Making more kids than usual for poor people isn't unnatural as in nature it is very normal to fight weakness with numbers, but that shouldn't be the case for humans. Insects are among the weakest species out there, a moderate storm can kill them by the millions (billions?) but their number is so large that they're not going to be extinct anytime soon. But again, they aren't people and live in their world in which you just have to reach the closest flower to make the day.

Sounds like you've lost the plot on what the movie was actually about.

it is true however that in the west, education is inversely correlated with fertility, that education is closely linked to intelligence, statistically, and that intelligence is at least 50% accounted for by heritability, as shown by many large studies.

Malcolm Gladwell says it's often an accident of birth, circumstances and a system that provide fertile ground for achievement, a cultural belief system that encourages intellectual achievement or at least does not discourage it and most of all -- hard work

Malcolm Gladwell at Microsoft Research: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMKLwVlpJk

these things are absolutely important but they are at most half of the picture.

intelligence is broadly heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201185

and a representative piece of a very large body of evidence that intelligence is the strongest predictor of achievement: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

Gladwell is making the case in his talk that Asians aren't better at math or are more intelligent. He speaks directly to your point: Westerners believe that you are born with math skills or you're not. Asians believe you can be good at anything if you work at it. Gladwell says it's because Asians had to work harder than Westerners to feed themselves, since rice is a very labor intensive crop. I'm not supporting or disputing Gladwell - I'm still pondering it.

I agree with you that intelligence is inheritable. I was thinking about the development of that intelligence.

Idiocracy said dumb people breed more dumb people, not that poor people breed dumb people.

I really appreciate your comment! I just watched Don't Look Up, then Idiocracy, then Death to 2021, and ... I get why people think they're clever and create hopelessness just like you pointed out. They get the instinctive thumbs up from us because we want to feel in opposition to what we just watched.

I completely agree that the internet has given us this "low context, dumb culture" because that's what gets the instinctive reactive thumbs up click.

Just wanted to let you note that I really appreciate this.

IQ is not rising; literacy rates are falling in the developed world. As an example, fewer people are literate in Massachusetts now than when it was founded.

fewer people are literate in Massachusetts now than when it was founded

I'm also sensing we may be having some trouble in the math department.

You're right. I can barely identify a number on sight.

I found a reference about literacy in Massachusetts [0] and literacy for all states [1], but nothing suggesting literacy rates are worse than over 200 years ago. I would presume literacy rates for over 200 years ago would be worse due to lack of public education, gender inequality, and jobs/trades not requiring reading and writing skills.

I am suspicious of the literacy rates in [0] and [1]. It seems that someone who immigrates from a foreign country would be considered illiterate if they did not speak English, but had high proficiency in reading and writing in their native language. Not knowing one specific language is very different from being generally uneducated.

[0] https://mblc.state.ma.us/programs-and-support/adult-literacy...

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy...

The parent said the metric was “people” not a rate of people normalized by total population, so by virtue of there being more people alive today than ever, many stats like this will be technically true but imo uninteresting.

Citation needed …

> The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness...

Agreed, but after watching Idiocracy a few days ago, I saw that the background imagery of the the year 2505 in Idiocracy is dystopian: there is desertification, food scarcity, decaying buildings, traffic accidents, garbage heap collapses, lack of sanitation, poor medical care, etc. it doesn't actually look anything like a risk-free environment that rewards witlessness.

I'm sure we can think of the current situation that endangers the survival chances practitioners of stupid behaviour as well.

more like society becoming more bifurcated between the smart and successfull vs. everyone else, instead of everyone becoming dumber.

Is it the smart who are successful?

Yes, but the dumb vote in droves for a buffoonish reality tv star they think will fire enough people in Government so that they don’t have to pay taxes anymore.

The orange one also hates brown people as much as they do and is unafraid to say it out loud.

Also, it’s just a bonus that their reality tv star really, really pisses off those rich educated folks in the city who “look down” them.

I look forward to when not everything is about that man. But we're not there yet, are we?

Ahh, yes. Ascendant fascism. Soooo boring.

Oh stop it with the pearl clutching; fascism has been ascendant in the US since 1945, le orange man (bad) is just the latest stop on the train ride from Joe McCarthy.

Did you forget about the violent coup attempt on January 6th?

It was just about as competent and deadly as the Beer Hall Putsch.

We are if you want to be. Just stop talking about him and ignore people that do.

I don't exactly want to be, because I haven't come to terms with it, and I'm still worried about it.

I think it's pretty naive to think that the only people to vote for, campaign for, and work for Trump were "dumb". Plenty of "smart" people made decisions between supporting, campaigning for, working for, or defending his campaign and administration because the things that are bad about him don't really affect (or benefit) their own interests.

Yes, approximately 2-3% of the population are sociopaths, who are only self-interested.

Another huge portion or of the population really just care about getting wealthy, with litter regard for anything else.

Seriously, if you want to be rich, all you have to do is be somewhat bright and willing to be a Republican political operative.

See Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Green, Sarah Palin, etc.

I’ve see it myself: some of the dumbest folks I went to school with are killing it in the GOP. Dumb as rocks.

The bulk of the voters?

Go and talk to them yourself. You’ll see.

...

Yes?

There's a floor on intelligence for most kinds of success. But success constitutes social positioning, and intelligence isn't very directly connected to that.

Being too intelligent seems to be a social disadvantage often and probably success for a lot of people requires hiding their intelligence.

The middle class is disappearing, but a larger proportion of the part that disappears every year becomes better off than worse off. The upper middle class and the working poor are both increasing in size at the expense of the middle class, but the upper middle class is growing more.

The broadcast components of our culture which must appeal to the largest cross-section of society do indeed cater more to the lower end compared to years past, because that is where the largest number of people still are. Without the middle class glue holding the top and bottom together, the center of gravity of popular culture gradually gets lower.

This tends to drown out the first trend I mentioned, the growth of the upper middle class, if you stick to broadcast media like movies, TV, and radio. But when you look at other forms of media which target cultural niches, you'll find the upper end is alive and well.

> larger proportion of the part that disappears every year becomes better off than worse off

I would hardly disagree with that statement.

Larger portion of the middle class gets downgraded not upgraded.

Some parts of their life get better due to advancements we make in science, but all other aspects are worse and worse.

An example can be “property ownership” - the amount of ppl that own property and are part of the middle class is decreasing year over year in developed countries.

We are slowly getting to the point where we can consider our grandparents or parents as millionairs in current standards.

Global inflation slowly kills middle class and no - ppl are not having it better in aspects that actually matter in long term. We are at crisis now.

There are actually numbers for this (that I'm sadly to lazy to look up on my phone), taking fixed inflation adjusted income thresholds, more people are moving into higher than lower brackets out of the shrinking middle, especially if you consider the starting sizes of these groups.

That might be true for developing countries like China but for sure its not the case in Europe and US.

China by itself can skew global average by a huge margin due to sheer amount of ppl living there.

But even in China market observes middle class crisis - slowing down or ppl getting back to lower class.

I wasn't even thinking about the global level, that's on another level of middle class becoming larger and richer :)

Some US data: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america... (long term, not the headline)

https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-class-shrinking-households-...

The data you show is for up to 2016. More recent market info shows that middle-class property ownership which was once required to be considered as part of middle-class (definition was changed) is rapidly decreasing making it almost impossible to get from lower-class to middle-class and overall removing pretty big percent of people that are currently (by income) put into middle-class (but would not be if we used old definition).

https://www.rismedia.com/2019/09/03/is-middle-class-homeowne...

It doesnt matter how much money you make, if that money cannot buy you a shelter.

You might disagree but next years are only going to make that crisis worse and worse.

And more and more families will be not able to sustain the level of life our parents had - even whwn working 5 times as hard.

The 2nd link has later data. Housing is an arbitrary metric (home ownership is only one aspect of class; it's very us specific - renting is far more normalized in other places; there may be unrelated shifts towards renting, e.g. for millennials supposedly leaving suburbs for the cities), and even with that the article doesn't even quantity a problem - it just points at some expensive cities, and some potential issues, while showing median income is still easily enough to buy a median house, etc. There's no metric according to which middle class is becoming poorer over any reasonable term in it.

And any very recent change was probably caused by pandemic and reaction to it, not a part of some trend.. to revert it, we should stop doing what we were doing for the past year or two :)

Btw iirc price to income ratio in the us is also one of the lowest in developed countries, or on par.

Long term, I think the thinning middle class narrative is closer to being merely humanities grads complaining that they cannot afford to live in NYC and SF, than to any real issue ;)

How can middle class not become poorer if inflation alone is making us able to buy less stuff that matters.

How can you say my grandpa that was able to afford a big house and feed 5 children working alone as grandma was taking care pf the house - was not living in better financial condition than me who makes 3 times as much money as he did but I cannot afford half of what he could…

The current definition of the middle class is constantly changing based on income only - which makes no sense. It should be calculated towards buying power you have.

And buying power over the years for ppl like me and younger only decreases. Thus -> middle class crisis is going to hit the fan like really soon.

It already did in China and its going to hit US too.

All the numbers in the above data are adjusted for inflation.

Anecdotes are not data. According to this (quick google): https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ inflation adjusted median price increased by about 80-95% since ~1970 (assuming ~25 years per generation for "grandpa"), depending on whether you include the COVID spike. According to this, however: https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-... median house size since 1970 increased by ~75%. That both calls "big house" into question, and puts the increase in price into perspective. Also, inflation adjusted income has increased by ~50% in the same time frame: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-.... So, housing has become expensive somewhat faster than income (but by far not 3x that you describe), in part because the houses are now much bigger (and not half the size that you imply for the 3x cost).

To put it more bluntly than in my previous post (and for reference I did not grow up in the USA), the main difference between your US generation and grandpa's, is that yours is far more entitled, while representing a far smaller slice of world economy. And, if my West Coast experience is any indication, the sub-slices of the generation tend to feel more entitled in inverse proportion to their actual economic contribution...

>The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising.

The movie reminded me of the Despair. inc poster "Meetings: None of us is as dumb as All of Us"

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/meeting...

I consider this movie kind of like a slap-stick comedy, and I know others who regard it in the prophetic sense, and I have always had the feeling that it was a way to make themselves feel a bit superior, as if they don't have a part in the big comedy too.

Isn't IQ defined by coercing test results into a normal curve with a mean of 100? The reality can't be that IQ is rising, because IQ is always 100.

Even without that, IQ is a measure of people's ability to take IQ tests; it's not particularly correlated with being smart or stupid, but instead your familiarity with the language used in the test, and practice at doing tests, especially IQ tests

Relevant xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/603/

Counterpoint: Biff Tannen as president was explicitly an allegory for what it would be like if Donald Trump was president.

Yes, his character was literally based on Donald Trump, who had been publicly talking about running for president since the 80s.