Yes.*
From the Milken Institute Review:
A recent cover of New York Magazine says it all: “The Stupiding of the American Mind.” The feature article, “A Theory of Dumb,” publicized the unhappy sequel to one of social science’s most enduring feel-good stories: evidence that economic development along with the spread of the complex mental tasks of schools and workplaces had boosted scores on IQ tests. For decades this tendency has been recognized and analyzed as the Flynn Effect, named after the political scientist James Flynn who died in 2021.
The writer of the New York Magazine piece, Lane Brown, discovered a graduate student thesis using data from nearly 400,000 IQ tests for 2016 through 2018. He found that (contrary to expectations) there were significant declines in scores affecting all demographics — but especially among people of college age and those with little formal education. In fact, when Brown’s piece was published, specialists did not find the conclusions surprising since a similar trend had already been evident in college aptitude tests.
Brown goes on to blame smartphones and social media for what has been dubbed the Reverse Flynn Effect. He cites studies of the declining performance of large language models when trained on low-quality online data of the kind consumed by the typical doomscroller — as opposed to the more challenging books, newspapers and magazines devoured by previous generations.
That seems reasonable on its face. There is impressive correlation between lower performance in other intellectual assessments, such as the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (aka PISA) tests, with less reading and lower ability to concentrate, as noted by the Financial Times columnist James Burns-Murdoch months before Lane’s article.
Something Disturbing This Way Comes
So something disturbing is happening. But it is difficult to find a so-called dose-response relationship between smartphone dependence and IQ performance. Even if we could, we would still need to understand whether one caused the other, or whether some third factor was responsible.I have already seen the consequences of smartphone fear in two highly intelligent (at least in my estimation) friends who have been persuaded to follow the trend to switch back to flip phones. One of them told me he had gone to Brooklyn to buy a “kosher” model — and he was not joking, there is a website devoted to kosher phones. (While not rabbinically certified to my knowledge, they have been “trusted” by some Jewish religious schools listed at the bottom of the home page.)
Flynn’s thesis was that Western education had been saturating young people with science-derived classification of a kind that helped them with the abstract tasks of IQ tests — but that this cultural background did not improve their innate intellect, which hadn’t changed.
What did Flynn have to say about the alleged technology menace? The answer is very little, even though he published his last book on IQ trends, Are We Getting Smarter?, in 2012, five years after the introduction of the iPhone. In fact, technology of any kind does not appear in the book’s index. That is not because he ignored technology’s importance, but rather because he subsumed it under a broader category of economic and occupational changes, the growing number of workers in managerial roles and the increasing role of abstract reasoning in the educational systems of Western countries.A passionate leftist, Flynn was inspired by the studies of the pioneering Soviet psychologist, AR Luria, who studied the relationship between intelligence and the practical conditions of life. Flynn’s thesis was that Western education had been saturating young people with science-derived classification of a kind that helped them with the abstract tasks of IQ tests — but that this cultural background did not improve their innate intellect, which hadn’t changed.
Flynn did not believe that the effect would continue indefinitely. He noted that IQ was already plateauing in 2009 (the date of the second edition of Flynn’s book What Is Intelligence?) in Scandinavia. But he also did not foresee a decline. I suspect that he would have said that technology, both in schools and in the professional workplace, was reducing mental effort just as other devices had eliminated much of the physical exercise in the household, commuting and the workplace.
This is consistent with the rise of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, which outsource much of our former mental calculation. If something like a map-reading exercise were included in IQ tests, scores in the GPS era would obviously not match those of generations that grew up poring over the maps once distributed free by gasoline stations.
Flynn Appraised
I met Flynn 17 years ago when he was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. Three things about Flynn stood out. The first is that he was one of a vanishing breed of economic leftists in the 1980s and 1990s. As an academic he was a civil rights organizer who moved to a distinguished career in New Zealand in 1963, believing his politics excluded him from U.S. academia. (He remained an Irish radical at heart. At one point when our conversation turned to political violence, I mentioned that there had been eight assassination attempts on Queen Victoria. His reply: “Not enough.”)....
....MUCH MORE
For what it's worth, Russel Sage was one of the richest people in American history. If interested see November 2015's "Derivatives And Usury: The Role Of Options In Transactions Used To Act In Fraud Of The Law":
I have been meaning to put together a post on Russell Sage, one of my heroes, for pretty much the lifetime of this blog and now, thanks to the power of procrastination, I don't have to.
A quick search of the blog shows only one mention of Sage, the fact that in Forbes' first rich list in 1918, Mr. Sage's widow, Olivia, clocked in as the second-richest woman in America....
Also:
August 2019 - "The Early History of Regulatory Arbitrage" (How Put-Call Parity Helped Russell Sage Evade the Law And Become Rich)
Really rich.
Banker to the Vanderbilt's rich.
One of the richest Americans of all time rich.
Some day I'll get around to doing a post on Mr. Sage, he was an interesting person.
As was Olivia , Mrs. Sage, the distaff side of the family parity.
If interested see also: September 2020 - The Grand-Père Of Option Pricing Theory: Louis Bachelier:
*****
....Now what Bachelier was about to do wasn't quite at the level of Leibniz or Newton inventing the calculus but it was orders of magnitude beyond the state of the art as practiced by Russell Sage, who amassed one of the greatest Wall Street fortunes of his day, $3 billion or so in 2020 dollars, based on simple put/call parity to evade New York state usury laws.
Here's the introduction to a 2012 post where I decided to go with Bachelier rather than Sage:
The Guy Who Discovered Black-Scholes Before Mssrs. Black and Scholes
Okay, not all of B-S but enough that if anyone had been paying attention they could have made money off the young man's work.But back to Professor Bernstein's letter, he notes that the B-man's thesis advisor was Henri Poincaré, which is a pretty good start but additionally links to....
I was going to do a post on the King of 19th century put and call brokers but you may find this more interesting.....
*And on declining general intelligence:
March 2023 - Well, It Looks Like You Were Right, You Are Surrounded By IdiotsFrom the journal Intelligence via ScienceDirect, May - June 2023 Issue:
