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.)

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.”)

The second is that, despite or because of his radicalism, Flynn was able to build bridges to many conservatives who shared his passion for free speech. He told me that ever since publication of the blockbuster The Bell Curve by the Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the political writer Charles Murray, discussion of race and IQ had become taboo on the left, which regarded any study of possible differences in IQ among races as inherently racist. Flynn’s passion for the study of IQ grew with The Bell Curve’s success, and he debated the authors vigorously on the evidence. But he also opposed efforts to cancel the topic and the authors.

While Flynn pointed to evidence for the reduction of the racial gap in IQ scores, he also rejected simplistic environmental explanations of the difference and defended the right of conservatives like Murray to speak on college campuses without harassment. His original publisher rejected his last book on academic free speech, believing he could be prosecuted under British law for the mere quotation of others’ views deemed racist. He consequently became one of the right’s favorite leftists.

The third is that the controversy over the Flynn Effect has obscured Flynn’s takeaway message. To understand it you need to see how Flynn differed from generations of other critics.

A Fine Old Tradition

Educational and cultural decline is a fine old American publishing tradition, running from Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands (1953) through Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987), Nicholas J. Carr’s The Shallows (2010) and, most recently, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation Grows Up (2022). We can only tremble at what the pundits will say about Gen Z.

Flynn did not join in this recital of decline. The real point of his studies is reflected in chapter 7 of What Is Intelligence? He argued that “critical acumen and wisdom,” which is not captured with IQ tests, “are equally worthy of attention” and that “obsession with IQ is one indication that rising wisdom has not characterized our time.”

The current lament over the mess left by social media is anachronistic. Consider the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s reply to a critic who back in 1957 said that “90 percent of everything is crud.” Disinformation about vaccines may be deplorable, but recall that America’s leading columnist in 1954, Walter Winchell, spread the false rumor on television and radio that the government was stockpiling “little white coffins” anticipating casualties from the new Salk vaccine. This prompted removal of 150,000 children from the trials.

Preparing readings for my own seminar at Princeton, “Understanding Disasters,” I noticed how many of the people responsible for the most notorious decisions have been highly intelligent, accomplished in their fields and usually following the best practices of their professions when they messed up. They lacked an important component of wisdom: the ability to recognize emerging weaknesses of an established playbook. Think the captains of Titanic, Edmund Fitzgerald, and Andrea Doria, the engineers of the Challenger, the strategic advisors of Lyndon Johnson and the medical advisors of Joe Biden.

Our problem has not been the dumbing down noted in the New York Magazine story; according to Flynn, it has been failure to wise up.