Before we enter into the exciting base matter for today’s discussion, I’d once more like to plug the near-definitive At Our Wits’ End by Dutton and Woodley (2018). That book exposed the alarming rate of decline of approximately .4 IQ points per year in places like the UK and the USSA. The primacy of intelligence has been acknowledged more recently: National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits, Kirkegaard, et al (2020).
The dystopian trend in the USSA was most recently expounded upon at the BPEA Spring Conference, March 25, 2021, and a paper authored by Caroline Hoxby, Advanced Cognitive Skill Deserts in the U.S.: Their Likely Causes and Implications. Check out the map at that linked summary and see if you’re in a cognitive skill desert.
In Advanced cognitive skill deserts in the U.S.: Their likely causes and implications, Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford University maps county-level data from standardized tests to show which regions have higher percentages of adults and children with advanced skills and which areas have lower percentages. She compares data for adults, 12th graders, 8th graders, 5th graders, and 3rd graders and finds that regional patterns, evident among adults, only begin to emerge by 8th grade and are similar to adults by 12th grade.
I’ve noted more than once that children trapped in failed government schools, and that’s ninety percent of USian children, demonstrate, via systemic standardized tests, a decrease in mathematical ability proportionate to their tenure in the so-called schools. Proficiency scores fall from elementary school to middle school to high school. The schools literally dumb the kids down, in terms of cognitive application, to the level of the average USian adult. That is exactly what Hoxby found. That is exactly what the “schools” were designed to accomplish. It’s a feature, not a flaw.
Of course, math, while last in the acronym, is the first and foremost building block of the STEM idol everyone claims to adore these days. Without it, there is no science or engineering, no advanced modern systems or convenient technologies. These are the numerically centered of the advanced skills Hoxby is concerned with. She focused on the middle school years, finding these to be the time of greatest development potential for higher-order reasoning, logical expression, abstract thinking, and critical inspection. Few if any of those subjects are taught, embraced, or even tolerated in today’s failed government schools. No foundation is laid and the “age of opportunity” in middle school is wasted.
Hoxby found that - surprise, surprise - larger, higher-tech cities which attract more capable adults also generally have better advanced-thinking scores among the children of those adults. There is also the inescapable pattern of more advanced thinking in the northern parts of the USSA compared with the relative dearth of advanced cognition in the south.
Still, she remains optimistic, reasoning that as with a geographic desert the mental deserts only require watering, the right water being increased spending. That is noble and, to a small degree, plausible, but it misses the larger causative factor - changing demographics. To put this bluntly, as seen on the map, locations with higher intelligence tend to have populations with higher concentrations of Europeans (and Asians). Areas with higher numbers of other peoples tend to exhibit lower intelligence averages. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s science, though a kind of science seemingly unwelcome in places where STEM is promoted.
The schools themselves are only partly to blame. They, after all, are products of policy and politics. Their work, good or bad, is tolerated in accordance with the norms of the resident culture. All of it is determined by identity. And since 1965, formerly White Christian European America has changed markedly, morphing into the United States of Multiculturalism. The effect of this change on average intelligence is akin to adding paint thinner to paint - both become thinner, diluted.
In a macro social sense, two things have happened and continue to happen that drive down the average IQ of the USSA. First, intelligent Americans do not reproduce. Native-born citizens of lower intelligence do have children. This is encouraged and in many cases subsidized. Those with higher IQs have few - and increasingly no - children. As the mentally challenged are rewarded, so the intelligent are in a way penalized. An entire society, economy, and the government have come to bear on them, driving them into faithless, work-obsessed, pleasure-obsessed, debt-enslaved, taxed, corporate hedonism that all but forbids the introduction to the world of new, young intelligent people. This domestic evisceration of the cognitive elite is bad enough. However, it is coupled with the second phenomenon, the nearly exclusive importation of lower-IQ foreigners. Paint + thinner = thinner paint. Import the third-world, become the third-world, IQs and all.
For fun, let’s see how this works out in reality. I picked Newton County, Georgia for no reason in particular. Per the 2019 Census estimates, Newton has a population of 111,744. The county’s demographic breakdown is as follows: Black, 47.7%; White, 43.9%; Hispanic, 6.1%; Mixed, 2.2%; Asian, 1.2%; Am. Indian, .5%; Pacific, .1%. These percentages add up to 101.7% … which confirms the government source. I am cognizant of the fact that the 2020 estimates, in advance of the full count, are available as per national percentage increases for Blacks and Hispanics. Newton is likely on the leading curve of those advances. However, I will, for now, ignore those changes and make a slight correction so as to accumulate a realistic 100% total population. Let’s call it 48% Black, 43% White, 7% Hispanic, and 2% Asian/Other.
Now, we play the weighted average IQ game. I’m going to lump Blacks and Hispanics together (55%) at 87 IQ. Because I am not sure of exactly what kind of Asians are prevalent around Covington, I will lump them in with the Whites (45%). The trick is what IQ value to assign the Whites. I suspect they have drifted south of the old Northern European standardized score of 100, most likely assuming the new American White score of 95. I’ll run a simple average with both. I’ll also add in a third, “worst-case” scenario in keeping with the total domestic intelligence decline.
(.55)(87) + (.45)(100) = 92.85 [ouch]
(.55)(87) + (.45)(95) = 90.6 [oh, boy]
(.55)(87) + (.45)(93) = 89.7 [damn]
Ninety is the score no first-world nation wants to dip below as that is the cutoff below which there is no guarantee of continued societal stability. The average of the averages is 91.05. That’s terrible. All of these numbers are terrible. And, in this specific case, as with much of the rest of the country, they are falling steadily.
Where do the children of Newton fall into this matrix? Let’s walk through the placements, shall we? We’ll specifically look at school-aged children, 5-18. The 2019 estimates alott 19.4% of the total population to that bracket or 21,678 individuals. I consulted the 2019 Georgia Department of Education [SIC] stats to confirm those figures and to assess the attendant identitarian breakdown. The Great Hoax has wreaked havoc on 2020-2021 enrollments in GDOE-tracked public schools as might be expected. Back in 2019, however, the enrollment was a fairly similar match: 19,579 students, or 90% of all children 5-18 years of age (the national average)(the remainder being privately schooled, homeschooled, or otherwise unaccounted for).
Pursuant to my previous lumping-normalizing rules, I find the student body is 71% “Black” (13,885) and 29% “White” (5,694). These, by the way, are your future total Census demographics, if lumped and normalized. Taking the middle “95, White” average, we have: (.71)(87) + (.29)(95) = 89.32. It may not be the brightest future.
I’ve looked at more Newton government school performance records than I ever cared to. By and large, they are utter failures, falling somewhere above Detroit and below rural Mexico. Pick one and look at the scores and the trends - low and falling. And, as with most public schools, they fall along the lines of progressively decreasing performance as described by Hoxby.
Newton is part of the vast southeastern intelligence desert. Their collective experience is demonstrative of the larger pattern and picture. More money, even radically more, will not solve this problem (see Detroit). Voting will not solve this problem (see the past 100 years). The problem is not political in nature. Tossing Dr. Seuss, Geo. Washington, and 2+2=4 out the door in favor of more social justice and equity will accomplish nothing. The issue is beyond cultural. It involves an identity changed, a demographic shift.
The new post-American USSA, to the extent and for the time it endures, will not be the end of the world. It will be, is already different. Relatively speaking, it’s parched - like a desert.
- Perrin Lovett
