Feb. 25, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:14:45
2919 Human Intelligence: The Flynn Effect - A Conversation with Dr. James Flynn
Dr. James R. Flynn is emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and author, most recently, of What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect. Flynn is best known for the Flynn effect, the continued year-on-year rise of IQ scores in all parts of the world. Flynn’s research combines political and moral philosophy with psychology to clarify problems such as justifying humane ideals and whether it makes sense to rank races and classes by merit.
Fellow Irishman, I suppose, Jim Flynn, who is an emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
He researches intelligence, and I have talked about his theories a number of times on this show before.
In particular, the Flynn effect, which has been part of my argument of be nice to your children because they're going to be smarter than you.
So...
Thank you so much, Dr.
Flynn, for taking the time today.
Happy to talk to you.
So if we can just start big picture before we delve into some of the more controversial stuff.
When I talk about IQ on my show, there seems to be quite a lot of skepticism about the value of IQ. And I've sort of reminded people, it's not a perfect measure of intelligence.
I don't think anything could be, but...
It does seem to be quite predictive of life outcomes, of academic outcomes, and so on.
I wonder if you could make the briefcase as to why we should even bother being interested in a measure such as IQ. Well, first, we shouldn't confuse IQ with wisdom.
I've published a book called How to Improve Your Mind, and there are plenty of intelligent people around who don't have the basic toolkit To evaluate international politics or economics or moral argument.
So, whatever IQ tests measure, and as you say, they relate mainly to how well you'll do in getting marks at university.
It isn't necessarily measuring critical intelligence or wisdom.
Now, as to measuring how well you'll do at university, there is a good deal in it.
If you combine IQ with school grades, it correlates about 40% with university marks.
Some would say that's up to 50%.
But note that's a combination of school marks and IQ. Now, the reason that the IQ buffs count both in, they say, after all, effort counts too in achievement.
And school marks give you an idea of whether the person really tries.
So it's quite sensible to take into account school marks as a measure of motivation and IQ as a measure of intelligence.
And the combination of the two gives you a rough prediction of how students will do.
Now it isn't perfect.
A correlation of.4 is not as high as anyone would like.
What it means is that if Harvard takes On its tests, I presume it uses SAT and it may give its own IQ test.
If they take, let's say, the top 3%, that is, people who are two standard deviations above the mean, what they actually get is probably about the top 84% of performers.
So it gives them some type of selective measure.
I mean, rather than having no measure at all except interviews and school marks to try and get an elite student body, they can get something like the top 1-6 by giving a test that, in order to qualify for Harvard, you have to be in the top 2 or 3%.
So, to that degree, it is predictive of university performance.
It's also, as far as I understand it, broken into a variety of categories, and if I understand it correctly, the Flynn effect, which we'll talk about in a sec, really focuses on improvements in one or two of those categories.
For those who've never been exposed to an IQ test, I wonder if you could talk about the different categories of specialization of brain specialization that it tries to measure?
Well, one of the best IQ tests are the Wechsler tests.
They have the WASTE, which is their adult test, and the WISC, which is their test for school children and these are broken down into effectively ten subtests.
Now these have varied a bit over time but I'll discuss the ten subtests that cover the period since these tests were introduced back in effectively the 1940s and they measure first vocabulary that is the extent to which you command the vocabulary that is standard to English And this can go all the way from fairly simple words to, let's say, a word like delectable.
And you would have to give a definition of that word.
It includes arithmetic, but by that it means more like mental arithmetic.
That is, it's not just memorizing the times tables and giving it back.
It also means you have to have some strategy.
They would say you go to market and you get Three items and it costs you $16.
You get three items at $5.50 each and you've been given $20.
How much change would you take home?
Well, you would have to multiply.
You'd have to divide the number of items into your cost and then subtract that into the money you were given and you'd get the answer, wouldn't you?
So you'd have to have some type of strategy for using numbers.
It measures general information, and that has to do with things like what continent Buenos Aires is in, information of that sort.
Information they feel that a reasonably educated person would have about the world.
You know, what's the capital of Switzerland, this sort of thing.
It also measures comprehension.
Now that has to do with how well you can handle everyday life.
You know, why you put stamps on letters, why streets are numbered consecutively, why we pay interest, things of that sort that have to do with basic competence for dealing with the world around you.
It would also have digit span.
That would be a memory test.
You'd be tested both digit span forward, how many numerals you could remember when they were randomly read out, And then reverse digit span.
Could you say them backwards in the order in which they were out?
Similarities would be the last of the verbal tests.
That's your ability to classify.
When, you know, cats and dogs are both animals.
But you can get it more sophisticated than that.
You could say, what are freedom and justice?
What's the classification that they fit under?
And then you'd go to the performance tests.
And these are slightly different than the verbal tests.
Recently put in Raven's progressive matrices, they put in some matrices designs, and these mean that you have to look for logical patterns and symbols that don't correspond to everyday life.
You might have a sequence of three triangles and a square, and then below that you might have three X's, and you have to figure the thing that would complete the sequence Analogous to the item you've been given.
They have block design, which is a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Object assembly is in many ways fairly similar.
Then they have tests your spatial orientation, a lot of it.
And then they have pictorial tests, picture arrangement, arranging pictures to tell a story and identifying the missing part of a picture.
These would be mainly the different skills they would be testing for.
And you note that they claim they're testing for three major abilities.
Your analytic ability, that is, your ability to analyze the sequences of symbols and find which would be the next symbol and logical order.
They're testing your spatial abilities, but they're also testing your speed of information processing.
For example, they'd have a coding test.
And you're given a key that codes numbers with letters, and you would have to use that coding key on a lot of data to see how well you could do on coding.
So there are analytic abilities, there is speed of information processing, there is working memory, and of course there are the verbal tests, particularly vocabulary and similarities.
And how Well, because you've talked about the problem of the frozen brain, that there are certain people, of course, who believe that your intelligence is...
I've heard estimates from sort of 40, 50, even as high as 80%, that it would be genetic or hereditarian.
To what degree is it fixed throughout your life?
To what degree can it change throughout your life?
There are two different questions here, and that is within your own generation and ethnic group, How easy is it throughout your life to jump the pecking order, let's say, to go from the 50th percentile to the 70th?
The other question, of course, is progress over time.
How much the population of a whole from one generation to another can progress?
Now, their environment, of course, I think is virtually all-encompassing.
You don't, with natural selection, get much upgrading of genes from one generation to another.
So when everyone in the population outdoes everyone in the previous generation, that's primarily environmental.
When you get down to within your group and within your generation, that is let's say you're a white American being compared to 11-year-olds, people in your age cohort, then environment and genes mix with a much greater emphasis on genes.
Initially, the quality of your family can give you either a head start or it can put you a bit behind.
That is, you can be a person with very good genes who comes from a substandard family or a person with poor genes who comes from a privileged family and vice versa.
School slowly loses out to current environment.
That is, after you go to school, the influence of parents, as you would imagine, gives way to the friends you make It gives way to the school as an institution, gives way to what you do in your private time to amuse yourself, and slowly current environment obliterates family.
It does this at a different rate for different cognitive abilities.
Vocabulary is one in which the family has the most lasting influence.
Even at the age of 17, your family background can be a handicap when you take the SAT, Before you go to university, particularly the SAT verbal, which is heavily correlated with vocabulary.
But probably sometime in your mid-twenties, even their family is obliterated.
Now, does that mean that you have a perfect match between genes and environment?
Well, there is an exception to that.
You may have a reasonably good match between your genes and what we call systematic environment.
That is, things that everyone is exposed to, like school and family.
But there's a joker on the deck.
20% of environment doesn't correlate either with your genes, nor does it correlate with your family background.
And that 20% gives even an adult considerable leeway.
That is, take an adult student.
They may be someone who came from an average environment.
They may not have tried very hard at school.
They may have a humdrum job.
They may have people all around them who are only of average intelligence.
But sometimes we find that those people make a choice.
They think, you know, I'm sick of not knowing enough about the world.
And they come to university as adult students.
Now, it's quite possible for a person who, let's say, is at the 83rd percentile in genetic quality to have sunk well below that in terms of IQ because of a current environment that is inferior and to come to a university and be considerably upgraded.
They could jump ahead of about half the people who are above them on the percentile scale.
That is, they could expose themselves to a university environment that not only matches their genetic potential but actually exceeds it.
And they can go from a vocabulary performance, let's say, at about, oh, the 83rd percentile to the 91st percentile.
That means they've jumped half of the people above them on the pecking order.
So it's never too late to ask yourself, do I want to upgrade?
And this has a lot to do with how people behave at retirement.
Often an intelligent person is working in a job that challenges their intelligence.
And then when they retire, they no longer use their intellect at work and they no longer exercise their mind.
And they can drop considerably in terms of their mental ability.
They found in international studies that people who keep working between, let's say, 55 or 60 and 70 only have about half of the loss for working memory as to people who retire.
And when you retire, you can make choices.
You can say, gee, retirement gives me time to perhaps sit on lectures of the third age, it gives me time to watch videos on cosmology, or you can just take time off for golf.
No, I'm not criticizing people.
Retirement is often a time to enjoy your grandchildren.
So I'm not saying we should be fanatics.
It may be that the lifestyle that suits you in retirement is one where your analytic abilities will degenerate.
It may be that the lifestyle you choose in retirement will give you lots of mental exercise that makes the deterioration of your abilities with age much more gradual.
And as I say, effort counts at any age.
Even when you're in school, 20% of your environment does not correlate with either current environment or genes.
Right.
So would it be fair to say, and I think you've made this analogy as well, Dr.
Flynn, that if we look at the brain more as a muscle and less of a sort of spine, You know, with your height, your spine, your sort of total height, you can do things to diminish one's eventual height, you know, malnutrition and so on, but extra food usually isn't going to make you a lot taller.
But if we don't look at intelligence as something that can be maximized but diminished genetically, but rather as something, a muscle that we can exercise, I think you would argue that we have a closer approach to the facts of the matter.
You have a closer analogy there.
People sometimes ask me, are IQ gains over time intelligence gains?
And I say, forget the word intelligence.
When we are conceived, we have much the same genetic potential for intelligence that our grandparents did.
And the mind at conception has not altered over time.
But as you say, we exercise our brains differently.
I take most of us drive a car today.
So we would expect that over time society has put a higher priority on map reading ability.
We today are more schooled in formal terms and while school children don't show big vocabulary gains, adults do because far more of them have been to university and they have exercised the part of their mind that allows them to manipulate words with dexterity.
Compared to people in 1900, we may not have to exercise our minds as much in terms of memory, because they had to remember their fifth cousin first removed.
Well, we usually don't have to list all of our ancestors and know who they were.
We also classify better.
They were more attached to the concrete world.
While we tend to use logic on abstractions, Luria, the great Russian psychologist, did studies of head men in Russia.
Heads of people who had not been much educated.
These were intelligent people, but they wouldn't take hypothetical situations seriously and they wouldn't use logic on them.
For example, if he said to them, where there is always snow, bears are white.
At the North Pole, there's always snow.
What color are the bears there?
And they would say, I've only seen brown bears.
And he said, but what do my thoughts convey?
And they said, such a thing is not meant to be settled by thinking.
It's meant to be settled by testimony.
If a person came to me from the North Pole, and he was reliable, and he said the bears were white, I might believe him.
In other words, they weren't willing...
For them, what color bears were were important.
They hunted bears.
And they wanted testimony about the concrete world that they manipulated.
They were not interested in hypothetical questions that you analyze through logic.
Or another example, Luria said to one of them, what do fish and crows have in common?
And they said, absolutely nothing.
And he said, aren't they both animals?
And he said, no, the fish is a fish, it's not an animal, and you can eat fish, and you can capture them.
He said, crows are not good to eat, but a crow can peck at a fish and a fish can't eat a crow.
In other words, they were focused on concrete entities and what use you could make of them.
And they weren't about to use classificatory abstractions.
You know, we're used to mammals and reptiles and primates and non-primates.
In terms of their general perspective, these were useless.
They were splitters rather than lumpers.
If you were hunting, you were much more interested in the spores that different animals left.
You were differentiating nature so you could make use of it.
You're interested in what fruits you could eat and what fruits were poisonous.
You weren't classifying things and using logic on them.
And the hypothetical is terribly important.
It means that we've made moral progress as well as cognitive progress.
When I was a young person at university, at the time of Martin Luther King, you might argue with your parents, who generally were more racially biased, and you'd say, what if you woke up tomorrow and you were black?
And my father would say, well, that's the dumbest thing you've ever said.
Who do you know who woke up black?
In other words, he was fixated on the concrete.
He wouldn't take the hypothetical seriously.
You know, the hypothesis that he might be black was for him absurd.
And he wouldn't use logic.
Of course, once you got him to admit that he might wake up black, you could say, well, then would you deserve to be put in the salt mines?
So moral argument always means taking the hypothetical seriously.
And you're quite right.
When we look at people today and then, our brains at autopsy would look very different.
As you know, a weightlifter's muscles at autopsy look different than a swimmer's.
So although our minds are no different at conception, they would look differently at autopsy.
They found that London taxi drivers had an enlarged hippocampus.
And that, of course, is the spatial visualization, spatial orientation.
And they had exercised that part of their brains.
And if society asks us to do exercises differently than in the past, We'll have a different brain at autopsy.
The parts of it that are rote memory might be smaller.
The parts that do analysis might be larger.
Map reading might be mixed.
We pilot cars, of course, but we don't hunt animals in the wild.
As for other aspects, they were not stupid, despite the fact that they would do badly on IQ tests.
They were Perfectly intelligent enough to deal with the cognitive problems that their time posed.
They could make change, they could farm, they could remember their ancestors.
We, of course, can solve a broader range of problems in that we are more likely to take the hypothetical seriously, and that's what science is all about.
We're more likely to use logic on abstraction, so we might have certain portions of the prefrontal lobes that we're more exercised.
So, to sum up, comparing ourselves to our ancestors in the light of IQ gains over time, our brains are no different at conception, but would be different at autopsy.
As to the cognitive problems we can solve, we are no better at solving the problems that our society poses, but our society poses a wider range of problems.
Now, if that doesn't tell you all you need to know, then you're fixated on a word.
People say to me, but are we more intelligent?
And I say, you've learned the four things that are relevant.
You use the word intelligence as you like.
Well, and it has struck me.
I was thinking about the degree to which we live and succeed and prosper really by manipulating abstracts and concepts these days.
I mean, the extension of the franchise.
Sure, look at a banker.
I mean, a banker in 1900, he had to know who was a reliable risk.
If he gave some a loan, he had to know personally the person who would pay it back.
If he gave a mortgage, he had to be sure that the people in the community were reliable.
What does a merchant banker do today?
They look at computers and projections, and they bundle together debt and these credit debt obligations, the CDOs.
They don't need to be intuitively aware of people in their community.
They don't need to know anyone personally.
They essentially just take credit card debt and housing debt and bundle it into a certificate and put it on the stock market.
That is, they use a whole different set of mental skills to be a banker today than they did in 1900.
And these take them much further from concrete reality and more into the realm of money in the abstract.
And I would also, I think you've made the argument as well, that it's very hard to overestimate just the degree to which the scientific mentality has so shaped and pervaded our way of looking at the world.
Because in the past, where there was more religiosity and superstition, there were foundational questions that were answered with dogma, which really discouraged further exploration of those questions.
And now with the sort of boundless vistas of scientific exploration and the skepticism and the need to have a hypothesis that is reproducible and reliable and never contradicted by the evidence and so on has given us a whole different set of tools for looking at the world that I think are almost diametrically opposed to the ways in which people approached metaphysical or foundational questions in the past.
Yes, the Piagetians are very strong on that and I think there's considerable truth in what they say Note, however, that what the scientific ethos of our time has given us are new habits of mind.
We are more ready to take the hypothetical seriously.
We're more ready to use logic on abstractions.
But that doesn't mean that we have gone on to assimilate the tools that allow us to put our analytic abilities to work.
You can be a person who is trained at Harvard in conveyancing.
And that means you've had to deal with abstractions and jurisprudence.
And in the court you have to pose hypothetical cases.
But you can still unthinkingly endorse American foreign policy because you just don't know enough.
There's considerable evidence that we today read less.
We read less significant literature, less literature of some substance.
And we read less history than people did even 30 years ago.
And sadly, university seems counterproductive.
If you look at the people when they go to university, the number who say that they read rarely or never for pleasure, that actually goes up about another 20% at university.
And when they get out, they don't read anything for pleasure.
And if all they do is play video games and do conveyancing, all of these wonderful concepts that science has given us in their minds are largely latent.
Their minds are prepared to think.
But look at the questions that Americans face in the modern world.
Many of them are like medieval serfs.
Just as a serf couldn't see beyond his immediate surroundings, they, for all their use of the Internet, When their government says, why don't you go into the Middle East?
They make up their minds without any knowledge of the history of the Middle East.
They make up their minds without any knowledge of situations that bear on what we do there.
I've often reflected that if Americans knew enough history to know that they had been lied into three or four of their last six wars, they might have had another perspective.
Or if they had read Robert Fisk's book, The Great Crusade for Civilization, they would know something about the Middle East and how counterproductive it usually is for Western armies to tromp around.
I've often said to people, well, you know, during the Middle Ages in Germany, you had the Thirty Years' War, and Protestants and Catholics were burning each other and beheading each other.
What would you have thought if the Sultan of Turkey had said, well, I think I'll have a Turkish army tromp around the Middle East and teach them better manners?
How fruitful an ocean would that have been?
So you're quite right.
Science does two things.
It prepares us to think in terms of hypotheticals and use logic.
That, I think, has had the dividend that fewer people are racially prejudiced today.
More of them are willing to say to themselves, well, what if I woke up black?
Would I deserve to be exploited?
But there's evidence that many, many people are reading less and reading less history and that their minds just don't have the conceptual tools to deal with a very complex real world.
Their minds are prepared, but their minds are not trained critically.
Oh, if people knew, of course, I think that the last Iraq war was, if I remember rightly, the fifth time that Western powers had gone in to tidy up the Middle East.
And it appears that the disastrous scenario that's unfolding at the moment is an exact photocopy, almost down to the letter of what has happened in the past.
But without that knowledge, people get swept up in groupthink and nationalism and...
Fail, I think, to extend the lessons of universality and ethics that we try to apply domestically.
It all just seems to vanish.
The war the Europeans have conducted.
And, of course, when we leave, Afghanistan's history will go on without us leaving a trace in the sand.
They will have the same problems of trying to forge unity.
They'll have the same disparate number of tribes that hate each other as when we went in.
So that's part of it, not knowing the history.
But part of it is not knowing enough to have an intelligent, critical attitude to what the media tell you.
I, by the way, have no desire to see people use chemical weapons.
But it was absolutely absurd of Obama to say that if the regime used chemical weapons, America might intervene, because then he made it inevitable that the other side would We have an incentive to fake chemical weapons, whether the government used them or not.
And, of course, one of America's most distinguished journalists, I can't recall him at present, but he worked for the New York Times, he found evidence that the so-called use of chemical weapons by the regime was really used by the revolutionary forces to taint the regime, and he tried to trace the sources in Turkey where they got those weapons.
Now, this was published in the Manchester Guardian, and as far as I know, no U.S. paper would touch it.
And you again have to say, you know, are Americans aware that when Saddam Hussein was our ally and used chemical weapons, we used satellite intelligence to help him target them better against the Iranians?
And chemical weapons are pretty bad, but when we did Operation Desert Storm and the troops were repeating...
Retreating defenseless down the highway, we not only obliterated them with machine guns, but we used fragmentation bombs, which are rather like tying you down to the floor and then just cutting you apart in six-inch chunks.
And we even used weapons that deprived the troops of oxygen so that they smothered to death.
Now, I guess there's some difference between smothering to death with that type of weapon and a chemical weapon.
But as you can see, you would evaluate the whole Middle East differently.
If you had some knowledge of the facts and history of the area and had enough self-confidence to apply your own critical intelligence and just getting a university education and having the modern temper of mind is not sufficient.
You've made, I think, some very good arguments.
That's not a very precise way of putting it.
Let me remember that I have an analytical brain.
Okay.
You've made very compelling and well-supported arguments that...
The growth in our capacity to process abstractions and to entertain hypotheticals to test universal theories, and my argument for many years has been that if it's in the realm of ethics, it has to be universal, otherwise it's aesthetics or some sort of more personal practice.
One of the basic things in ethics is the ability to universalize.
Right.
And you've got some really chilling examples of the callousness and coldness and cruelty that Do you think that the increasing conceptualization and abstraction of our lives is helping us
I mean, we've used the example of race.
I mean, if you want to be a real human being, you have to make your own mind up about moral questions.
And the things that tend to impede you are whatever ethical principles that you've received from your parents.
Some people just never think of questioning those.
But slowly, being able to think better has improved moral debate.
There are still people, that is, fathers in Islamic countries, who if their daughter is raped will kill her for dishonoring the family.
And if you say to that person, what if you were rendered unconscious and sodomized?
Would you deserve to be killed?
And they'll say, that's not what our code of honor says.
That is, they treat their code of honor as a sort of precious jewel that is inherited and they act on it without generalizing it in any way.
So the received ethics of the past, which often incorporated a lot of cruelty, I think people are becoming more able to criticize it.
The same is true to race.
You know, what if you woke up black?
Would you really believe that you should be deprived of the vote and not be able to marry whoever you want?
And slowly, I think, we are beginning to attack that third great illness, beyond racism and inherited morality, And that is nationalism.
Now, there we haven't gone as far, but nonetheless, today, fewer people would repeat the rhetoric of General Curtis LeMay at Vietnam about bombing people back to the Stone Age.
I mean, today we feel that our opponents, if they're non-combatants, we at least worry somewhat about collateral damage, that is, killing people who are non-combatants.
And we have some minimal concern We think, well, gee, if we were being bombed and my kids were killed as collateral damage because a missile hit a complex and killed everyone in the apartment next door, we ought to be upset about that.
So I think you're correct.
There has been a slow growth of people's ability to think critically about ethics, and the way in which you do that is You take the situation of your opponent and you generalize it to include yourself, and then you see whether your views are logically consistent.
Again, I tried to do that with the Turks and Catholic-Protestant strife.
I mean, if we wouldn't welcome an Islamic army tromping around Europe and settling our disputes, why do we think that our army should tromp around the Middle East and settle their disputes?
So that's a case of generalizability.
When you go back to World War I, I've written a little book called Intelligence and Human Progress, and you find that as recently as World War I, intellectuals were virtually blind to their own nationalism.
That even a person as saintly as Martin Buber, who later on urged Israel to be less nationalistic, At the time of World War I, when challenged about what the German army was doing in Belgium, he said, I have it on good authority that when Germans are captured that Belgian women poke out their eyes and put coins into the empty sockets.
You know, the fact that this highly intelligent man could believe that sort of stuff showed that he didn't really consider the Belgians human.
They were just sort of savages.
They weren't Germans.
And Thomas Mann said, this war is a great opportunity to have German culture override Western materialism.
And another German intellectual said, this war is wunderbar.
So I think at least today you do have such people around who can't look beyond their nation and can't look upon people who aren't in their nation as anything but enemies.
But there's been some progress.
Well, you know, Socrates would make the argument for universality, and more specifically, of course, Immanuel Kant would make the argument for universality.
So what you're saying is we've all just been waiting for the conceptual abilities of mankind to catch up with the great philosophers so that we can all move forward together.
That's a very encouraging thought.
Yes, and there are many other things.
I mean, some of the wonderful ideas that you can use to give yourself a mental toolkit do come from philosophy.
But quite a few of them come from other sciences.
I mean, knowing what a market is is a wonderful instrument.
That is, knowing how a market operates.
And, of course, misconceptions about this can be very costly.
Knowing how a stock market operates and what debt is.
If you have a few basic economic concepts, you can say to yourself, Well, marketing debt is an asset only if the debt is likely to be repaid.
You know, if someone owes me money and I say to you, I'm willing to sell the debt to you, you may well think, gee, well, the person that owes Flynn money, he's very sound and Flynn is in need of cash and I'll take the debt over and the flow of payment will reimburse me.
It's another thing, of course, when you bundle together stock certificates that have Marginal mortgage debt, credit card debt, automobile debt, and then you say, ah, we will market that as an asset.
We will sell that, and you can buy it.
And of course, you'll make a lot of money on it, but you only make money on it if the flow of repayment continues.
And you'll have a sophisticated computer model that will predict the conditions under which the flow of A payment will go on but none of these models are really adequate to capture all of human behavior and at a certain point you find that people are overextended and that they can't pay off their mortgages and they can't pay off their automobiles and then you have a crash so it isn't just that you can get stuff from
philosophy proper you can get very useful concepts from economics You can get useful concepts from international politics.
In my book, How to Improve Your Mind, I point out that you really need three concepts to understand international relations.
One is that nations often act in their own interest.
For example, Finland is rightly very frightened of Russia, and very rarely do the Finns criticize the Russians.
So self-interest is important.
Sometimes affinity is important.
America could conquer Canada anytime it wanted, but it recognizes the Canadians are democratic and are pretty much like us, and it feels reluctant to just seek its own interests.
And then finally, your image of yourself is important.
Americans have an image of themselves as being exceptionally virtuous, and this leads them to all sorts of follies on the international scene.
But Israel, of course, has an image of itself as a persecuted people that everyone tried to exterminate, and therefore distrusts everyone, even those who come to its aid.
So if you want to analyze why nations behave as they do in international politics, those three concepts, to combine national interest, to combine affinity with other peoples, to combine your own narrative about your own history, These are very valuable tools in understanding why nations do what they do.
Very apt and wise words.
We'll put links to your books, which again, I highly recommend to people when we put the show out.
Now, if we could turn to race and IQ, of course, the traditional challenge in American society is the black-white IQ disparity.
I was very encouraged by...
Your responses to some of the hereditarian arguments, and I don't want to put Charles Murray as a solely hereditarian cat in that category because, of course, he's more subtle than that.
But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the challenges of the disparity and your approach to focusing and the evidence that supports the environmental approach to resolving the gap.
Yes.
Well, you have to bring sociology to aid psychology.
The question comes down, of course, as to whether certain human groups are immersed in a subculture or a culture different than, let's say, contemporary white Americans.
It's not just race, it involves gender.
If you look at IQ tests a couple of generations ago, women in most countries did worse than men.
If you look at current data, You find that in advanced Western countries where women have equal access to the mainstream culture, that is to education and employment, that women do at least as well as men do on IQ tests.
And I take it women were caught in a subculture that didn't give them full access to the advantages that America could afford.
One of the good examples of this is Israel.
That is, in every modern industrial society I've studied, there are about six.
And five of these women do as well as men, and Israel, women on average, do worse.
This is entirely because 20% of Israeli women come from hyper-orthodox homes, and they are not allowed to read the Torah.
They are discouraged often from seeking any type of professional education.
And they're expected to go from wards of their fathers to being wards of their husbands and childbearing.
And since they are systematically removed from what the modern world can offer you in terms of intellectual endeavor, they have about eight points lower IQ than the rest of Israelis.
So this is the exception that proves the rule.
And you'll find this in many less developed countries.
In many less developed countries, women still have a status of inferiority.
Now the question with blacks is effectively, do blacks participate in a subculture which acts as an environmental influence that keeps them from developing the cognitive skills that are typical of white America?
Now note again we're not talking about individuals.
The best educated and the most intelligent man in America today could be a black.
We're talking about group averages.
And I think two things are very relevant here.
One is a study by Elsie Moore.
You're often told, you know, why don't the children of black professionals do as well on IQ tests as the children of white professionals?
They're all from professional homes.
It must be genetic.
Well, Elsie Moore did a study, and the numbers are not large enough.
Political correctness probably prevents the study from ever being duplicated.
But it was interesting.
She had, as I recall, about 46 children and 23 were adopted by white professional parents and 23 by black.
And in all of these homes, the mother had 16 years of education and the father was at least a professional or a sub-professional.
And the children being adopted out were all black children.
That is, the white families, we've controlled for genes, haven't we?
We're adopting out black children.
And they found that black children adopted into white professional homes at the age of eight and a half had about 13.4 IQ than black children adopted out in black professional homes.
Now, that seems to show that there are subtle differences between black and white subcultures That are not obliterated by economic class.
And she called the mothers in to work with the kids to see what the hell was going on.
And she found that when white mothers and their children were given cognitive problems, they were uniformly positive and encouraging.
They said, well, that's an interesting idea, Johnny, but why don't we try this?
Well, the black mothers were almost uniformly centurious.
You aren't that dumb.
Certainly you can think better than that.
Now, here you get into, of course, the devil in the deep blue sea.
If you say that the difference between the races is genetic, you are, of course, crucified.
If, like me, you say it's environmental, you're told that you're blaming the victim, that you're saying that something is the matter with black subculture that doesn't present the same type of cognitive challenge as white subculture.
Well, what's the third alternative?
Is it that Martians spray dust on white and black homes that encourage some and discourage others?
That is, if it is environment, we have to look at black subculture to see why it is that their environment doesn't give the same incentive to cognitive challenge as a white home.
If it's not genetic, it's got to be somehow cultural.
And I'll produce one other piece of evidence as to why I think it is cultural and not genetic.
And that is I first study in Germany.
After World War II, American white and black servicemen left a lot of illegitimate children behind in Germany.
But note that these were just dark colored Germans.
There was no black subculture in Germany.
And the offspring of black servicemen did as well on IQ tests as the offspring of white servicemen that is the different genes of the races didn't seem to have much to do with it now you can always say that the samples were too small and you can always say that if you take into account the fact that the army selected soldiers with a mental test that they flunked more blacks who never got to Europe and maybe there's a three IQ point difference
hidden in the data but even Germans were not Without prejudice looked at Hitler's influence.
But let's put it this way.
If in America in that time there was a 15-point difference, and Germany at that point there was only a 3-point difference, then we have an interesting idea that if the difference between American whites and blacks, maybe only about 3 points of it is over prejudice, and 12 points of it is a difference in subculture.
And evidence that that's true comes from another source.
Jensen found that in America, as cognitive tasks became more complex, blacks fell further behind.
And he said, aha, that shows they're less intelligent.
You know, simple cognitive tasks, they're closer to whites than they are on more complex cognitive tasks.
Well, in Germany, all that disappeared.
That is, the comparison of white and black on the ten Wechsler subtests, there was no correlation whatsoever with the complexity of the task.
The blacks and whites were just as close to equal on the more complex tasks than the lesser ones.
So I would argue that the evidence in totality shows that the difference is not genetic, but has to do with differences in the subcultures.
It's quite clear to me that Asian Americans tend to outperform whites because they come from a subculture that puts an even greater emphasis on cognitive ability than whites do.
It's interesting, you walk into a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, and there's a little kid sleeping over his books and he suddenly wakes up and picks up the book again.
That is, for him, it's just second nature to do his homework and there it is in front of him.
That's less true in white homes and less true still in black homes.
You find, as Thomas Sowell, who's a black historian, points out, you find that in many cases that while blacks want their children to do better at school, they don't set up the proper atmosphere for developing cognitive ability.
For example, they'll be over the moon if the kid makes an athletic team, But be perfunctory if they bring home a good arithmetic score.
I take it in a Jewish home, it's just the difference.
If the Jewish kid makes the sports team, the parent often says, are you crazy?
You're playing football.
You'll get brain damage.
You won't get to medical school.
And the emphasis on academic achievement is overwhelming.
I talked to a Chinese physiotherapist recently when she was giving me some physio.
And, uh, She said she'd been talking to a friend of hers who said that her daughter had flunked a test.
And she said immediately to this East Asian woman, you mean a real fail or a Chinese fail?
And of course, it wasn't a flunk at all.
She'd gotten a B+. Oh no.
In the mind of her parents was a flunk.
So I think that...
Now, I think things have improved.
You know, over the last generation, blacks have gained five points on whites.
So it may be that black practices in the home and the exposure of black children to cognitive challenge is improving over time.
And another interesting thing is the Dickens-Flynn article shows that it's wrong to think that blacks are today, let's say, 15 points behind whites.
Today they're only 10.
And that's at about the age of 11 or 12.
And you find at the age of 4, there are only 5 points behind whites.
You find in the Harvard infant tests, at the age of about 8 to 12 months, they're not behind at all.
You find at older than the ages of 11, they can be as much as 20 points behind.
And I have tried to set up an analysis of black life that shows why at every step Black culture presents less of an environmental enrichment than white.
I don't have any trouble at all at the age of 24 when blacks have now fallen away to a very large deficit with white because, of course, one third of black males are convicted of a felony And blacks on average between 18 and 24, more of them serve time in jail than go to university.
And of course more black mothers tend to be solo mothers.
If there are not enough black males to marry, you're likely to have a child by someone who's not a promising husband.
So there's no difficulty why between the ages of 18 and 24, why blacks lose IQ ground on whites.
As I say, if you're more likely to have a jail term than to be in university, that's not a very rewarding environment.
And the black sociologist at Harvard, I'll try and think of his name in a moment, who's written news says, black teenage culture is less rewarding of cognitive ability than white.
The whites play, of course, imitating black culture, but they're much more serious about studying for the SATs, Well, the black teenage culture, with its emphasis on music and hanging out at shopping malls, this tends to make for less cognitive challenge, let's say, between the ages of about 13 and 18.
And if you go back below the age of 13, you find that blacks aren't usually in as good schools as whites.
And if you go back below the age of 6, you can run into Elsie Moore, That something is going on in black preschooling that's not as cognitively challenging as white preschooling.
So I think I can show, through an analysis of the black experience in America, exactly why they lose more ground on whites with IQ with age.
Of course, I've been attacked as a racist for this.
I'm saying that blacks deserve what they get.
Well, I'm not saying that at all.
I'm an Irish-American.
And when Irish came to America, they had cultural traits because of their history that made them far inferior to Chinese Americans.
The Chinese valued formal education.
If your kid was the best kid in the village and became a Mandarin, he could favor the village.
They were familiar with the market economy.
They marketed their crops.
They had three rice crops a year and they The Irish were the only group who came to America who settled in cities who mainly had no experience of urban life and they couldn't go to the countryside because while they're peasants they had no farming skills.
In Ireland the farms were so small that to survive you had to grow only potatoes And you turn them over twice a year.
So the Irish came to America.
They couldn't farm even though they had been peasants.
They were totally unsophisticated about urban life.
They tended to have less respect for the law because the law in Britain meant British law and you were supposed to be against that.
The penal laws were such that no Irish Catholic could go to school, which meant if you were a Catholic you couldn't get formal schooling.
So the historical traditions of the two people were entirely different.
Now, am I saying the Irish deserve what they got?
Of course I'm not.
Their history, no Irishman concocted the history of Ireland.
Irishmen came to America and formed initially a subculture with a great emphasis on possession.
They had never owned their land.
So, an Irish kid of 12, like the older generation of my family, tended to all go out into factory work.
Chinese kids of 12 tended to stay in school.
You know, paying off the mortgage and owning your home was a wonderful thing.
Potting up educational capital was less important.
So, if you look at the histories and environments of people, you will find that there are reasons for less performance on IQ tests and less academic achievement and it's pure absurdity to say that we can stand on Mars and say all groups have the same genes for intelligence and all groups have just as rewarding a subculture and therefore everyone ought
to be equal everyone doesn't have just as rich a subculture for academic performance And if you don't take that into account, you don't understand what's going on.
Yeah, I think you mentioned that some of the more professional households the kids can expect to hear, toddlers, infants, can expect to hear about 2,500 different words a day, whereas in some of the more impoverished households, it's as low as 600.
And in some of the black communities, the moms don't chat with their babies because they say, well, they can't talk back, so why?
And these are just different.
That would definitely be in the realm of culture as far as I would understand it.
And there's also another factor.
For every hundred young white women of marriageable age, there are a large number of suitable white partners.
For every hundred black women of marriageable age, there are only 57 black males that are viable.
The rest are dead, they're in prison, they're chronically unemployed, they are on drugs.
Well, if you're a young woman, what are you going to do?
Are 50% of you going to go childless?
You're going to have children with black males that you may not even want around as a permanent partner.
Now, that means you're likely, much more likely than whites, to be a solo parent.
62% of black children today are being raised in solo parent homes.
Now, this has nothing to do with castigating the mother, but if you are one of two children in a two-parent home, the child before school hears a lot of adult education.
If you're a solo black mother with three or four kids around, the vocabulary environment is entirely the child's vocabulary.
That sets the tone of the environment.
When I used to work with the NAACP in Chicago, you'd visit black women who were in public housing five blocks from Lake Michigan who had never seen the lake.
That is, they were totally isolated, and the child...
You know, as you say, they didn't think of talking to their children because the children couldn't understand them, but the child was essentially surrounded by child talk.
Under more favorable circumstances, the child was surrounded by adult talk even before school, and that's a much more enriched vocabulary environment.
Do you think that there's any credibility to—my head spins with this stuff because it's so data-driven, and you, of course, have to, to some degree, accept what people say about the data.
But one argument I think that Charles Murray has made, which I'd like you to address, is the potential dysgenic effects of the welfare state on our capacities or culture, or I guess he would probably argue more genetics.
I don't want to speak for Dr.
Murray, but— Do you think that there could be an effect of, and this would be not among blacks, but among all cultures, that there may be some dysgenic effects from the welfare state that may be putting a downward pressure on this accumulation of intelligence that you've identified?
Well, if the welfare state essentially just keeps people alive in poverty, and these people are ignorant of contraception, and have a higher birth rate than Americans who are more affluent certainly education does something to stratify people in terms of genes for intelligence that is there are many handicaps for people in deprived environments to make their way in the educational system but
to some degree you will have a situation where people Over and above these handicaps the brighter person will tend to go up on the ladder and if you have a certain correlation between genes of intelligence and middle class and upper class status and those people have very few children and don't marry until the age of 30 and what the welfare state does people at the bottom of the heap they are chronically unemployed always
marginal in terms of housing have demoralized family life They don't know much about contraception.
Many of them are in despair.
When I used to talk to a young black girl, I'd say, you know, Susie, you have three kids.
And she'd say, you don't understand, Mr.
Flynn.
My children are the only people that love me.
In other words, their reason for having children is not to victimize the welfare state.
They say, you know, I never had a father.
Any lover I've had beats me up.
My children are the only people who love me.
Now, if you have such a situation over many generations, you would have some decline in genes for IQ. I think there's a solution to this, and that is to have a welfare state and to have social conditions so excellent that you have eliminated the culture of poverty.
You find in Scandinavian countries like Norway and Sweden, That there is no correlation between lower economic status and birth rate because everyone has enough to eat, reasonable housing and a reasonable education and job to fill.
And under those conditions, the people further down the ladder are not that much further down the ladder and they develop middle class aspirations and they master birth control.
So I have found that eugenic tendencies where they exist, in my opinion, exist because the welfare state is usually starved and where it's merely maintaining people without hope and life of a better life and education and housing.
Well, in those countries where the welfare state is robust enough that everyone has a decent life and, you know, a carpenter can find a living and a bricklayer and They have intact homes that at that point the dysgenic tendencies disappear.
So you can choose.
If you want dysgenic tendencies, have a truncated welfare state and a culture of poverty.
If you don't want a dysgenic tendency, why not try and elevate all your population to the point where they have middle class aspirations and middle class patterns of contraception?
Looking forward, I've heard some arguments, and it doesn't seem to me that the data set is broad enough to be conclusive, but that there may be a peak.
And I was reading an article recently about in England, among people tested, kids tested with 14-year-olds, there seems to have been a slight decline in IQ. Do you think that we're reaching the maximum of the hardware upgrades that the brain can achieve, or do you think we can keep going?
I've been predicting that for a long time because the things that fuel IQ may be coming to a point of diminishing returns.
I don't think Britain has hit that yet.
Although it's true that there were no IQ gains for 14 or 15 year olds, there are still plenty of IQ gains in Britain for younger children and also for adults.
So I don't think Britain...
I think the 14, 15 year old is atypical of the data, but there's no doubt That IQ gains have stalled in Scandinavia.
They have probably stalled in the Netherlands.
And I saw data somewhere else that maybe they've stalled in France.
They're still robust in Germany for vocabulary.
They're robust in America.
They're robust in Korea.
They're robust in most of the developing world.
Now, why might they come to a halt?
Well, it may be that in terms of giving people a grasp of the hypothetical and abstractions, that formal education in certain countries has done about as much as it can.
I mean, we may have learned virtually all the tricks of trying to school people in science and hypothetical thinking that we know about.
Family size is important, as we've seen it.
The ratio of parents to children in the home If it's a high ratio, it's much better off than if it's a low ratio.
But if we have any fewer children than we have, we won't even be replacing ourselves.
So family size is beginning to reach a limit.
In terms of cognitively challenging leisure, at a certain point, people get shell-shocked.
I mean, it's one thing to encourage people to read and play chess and To do perhaps demanding video games and leisure, but at a certain point you just want to relax.
So it may be that the various triggers that trigger IQ gains, that is better education, decline in family size, cognitive use of leisure, It may be that all of these things are about to reach a limit, at which point IQ gains will not continue.
Now my answer to that is fine, it's a pity, but look at how little of this new intelligence we are realizing in terms of making it a capacity for wisdom and for social criticism.
You know, the future may be not so much hoping IQ will go up, Hoping people will be better educated by universities and get the basic concepts they need so that the next century will see a rise in critical thinking and a rise in wisdom.
Well, I think that is the challenge.
I mean, having the capacity for abstract thought is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom, I would argue.
It's a precondition but it's not a sufficient condition.
Right, and it's the job of, I would argue, those of us who enjoy, for whatever masochistic reason, finger-wagging the morally universal finger at mankind to continue to try and educate people about the best way to implement universals and ethics to achieve the real moral goal.
Well, I've written a series of books on this, three of them.
I'm sorry?
Yes, I published The Torchlight List, which dares people who say they don't enjoy reading to read five books and And I say, read those and I'll bet you you'll be knocked over by one or two of them.
One of them is Isaac Beshevis Singer's The Slave, which I think is a great book.
And I say, if you even take half an hour before you go to bed at night, here are a list of 200 books that will educate you about the modern world.
Novels, popular histories, some of them are poems, some of them are short stories, some of them are films.
And it's an effort to try and turn around the terrible thing that's going on.
That is, fewer and fewer highly educated people reading for pleasure and getting to know the modern world and getting to know its history.
I published a little book called Fate and Philosophy, which says you don't have to be a philosopher to think deeply about what the world is all about.
You know, it has a section, what is good on ethics, what is possible, and what exists.
And then finally, there's this How to Improve Your Mind, which tries and gives you the conceptual tools to do a bit of market analysis and understand flawed moral argument and understand international relations.
So I'm deeply concerned.
I mean, the next century ought to be a century where we worry less about rising IQ and we worry more about capitalizing on the IQ gains we've had.
It is...
I do sort of get the feeling that we're kind of at a crossroads, and this is why I find your work so encouraging, because there was, of course, the old Platonic argument that the world will not know peace until the kings become philosophers or the philosophers become kings.
And I do find that we're kind of at a crossroads.
I mean, Western civilization seems to me to be facing a significant number of challenges.
I mean, relative to the Black Death, okay, fine.
It's not catastrophic, but if you look at sort of the accumulated challenges We're good to go.
I think that what we need is these sort of iron girders of principles and particularly moral philosophy to sort of herd the sheep back.
I mean, that sounds like a bad way of putting it, but to herd people back to a common understanding so that we can solve these problems rationally rather than either avoiding them by kicking the can down the road when Greece just got another four-month extension that ended up keeping things going to four months later.
Rather than kicking the can down the road, which is irresponsible, or having emotionally self-interestedly reactive reactions to these problems, to devote ourselves back to sort of the foundational principles of personal responsibility, universal ethics, perhaps some private property extensions might not be bad.
But I think that...
At this point, if we can say maybe we've reached the peak, then we really need to harness our increased capacity with the power of critical thinking to really attack these problems.
And I think we have to do it sooner rather than later because they seem to be getting worse the longer we ignore them.
Well, the ancients were right.
They said you can't be infected by materialism, militarism, or the cult of popularity.
If you measure human beings in terms of their number of possessions...
If you measure human beings just in terms of whether they're affable and go along with what everyone thinks, if you measure human beings and thrilling to the fact that your nation can push anyone else around on the international scene, you overlook what is really the purpose and that is the liberation of the mind.
Chekhov says man is what he thinks.
And all my life I have wanted to get the intellectual equipment so I could liberate my mind To have an independent opinion about the great events and great problems of the world.
In Norway, polls show that people are asked if they have job satisfaction.
And those who say yes, they are asked, would they give that job up for a less rewarding one at twice the income?
And most of them say no.
Now, it would be interesting to see what a poll would say in America.
At least you get the impression that very few Americans would be willing to live on half of their affluent income if it meant that they would have more leisure to think and to read and to have an independent opinion.
So you're quite right.
I mean, there has to be a change in values.
People have to measure their society in terms of the number of people who can think for themselves about ethics and about nationalism and about racism and measure it less in terms of whether people can afford private airplanes.
Right.
And the chilling study that came a few years out of England that I think that the number one desire for young British people was to be famous.
Not any achievement, not famous for their virtue, but just to be well known, which seems to me to be splitting self-regard.
You shouldn't want to be famous.
You should want to be in control of your own mind and your own life.
That doesn't necessarily bring you fame.
No, and certainly moralizers in the short run have achieved far more infamy in their own time than famous maybe later after they get the hemlock or the treatment.
That's often a matter of luck.
You know, it amuses me.
People want fame.
They want to win the Nobel Prize.
How many Nobel Prize winners can you name?
Maybe a dozen, perhaps?
Yeah, you might name a dozen.
And how many are given?
There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, aren't there?
I mean, even winning a Nobel Prize is not winning lasting fame.
I mean, it's a nice thing for people to get, but it doesn't make you really famous.
Or name a congressman from 30 years ago.
Most people can't.
I mean, they were big deals in their day, but they failed.
Yes.
We remember most those who bring us the greatest gifts, and it's really politicians, and I think mostly it's the abstract thinkers who really help us to understand ourselves and the world.
And that, of course, is a great gift that you've given.
I'm sorry, I interrupted you.
We were just about to make another point.
No, I was just about to say that all of these things interrelate.
The modern world is a wonderful place.
It means that we have, most of us, the leisure and the income to think about the world and to think of science as impact on it.
And I think we are finally coming to terms with the impact of science.
But unfortunately, we're neglecting about two-thirds of what it has to tell us.
And of course, we're also neglecting the fact that endless growth is posing problems in regard to the climate that are about to become insuperable.
So what can we do?
We can say to people, look at the world without illusion.
Look at every problem as an empirical problem and a moral problem and see the extent to which you can liberate your mind to solve them and don't worship the false gods of ever-increased productivity and the life of easy popularity.
Thank you very much for your time, Dr.
Flynn.
A real pleasure.
We'll be putting books that I would certainly recommend.
Are We Getting Smarter?
It came out, I guess, two and a half years ago now.
Yeah, that's right.
You read it, did you?
Yeah, How to Improve Your Mind, 20 Ways to Unlock the Modern World.
20 Keys to Unlock the Modern World, that's right.
20 Keys.
Sorry, I don't have my glasses on.
It's all kind of blurry down there.
But yeah, so we'll put a list of those books, and we'll also find and put a list to the 200 books that you recommend.
Thank you so much, of course, for your time.
Thank you for all the work that you're doing.
And I know you take on some controversial topics.
And I appreciate your defense of those whose opinions are different from yours.
