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Re:My new favorite book of all time by sisu on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:35PM (#16259543)
"The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade."

Is this statement correct? I was under impression that while the per-country averages are mostly rising, the global average is going down.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2730791/Are-S... http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/

Re:My new favorite book of all time by lawtguy on Monday January 29, 2018 @03:30PM (#16260395)
The statement about rising IQ is the Flynn Effect[1]. The fact that IQ has risen over the past 80 years or so is well accepted. Exactly why this is happening is open to debate.

The fourmilab link you mentioned seem to be based on the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations"[2]. They explicitly normalized all IQ data to have Briton as 100. The author then assumes that IQ hasn't changed any in the past 50 years. The author mentions the Flynn effect and then ignores it. Once you do that, you really can't say anything about how IQ is changing over time. Instead he basically ends up measuring the relative growth rates of countries.

The Daily Mail link has a whole bunch of things, the graph they have of lowering world IQ looks pretty much like the one in the fourmilab article, so I suspect it's based on the same data.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations