0. https://www.tnp.no/norway/economy/poverty-income-inequality-...
Norway has been able to (due to oil revenues) avoid the (non-imported) increased inequality that has affected most other western countries over the last decades.
[0] https://www.faktisk.no/faktasjekker/ZoD/innvandring-er-den-k...
Again more conjecture, but maybe IQ has more to do with concentration and abstract thinking. If there were a relationship between wealth and childhood trauma/stress that could impair abstract thinking, it would make a good case for policies designed to prevent childhood trauma, in particular those brought on by poverty.
Finally, the causal relationship you have set up between intelligence and quality of living situation, while undoubtedly true to _some_ extent, ignores everything we know about system racism, system sexism, our horrific healthcare system and a host of other factors that complicate this idea - at least in the US.
> Income, yes, but not wealth.
Why is that? Wealth is just an accumulation of income.
To be wealthy, you just need to have assets and not do dumb things. Wealthy people either inherited it or had a liquidity event. Nobody gets rich via income. There is some intelligence involved in the liquidity part, but also alot of luck. If you have inherited property in NYC in the last 40 years and didn't sell it, you are wealthy. If you operate a McDonald's franchise, you are wealthy, and probably are of average intelligence.
85% of American millionaires are self-made (i.e. first generation).
"The Millionaire Next Door" https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer...
You can choose to read the book and determine how it is done, and what you can choose to do to become a millionaire yourself, or you can choose to remain a victim of fate. Your choice.
The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less, in Western Europe of all places, is absolutely ridicolous. If anything the opposite is the case. As regards jobs we also have the opposite problem: too few simple jobs.
Wealth, inequality, and poor are not well-defined. Using the typical measures: poor being near the poverty line for an area wealthy being access to capital (be it over 100x the poverty wealth line or double the average) and inequality, the gap in absolute terms from top to average. The pareto principle will always illustrate how greater inequality defines that there are more poor people, even when the poverty line changes. Abstract equations, notwithstanding.
> The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less
The amount of food, available, is changing. The most popular bananas (https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-confirms-that-bananas...), beef, fish (http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/cetaceans...), are all in decline for differing reasons. So there's a little truth to it from a perspective. Yours isn't any more valid than theirs, so what did you add to the discussion?
Ironically, the beef industry may be kept on life support due to the ongoing climate change. New grazelands will appear from beneath the tundra across the world offering another few generations of opportunity. Buy your land in the US Dakotas for your grandchildren. It's a golden opportunity.
> bananas
It should be obvious that Europeans don't need bananas for proper development. In addition that has nothing to do with poverty.
Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour with anything at all you get people that scour the internet for even the tiniest scrap of evidence for you.
> Yours isn't any more valid than theirs, so what did you add to the discussion?
At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid. There has never been a time or place where everyone was better off materially and if you are not aware you and OP should start reading some of those books.
Given these are orthogonal situations, I don't know why you think I said they are connected. I was speaking to the valid perspective of change in the food chain.
> At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid
Appealing to your own authority? What about everyone else? Not compelling.
> Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour
Bringing something to the table should be the defacto approach. Bring something to support your views, other than rhetoric. You'll be a more effective poster (and speaker) if there's something there to talk about. Good luck with whatever.
Far as I can tell, this is the opposite of the trend, in the U.S. and Canada.
> I wonder if the drop in IQ is related to the increase in wealth inequality in these past 50 years as well.
Not sure what mechanism you think would enable that. Thinking that the richest people in society are, in relative terms, more rich than you than before has no obvious effect on anything related to IQ. Average and median PPP wealth and income continue to grow.
We've got an obesity epidemic. The average American is clearly not eating healthy. Maybe you misinterpreted the OP's statement? "Decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed" is awkward, but the intent is clear from context.
I also do think that wealth inequality correlates with lower average IQ. Rich people want to keep the majority of people dumb; breed them like cattle, hook them up to machines and milk them.
In this society, a complete idiot with capital can achieve much more than a genius can achieve without capital.
One example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/huntington-har...
Much more common are ways of starting with a lot of wealth and turning it into even more wealth.
What evidence is there of that?
> The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.
People tend to make their own luck. For example, if you sit home and watch TV 6 hours a day, you are highly unlikely to get lucky. If you're out swinging the bat, you're far more likely to get a hit.
But even if it is, that just pushes the question back another stage. People make choices for reasons, based on their experience and predictions. Lucky to be someone who had the appropriate experiences and made appropriate predictions to choose drive and motivation. There should be no reason to doubt this unless you believe in some kind of external soul or intervening deity - a child who is hit every time they speak or move without being told to, will make different choices about "drive and motivation" as a child who is encouraged and praised when they do things of their own accord. It can't be otherwise, to suggest that people do things /without/ their environment affecting them at all is so absurd as to be instantly dismissible. The idea that infants might know what "drive and motivation" even are, without being taught, that everyone must learn that they are effective and valuable, independent of all experiences, doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
Put simply, if what you say was true, /everyone would choose that/.
People are all born with different characteristics, sure. But this does not predestine them. You, with your brain, can choose your path. You can choose to take advantages of your inborn advantages, and train to overcome your inborn deficits. It's why you HAVE a brain.
You can CHOOSE. People do it every day.
To claim to be fated to be a victim of circumstance is choosing to be a loser. You'll not be what you could be.
Free will implies that if you make a decision (after a long process of deliberating) then roll back the universe to before the start of that process and run it again, you can make a different decision even though exactly nothing changed.
In deterministic universe, everything will run right on the same tracks, and your cognitive process influenced by its internal structure, its accumulated experience and current inputs, will arrive to the same conclusion. No free will here.
In non-deterministic universe, something will randomly happen differently and you will arrive to a different conclusion, but that is still not your doing. You don't control that atom decaying or not decaying and flipping your neuron or something. So no free will here either.
In dualistic universe, your "soul" will influence the decision differently, but that is merely moving the problem into soul realm. Depending on how much decision making your theology places into the brain and how much into the soul, the soul acts as a generator of randomness (it is is not influenced by materialistic inputs and experiences) or as a whole processing unit (if all thinking is done there). You don't control that either.
Yes, I am.
You are using a dream of free will as an excuse to put down people and be rude and judgemental, and to put yourself above others.
One can choose to go jogging, but one can't choose to have the motivation to choose to go jogging.
Of course you can. Sheesh. Take responsibility for yourself.
More cohorts of people are entering the so-called "lower" classes and with this likely comes factors that affect mental aptitude such as decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed and unchallenging jobs.
This would agree with the study, which shows that families' IQs are getting lower with each generation.