Intelligence

Here is a fact which is probably politically incorrect to admit, but is true anyway: people on average just aren’t very smart. Unlike the children in Lake Woebegone, half of the American public are below average in intelligence (and a good portion probably don't even get the Lake Woebegone joke).

Intelligence is a complex, poorly understood, many-faceted attribute, and intelligence tests are therefore imperfect. They are culturally biased, and tend to favor left-brain tasks. But they are nevertheless pretty good predictors of success in our culture because our culture tends to reward left-brain activities. Intelligence tends to be distributed in a “bell curve” around the average, just as are most physical attributes, like height or weight. Intelligence tests are calibrated so that the center point or average of this bell curve is at 100, and the standard deviation is about 15. The diagram below shows the bell curve divided into standard deviations, with the proportion of the population in each segment.

In general, success in undergraduate college work requires an IQ at least one standard deviation above the average (about 115 or higher), though certainly there are exceptions. Success in medical school, law school, graduate work in math or sciences or engineering or computer programming, or executive management generally requires a somewhat higher IQ, although again there are individual exceptions. That implies that only about 1/3 of the general population has the mental ability to succeed in these higher-skill and higher paying fields. This is a reality that no amount of political posturing, class warfare or political correctness can avoid.

Lots of factors can produce lower intelligence. Unfortunate genes are certainly one cause, as are prenatal damage in the womb from the mother’s malnutrition or drug abuse. Lack of adequate intellectual stimulation and/or malnutrition (the two often go together) in early childhood can lower intelligence, as can drug or alcohol abuse.

Now until the industrial revolution most people worked on farms, and it doesn’t take an especially high IQ to herd sheep or cattle, follow a horse-drawn plow, chop down trees, build wooden buildings or pick crops. Nor did it take exceptional intelligence to drive a wagon, crew a sailing ship, or load and fire a musket in the army. So there was plenty of adequately-paying work for people at the lower end of the intelligence distribution.

And even when the industrial revolution arrived, there were plenty of jobs on factory assembly lines, or driving vehicles, or in manual labor for those with less than average intelligence.

The social disruption we now face is that our increasingly-complex technologically advanced society has fewer and fewer jobs available for that majority of the population who are not intellectually capable of the higher-skill, higher-paying jobs in the technology and information industries. Increasingly factory robots are displacing the few lower-skilled people still left on the assembly lines.

It is of course politically incorrect to discuss this reality, and certainly it is in bad taste. But discuss it we must, because it poses one of the most difficult problems our society faces – how to gainfully employ, at a reasonable living wage, that majority of the population who (often through no fault of their own) lack the intellectual capacity to succeed in the higher-skill jobs. No amount of political demagoguery is going to change this distribution of intelligence, nor the social problems it poses.