For several years, I've been pointing out that something is going wrong with the British, at least among younger British males. And it's not just immigration -- the white working class in Britain has become a lot drunker and more petty crime-inclined than their distant cousins in the U.S. white working class. And the British upper classes are dropping their traditional elite interests for the same prolefeed -- the telly, footer, and binge-drinking -- as the lower orders.
From the London Telegraph:
British teenagers have lower IQs than their counterparts did 30 years ago
Teenagers in Britain have lower IQ scores than their counterparts did a generation ago, according to a study by a leading expert.Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period.
Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.
The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.
Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect and the author of the latest study, believes the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having "stagnated" or even dumbed down.
He used data gathered in IQ tests on UK children to examine how the country's cognitive skills have changed over time.
He found that while children aged between five and 10 saw their IQs increase by up to half a point a year over the three decades, teenagers performed less well.
"It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers," said Professor Flynn. "While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched.
"Other studies have shown how pervasive teenage youth culture is, and what we see is parents' influence on IQ slowly diminishing with age.
"Up until the age of nine and ten, the home has a really powerful influence, so we can assume parents have been providing their children with a more cognitive challenging environment in the past 30 years.
"After that age the children become more autonomous and they gravitate to peer groups that set the cognitive environment.
"What we know is that youth culture is more visually orientated around computer games than they are in terms of reading and holding conversations."
He added that previous studies have shown that IQ increases as teenagers move into adulthood, entering university or starting work.
Professor Flynn also believes that the larger drop in IQ among the upper half of the ability range could be due to effects of social class.
He said: "IQ gains are typically correlated by class, but the results in this case are very mixed. Maybe the rebellious peer culture of the lower half of British society has invaded the peer culture of the upper half.
"It could be the classes in the upper half were insulated from this rebellious peer culture for a time, but now it is universal."
His research, which is presented in a paper published online by the journal Economics and Human Biology, also refutes the commonly held belief that increases in IQ over time are a result of improving nutrition. [Well, British teenagers in 1980 were pretty well-fed compared to 2008, so I don't think you should generalize from these two data points to rule out nutritional improvements as raising IQ in other times and places.] ...
Professor Flynn's study was conducted using a respected IQ test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices. Questions involve matching a series of patterns and sequences, so that even people with no education can take the test.
(By the way, here's my review of Jim Flynn's last book, What Is Intelligence: Beyond the Flynn Effect, which Flynn liked a lot.)
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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125 comments:
Without seeing the study, the first question is: what's the racial breakdown of the 1980 and 2008 samples? Could this be a demographic artefact?
Also, the giant decline on the right side of the bell curve sets off warning bells. A roughly 5% drop in 28 years? Really? Sample size?
I recently saw a documentary called "A Very British Gangster" by Donal MacIntyre.
Holy crap, the working-class white thugs in Manchester are really stupid. They behave like inner-city blacks. It was amazing, in a sort of sad way.
Also, notice the rise in "ganster" films that have come out of the U.K. recently. It seems that the working-class british youth are on their way down the tubes with this hip-hop/ganster/thug worship the same way the inner-city blacks did during the crack wars of the 80's/90's.
weird. not sure what to make of that. something dysgenic.
maybe birth control technology has an increasingly large effect on reproduction the smarter you get. that would account for the very smartest of the upper classes failing to reproduce, leaving the "merely smart" among the upper class to do all of the breeding. this would lead to a larger decline in IQ points among the upper class than the lower classes.
but if that were true, a similar phenomenon would be observed in continental europe, and as far as i know, it is not. IQ and height continue to slowly but steadily increase there.
perhaps this is why flynn hypothesized about english culture.
Well, the definition of "British" is up for grabs here, is it not?
Assuming its not, and this is legit:
I also see this as possibly being due to the proliferation of drugs, as well as heavier drinking at a younger age.
Doing drugs and drinking heavily at 17 will cause people to fall a few points in IQ.
Theodore Dalrymple wrote It Hurts, Therefore I Am
... Indeed, the popularity of tattooing in some quarters seems to be growing rather than declining. It is a curious characteristic of our age that cultural influences now seem to flow from the lower social classes upward, rather than from the upper classes downward, so that middle class people are having themselves tattooed in greater numbers than ever before. And what used to be an all-male preserve is no longer so: along with banking and gentlemen's clubs, another bastion of patriarchy has fallen. ...
"60 years ago, blacks didn't behave like inner-city blacks. Sure, they were more prone to crime and violence than the whites of that time, but they weren't thugs. Culture matters."
That's misleading at best. There was always a significant portion of blacks who were thugs. Read the Autobiography of Malcolm X or Pimp by Iceberg Slim if you want to know about what was going on in the black ghettos of the 1940.
For the commenters:
"Among those in the UPPER HALF OF THE INTELLIGENCE SCALE, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago."
Guys,
When this article talks about "those from the UPPER HALF of the intelligence scale", its primarily talking about BRITISH WHITES.
The UPPER HALF of the intelligence scale (mostly whites) has DROPPED BY 6 WHOLE points. This is a statsistically signifigant phenomenon.
The culture has *changed* indeed. Its heartbreaking to see white teenaged males starting to mimic underclass norms like being abrasively loud, tatooing themselves, dressing "tough", and the like. They do it because (of course) it gets the attention of females and allows them to feign being a "alpha male" tough. It may have some self-defense reasons behind it also, as in looking and acting intimidating might keep the new Middle Eastern and Carribean British from EVEN THINKING about messing with them. So in that light it could be something of a defense mechanism.
Lets not forget the pressure on teachers and the education establishment to produce equal outcomes. The best way to do this is to neglect the white kids and focus on helping the nonwhites.
Also look at the "role models" that the white British youth have. Tattoed roughian soccer players, playboys like the tatooed Robbie Williams, playboys like Prince William and Harry, etc. "Cool Britannia" under Tony Blair is reaping what it has sewn.
As a previous commenter noted, its astonishing to note that trends come "up" from the lower classes to be playfully copied by upper class kids. I think (my opinion) that the elite LOVE this stuff as it lessens the real competition for their own children's life chances in getting into top-flight learning institutions and jobs at the best companies later own. My little social hypothesis is that the elite would like the middle class to be more like the lower class to reduce competition from themselves and their offspring, and leftists are all to happy to use their cultural powers to aid them in that goal.
The hooligan phenomenon in Europe is a sad social phenomenon indeed.
In the years leading up to The Bell Curve, Charles Murray wrote a piece for The Sunday Times of London titled The Emerging British Underclass, available in PDF here. We're coming up to its 20th anniversary.
It was published in book form, along with four critiques and Murray's rejoinder thereto, by the IEA Health and Welfare Unit. (Not to be confused with the Social Affairs Unit, nor with Idi Amin's Public Safety Unit.)
Interestingly, it deals with behavior and doesn't mention intelligence at all. Still, Murray is justified in saying "I told you so" either way.
LOL so many cultural justifications put out. The same people probably would have never entertained culture as a significant factor in the black-white gap but now their white nationalists hearts ache at the idea that the British are falling hard AND permanently so they scrabble for any excuse.
"That's misleading at best. There was always a significant portion of blacks who were thugs. Read the Autobiography of Malcolm X or Pimp by Iceberg Slim if you want to know about what was going on in the black ghettos of the 1940."
In 1940 there were still Irish, Italian and Jewish street criminal gangs as well.
Rast:
"How many Arab and Polish immigrants are being counted here?"
Polish aren't white? I'm sorry, but iSteve readers are so particular about who falls into their special club that sometimes I can't keep up. Care to enlighten me?
This is hilarious. The press articles on the IQ decline like this one suggest that the rise of electronic entertainment is the negative influence responsible. Yet if you go back to the articles a decade or so ago on the Flynn Effect, similar press articles also suggest that the electronic entertainment is the positive influence because the Raven's test which the increase is measured in (as well as this recent decrease) is so visually oriented, just like electronic entertainment. If only people had the courage and honesty to say they just don't have a clue.
That would seem to go for the cultural explanations being tossed about too. We're talking about abstract, fluid intelligence here, it's not at all clear how or even if culture facilitates that.
Two points:
Even with massive immigration to the UK, a 6 point fall in the upper half of the teenage IQ bell curve has got to be a primarily white and white middle class (or at least lower middle class) phenomenon. The US is over 1/3 minority and that only puts the US IQ mean 2 IQ points below the UK, which is more like 1/6.
My personal experience supports this. White teenagers and early-20s students at University often cannot write legibly, can barely think, or even talk. And this is a recent phenomenon - those in their late '20s seem unaffected; it starts with those around 22-23 and below. Those who entered high school around the time Labour took power in 1997.
Our education system was already rubbish before Labour took power, so I don't know if it's a further decline in education or other cultural changes.
It's not about working class whites acting tough, anyway. I'm from Belfast where working class whites have always acted tough, we have had the best education results in the UK (this may be set to change as the 11+ exam which acted as a conveyor belt up for bright working class children has just been abolished).
British youth acting black are known as "chavs", and I hear online Brits complain about them and the country itself constantly.
It really must be tough for them watching a new piece of the British Empire regain independence every number of years, and see the motherland itself go down the tubes.
Someone posted a link to a very similar story (the same one?) here only a few weeks ago.
The article was falling over itself to blame mobile phones, computer games etc. Race never came into it, which says something at least.
If only people had the courage and honesty to say they just don't have a clue.
Yes, and starting with James Flynn himself ('It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers.')
I'm not clear on what the numbers quoted are supposed to mean. What happened to the IQ scores between 1980 and 2008? Did they continue to rise until some point or have they flatlined? How do the teenage scores fit in with the data that those of 5-10 year olds continued to rise? Is it any suprise that the Flynn effect had to come to an end? In which comparable developed countries have the IQ scores continued to rise over the same period? Are the Raven's tests taken the same?
This is also happening in Germany, only slower. Basically teens here are imitating the gansta culture of immigrants from Turkey and the ME. In a way they are being forced to do this because German kids are routinely beaten up at school by Turks and Lebanese “kids” (who are usually too old for school already). You can overhear German kids relating horror stories to each other on any public bus. Black gangsta's are probably more prominent in the UK. Multicultists must have known this would be the outcome of their wilful intermixing of races and cultures. It must be what they wanted. Of course when people pointed out to them in the past that this would happen, they were either appeased or branded racists. Now multicultists are sounding alarms that we are dumbing down and cannot maintain our economic status. Wow. Superior logic in full display.
Gotta love the boneheads in public office.
If the decline is concentrated among the top half of the social spectrum I doubt that the works of Theodore Dalrymple or Charles Murray are much help in explaining it because they have focused on the underclass.
There is insufficient evidence to draw a firm conclusion as to the cause but the two possibilities that occur to me are:
- Increased use of alcohol and drugs by younger children (and pregnant women).
- A strong anti-elitist ethos that pervades the education system.
A little bit off topic, but one thing I haven't seen addressed here is the influence of disease on IQ. It must have been huge in the pre-antibiotic age, and even when I grew up (1960s) I can remember being around families with a "slow" child, who "used to be normal until he had a high fever that time and after he recovered he never was the same."
Could that account for a lot of the Flynn effect?
"Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago."
This is methodological and statistical (other sample, other distribution)nonsense.
Good for the British. This is the first sign I've seen that they actually still have survival instincts. If enough of them abandon their pantywaist emasculated lifestyle$ and remember how to be men again, they have a spittin' chance of holding on to their turf when the world economy falls further into the tanker in the next 5-10 years.
Funny to hear the bizarre class/race phobias from commenters here. FYI Otzi the Iceman was covered in tattoos (oh, the horror!). Like the Vikings. Like the Picts. Like the GIs who won WW2 for that matter.
Man up, men.
There is no such thing as the 'white-working-class'. You are talking about British people, period.
This is why working-class kids are not thriving:
the 60s: Grammar schools abolished, 'progressive education' started, large scale immigration
the 70s: more large scale immigration, 'progressive education' dominates, start of political multiculturalism
the 80s: Mrs Thatcher's economic reforms destroy British industry, anti-racism becomes an industry, better off, better educated British working-class leave the cities, more large scale immigration
the 90s: more immigration, systematic discrimination against British people in housing, employment etc, Feminism creates the ladette, ethnic minorities become majorities in may parts of our cities with all the attendant benefits
1997: New Labour sets about electing a new people.
In the 1990s I read an article by a Guardian journalist called Linda Grant. In it she described a scene in an unnamed northern town: she looked down an alley and saw two figures, 'were they rats?', no they were a couple of English kids knocking a football about but she went on to describe them as having 'fused bones' like the 'inbreds of Appalachia'.
Throughout this period it has been a combination of left, right and ethnic politics which have do so much damage. The British working-class used to be conservative with a small c and basically non-ideological.
Richard
Let's try to think of biological reasons.
"Increased use of alcohol and drugs by younger children (and pregnant women)." Very plausible.
Also, I read recently that if the mother *or* father is in their thirties or older then the child is affected.
Has the age of white mothers and fathers increased recently in Britain?
Maybe there is a similar effect in the US's white upper class? Someone could look for that. Of course an increase in assortive mating may hide this effect.
I wonder how much this has to do with MDMA (i.e., Ecstasy) usage amongst teenagers.
The right half of the bell curve was presumably predominantly white in both 1980 and 2008. However, that doesn't mean the same sort of people are represented. If smarter Brits have been having very few children, then the upper half of the bell curve in 2008 must reach lower down into the population. I.e., in this respect we may be seeing not a (direct) effect of culture but rather a dysgenic change in the British population.
It makes sense that dysgenics should dominate the Flynn Effect in the UK first. That's where the industrial revolution started, and that's where dysgenics started. I don't think other countries in Europe had a negative relationship between intelligence and fertility until later.
It is not like the US does not have problems in this area, too.
Penn State professor says that Compared with the students in the 1970s, today's accounting students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
I do not think there is any significant difference between the two groups in terms of native, raw intelligence. Instead, the distinction between yesterday’s and today’s students when they first set foot on college campuses rests in their educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process. In short, they differ in terms of their readiness for college.
...
Today’s students cannot read at what used to be a tenth-grade level... Today’s students cannot read critically... Worst of all is attitude. Yesterday’s student was willing to work; today’s student is not. Past students thought of education as a privilege; current students view it as an entitlement. Earlier students took responsibility for their mistakes; contemporary students call mom and dad, who in turn call their attorneys.
...
The decline in the family also explains a lot. A child learns best in a stable environment, which apparently is in recession. In addition, when parents don’t require their children to learn school material and when parents don’t support teachers and principals (when these educators aren’t doing stupid things), their children don’t form good study habits and they learn to disrespect teachers. Also contributing to the problem are lack of adequate supervision, increased use of drugs, increase in television viewing, and introduction of electronic games.
Furthermore, there has been a cultural shift in how Americans view education. We used to view education as a learning process that liberated the individual and created mature adults. Today society tends to view education as a commodity to purchase and list on a résumé, not caring whether any learning occurs.
I knew there'd be some heroic efforts here to blame this on the Blacks and immigration (thanks Richard; more to come, no doubt) but can we just once hold White people responsible for their own failings?
Anyone who looks at actual people, rather than statistics, must notice that many stupid people have chosen to be stupid. There have always been White working-class British kids who refused to switch on their brains, presumably now there are more than a generation ago. That seems to me a weakness of inherent IQ hypotheses; to measure someone's IQ they have to take a test, so how do you measure it in people who won't try to get the questions right?
I think this decline in "IQ" is bound up with the increase in yobbishness; whereas there have always been kids who refused to learn, now they also enjoy the power of preventing other kids from learning either, by disruptive behaviour for which they can't be punished. The biggest disadvantage White working-class kids face in education is other White working-class kids.
It's quite true that "popular culture", ie commercial entertainment fed to the masses, or "prolecult", seems to glorify stupidity and yobbishness to an ever-increasing extent. It may be significant that all the celebrity yobboes are quite-to-very right-wing. The people peddling this crap to the proles are themselves well, or at least expensively, educated.
By the way, the kids who won't learn are by no means all poor. Some come from families of well-paid manual workers who can get them into similar jobs, which is probably a better bet for most of them than education. Unfortunately they can't be made to leave school til they're 16 (soon to be 18 - great move).
I wasn't able to see the original article, but how accurate do we believe the IQ tests are in the first place?
In my experience teaching troubled youths, I found that a certain percentage of them refuse to try on the tests unless there is a reward for performance. So the test is not an accurate measure of IQ in those cases, though refusal to perform may well be correlated with lower IQ.
Amazing really. This IQ veneration goes too far. A head with no body cannot survive and will wither and die. Every time.
Any British patriot should sing a paean to those uncouth, unclean, tattooed, unlettered working class hands, because those are the only hands that can pick up arms and defend your nation.
If a society tries to exist as a disembodied head that spites and shuns the rough and dirty hands, then it will find itself supplanted by rough and dirty hands from outside. Whether those hands belong to British yobs or "rednecks" or someone else does not matter. What is assured is that those will be the same hands that take up arms and defend---or conquer---the polity.
Theodore Dalrymple should write an article entitled, "Thank God for Yobs."
It hasn't helped that decades of "progressive" educational policies and the battle of attrition against all forms of elitism (abolishing the old Grammar School system etc), have profoundly dumbed down state education. Add to this New Labour's cynical manipulation of the exam system (no child can fail an exam now) to make it look as though standards are rising, kids achieving more. The better universities no longer even accept the debased A level as an entry qualification.
Private ("Public School") education is still very good and many parents do whatever they can to send their kids to these schools. Ironically, the crusading lefties have created a deeply unequal and divisive educational system.
I've read that many poor white boys feel (and are) redundant, in every sense. Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe. It has become an established way of life for a certain class of teenage girls to get banged up as early as possible in order to drop out of school and get state housing and income (child support). The more kids they have, the more state aid they get. The fathers are no longer even looked to to provide a home and income. The offspring of these casual couplings grow up without fathers, more often witnessing a succession of their mothers' boyfriends. A grim new underclass has been created: illiterate, feral and without hope.
The final dumbing down and destruction of national achievement is happening as a result of the increasing institutionalization of political correctness: the "commitment to diversity and equality".
It's no wonder Brits are taking to the bottle.
It's called devolution, and yes, it works in whites as well as blacks.
--Senor Doug
Not one commentator so far has mentioned the first reason Sailer listed for the decline in the British working class -- Godlessness.
In 1940 there were still Irish, Italian and Jewish street criminal gangs as well.
How is this relevant?
LOL so many cultural justifications put out. The same people probably would have never entertained culture as a significant factor in the black-white gap but now their white nationalists hearts ache at the idea that the British are falling hard AND permanently so they scrabble for any excuse.
The situations aren't even close to being the same, so it makes sense that the explanations would be different.
"Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect "
Actually the effect was discovered by "Smith" in 1942 or so.
"He cautioned that since the study did not record the social class of participants, ..."
How convenient.
Hayek noted the beginnings of this trend in the 1950s -- see Hayek's introduction to the paperback edition of _The Road to Serfdom_.
First, I agree with the statement that nobody really have a clue about why the Flynn effect happens and now why it reverses.
A single data point does not a trend make so we will have to see how it works if we get a few more data points.
Having said that, I will throw in my own conjectures, which are as plausible as the next theory.
Could it be that the modern western culture have selected for people who mature faster and faster? If Flynn was only looking at IQ of younger people, it would seem like the IQ of the population is increasing(due to earlier maturity), if there were few effort to measure adult IQ until now, they might be "shock" to find out that all along, due to earlier maturity, people's IQ topped out at lower values. Better nutrition, sexual liberation, and the ability to sustain a family in the teen years(albeit a broken one) all contributes to this. Those who have more kids ealier just have to see their kids survive to adulthood to win this race. This happens to all races.
Thanks, Steve. As a Brit, I appreciate your posts on Britain. It's cathartic.
You miss the impact of the urban environment in combination with the now ubiquitous mobile phone (and internet to lesser extent) on white working class mating strategies.
(You can apply same analysis below to middle class where internet dating may matter more).
In the UK there is no rural living.
Rich and poor are crammed far closer together than they are in the US. This means there is a higher number of alpha-males per square KM in UK than most places. This is something you could put a number on.
Ultra-urban living means it's tough for working class white males to get a woman because they cannot afford one.
In UK working class whites live on benefits and/or in council houses.
In US working class live in trailers they own. In US cost of living - e.g. cost of gas for your love mobile - is cheaper
It's much easier for US working class males to attract a mate because they can own more property and travel further than his white UK counterpart.
So, the lower classes in UK
1. cannot spread out into a wild, inexpensive countryside and make a nest to attract a woman.
2. cannot afford to travel far from their location to find a mate.
The result: aggression ("lunkheaded machismo" - your words), spending of limited benefits on designer gear and noisemaking and light-glinting car accessories. A tacky veneer of status to impress on the fleeting glance of a passing female. The UK chav must believe they have more chance attracting a mate strutting around and getting an aggressive bad boy "reputation" than focusing on schooling.
Urban living has also made our working class women more aggressive. The girls are doing better academically than the boys because they have a the dangling carrot of alpha-males being just a block over.
In an ultra-urban mating environment it does not make sense for a beta-female to settle for a beta male on the council estate if he does not earn more than what she could get herself from government benefits, and child benefit, and he spends it all on flashy clothes, beer and footy anyway.
Twenty years ago a typical working class girl mating strategy would be to sit on a wall smoking a cigarette and chatting to older, local boys who had more status than those who were younger.
Today, these same girls use mobile phones instead
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/321/7269/1155
and probably internet because mobile phones increase her range of access to higher status alpha-males across the city or even the country.
Because our working class urban white girl is a comparatively short distance from an alpha-male a block or two over it makes sense for her to make an effort to attract him and ignore the unfortunate local, unemployed, benefits claiming chav.
Although there are a large number of alpha-males per square KM available to working class females in UK (compared to US and elsewhere) their numbers are still finite, which necessarily dramatically increases competition between females for the few alpha-males.
So the arms race means they need to improve both their looks and their smarts - as much as they can. It could make the difference. How does young working class female schooling/IQ compare to male?
These girls pester whomsover they consider attractive with text, email and drink with them in clubs every week to impress them.
Thus, with rise in male aggression and Black-typical bling obsession we see rise in female drunkenness, female on female violence.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1131719/Ladette-crime-wave-offences-committed-teenage-girls-soar-22-just-years.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/violence-among-teenage-girls-is-an-everyday-event-study-reveals-634524.html
If US whites did not own their own nests (trailers) in the wide, free country with cheap gas and were forced to live crammed into the big cities 30 minutes from wealthy people, as they are in UK, you'd probably get a similar effect.
So relatively few interested cads with a job (for working class females this will qualify for alpha-status) give lower class females babies that are raised by her marriage to the state.
Middle class male young are faced with similar environment and their response is similarly more aggressive. Sign of this may be popularity of rap music among UK whites.
Okay, the above explanation lacks eloquence but I think I got the message over.
What exactly does it mean to say that there has been a drop in the upper half?
Hypothetically, let's suppose that we have a universe of 100 white people, with normally distributed IQs around a mean of 100. What happens if we add 30 black people with average IQs of 85 to the mix? In that case the average IQ of the upper half of the entire population will drop, simply because the line has been re-drawn.
If the average IQ of teenagers dropped by 2 points, and the average of the upper half of the distribution dropped by 6 points, then the average of the lower half of the distribution must have increased by 2 points.
That pattern does not seem consistent with many of the possible explanations so far offered.
I don't see the paper at the journal's website, anyone find a link to it yet?
Look at the movie "Trainspotting" for cultural evidence. Others have mentioned the recent spate of Brit gangster movies, but "Trainspotting" feels almost like the world's most entertaining documentary.
These are all middle-class white Scottish lads, yet they live like the lowest thugs of the ghetto. By nature they were blessed with reasonable intelligence and physical gifts, but they are incapable of planning and delaying gratification for even 5 minutes into the future.
One interesting thing you see in the movie is that all of the different characters have different personality types. Some are smarter than others. Yet all of them suffer from the same disease of the soul.
One character is a girl only 16 years old who clearly comes from an upper middle class family and attends private school, but she spends her weekends going to clubs and giving her body to drug addicts.
English kids did not so bad at the pisa and timss world wide tests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment
But those tests implies that someone needs to cheack out Norwegian kids iq , cuz they scored less then the western/northern euroepean kids.
Tattoed roughian soccer players... "Cool Britannia" under Tony Blair is reaping what it has sewn. --anonymous @#8
The words are "ruffian" and "sown". (Unless Mr Blair was a seamster.)
But I'm impressed. These are the spelling errors of a fairly literate person.
There is something off about that cohort - really, really off. There is something wrong about their faces too.
I bet it's environmental factors working on the population that was left behind, that never emigrated.
I also think it's happening elsewhere in Europe but the effects are muted by the culture requiring more of young people. Something is happening throughout the EU that is turning young people into animals. The UK ones are feral, the ones in the rest of the place are domesticated. So the ones in the rest of the EU are showing up for school and thus do better on IQ tests.
I've had your ordinary bad experience with groups of American young people of a variety of races but they're always still recognizably human - they're hooting at girls or threatening people, but they are joking with each other in a human way and they will stop if superior force shows up. And they still feel shame. On the other hand, I've seen middle class, university-educated Germans and Brits turn into something that I have a hard time even describing. Upper class Americans teenagers act in this scary way too. It's not necessarily violent but it's CREEPY.
Does anyone else know what I'm talking about?
I think everyone is overreacting. This is a story in the popular press on a "hot-button" issue. It is almost certainly wrong or twisted in some way.
If a steam turbine blows up and kills some workers: it isn't news if it's in a coal fire plant. It is news if it's a nucler plant.
If thermometers go down at the Little America station at Anartica: it isn't news. If they go up it's news.
Similarly basal metabolism measurement changes in the population aren't news. IQ changes are news.
Google the word "chav".
One of the classics is (was) on youtube, in which a chav, dressed in black rap style (baggy pants, hooded shirt, etc) was screaming racist obscenities at a black woman, on a bus, going home from work (the chav obviously, by definition, is not).
I was in the UK 8 years ago, and what struck me is that there seems to be a very clear low class in that city.
In our cities ghetto's or, sorry, politically correct low income urban areas are code for non-white sections, but in the UK, at least London, the lower class of whites is simply... Idiocracy in real life.
"I wonder how much this has to do with MDMA (i.e., Ecstasy) usage amongst teenagers."
We know that MDMA can easily damage the limbic system, leading to chronic depression and other mood disorders, but I haven't heard of any research showing that it damages cognition. It's quite possible, though. It will probably take a generation or two before we know the full extent of MDMA's long-term effects.
Jack of london,
immigration has had an increasingly detrimental effect on working-class kids. Blacks and other ethnic minorities receive endless attention. (Some don't need it though)
Only this week Boris Johnson the Mayor of London was at an educational conference, one of many, on the 'black child'. He said that too many black kids were being 'excluded' from schools. Sound familiar?
There was also an educational conference on 'white' kids recently. The Times quoted a teacher-delgate, who said that 'the white anglo-saxon worldview was not popular in the teaching profession'. He was white man himself, of course. The story was illustrated with a photo of an English kid in a hoodie. We were also told that black kids were the most self-confident.
There were two other stories on the same page. One was about the latest spate of London stabbings, (guess who?) and the other was about the celebrations marking the centenary of Frank Whittle's birth.
You are right, though, British people are responsible for their own failings.
I, and many other people like me, have allowed an anti-racist, that is anti-British, education system to dominate politics for too long.
This could always change, of course.
BTW, say what you like about British 'chavs, who are physically identical to white Americans, they still do not support terrorism, practice FGM, commit 'honour killing', believe in forced marriage, shoot each other frequently or think gang rape is fun.
Richard
A friend of mind who lived/worked in NYC observed that whilst teenagers on the subway would always be loud, obnoxious, etc., that when they bumped into him their demeanour would change, become kinda friendly, and they would apologize. He's big guy, but not that big. Yeah, it's anecdotal, but it does seem in the US, even in heavily urban environments, there is some sort of residual civilizational norms. I am sure it all falls apart at the margin, but in more public spaces shared by various classes, races, etc., it's still there.
Another thing I noticed about folks from the UK, you can usually pick them out. Their faces are kind of pinched, jaw sorta clenched in a feral way. It's really weird (and sad)- a sort of cultural devolution. So passes the glory of the world I suppose, but hard to be philosophical when you gotta live through it.
"Not one commentator so far has mentioned the first reason Sailer listed for the decline in the British working class -- Godlessness."
That's probably because equally godless countries like Sweden and the Netherlands have not experienced the same decline in behavior that the UK has.
"It really must be tough for them watching a new piece of the British Empire regain independence every number of years, and see the motherland itself go down the tubes."
Fortunately, the callow Brit youths haven't had to suffer a lost colony since 1997. Unfortunately, they now have to suffer over-bearing Brit-superior entertainment like Harry Potter.
What percentage of the truly dynamic portions of England were outted to Australia, America, Canada, Hong Kong, etc. Maybe mother England (not mine of course) is left with its unlevenable dregs and unable to defend herself. And why does Steve or anyone here care? It's only social evolution and to nature by this site's lights. Karma, really.
A paper back in '04 speculated that the Flynn effect was over in Norway:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W4M-4D45TJ5-2&_user=854313&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000046079&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=854313&md5=388d9b12292a276ef21184d857afa859
"Abstract
The present paper reports secular trends in the mean scores of a language, mathematics, and a Raven-like test together with a combined general ability (GA) score among Norwegian (male) conscripts tested from the mid 1950s to 2002 (birth cohorts ≈1935–1984). Secular gains in standing height (indicating improved nutrition and health care) were also investigated. Substantial gains in GA were apparent from the mid 1950s (test years) to the end 1960s–early 1970s, followed by a decreasing gain rate and a complete stop from the mid 1990s. The gains seemed to be mainly caused by decreasing prevalence of low scorers. From the early 1970s, the secular gains in GA were almost exclusively driven by gains on the Raven-like test. However, even the means on this particular test stopped to increase after the mid to late 1990s. It is concluded that the Flynn effect may have come to an end in Norway. Height gains were strongly correlated with intelligence gains until the cessation of height gains in the conscript cohorts towards the end of the 1980s. Contrary to the intelligence gains, the height gains (conscript cohorts 1969–2002) were most pronounced in the upper half of the distribution. Evidence indicating decreasing intercorrelations between tests is reported."
Keywords: Flynn effect; Intelligence; Norwegian conscripts
If this IQ drop is legitimate it bespeaks an organic rather than cultural cause. There is an epidemic in this country of various attention and learning disorders as well as autism (also going on in Britain). These conditions affect boys disproportionately. They are unable to think coherently and their moral reasoning ability is impaired. The late psychologist Dr. Bernard Rimland referred to their problem as "the dyslogic syndrome" and ascribed it to the deleterious effects of environmental toxins on the developing brain.
"TW, say what you like about British 'chavs, who are physically identical to white Americans, they still do not support terrorism, practice FGM, commit 'honour killing', believe in forced marriage, shoot each other frequently or think gang rape is fun."
Not yet, but the experiment is only twenty years old. Steve censored my last post probably because I used the most powerful word in the English language, but the upshot is this:
Thirty of so years ago, some rich globalist types set out to try to turn white Brits into (that word)'s. There role models were destroyed, they were shown as being weak and useless, forigners were brought in to compete for blue collar jobs with their fathers, and an orgy of sex, drugs and rock and roll was promoted as a healthy normal lifestyle. Think of Trading Places with Murphy and Akaroyd.
The result has been almost embarrassingly easy and quick. A couple of old guys at the venerable St. James club are having a good laugh and a free lunch at the expense of one of their buddies right now.
"How is this relevant?"
Well Weston, the original question was whether culture counts in human performance. Someone brought up the fact that there was less ghetto crime 60 years ago when everyone was dumber (according to Flynn). I said that there where many whites doing what blacks do now (forming gangs, criminal violence, etc.) at 60 years ago. Where is the question of relevance?
The movie Trainspotting is set in 1980 or so.
The main characters are not from middle class families at all. They are working class.
Duh. Didn't anyone read the study? IQ drops like a rock just when puberty and competition for girls kicks in.
I've been saying this for some time, and Steve has a huge blind spot here (like Michael Blowhard, he's simply too old to get it). Roissy is correct.
Culture shifted. The thuggery of Blacks went into overdrive because it was the most efficient way to get girls.
Unconstrained female choice ALWAYS produces thugs. The thuggiest of the thugs, including the upper class as well.
THEY are adopting the thug behavior, because it gets them girls.
Quick -- what is the MOST important thing to young, heterosexual men (which is about 95% of most young men)???
GIRLS.
It's that simple. Female selection for Alpha, short-term men produces exactly this type of behavior. After all, if women stopped sleeping with thugs, there wouldn't be very many, and those who were would conceal it.
This happened to Blacks first, while always having greater dysfunction than white peers, blacks in 1965 hat 24% illegitimacy compared to 4% with whites, the current rate is 70% nationwide and 90% in the urban core, and 41% for whites.
This is the future -- single mothers, ruthless unconstrained competition for women, who are the most scarce resource, gangsta style stuff not because "Black people are evil" but because the model of tough hood attracts women the quickest if you have no money.
Gangster culture descending on the UK? Where did said culture originate? The US of course.
This isn't to blame the US for anything, really. There's a lot of wonderful things about the States. Some of them can even be transferred to other culture. But none of them can be transferred as efficiently or as profitably as the absolute trash culture we've grown here.
Enoch Powell was right, of course. Anti-communists of his era "weren't supposed" to be worried about American influence as well, but he was.
Iron John, I'm starting to suspect that you're not joking. What is your image of these thugs any way? I don't know any, so you may well be right (and me, wrong), but I don't see them as the kind who work out a lot, train in self-defense, protect their children, know their children's names.... Surely it's not the tattoos that are making them so wonderful capable of defending Blighty against attack from....
What is it you're worried about? Women's underpants or something? Punks didn't defend Britain from rudeboys, they just traded records. You're thinking yobs are going to defend Britain from Islam, PC multicult, Scientology...?
Maybe Dalrymple should continue to pick his own book titles....
Two points
1) The young Brits are known in their own country, and abroad on "holiday" in Europe, as incorrigible drunks.
The cause, I believe, is self-immolation by whites. These young white Brits are basically destroying themselves because P.C. Multiculturalism has emasculated their very culture and identity as Whites. Keep in mind the P.C. Nightmare has been much worse in UK than US.
2) Is it possible the "Flynn Effect" has been a Hoax all along? Another Margaret Mead situation for 30 years now?
The "Flynn Effect" has been the one pillar that the Nurture crowd could hold onto in the IQ debate.
I've never understood how IQ could possibly "rise" as it was said to, given all we know about how IQ is 60-80% or more genetic.
Didn't Steve write something a few months ago about how stupid Englishmen must have been at the time of Isaac Newton? As I remember he used the figure of a 'Thomas', cousin of Isaac Newton.
It's pretty interesting. I was educated in an low end English public school (private school for Americans) in the 90s and even there, there was a strong cultural element where people kind of brag about the fact that they don't study or care, but I don't really know whether that boorishness is a conserved element or something new (public schoolkids mocking and having contempt for "swots" is historically pretty stereotypical).
British underclass and working class people are pretty weird about education in my experience. They seem to regard school as a kind of humiliating prison, where it is a personal affront for a teacher to actually tell their children to do things. They seem very explicit in regarding education as something which is fundamentally pointless and a waste of time. I don't think I've ever met one working class White British person of my generation or the immediate preceeding who has ever told me they actually enjoyed or were proud of anything they did in school but goofing off.
As to the Ali G contention, not all working class British lads want to be Ali G, but those who don't do want to be like Alan Sugar or Richard Branson, or at the lower end of the scale, loadsamoney. Guys who aren't educated and drop out of school to be successful in business or a trade.
Still, looking here Greg Cochran suggest that IQ is dropping around 0.5 - 1.0 points per generation. Is this loss perhaps just an instance of this becoming visible due to a cessation in whatever gains in the Flynn Effect have offset this?
Excellent catch Caesar on Murray,
I do remember reading Murray on the growing white underclass problem.
It's been years, but I think something was said about it in the Bell Curve as well. Perhaps I'm wrong, but Murray absolutely predicted it (and here in America as well). I'm going to refresh my memory about how and why this was to come about, but I vaguely remember him saying something to the effect of, due to the math, the expansion would be so great that we would focus much less on underperformance of NAMS as their shortcomings would become far less obvious.
The above commenter is right. The Godlessness is the heart and soul of the problem. Christian patriarchy is the greatest force for good and civilizational development. Also, one of the main features of Judeo-Christianity, monogamy, is one of mankind's greatest defences against germs and makes the first homes of the next generation, the womb, the healthiest.
Edward: "In the UK there is no rural living...Rich and poor are crammed far closer together than they are in the US."
It is my belief, which is verified by research, that overcrowding causes a host of social problems - most especially increased aggressiveness as people compete for more space and/or resources to acquire more space. Gangs and such fight over 'turf.' Perhaps some ethnic groups can deal with overcrowding better than others, but for many overcrowding causes more problems than you would think.
QUOTE: "Crowding as a chronic source of stress, constitutes a major threat to psychological well-being. Dense populations are characterized by considerably increased aggressive behavior. Crowded monkeys (even well-fed) have brutal fights, wound and kill each other, including females and young. Crowding stress adversely affects gonadal functions, and during pregnancy may inhibit reproductive activity even through the second generation (Marchlewska-Koj, 1997), among others by masculinization of female pups. Chronic crowding leads to deficits in learning tasks (Goeckner et al., 1973) and has been suggested as a stressor to induce an animal depression model (Naitoh et al., 1992). In human populations crowding stress is suggested as an important factor in the development of increased urban insanity/schizophrenia." - http://www.chaperone.sote.hu/cikk9f.htm
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I believe that in addition to the UK other countries are made more aggressive by massive overcrowding - nations such as Israel, Palestine, Iran, and Germany/Japan (though they have been 'tamed' in modern times), plus others.
According to the BBC, more than half the migrants from the UK this decade are British citizens. The same story says 2/3 of the immigrants to the UK are from outside the EU. How long does this have to go on before it starts to skew the IQ numbers? Throw in the fact that about half the marriages of Pakistanis in the UK involve first cousins and you have a disaster in the making!
Say you just graduated from medical school in the UK. Given the tender mercies of the NHS, is England the best place to hang your shingle? No, the US is (like the British expat surgeon that just operated on my hand here in Boston), or Down Under.
In other words, they are exporting their middle class and importing an expanded underclass.
Brutus
Re Anonymous 02/09/09 - "Something is happening throughout the EU that is turning young people into animals. The UK ones are feral, the ones in the rest of the place are domesticated."
Yes, it's called overcrowding. Europe is a very crowded place, with virtually no space for people to roam or be out and about anymore. For some reason too many people in America still settle in the crowded areas along the coasts and avoid settling in the relatively unpopulated Midwest. It is my belief that one of the main reasons for the German mania of the 1930s-40s was a case of German "cabin fever" - they saw the largely empty Slavic lands to the east of them and wanted to expand in to them to alleviate the conditions of overcrowded Germany.
Humans evolved in uncrowded conditions, and thus we as a species are not at all used to overcrowding as it leads to all kinds of dysfunction: "Crowding as a chronic source of stress, constitutes a major threat to psychological well-being. Dense populations are characterized by considerably increased aggressive behavior. Crowded monkeys (even well-fed) have brutal fights, wound and kill each other, including females and young. Crowding stress adversely affects gonadal functions, and during pregnancy may inhibit reproductive activity even through the second generation (Marchlewska-Koj, 1997), among others by masculinization of female pups. Chronic crowding leads to deficits in learning tasks (Goeckner et al., 1973) and has been suggested as a stressor to induce an animal depression model (Naitoh et al., 1992). In human populations crowding stress is suggested as an important factor in the development of increased urban insanity/schizophrenia." - http://www.chaperone.sote.hu/cikk9f.htm
Methinks that people of European descent are much more negatively affected by overcrowded conditions, while perhaps people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent are more tolerant of such conditions because they evolved in more dense settlements than Europeans.
We were also told that black kids were the most self-confident.
Yet we used be told (maybe we still are?) that black educational shortcomings derive from a lack of self-esteem.
It must be hard work in the world of the educationalist, keeping up with the latest thinking.
John of London wrote:
That seems to me a weakness of inherent IQ hypotheses; to measure someone's IQ they have to take a test, so how do you measure it in people who won't try to get the questions right?
John, you must be unaware of the statistically significant correlation between brain size as measured by CAT scans and performance on paper-and-pencil IQ tests. You also seem to be unaware of the statistically significant correlation between nerve conduction velocity as measured by RT (reaction time) tests and performance on paper-and-pencil IQ tests. You can judge the evidence for and against both of those correlations by reading a book called "The g Factor" by Arthur Jensen. Maybe you think that head circumference and brain volume are determined by culture as well? :-)
You unheroic efforts to deny reality notwithstanding, an informed, honest person cannot write off IQ differences entirely on culture. Compared to genetics, culture plays a minor role in them. Smart humans are smarter than dumb humans for the same reason for which dumb humans are smarter than hedgehogs - genetic differences.
I think some of the commentators here need to take a chill pill. I've lived in London my whole life and civilisation isn't yet falling apart. You guys make it sound like A Clockwork Orange. It's only like that on Friday and Saturday nights.
Britain died about 64 years ago. By suicide.
Keep in mind the P.C. Nightmare has been much worse in UK than US.
This is true. I lived in the UK in the early '90s and the PC multiculturalism and populist anti-intellectualism among the urban working and lower-middle classes, especially among those under 40, was pretty rank, worse than anything I experienced even in Berkeley CA or Cambridge MA.
"This is the future -- single mothers, ruthless unconstrained competition for women, who are the most scarce resource, gangsta style stuff not because "Black people are evil" but because the model of tough hood attracts women the quickest if you have no money."
I'm getting tired of your pretension of knowing anything about relationships. Newsflash: Just about every young male is getting laid. Women who are casual about sex are not scarce commodities. You have to be fairly abnormal to feel terribly frustrated. So frustrated that you start thinking its just a segment of guys out there getting regular action. No, actually, the abnormal and unwanted segment of society are those guys not getting laid and doing so much theorizing.
Again, repeating, a teenager does not need to act thuggish these days to have a sexual experience before graduation.
Yes, it's called overcrowding.
Perhaps, but how relevant is that to the question at hand? In 1981, the population of the UK was a little over 56 million. Today, it's about 61 million. That's only 10% growth in 25 years in a population that was overwhelmingly urbanized to start with. Furthermore, much of that growth came from immigration; most of the immigrants settled in poor and working-class neighborhoods
In other words, overcrowding in Britain has hardly changed at all since 1980. And, to the extent that it has increased, the effect has not fallen primarily on middle-class areas. How, then, can overcrowding explain a decline in IQ among "the right half of the bell curve" over the same period?
"Newsflash: Just about every young male is getting laid."
No.
Between age 24 and age 36 I was actively dating about 60% of the time. I have a basically gentle but often outgoing personality, decent skin, height-weight-proportional, moderately good muscle tone, just over 6', I brush my teeth and get haircuts. I a below-average joke teller, an above-average storyteller, and an excellent listener.
I dated in a large Left Coast city. I used my friends as contacts; I used cupid.com, matchmaker.com, and some other .com I don't really remember. I had first dates with about ten girls a year, and third dates with about four a year, for twelve years.
Everyone can have their own explanations for this, like I was "too desperate" (read: I like women) or "too bookish" (read, I treat women like adults) or whatever. My explanation is that I was sunk by being not apathetic enough - my passion for philosophy and that sort of thing made me a huge bore.
Explain it however you want, you're still wrong.
That's probably because equally godless countries like Sweden and the Netherlands have not experienced the same decline in behavior that the UK has.
But why hasn't the behavior of the US white working class declined to the level of the black American underclass or the British working class? That's the mystery.
We were also told that black kids were the most self-confident.
Indeed; but on what basis are they so confident? From Bernard Ortiz De Montellano's Multiculturalism, Cult Archaeology, and Pseudoscience:
"Stevenson, Chen, and Uttal ... compared black, Hispanic, and white children in Chicago and found that the self-evaluation of African American children exceeded their actual achievement scores. Stevenson's group felt that this was due to blacks not getting, or not incorporating, reliable and accurate feedback on their performance. 'Teachers praise the children for modestly good performance instead of pushing them to do better'.... Stevenson points out that praising work that is substandard, often on the pretext of protecting the self-esteem of the child, does not do the child any favor, because one of the most important sources of children's self-esteem is realizing that they have mastered a challenging task...."
Alcohol consumption doubles since the 1960s
'The Fall of the Roman Empire' is a topic that has consumed alot of ink and film. Why is no one similarly concerned with 'The Fall of the British Empire'. Now that the empire is gone, the fall seems to have come home. The way things are going, I almost expect to hear that London has been sacked by Pakistani tribesmen and the crown jewels carried off.
The thing is, the fall of Britain seems to be a screaming warning for the US. Some bright person should write something on this theme, don't you think, Steve?
Overcrowding? Are you people insane? Do you know what the tenements were like in American and British cities not very long ago at all? My immediate ancestors lived 10 and 12 to a room. In the US, we still pack students in 2 or 3 to a room, something they don't do in the "overcrowded" UK. Council housing is lush compared to what we have here. They're not that crowded.
If this were something happening to American white people you'd all be blaming *isolation.*
It's organic, and heavy drinking is the most likely culprit. Vitamin D deficiency might be doing it too. Even during rationing, children got cod liver oil. They don't anymore.
John of London made some good observations. But it’s also clear that the cultural decadence goes proportional to the degree we allow black culta to become a standard part of formerly European countries. Pop culture is also a mild form of black culta. Gangsta culture basically runs against all the tenets of Protestantism and even Catholic teaching. On the other hand, maybe the penetration of gansta culture into the West is a measure of its decline. I.e., it penetrates into vacuums which were created by radicals intent on destroying the leftovers of European Christendom.
European Christendom takes lots of discipline and fairly authoritarian structures to function. These empires (British, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and German) were all destroyed either during WWI, WWII or 1968. Now we have “democracy” which is run by an immoral, materialistic and radical functional elite telling us what we are allowed to think and what not. That's a far cry from the aristocratic structures with the church all tied in, and the desire by those families to have distinct fiefdoms with local identifying cultures. Sure it was also selfish but indirectly benefited the proles because it gave them identity and purpose. And there was pressure to get a skill and earn money. How many of the working class Brits ended up as soldiers and lower level administrators in one of the colonies, doing things which we frown no nowadays but maintaining structures which made Britain wealthy in the past? Now they take drugs, binge, screw around and act gangsta, all at the taxpayer’s expense.
The basic message nowadays is if you will submit to the new muticult ideology the gov. takes care of you and you can just be an idiot and it’s OK. And that's the way many are behaving. Why go to jail for holding cultural beliefs which may be natural but which will not be implemented in your lifetime?
"No, actually, the abnormal and unwanted segment of society are those guys not getting laid and doing so much theorizing."
No, actually, it's the WASPy Harvard elite that's conspiring to keep T99 a virgin. They've brainwashed every girl in the continental United States into finding him repulsive. They'll pay for that. One day they'll really pay.
T99 is a lot less repulsive than Svigor. I can imagine holding a conversation with T99, even if the conversation involved him being wrong about everything, which it would. Svigor, not so much.
The British government assures us that educational attainment (ie number of university students, GCSEs an A levels passed etc) has never been higher.
T99 is a lot less repulsive than Svigor. I can imagine holding a conversation with T99
Yes, but would you sleep with him? If not, then you've clearly been brainwashed by the WASPy Harvard elites into helping them keep T99 a virgin forever.
Anon: "Overcrowding? Are you people insane? Do you know what the tenements were like in American and British cities not very long ago at all?"
It's been quite verified that the people who emerged from tenement housing were/are very, very often infected with a host of social pathologies.
See John B. Calhoun's research on the deleterious effects of overcrowding on mice and rats, which virtually mirrors the effects you see on the crowded underclass in countries around the world:
"...the rats in Calhoun's experiments developed social pathologies similar to the behavior of humans trapped in cities. Among the males, behavioral disturbances included sexual deviation and cannibalism. Even the most normal males in the group occasionally went berserk, attacking less dominant males, juveniles and females. Failures of reproductive function in the females - the rat equivalence of neglect, abuse and endangerment - were so severe that the colonies would have died out eventually, had they been permitted to continue." - http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/frontier_theory/10037
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"There was no shortage of food or water or nesting material. There were no predators. The only adversity was the limit on space.
Initially the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 days. The population reached 620 by day 315 after which the population growth dropped markedly. The last surviving birth was on day 600. This period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against. After day 600 the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits...The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun
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"...protected from disease and predation and supplied with food, water and bedding – they bred rapidly. The one thing they were lacking was space, a fact that became increasingly problematic as what he liked to describe as his “rat city” and “rodent utopia” teemed with animals. Unwanted social contact occurred with increasing frequency, leading to increased stress and aggression. Following the work of the physiologist, Hans Selye, it seemed that the adrenal system offered the standard binary solution: fight or flight. But in the sealed enclosure, flight was impossible. Violence quickly spiralled out of control. Cannibalism and infanticide followed. Males became hypersexual, pansexual and, an increasing proportion, homosexual. Calhoun called this vortex “a behavioural sink”. Their numbers fell into terminal decline and the population tailed off to extinction. At the experiments’ end, the only animals still alive had survived at an immense psychological cost: asexual and utterly withdrawn, they clustered in a vacant huddled mass. Even when reintroduced to normal rodent communities, these “socially autistic” animals remained isolated until death. In the words of one of Calhoun’s collaborators, rodent “utopia” had descended into “hell”" - http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/2/09-062836/en/index.html
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Also see: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=1501789&pageindex=1
It's been quite verified that the people who emerged from tenement housing were/are very, very often infected with a host of social pathologies.
Those are my great-grandparents you're talking about. Maybe you should worry more about your own social pathologies.
And if I had to choose between T99 and Svigor for the renewal of the white race, definitely T99.
The UK now has not only historically high immigration but also very high emigration. Most of the 400,000 or so Brits emigrating every year are highly skilled and educated. Obviously, when these people from the top half of the bell curve leave, their children leave too, lowering the average IQ of the remainder.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1569400/Emigration-soars-as-Britons-desert-the-UK.html
If the brightest and best whites are emigrating from the UK, are the brightest and best non-whites immigrating to the UK to make up the shortfall? This is very unlikely. No doubt Cambridge University can still attract some brilliant Indian academics to come and live in the UK. But it's obvious these people will not be typical of the massive immigration into the UK. The average Mirpuri villager who gets a UK passport after a first cousin marriage to a Bradford teenager is probably not in the top half of the bell curve.
"This is the future -- single mothers, ruthless unconstrained competition for women, who are the most scarce resource, gangsta style stuff not because "Black people are evil" but because the model of tough hood attracts women the quickest if you have no money."
For once, T99 is right. Increasing disparities in income in America are forcing this along with the sexual revolution. One manifestation is the craze for tattooing among non-elite young men.
All the people mocking this theory are really out of touch. There IS a kind of soft polygamy among people under 30 in major metropolitan areas. It's not an issue of "can't get laid" but of a large proportion of the higher quality women chasing after a much smaller pool of elite men rather than settling down and starting a family.
I think that this kind of dynamic may partially explain black tendencies towards impulsiveness, extroversion aggression etc. it could be the long term result of selection in highly polygamous societies. Those are the traits a non-elite male would need in such a society to pass on his genes.
The system which seems to work best for the British working class is benevolent feudalism. Something which offers a common cause they can take pride in (and thus encourages loyalty), a sense of tradition (thus of history), clearly defined roles and tasks, and the sense of being part of a mutually supportive group. With the exception of a few remaining large country estates, only the armed forces are able to provide this nowadays.
The welfare state houses people and takes care of the poor and sick, but it cannot give meaning to peoples' lives.
If the plummeting IQ level is indeed true and relates specifically to whites, then it could be that the least intelligent are doing too much of the breeding.
Damn, I should have made a book on how many posters would blame Blacks for White British degeneration.
An anonymous said "Britain died about 64 years ago. By suicide."
What the hell do you mean? We tend to think that 1945 was a pretty good year for Britain, actually. Good for the world, too.
I don't buy the overcrowding hypothesis, but the suggestion that pollutants in the urban air are damaging kids' brains seems plausible - except for the incidence of rural yobbery. Quite a lot of the reported cases of decent people being killed, injured or intimidated by gangs of teenage yobs are in villages.
Reports and statistics don't give the full story because much yobbery is not illegal - it just makes life much worse for everyone else - which is the point as it gives the yobs a feeling of power.
steve wood
In other words, overcrowding in Britain has hardly changed at all since 1980. And, to the extent that it has increased, the effect has not fallen primarily on middle-class areas. How, then, can overcrowding explain a decline in IQ among "the right half of the bell curve" over the same period?
No, as I said, it's not just over-crowding but high population density and co-mingling of rich/poor in current technological environment.
Mobile phones (far more effective social tool than cigarette)
Internet
Prohibitive cost of travel in UK
Meet someone just once you can stay in regular contact, and dream of reunion, through modern technology.
Those wealthy enough can travel with no problem to meet mates.
As for middle-classes, I know alpha British guys dating girls from Belgium, girls dating guys from Switzerland.
For the lower-classes, the males are generally fixed in one place. The females could have more mobility if a richer guy picks her up in his car and takes her somewhere.
Middle-class has fallen further because it has further to drop.
Lower-classes are now probably near or at some fundamental stupidity limit - the Idiocracy line.
Why IQ of 14 year olds depressed?
Our young teenagers live in dysfunctional families, in a dysfunctional aggressive society. They also face greater emotional stress because it's harder than ever to hide from (text bullying) and keep track of social relations (who kissed who).
Emotionally stressed people use their frontal lobes less.
I'm sure there is a genetic aspect to this change too, but there also is an environmental one which starts with over-crowding.
I've not read a better environmental explanation in this thread. :)
"I've never understood how IQ could possibly "rise" as it was said to, given all we know about how IQ is 60-80% or more genetic."
There have been authors tracing the effect of lead contamination on IQ. Lead has been declining for about 30 years and probably has leveled off recently. That may well account for the usual Flynn effect. This could be tested by comparing the trend in various countries because lead was taken out of gas at different times in different countries.
As for the counter-Flynn effect more recently, from comments above we see:
"Increased use of alcohol and drugs by younger children (and pregnant women)."
Also, I read recently that if the mother *or* father is in their thirties or older then the child is affected." Relevant to upper-classes.
and
"It's organic, and heavy drinking is the most likely culprit. Vitamin D deficiency might be doing it too. Even during rationing, children got cod liver oil. They don't anymore."
Anon --
Teenagers and College kids do have lots of sex, because of the prevalence of booze, social constraints (their own circle) and so on. Where things start to go wrong is afterwards, where a few men have lots of sex (post-College) and most have little. And yes, there are constraints in College with the gender imbalance (more women than men) forcing women to trade downwards off their preference curve.
People were far more crowded with less material goods than now forty years ago, yet had far lower rates of dysfunction, including Blacks. It's the sexual competition, which is indeed ruthless.
Reality check: Ipods can be churned out at any time, women are not. They are the most scarce resource and humans are animals subject to sexual selection pressures just like every other animal. Darwin doesn't magically stop just because you find it unnerving.
Brit youths were in the late 1700's and early 1800's pretty much like the drunken louts of today, see any Hogarth engraving. The Victorians took a huge dose of public campaigning to reduce drinking and sex and sexual competition for women. In it must be said, for worse crowded conditions than today.
In fact, the European continent is suffering a catastrophic decline in population, many areas going to half their former populations including cities like Turin, Milan, Lyon, Sheffield, and Liverpool.
It is not crowding. It is not Godlessness (though the Scandinavian nations have their own problems, fairly massive if ill reported). It is not socialism though it makes things undoubtedly worse. It is the competition for women (and among women, the few dominant men) enabled by cheap, reliable contraception, anonymous urban living, high incomes for women (earn more than men on average in the West) and a profoundly female-oriented consumer culture.
This is entirely new, no nation or group has undergone this before in recorded history.
*I* do allright, however I shudder at the casual misogyny of young men who have little attachment to women and few prospects. No nation or culture has ever had stability and prosperity without investing nearly all males in society by family and marriage.
Like I said, most here are too old, too socially isolated, have no clue as to the massive shift in women's preferences and behavior over time.
And yes, WASPy elites are often at the bottom of pathologies, just look at Obama's pal William Ayers. Trust fund revolutionary. After all, none of that stuff makes money. It requires a previous generation to make the money so a Daddy-obsessed "rebel" can destroy the foundation of society that made the money in the first place.
LOL so many cultural justifications put out. The same people probably would have never entertained culture as a significant factor in the black-white gap but now their white nationalists hearts ache at the idea that the British are falling hard AND permanently so they scrabble for any excuse.
The fact that you can destroy or harm anyone's IQ does not imply that you can significantly improve anyone's IQ.
An analogy would be to a tall person and a short person. You can chop off the legs of a tall person and thereby make him short. You cannot get a short person to grow longer legs. (You can put him on stilts or the equivalent, but that is a different thing.)
Truth, was "wigger" the word that got your comment banned?
"The above commenter is right. The Godlessness is the heart and soul of the problem. Christian patriarchy is the greatest force for good and civilizational development."
The Japanese manage to run a civilized country without Jesus.
Testing99 said...
This happened to Blacks first, while always having greater dysfunction than white peers, blacks in 1965 had 24% illegitimacy compared to 4% with whites, the current rate is 70% nationwide and 90% in the urban core, and 41% for whites.
The White problems are worse than 41%.
If you add up the general divorce rate with the White illegitimacy rate you get:
41% + 50% = 91%
That means 91% of White children come from dysfunctional homes!
Anonymous said...
there has to be something else that is very sick in the white population of the UK, something sicker than the what you see in the white population on the continent
What is it ?
It is only showing up in Protestant countries. The Protestant countries of Europe are far more Catholic than anyone realizes, and are slowly returning to Rome. Essentially the cultural Marxism attacking the Anglo-Protestant countries is designed specifically for us.
T99 is a lot less repulsive than Svigor. I can imagine holding a conversation with T99, even if the conversation involved him being wrong about everything, which it would. Svigor, not so much.
I second, third, fourth and fifth that!
Although one tires of hearing T99 telling Steve about his "blindspots" and why "people think you're stupid" I find his madcap extemporizing wickedly entertaining. That he thinks we miss the neon-bright evidence of his jewishness that it is is touchingly naive, too.
"That he [T99] thinks we miss the neon-bright evidence of his jewishness that it is is touchingly naive, too."
Well, he certainly had me fooled. For a long time I mistook him for one of those WASPy Harvard elites who are turning hot young females against sensitive beta male geniuses.
"Truth, was "wigger" the word that got your comment banned?"
Yes, with an "N"
It wasn't designed for you Anglo-Protestants, you left the protection of Holy Mother Church and had no defenses against what has always been prowling. Chesterton predicted ALL of this more than a hundred years ago.
The Japanese manage to run a civilized country without Jesus.
How's it working out for the English?
t99,
"*I* do allright, however I shudder at the casual misogyny of young men who have little attachment to women and few prospects."
You are in a safe place. There's no need to anonymously lie on the Internet.
testing99 said...
*I* do allright
Yes, if by "allright" you mean that you'll never in a million years run the slightest risk of ever catching an STD, then you're definitely doing all right.
Truth said
with an N
At least I got away with "wigger"...maybe because it's on topic for this post, who knows?
"Any British patriot should sing a paean to those uncouth, unclean, tattooed, unlettered working class hands, because those are the only hands that can pick up arms and defend your nation.
If a society tries to exist as a disembodied head that spites and shuns the rough and dirty hands, then it will find itself supplanted by rough and dirty hands from outside. Whether those hands belong to British yobs or "rednecks" or someone else does not matter. What is assured is that those will be the same hands that take up arms and defend---or conquer---the polity."
Hahahaha!
The Brits have always been in love with this idea that aggressive stupidity makes for good soldiering, even though their own imperial success was based 99% on having the best (and smartest) economy on earth.
I guess those nerdy, gabby, egghead Jews wouldn't make good soldiers - no wonder Israel keeps losing every war they fight with those macho manly Arabs.
The ancient Romans had the same romantic notion about the nature of martial prowess, equally demonstrably at odds with reality - they went on about those huge, manly blond Germanic tribesmen almost like they had a collective gay crush on them, and then consistently chopped them to pieces in battle after battle, because even back then, discipline and logistics trumped machismo.
Societies are vulnerable to attack when their institutions are weak, not when their people are well-mannered and dislike violence.
T99 is a lot less repulsive than Svigor. I can imagine holding a conversation with T99, even if the conversation involved him being wrong about everything, which it would. Svigor, not so much.
Silver - I second, third, fourth and fifth that!
Thats funny, because Svigor is far more on the money, certainly more than you Silver. T99 is interesting but he will go on about Israel and unsinkable aircraft carriers and the like.
Half-Sigma:
"The above commenter is right. The Godlessness is the heart and soul of the problem. Christian patriarchy is the greatest force for good and civilizational development."
The Japanese manage to run a civilized country without Jesus.
As did the classical Greeks and Romans, who invented western civilization long before Christianity became a carbuncle on its back. The parallels between Roman Empire and Christians, and the modern West and Muslims, are all too obvious.
Besides, Christianity wasn't all that patriarchical, and its strong Paulist anti-sexuality was a mighty sword waiting for feminists (no matter how anti-Christian and anti-religion they claimed to be) to pick up later.
Please, please. There is a difference between getting laid, and maintaining a healthy relationship.
Getting laid is fairly easy; all you need is a one-night stand, or even enough money and a visit to a prostitute. It is long-term monogamous relationships that "Big Man" soft polygamy has been eroding. Testing99 is quite right that it breeds thuggish violence. Also this early maturity (pseudo-maturity is more accurate) does create dumbness and narrow-mindedness.
BTW, monogamy in western society was the result of pagan Greco-Roman and Celto-Germanic peoples.
114 comments? WTF??? I don't have time to read all that.
114 comments? WTF??? I don't have time to read all that.
Shorter version:
Britain's IQ decline is caused by overcrowding, except that's silly because it used to be even more overcrowded, but no it's not silly, so there.
T99 says it's because bitches won't sleep with guys like him.
Several people make fun of T99 and his bitter virginity. A couple of people sort of stick up for T99 and tell him it's really not so bad dying a virgin.
This thread has kind of made me want to go get some male rats, name them T99 and Svigor, let them at some lady rats, and see how long it takes for them to feel crowded.
"The ancient Romans had the same romantic notion about the nature of martial prowess, equally demonstrably at odds with reality - they went on about those huge, manly blond Germanic tribesmen almost like they had a collective gay crush on them, and then consistently chopped them to pieces in battle after battle, because even back then, discipline and logistics trumped machismo."
Anonymous, those illiterate barbarians sacked Rome and kept sacking it until there was nothing much left and the ruler of Rome was crowned in Aachen. Along the way the Romans tried paying them off and then recruiting them into its legions to fight their kinsmen and hold the borders. How did that work out? History repeats itself.
However: I am not talking about formal military defense here (even so, "rednecks" and working class kids fill the ranks of the armed services). I am talking about something related: Turf.
Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqyU2z-FJr8
This is a street scene in the UK. Ask these fine young gentlemen what they are doing hanging out on the street corner? "Protecting their patch."
Now, switch the scene the LA. What fine young gentlemen are protecting territory there?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfjaLxwv4gM
A little history lesson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G6vazn0RCA
These fine young gentlemen politely negotiate with their competitors over turf and market share on an ongoing basis. Who is on what street corner impacts for average non-member citizens where they go at night, where their business can be located, which businesses they patronize, to whom they pay taxes, and other neighborly arrangements. Overstepping the bounds set by these young politicians has material consequences, even for women and children.
That is what I mean by "turf."
Bear in mind that many of these organizations are young and will mature in the next 10-20 years with their membership. Right now they are heavily recruiting middle school age boys who will be trained on an ongoing basis in organizational skills and protocol.
Make of it what you will. Well mannered and educated Western people have quickly forgotten the meaning of so basic a term as "turf." You probably believe you can depend on law enforcement and bureaucrats to handle these matters as they have done in your life experience.
History records the answer to that train of thought: "Vai victis."
Anon: "I guess those nerdy, gabby, egghead Jews wouldn't make good soldiers - no wonder Israel keeps losing every war they fight with those macho manly Arabs."
The nerdy egghead Ashkenazi Jews generally aren't the ones doing the front-line fighting...they leave the actual front-line fighting up to the darker more Arab-like Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in Israel, not to mention many of the Black African Jews who also live there.
Since "dropout culture" seems to have a stronger influence today than 10 or 20 years ago, it seems likely that the apparent IQ drop is an artificial reflection of teens styling themselves as stupid. Increasing IQ among middling IQ people seems to be correlated with an increase in self-image/self-consciousness which in this case leads to a lower IQ score consistent with the full arm tattoo. (The economy has done a great job of making a drop out self image easy to achieve).
One drawback of IQ score comparisons between cohorts is potential change in the "sandbagging effect", which could be isolated if a sample of well proctored test takers in each cohort were paid money for score. change in the difference between the motivated and unmotivated scores in a cohort could help to capture changes in sandbagging over time.
Will whoever it is that constantly carries on about T99 and his "WASPY elites" kindly shut up? First of all, WASPY elites do indeed exist, regardless of how big a role in America's decline one wishes to ascribe to them. And second, it was (maybe) funny the first couple of times you skewered T99 this way, but the twentieth time, not so much.
Will whoever it is that constantly carries on about T99 and his "WASPY elites" kindly shut up? First of all, WASPY elites do indeed exist
Hi, T99!
As a Brit living in...Britain. I have to say that while elements of this discussion are true, everyday life is not quite the brutish ordeal portrayed by some!
Uncouth behaviour maybe more common than it was, chavs may haunt the urban areas - and surburbs too - but they are not the majority.
My guess is that the IQ drop in UK has several causes: massive drinking and drugging, a huge welfare state, mass immigration, a powerful inverted snobbery that hates anything hinting of intelligence, and a pop culture that celebrates yobbishness to an extreme degree. Idiocracy, in a word.
... but because the model of tough hood attracts women the quickest if you have no money.
T99, all you have to do is act like a tough hood, and then you'll get plenty of love action.
It's EZ! Easier than getting money.
As a Brit living in...Britain.
Thank you for joining. I was hoping some Britons would lend us their perspective.
Some questions:
Do you find yourself consciously avoiding certain areas to stay away from young, native-born males?
Is there a consensus as to what is up? Do most of your associates agree that drinking is the problem, or bad education, or too many episodes of the Young Ones, or...?
Was the atmosphere different in the Thatcher-Major era (assuming you remember?)
"Hi, T99!"
Hi, jerk!
By the way, you're wrong again. I'm not T99.
But you are a jerk.
T99, Anonymous, Svigor:
STOP WHITE ON WHITE CRIME!!!
Anonymous said...
Hi, T99!
Nah, he doesn't sound like T-Dawg. But he does sound like one T-Dawg's posse.
Anonymous said...
By the way, you're wrong again. I'm not T99.
Anon, you've got your Anons mixed up. That makes you wrong, Anon. I'm not that Anon, Anon. I'm this Anon. Got it now?
Truth said...
STOP WHITE ON WHITE CRIME!!!
Who says it's white on white?
...they went on about those huge, manly blond Germanic tribesmen almost like they had a collective gay crush on them, and then consistently chopped them to pieces in battle after battle, because even back then, discipline and logistics trumped machismo.
"Teutoburg Forest, AD 9: Three legions under P. Quinctilius Varus, governor of Germania, and their civilian hangers-on are ambushed and virtually wiped out by the supposedly friendly Cherusci led by Arminius. Total Roman losses are probably well under 20,000, but the disaster means that the frontier coalesces on the Rhine rather than the Elbe as planned." -KL47 "This defeat marked the end of any hope of expansion across the Rhine. More than that, it marked a change in Imperial policy." -cjriga
Teutoberg Forest Disaster
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/defeats/tp/Romandefeats.htm
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@RobertHume -
"There have been authors tracing the effect of lead contamination on IQ. Lead has been declining for about 30 years and probably has leveled off recently. That may well account for the usual Flynn effect. This could be tested by comparing the trend in various countries because lead was taken out of gas at different times in different countries.
"As for the counter-Flynn effect more recently..."
Yes, lead toxicity rates have been declining. But they've taken a long time to get down to their previous levels.
In Britain, the laws regulating lead usage and pollution were put in place between 1978 and 1996.
http://www.air-quality.org.uk/02.php
There is approximately a twenty year lag time for the children with low toxicity rates to reach adulthood, in terms of IQ averages and crime rates. So, for Britain, we'd expect to see the according decreases to happen between the late 1990s to the mid 2010s, which means about now we should see noticeable changes.
Indeed, crime rates, specifically the violent kind, have been falling the past decades.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2609623/Has-removing-lead-paint-petrol-reduced-CRIME-Toxin-linked-surges-theft-violent-assault.html
I'm not sure about IQ. All I see is data that says on average 2 IQ points have been lost in Britain the past several decades. But going by the lead toxicity data, we'd expect that lost to have happened mostly in the past. The average IQ should be back on course with an increase at present, assuming all other conditions (besides lead toxicity) have remained the same.
No one has shown any data to the contrary, as far as I know.
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