Is "Idiocracy" is a prophecy?
Thoughts on IQ drain at the end of the century
A while back, I read these two essays that have lived in my brain for several months and supplied the statement:
Over time, the IQ of the general world population is going to drift over the next century, and we will lose 18 pts, which translates to a loss for advancement, technology, etc.
Thank you for your contribution to today’s essay:
- : does anti-natalism work?
- : Smart Extinction? Projecting the Future of Global Intelligence and Innovation
I try not to get my hackles up with knee-jerk chicken-little-ism, which my husband patiently walks me out of when I read “the sky is falling we’re doomed!” rhetoric, from the left, the right, or either side’s fringe elements. There seems to be less of that in the middle. The hyperbole simply garners a massive eye roll on my part.
Rabbit holes
Among my random sojourns through Substack, I stumbled on an interesting bit by a writer who is anti-natalist (I think), which provided an interesting link to a piece on the correlation between the prediction of falling IQ scores and the decline in fertility.
Suffice to say, after reading through the piece, I think, they did their studies and analysis well. Granted this is 15-20 years past when I took AP Statistics. But the results and analysis present an interesting consideration:
IQ scores will decline by 18 percentage points by 2100.
For reference, here is a standard Gaussian curve of IQ scores for males vs females.
I haven’t read their other work outside of this single piece, so I am neither condemning nor endorsing.
The essential gist of the analysis is this (if I understood it correctly):
As the standard of living in western nations has increased, by extension, so has innovation into medicine, living conditions, access to food, increase in agricultural output, technology, life expectancy, etc. There may be some quibbling by more liberal-minded folks about access to healthcare, but historically speaking, there is a general consensus that we do live longer and more of our children survive to adulthood. Much of this is attributable to relatively widespread access to clean water, good sanitation, disposal of waste, and greater access to food in general, rather than working as serfs on some titled lord’s land, paying exorbitant taxes, barely subsisting on what you grow, and generally consuming beer and wine pretty steadily because clean potable water deposited directly into your home via wells and the water works of a city is more a modern convenience of the last 150 years than was common for the rest of human history. The mid-twentieth century saw a massive increase in indoor-plumbing across America herself.
As the standard of living has increased and people are able to lift themselves out of poverty by some measure, due to patronage, capitalism, meritocracy, or what have you, people through one means or another are able to achieve a measure of access to education. I came out of the working classes, as did my husband, and because of his smart choices in college to choose finance as a stable career path, he got a good job that jettisoned him out of the working classes into the middle class. By my marrying him (hypergamy as the angry liberal socialist and sexually frustrated conservative red-pillers love to call it), it also lifted me out of potential poverty. This type of ladder does still exist, though it becomes shorter and less likely for the upper middle and upper classes, because where else, exactly, can you climb once you’re already at the top?
In industrialized western nations, studies have shown that women with higher levels of education are less likely to have children, especially numerous children. I surmise this is delayed for several reasons:
it takes longer to complete upper schooling
longer to get established in a career
longer to find a “worthy” male of their same level of intelligence, status, values and career goals—at least, according to their chosen values
the prospect of raising a single child let alone multiple children is financially difficult at times and
raising children is time consuming, resource consuming, and draining
You have to keep children alive. You have to be able to feed yourself and eat relatively well during both your pregnancy and breast-feeding so that the children meet their developmental milestones and get the correct amounts of nutrition when they need them in order to develop properly, per the writings of the Weston A Price Foundation and some slightly controversial nutritionists I like to read (Lily Nichols and Sally Fallon). If you have never tried to get a baby to eat a nutritious food he/she doesn’t like, you haven’t known the taste of pure, undiluted frustration.
You also may need support from your spouse at the very least, if not additional extended communal or family support, which, may not be there, particularly among boomer parents, according to millennials if their gripes on Reddit are to be believed.
Child bearing is no easy matter. At least half of the women, including myself, that I know who gave birth to children in the past year, had difficult births, between late due dates, c-sections, placenta previa, and other issues. Childbirth still runs the risk of death, even with miraculous medical interventions, mind-numbingly blissful drugs, and surgery to safely deliver child and mother through the birth.
Why the decline?
There’s a lot of speculation as to why there are declining fertility rates, including the above mentioned reasons about educational attainment and the delay of having children. If one cannot find a mate quickly enough within the fertile window of women’s fertility—unfortunately it does start to decline, realistically speaking, for men too, by the way—it becomes more difficult with time to have children as a woman. The older we become, the harder it is to give birth and the greater likelihood of complications during pregnancy. The first time you get pregnant, you’re body has to learn how to deliver a baby, as our nurse midwife explained to me after our child came down face up instead of face down, and that makes an enormous difference when laboring.
In a similar vein to women’s fertility and age, men’s sperm quality and viability also decreases as they age,1 though a lot of fertility, I think, is particularly dependent upon how good a diet both men and women are consuming in the process of attempting to conceive. This is not meant to downplay the struggles of infertility. But from my reading and what other parents have intoned, it does seem to contribute strongly towards being able to conceive a child. If your diet is garbage, it’s going to be difficult for your body to produce quality sperm, to survive in an equally needed quality environment for a fertilized egg to grow into a healthy child. Per Shana Swan from her book “Countdown”, both smoking and drinking impact quality of sperm, and mothers who smoke marijuana experience a increased likelihood of miscarriage.2 But, grow a fetus does, even with poor nutrition and lower access to good food. It does seem to have long-term effects on the development of the child, of both the IQ and the overall health and propensity towards other disorders and issues throughout the lifespan. As Sally Fallon notes in her books, if you want to get a good idea of the health and long-term consequences of health on a child, take a look at their teeth. The teeth are ubiquitously and universally an indicator of long-term health and future problems.
These things aside, the decline of fertility is probably a combination of many things:
poor nutrition
various endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, related to plastics, toxic chemicals for manufacturing, birth control, etc.
the natural decline of fertility as one ages and goes through the natural lifespan, which is expected and normal, as related to waiting longer to attempt conception and pregnancy3
personal and societal messaging that influence decision-making in terms of the viability or perceived viability of having children and its added benefit to one’s mental and emotional health
excessive travel, poor sleep, and stress4 can all impact the release of an egg during normal menstrual cycles.5
Finding a Mate on the Level
Not having help is a huge factor, especially for young adults and adults who move far away from their large extended relations and family systems to live in suburbs or cities, in pursuit of better jobs because they cannot make a living in the place that they grew up in. Ambition, desire for wealth, status, higher income, amenities, and access to better mating prospects are all motivators to leave their origin of birth.
As a woman who tests into the 2% of the population with a high IQ, it’s difficult finding someone who is intellectually the same level as yourself. That was even more difficult in the working classes. It’s not that working class people aren’t smart, but when you’re about 2% of the population, and you test higher than 98% of other people, especially those around you, you realize you need other pastures to graze.
I would venture a guess that this line of thinking, on some level of awareness, goes the same for other individuals with above average IQs, or really, any set of hyper-specific criteria.
It becomes a cost benefit analysis and statistical shell game of probability for the likelihood of finding who and what you want within ever narrower parameters.
You have to find someone who you can get along with, at similar levels of values, and meet somewhere in the middle. There were plenty of nice men that I met in the working classes who would’ve made good stable husbands, but they looked at me sideways when I wanted to talk about topics that included the inevitable heat death of the universe, string theory, and epigenetics, some of my favorite topics in science when I was a teenager and in college. Most people don’t give a damn about those kinds of thing, if they’ve even heard of them at all. “Survivor” is in its 48th season as of this writing, and “According to Peacock, Season 7 of “Love Island USA” enticed 18.4 billion streaming minutes, making it the most-watched original season of television on the platform.”6
Depending on your value system, you may hold the view that these kinds of shows are relatively harmless, or, are further proof of the erosion of our culture; I could say I doubt very much anyone considers Survivor or Love Island as high art, but if reality tv edited to show people at their absolute worst for lolz garners that much consistent attention and ratings, if you are the kind of person who enjoys something less mindless and more thought-provoking, it might be a bit difficult to share in those kinds of passions together.
Being ignorant versus being genuinely stupid are two different things, and while someone may be smart, that is not equated with being intellectual. Then again, many of the cultural hallmarks of being “intellectual” or “well-bred” or “learned” are mostly markers by people wanting to signal high status, rather than actual demonstrable knowledge or understanding.
touches on this with this essay, and I’d recommend it as a baseline for the idea that I just posited. had an excellent piece as well discussing her experience in the Ivy Leagues a decade or two ago (? — not quite sure how old she is, but I’m guessing she’s approaching 40 since her child is working on entering college). For all the prestige attached to attendance and the doors it opens, her point is, even in her time, they didn’t necessarily teach critical thinking, and that in itself, is not always an indicator of being highly intelligent or smarter than everyone else in the room.We have to factor that, for the people who are above average or higher level intelligence, especially very smart women at the high end of the spectrum, they may find a lot of difficulty in finding a man. Most men who are above average intelligence or higher, of 130+ are considered high-level, have fewer options of highly intelligent women and in a literal sense, “marry down”. Their wives are probably pretty decent, fairly nice women. But many of the men who are in those upper levels may or may not get the intellectual stimulation that they’re looking for in their partner, and thus, seek it elsewhere, primarily in male friendship. In reading “The Fellowship”, an excellent book that discusses the relationships between the Inklings, a minor commentary was given related to J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife, Edith. Edith was smart, but she often struggled with her husband’s intellectual pursuits, and the conversation and carrying on of his professional colleagues and their wives. When you’re not in the same league as the people around you, or even culturally, where the people are cliquish and gatekeep on purpose — sometimes out of a sense of self-righteousness, smugness, and superiority — it can be painfully hard to want to continue on with your partner or those circles.
If you look at the IQ distribution scales, there is a significantly larger proportion of men in both the upper and lower echelons of high and low IQ (a.k.a. there are a greater proportion of both low-IQ, low functioning and high IQ men) compared to the distribution found in the female population. I don’t say this to be controversial. I’ve looked at the data, and it was part of a requirement for my classes when I took my masters degree in a psychology-related field.
The point
’s piece, is to say that affluent industrialized western nations with more highly educated and higher level IQ people do not have nearly as many children, as the two linked pieces above relate to. In my own experiences from my masters program and from the data that the article sites, lower level IQ people have more kids more often, generally. The argument often goes that it’s because they have lower access to contraception and/or difficulty obtaining abortions, and this might in fact be the case. But one has to have a steady enough job and be able to put two and two together related to the consequences and weight of one’s actions.Most people, secular or not, don’t really want to think about sex in this way. To most, it’s all flirtation, dressing in adornments to attract the opposite sex, and trotting out behaviors geared towards the eventual end of life-creating acts. With the advent of the birth control pill, procreation was divorced from sex. That’s not to say that people didn’t have sex outside of marriage, as numerous 19th century novels discuss the shame of being a bastard child born out of wedlock (and there were probably quite a few of those) and if you read closely enough to understand the euphemisms, plenty of men and women were rearranging furniture pretty frequently. But with the availability of reliable-enough birth control, even with a 91% success rate, the procreative nature was cast aside from sex and focused solely on pleasure. If we read current cultural analysis from
, , and Sydney Watson, the exploitation of the human person has perhaps reached peak commodification of sex as a multi-billion dollar industry. There is no denying how many billions of dollars go towards the manufacture, sale, and advertising of pornography, and the billions of dollars that are thrown into advertising sex as part of a youthful luxury-oriented lifestyle. If you’re not young and sexy, bearing your skin, looking sultrily at a screen with your mouth half open and half-lidded eyes, I’m afraid that you’ve not been paying close enough attention.If fewer high-IQ individuals are having children, it stands to reason that those genes that count for a higher level intelligence are not being passed on.
In 2022, 71% of women who received abortions made less than $30,000 a year. Only 29% of them made more than $30,000 a year. This means that abortion is disproportionately utilized by the poorest members of society.
Those with lower IQ, if they do not have the capacity, training, or necessarily the ability to follow operational higher level thinking patterns (a.k.a. enough of their prefrontal cortex developed to create an order of operations and consider the pros and cons of a situation), they may not necessarily put two and two together about self-control and using contraception to prevent the birth of children. I would argue, that intelligence has far less to do with it than a strong sense of values, emotional control, and the origins of one’s family culture and functionality as a predictor of all these things.
As the research essay I’ve been citing talked about, their prediction based on their analysis is that by the end of this century, the average IQ will have drifted from 100 to about 70 points. The average score is 100; this means that the new average will be at about 70.
Low level intellectual functioning that was once referred to as mental retardation, sits at about 80 IQ points, back from my days learning about where functioning sits when we consider how well a person is able to complete functional tasks.
40% of the population is predicted to have an IQ of about 70, with an 18 point drop from high-level IQ people—remember that it’s 130 IQ+— we’ll go from 130+ as our high level, to a new “high level” of 116 to about 105, which will now be the “above average” metric.
Long term, this means there will be a brain drain in terms of innovation, inventions, and in general, creative output overall that had once been the engine of social advancement. If higher level IQ people do not have enough children to help maintain an intelligent population with the capacity for high level thinking, you will see a greater drift, according to DLA.
Is Idiocracy Coming?
My initial thought after DLA’s piece was this:
Society has come to resemble the art that predated the essay, and seems to be struggling toward a cross between “Idiocracy” (2007) and “Children of Men” (book and film).
“Idiocracy” was a a biting social satire about a soldier in the Army who awoke from cryo-sleep 500 years in the future to find that he, with his average-level intelligence, was the smartest man on the planet, tasked with solving America’s problems. The studio who released it was unwilling to take much of a chance on it, and thus the film didn’t screen to critics or was released very widely. It is worth a watch, if nothing else for the biting social satire.
“Children of Men” has two versions, the film and book, though I’m more familiar with the movie. The basic premise centers around a British social servant who lives in the near-future where, for reasons never established, global infertility has caused there to be zero new children born for about twenty-ish years. Then, through plot devices and circumstance, the MC becomes involved in a clandestine resistance group trying to protect the first pregnant woman anyone has seen in two decades.
One medium is humorous, whilst the other is quite serious in nature.
While “Idiocracy”’s opening setup humorously contrasts the concerned, well-to-do, well-educated highly-intelligent affluent couple with the low-IQ, low-class white trash man running around sewing as many oats as he can, there’s a definite attitude difference between the two groups. One is overly preoccupied with timing and getting it right — highlighting an underlying anxious desire for control of variables, while the other example just … has at it, without regard to consequences.
By the end of the interview segments, the affluent woman must now be in her 40s, her husband deceased, and without children, waiting for “the right guy” to come along and accept her fertilized egg. Though we haven’t seen societal decline quite as serious as depicted once Luke Wilson’s character awakens, DLA’s point is that it’s coming sooner than the 500-year prediction “Idiocracy” gives. Also to be fair, the redneck guy has far more skills and abilities than the film credits him for, so no, he’s probably not an 84. It’s a minor point, but it did irritate me. He’s not solving any mathematical proofs, but if he can get up and use the bathroom, collect the mail, cook some eggs, and get to a job relatively on-time and complete the work without getting fired, then he’s closer to a 100 than the producers realized.
With “Children of Men”, human society’s infertility and its inheritors is explored in the subtle commentary of the book that isn’t as discussed in the film, though one could make the case that we already see it here and now: The childless young adults of the novel dote and tote on their dogs and cats, whom they personify and treat like children rather than animals. The other day while walking through HomeGoods, I saw multiple pet strollers on sale. Turning over the sale tag attached to the handle of one, I saw that there were at least four models advertised, increasing in weight size towards 70 pound dogs to be carted around in the comfort of their carriages.
And the winner is …
Honestly, I’m not really convinced that people will have “lower IQ” scores than they used to, or that we’re heading toward the edge of an IQ cliff. My parents didn’t have the education that might have benefitted them and jettisoned them into the higher classes or wage-earning jobs that totaled six figures.
If anything stalled them, it was not having family cultures that taught them the values of or opportunities for upward mobility. My dad was a smart man. Smart enough that he passed both the Army and Coast Guard ASVAB (entrance exams) with a perfect score and an eighth grade education in the early 1950s. He never quite had the social intelligence and know-how to really navigate the business world, despite being a truly intelligent and capable man. We’d have been better off if he hadn’t tried to pursue get-rich-quick schemes and stopped working. My mother was the bread-winner, and though she had great savvy and made good money, if he had been working as well, it would have increased their household finances to a significantly higher level. They never saved for retirement, instead being those people who rely on social security as their saving grace in old age.
Is believing in the social safety net a show of ignorance and low IQ, or is it placing too much trust in an institution that promised stability? I don’t think it’s a mark of stupidity at all. Many people, working class and not, have done that, for several generations now.
Our lives are the culmination of every choice we make, and how it snowballs.
You may never get rich, or maybe you do.
But culture, not IQ, is a better predictor of stability and outcomes, than how smart you are. What are the values that guide you to make good choices, to understand how to behave, or how to get along with others?
Most parents who end up with a child smarter than they are will recognize that. They’re not generally borderline or narcissistic people who vicariously live through their children’s accomplishments and treat them like a show pony prize they trot out to their equally odious friends.
They work as hard as they can to get their kid into a private school, or a lottery for a good local school, or work with them late at night to study and instill good study habits. Maybe they pay off an Ivy League school to get their kid in, but for millions of parents, they show up in the ways they can and encourage their kids to do their best and try.
Ben Carson, former presidential candidate and surgeon, grew up in a single mother household. It wasn’t his mother’s brilliance, but her insistence on working hard, focusing, and taking seriously one’s studies, that set a good foundation for Carson and his brother. She assigned them to read whatever it was, a book a week, or every two weeks, and gave them an assignment to write an essay on the book and read it to her. It took Carson years to realize that his mother could not read.
She didn’t do this because she was a task master, or a mean mom. She did it because she loved her children and to her, she believed and knew, that this extra work they did, would help them be successful as adults. I don’t know the story of Carson’s brother, but Carson himself went on to have a stellar career as a doctor, and is himself thoughtful, intelligent, and well-spoken when called upon to give an opinion, whether you agree with him or not.
, who has an excellent, but straightforward autobiography, didn’t really have good guidance to put him on a solid path. He tested for the Air Force ASVAB and in having the recruiter explain his results, Henderson finally understood for the first time how his intelligence set him apart. He spent the next decade or so in the Air Force, learning and understanding the cultural differences and attitudes that separated the well-to-do from the not-so-wealthy.It wasn’t IQ and critical thinking.
Those things help.
It was the values and attitudes that are passed on.
Do we value and love one another for who we are, not just what we provide to the other person?
Do we guide our children to not only nourish their potential and talents, but learn to stand back a bit when our kids pursue a love of science or poetry over playing cello and mathematics? Or, por que los quatros?
Do we teach them to be industrious, hard working, and kind, or be selfish, stingy, lazy, and sneer at others, mocking and belittling them when they are skilled in something we are not, only to criticize because we compare and feel small compared to them?
There may be some intellectual drift. I think that’s inevitable, but gene inheritance is unpredictable, and here’s my reasoning way, from my lame personal anecdote:
I spent nine months in a mild state of fear. My babies run the risk of Rh Syndrome, since I am Rh negative and my husband is Rh positive: O-, and O+. Long story short, once my body becomes sensitive to a positive blood type in utero, the likelihood of an Rh positive child surviving to term is reduced drastically with each successive pregnancy; I won’t have six kids (I can barely manage to function some days with just one). And Rhogam, the life-saving shot that has nearly eliminated Rh syndrome, doesn’t always work. I know at least one woman who will only ever have two children because it doesn’t do for her what it does for most Rh negative women. I don’t want to cradle a dead baby, ever or early, because my immune system mistakenly interprets the positive antigens on my baby’s blood platelets as a virus it needs to eradicate.
But genetics are unpredictable.
My baby came out with the same blood type as me, meaning my husband carried the negative type as a recessive. And if I did my punnet square correctly (correct me if I’m wrong), there’s a 50% my children will have my blood type, and less risk of me developing that sensitivity.
The bottom line is that we just don’t know with certainty what the future holds. Our scientific advancements, especially in the fields of medicine, health, and science, made it possible for me to have an insurance policy against Rh sensitization should my child have been a positive blood type. What we didn’t know, was that my husband carried a negative recessive gene. He could have carried the positive one, but he didn’t.
Everything in our society directs us toward trying to have control over uncertainty, and we have learned to not only anesthetize our discomfort with difficulties in life in general through sex/porn, drugs, screentime, video games, gambling, etc., we have learned that uncertainty is, in an unspoken way, a sin to be eradicated.
There is no way to keep at bay all uncertainty, especially pertaining to genetic outcomes.
Yes, there will probably be genetic drift. But as people intermarry and migrate across the globe, there will be higher likelihood of unpredictable gene expression. Smart people don’t always make great decisions, especially for others, just simply by virtue of their being “smarter” on a paper test than a population cohort to compare it to.
That suggests that one cannot be greater than the sum of their parts because of one identifiable trait, but it demeans the person from their significance and value as an individual. And, from the Christian standpoint, it denigrates you as the unique creation that you have been created to be, as a beloved adopted child of God. As G. K. Chesterton notes, God makes daffodils all day long, but he never tires of them and delights in each one, no matter how many there are.
The claim also smacks of determinism. There are many things that we cannot control, but give us some credit. Genes may not have agency, but you do, in your decisions and choices, going forward. Always.
Innovation will still come. Genetics are too wild and unpredictable to make the claim that in 100 years, enough of the world will have drifted that we’ll have to redefine genius. After all, you could have a recombination of a person with an IQ of 110 and their spouse at 105, that, after a generation or two, the smart genes, and a variety of other things, will naturally select for higher IQ. It will pop up again.
The article was an interesting read, but the number of variables in life, as well as genetics, are far too complicated to make a sure-fire prediction that we’re all going to become dumber.
After all, wisdom is only earned through life experience of surviving the stupid things we do. And then we pass it on — hopefully the wisdom, not the stupid things, though those bits will still be present. And if we raise our children and grandchildren to be respectful of listening to their elders, a cultural and value laden trait that is passed on socially, they will learn to listen to good wisdom, develop prudence when the advice does or doesn’t bear out, and learn to make good decisions and develop good habits through trial and error.
Like everyone else.
Through time immemorial.
🕊️ Pax Christi 🕊️
🫧 🧼 Housekeeping 🧼 🫧
So, I gained a couple people last week. Welcome! Glad your here. People are always welcome to comment, though be forewarned, it may take me a while to get back to you. It’s not personal. We are tired. And if you haven’t been following along, we moved, and are still in the process of unpacking our house.
I’m just tired.
No more paid posts moving forward, but this has been a hard week. Baby didn’t wake up last night at all, which was amazing, but I still feel like I have a sleep deficit.
I am trying to get back to Mondays … but my house is about 30% still mess and disorganized. We’re doing well, but I have to pick and choose my nap times carefully. And we don’t have help outside of each other, since my mom went back home.
So.
My docket of things are:
Write Ep. 8 of the Spaniard
Start working on unlocking former paid posts and cleaning them up
Figure out what to do with my novel
Till then, we just keep swimming.
Ibid
Though these other added chemicals probably create a hindrance and speed that process up.
Prolonged stress can delay or disrupt one’s menstrual cycles.
I am not an expert, but having sat through a few instances of Natural Family Planning methods a la the Sympto Thermal Method, all these things can be contributing factors. As Catholics, we utilize these teachings as part of our faith and marital vocation.
‘Love Island USA’ Sets Peacock Record for Original Series With 18 Billion Streaming Minutes for Season 7:https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/love-island-usa-ratings-peacock-record-1236470483/