Why Are Whippersnappers Smarter Than Me?

The "Flynn effect" is the observation that people keep getting smarter--that is, each time IQ tests are redone and revalidated, people who score 100 on the new test score over 100 on the old. See this article in Wired. Apparently this is true over all industrialized countries. So the assumption is that "G" (general intelligence) is real but responds to the environment, regardless of data that seems to show that the correlation of IQ and heredity is about 60 percent. The question is what would account for it--the author pushes the hypothesis that cognitively demanding leisure activities push it. (More later.)

The article includes this bit:

"Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation [than intelligence depending on genes], one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine 'somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends,' Dickens says. 'That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball.' Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. 'And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA,' Dickens says."

I'm struck by this because I firmly believe in vicious and virtuous cycles. Addiction is more common than we know and so is saintliness. Putting one's faith in cycles also cuts the Gordian knot for liberals: how do we reconcile the evidence for genetic correlation and our faith in equality? (There would be a side question of inheritable personality traits. When we disapprove we call them addictive personalities, when we approve we talk of persistence, stubbornness, etc.)

Back to the Flynn effect. As well as cycles I believe in the power of learning by example, learning by osmosis. Humans imitate, they imitate from birth. The fact is that the poorest among us still live a life of more choice and complexity, more stimulation, than my college educated great grandfather did in 1850. (I hasten to qualify--the comparison is not so stark as I state it. Our ancestors knew and dealt with many things we don't, but none of them appear on IQ tests.) So all our children are exposed to our dealings with the complex, human-formed life and absorb lessons. These get reflected in IQ test development and in performance on the test.