I focus a lot of my historical reading on the first World War and on the 1930s. I think that people were really stupid back then. I take the Flynn Effect seriously, which suggests that the average IQ several generations back was what today would be considered to be mentally retarded. In my view, this helps to explain how cheerfully the nations went to war in1914. Yes, the war turned out to be worse than what they expected. But how were their expectations not influenced by the Civil War or the Franco-Prussian war?
--Arnold Kling
OMFG, people. World War I happened because world leaders 100 years or so ago were "mentally retarded"? Really?
REALLY?????
So going back another 50 years or so, Abraham Lincoln must have been the intellectual equivalent of a spider monkey?
Go another 100 years back from that. The founding fathers were the mental equivalents of dung beatles?
Adam Smith had an IQ of 13?
Blogger, please.
7 comments:
Well, one might make that case for Adam Smith, but for Lincoln to seize centralized power like that, he had to be fairly intelligent.
You misinterpreted what I said. Was that deliberate?
I did not refer to leaders. I referred to the average. Ordinary citizens were delighted at the start of the first world war. That strikes me as stupid. You disagree?
--Arnold
What was Karl Marx's IQ?
So stupid people love war? That's a faulty assumption. Differing reactions to events (such as the outbreak of war) suggest differing value structures, not a lack of intelligence.
And to think, I thought analysis this weak was restricted to neo-Keynesian NYT bloggers. Le sigh.
It's certainly easy to look back at past wars and think they were stupid. We quickly forget the strength of past tensions that lead to war. The alliances that lead to World War I certainly seems silly now, but at the time I'm sure they seemed deadly serious. How stupid does the Vietnam war seem to most people now? At the time everyone was terrified the communists were going to take over the world. Now that we know communism wasn't going anywhere, such a fear seems stupid. How stupid will our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem 30 years from now when Islamic radicals have failed to destroy civilization?
As opposed to the average, ordinary citizens of today who are more aware of Jersey Shore, Ghost Hunters and Justin Bieber than Stephen Hawking, Ronald Coase and Liu Xiaobo?
Wouldn't it be shocking if we found out that human intelligence has followed a similar Gaussian distribution since for the last 100 millennia and that communication, accumulated human knowledge, and global trade were what have increased?
Perhaps the "glory of war" is an easy sell to young males of any era - especially the ones who haven't experienced war.
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