Worldwide IQ in Decline

This chart was derived from a study at the University of Hartford (Connecticut). While people have tired desperately to come up with all sorts of hypotheses related to pollution and global warming (yes, global warming), the answer is quite simple to anyone who has taken even an introductory course in statistics.

Fertility rates are inversely proportional to intelligence. That is, the more intelligent you and your spouse are, the fewer children you are likely to have. Rudimentary statistics tells you that the average intelligence of the entire population will fall.




Now, compounding this are two additional factors:

1. One of the balances to the fertility rate problems has been the Darwinian one -- low IQ is not a survival characteristic. That is, peoples with low IQ tend to have lower life expectancies. Therefore they reproduced at lower rates. Modern science and technology has intervened to reduce the effects of life-threatening disease -- from malaria to Ebola.

2. As Charles Murray pointed out in Coming Apart, the tendencies for like to marry like are increasing. Since a child’s IQ is highly correlated to that of his parents, this means that instead of reverting to the mean, IQ is becoming more bi-modal – that is, greater concentrations at high levels (low fertility)  and low levels (high fertility).

All of this suggests strongly that we should expect the decline of the last 50 years to continue. Not a particularly positive trend in light of the fact that technology is also rapidly eliminating the sorts of jobs that people with lower intelligence can do. 

The Federal Check Writing Machine

The US Census Bureau released the following data (as of Q4 2012)


312 million      US population
110 million      People living in households that receive Federal welfare (means-tested benefits)
153 million      People in households receiving federal benefits (includes non-means-tested)                                        

35% of all US households get Federal welfare payments. Almost half (49%) get benefits from the government of some kind.

Is it any wonder that a message of "turning down the Federal spigot" doesn't resonate with a large portion of the populace -- and that it does with the half of the populace that sees itself as writing those checks.

How Little We Work

The Bureau of Labor statistics has released it's newest American Time Use Survey. Below are listed the daily averages for for adults. It is interesting to note that on average Americans spend only about an hour more per day working than watching television. The working number average is as low as it is because it includes all the adults who do no work of any kind (90 year-olds in nursing homes and 25 year-olds on welfare), but from an economic perspective that doesn't really matter. The average American spends less than four hours a day actually producing something of economic value. Imagine how much larger would be the American economy if everyone worked an extra 15 minutes per day -- or there were fewer people not working at all.

Minimum Wage Reality in Oakland

The City of Oakland, California is getting ready to follow other liberal enclaves like Seattle in imposing higher minimum wage ordinances. But it turns out that at least one non-profit organization in Oakland understands the economics of wage floors. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Oakland's Youth Employment Partnership spends roughly $1.8 million a year to give 800 hard-to-employ teens steady minimum-wage jobs that keep them away from vice and encourage them to appreciate a hard day's work.

But the nonprofit could be forced to cut the jobs it offers by 30 percent next year if Oakland voters approve a plan in November to raise the city's minimum wage from $9 to $12.25 an hour starting March 1, its executive director said.

Because nonprofits have only a fixed amount of grant money each year, the ballot measure, called Lift Up Oakland, could have the unintended consequence of making it harder to hire and train thousands of at-risk and needy workers - teens, parolees and those with limited work experience, nonprofit leaders say.

If artificially increasing the price of something (low-skilled labor in this case) results in less of it being used by this non-profit organization, what is it (other than rampant ignorance) that would make someone think that every other user of low-skilled labor won't behave the same way? The author of this article, Will Kane, implies that for-profit employers must have unlimited amounts of money to spend on wages. Which, of course, means that Will has never actually run a business. 

The War on Poverty

The US was winning the war on poverty --- right up to the point where the Federal Government declared a WAR ON POVERTY.

Percent US Families Below the Federal Poverty Line