Somewhere else: January 2010

When Dubai doesn't sell anymore and the "stupid" price is already half of what it used to be 15 months ago, there is an ultimate marketing solution. They'll give you a $200,000 car for free when you buy their $5,000,000 house in the middle of the desert where the temperature is bearable only during winter so you can feel as stupid as all your standardized neighbors.

"Free Bentley when you buy a house in Paradise Valley

"We all love freebies, but a free 2009 Bentley Continental GT? That's like the mother of all freebies. A Scottsdale developer is planning on giving away this fabulous car on purchase of one of its multimillion-dollar custom homes in Paradise Valley. Okay, so now it makes sense. You need to be a millionaire in the first place anyway to get this baby. This car will be parked by Five Star Development in the driveway of two of its custom homes. A very nice way to tempt people, I must say. The Bentley Continental GT (Grand Tourer) costs $198,000. It's a great scheme to stand out in the real estate market and show just how prestigious the deal is.

The Realtor who sells either of the homes will receive The Breitling Bentley GT Chronograph Steel watch (for men) that retails for $7,695 or a Cartier Pasha watch (for women) that retails for $5,150. Wow, so it's a win-win situation for all. If you want to take a look at both the houses and Bentley, you can do so on Jan. 10-11 and Jan. 17-18 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m."

Damn it, we've missed it.

"Can it be possible that every generation of humans is more intelligent than the last? Parents of teenagers may shake their heads in disbelief, but there's a statistical phenomenon that suggests that this is indeed the case.

They call it the Flynn Effect - the significant improvement in average IQ scores that has occurred over the course of the 20th Century, First described by a New Zealand-based social scientist, Professor James Flynn, in 1984.

Flynn, from the University of Otago, compared intelligence-test results from almost thirty countries and found that, in most cases, a notable trend was emerging: adult IQ scores worldwide had been rising fairly consistently, by
about three points each decade, since results were first collected. In steep contrast to popular belief that modernity dulls the intellect, it appears that for some reason, human beings are getting smarter.

So will my kids be smarter than me? My teenagers certainly think they are; have they got a point? And then, the cruncher - am I really that much smarter than my own parents?

The implications of the Flynn effect are profound. An adult born in the 1930s with an average IQ - that's 100 - may well have kids with IQs of 109, and grandchildren with IQs of 118. But working backwards, today's typical 21-year
old with an IQ of 100, would have grandparents whose IQ was 82.

Going further, the average IQ of the schoolchildren of 1900 would have been around 70; the extrapolation is that most adults living a century ago would today have been considered mentally retarded.

Obviously this was not, in reality, what was happening; but Flynn's findings were very puzzling.

"The very fact they occurred creates a crisis of confidence: how could such huge gains be intelligence gains? Either the children of today were far brighter than their parents or & IQ tests were not good measures of intelligence," Flynn writes nearly a quarter of a century later, in his new book which analyses the conundrum, titled What is Intelligence? - Beyond the Flynn Effect.

Detractors of IQ tests pounced on Flynn's research, arguing that it was proof that IQ testing could be dismissed as "merely phrenology updated, a pseudoscience fronting for a host of racist and elitist ideologies that dare not speak their names," as writer Steven Johnson puts it.

Authors such as Stephen Murdoch (IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea) and Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man) found in Flynn's work substantial arguments against the validity of IQ testing.

Meanwhile others - notably Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray - began a controversial debate linking intelligence and race. Herrnstein and Murray's book, The Bell Curve, used Flynn's research to argue that intelligence was a stronger predictor of factors like wealth and success than socioeconomic status; more contentious were two chapters where they argued that there were enduring racial differences in intelligence.

Meanwhile scholar Arthur Jensen, in The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability, suggested that the average white-black difference apparent in IQ scores had a biological component. Flynn was disturbed by the interpretation that other researchers had attributed to his findings.

"Arthur Jensen, a scholar of high repute, actually thought that blacks on average were genetically inferior, which was quite a shock. I should say that Jensen was beyond reproach; he's certainly not a racist. And so I thought I'd
better look into this," Flynn told Wired magazine.

In his new book, Flynn tries to define intelligence and looks for explanations about why it changes over time. By analysing the results gained by people taking the different segments of each IQ test, he found that the improvement over time varied greatly on different parts of the tests.

On basic maths and language questions, there was little change in results; but with tests that dealt with more abstract concepts, there was a huge change.

Over time, Flynn says, IQ tests increasingly expect that their subjects are able to take hypothetical situations seriously. "You might be dealing with abstract matrices shapes where you look for a logical progression in the shapes, for example."

And it's that ability to think in the abstract that has changed significantly over time, he believes.

"In 1900, all of the evidence we have was that people were much more grounded in the concrete, they weren't used to abstract symbols. The main abstract symbols people had at the beginning of the last century were playing cards and musical notation, and that was only for an elite," he explains to Fast Thinking.

Before 1900, most people in the West received only a few years of education before starting in the labour force; but social change in the beginning of the last century meant that most people soon received a secondary education.

Flynn says that this led to an explosion in the arts and cultural activities, and a very big rise in literacy and numeracy levels.

Researchers Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan, from the Australian National University, have recently completed research suggesting that the literacy and numeracy of Australian students has not improved since the 1960s.

In fact, the pair suggest that overall standards may have declined slightly; with the typical teenager in 2003 about a quarter of a grade level behind their 1964 counterpart.

Andrew Leigh says that he is inclined to attribute much of the enigma of the Flynn effect - which is found in adult tests - to the fact that people in developed nations are staying in school for a longer period of time. "In the end, the typical adult is a good deal smarter but what we found in our paper is that the closer you get to school-aged kids, particularly when you hold constant educational attainment, there doesn't seem to be big increases," Leigh explains.

"Someone who has completed 10 years of schooling now doesn't seem to be much smarter than somebody who completed 10 years of schooling 60 years ago, at least on that sort of narrow dimension for literacy and numeracy which is what iQ scores typically capture."

In the early 1980s, three in ten Australians finished high school, whereas now, eight in 10 finish high school, he says. "More education makes you smarter."

Flynn agrees that there has been a decline in the early rises in literacy and numeracy; but even taking into account other factors that influence intelligence (such as smaller families, better nutrition, more education) there is an inexplicable rise in iQ scores across the twentieth century.

It's true that since the mid-fifties, those exponential literacy and numeracy increases have stopped, Flynn says; but general cognitive ability has risen significantly, with rapid advances in science thanks to better use of logic and
hypothesis.

In business, the quality of administration and entrepreneurship has improved, partly fuelled by the expansion in university graduates.

But Flynn believes that it is the types of mental ability acquired that has made a big difference in iQ scores; we are probably not much more intelligent than our grandparents at all.

He points out that increased literacy at a young age doesn't help children to understand more demanding adult literature like War and Peace with its adult concepts and vocabulary.

"I think it's highly plausible that the huge gains on IQ tests have begun because we live in a world of symbols and we're much more ready to abstract from the concrete. And if you look at Congressional debates over those fifty years, you will find that the level of debate has really risen; and I think that's because you can't discuss moral and political questions unless you take hypothetical things seriously," he tells me.

He believes that the social context of everyday life has become more complex and more based on abstract concepts; and in turn, people have had to learn to think more critically.

"You know, we're definitely more willing to be cognitively challenged in our leisure also," Professor Flynn says.

"That's hardly surprising because in 1900, people worked sixty to eighty hours a week and they didn't have much energy left in their leisure to do much apart from recuperate."

Since IQ tests were first administered, society has moved from being primarily agriculturally- based through the industrial age and into the information age, where people work primarily with abstract concepts.

Perhaps this has improved our ability to perform tasks involving abstract reasoning, he suggests.

Writer Steven Johnson has weighed into this debate with a book titled everything bad is Good for You, which argues that many aspects of popular culture frequently derided by scholars - like video games, internet role-playing and television shows - are in fact good for our cognitive and moral development.

Johnson argues that popular entertainment is increasingly becoming more intellectually demanding. Pop-culture today requires strong cognitive work - like making snap decisions in a video-game or coming up with a long-term strategy for an internet role-play or following the complex, multi-layered plots of a crime drama show on TV.

Even the intellectual 'junk-food' equivalent - like reality TV show Survivor or perhaps the cartoon series The Simpsons - requires viewers to concentrate, follow complex plots and have external knowledge of other references made within the television show.

Comparing these with shows popular a few decades ago (such as I Love Lucy), Johnson says that we are being forced to work harder to understand and participate in popular culture.

Cognitively, humans are now capable of more than they were in past eras.

By forcing the brain to keep up with the complex relationships that make up modern television programs or handle the visual puzzles inherent in videogames ("whether it's the spatial geometry of tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto," Johnson writes;) humans are developing their cognitive muscles.

Johnson's theories are borne out by Professor Flynn's ideas.

"Our minds have actually changed due to social influences. We've developed new habits of mind over that period and Ii think that's the most important message in my book," Professor Flynn told me.

"So, for that reason, it's not fair to take preindustrial people living in places like tropical africa and compare their IQ tests; they haven't been exposed to modernity," he says, rebutting the arguments of those who believe in a racial connection with IQ disparities.

"if you looked at our people in 1900 you'd have said that they can't take the hypothetical seriously, they can't detach logic from the concrete, they don't like to classify the world. they're hopeless in terms of contributing to a modern society."

He sees signs that IQ gains are slowing markedly in developed countries but believes that increasing modernisation will cause these IQ gains to take off in the developing world.

Meanwhile, our kids, raised on an intellectual diet of intricate television plots, complex videogames and difficult multi-tasking scenarios, may be very well placed to survive in a world where climate change, environmental decay and global unrest have thrown up hugely complex problems for those inheriting the planet to solve."

Fran Molloy