At Our Wits' End, page 15
Fascinatingly, Perkins draws upon information from the UK’s Office for National Statistics for 2015, which found a slight reduction in the number of live births the previous year. He suggests that this would likely reflect government benefit cuts, which were introduced in 2013. The statistics also showed that foreign women living in the UK—which has relatively generous levels of unemployment benefit—were 0.34% more fertile than their compatriots at home, when stratified by the prosperity of their country of origin. So, unemployed women from poor countries were, perhaps unconsciously, adjusting their fertility upwards to take advantage of the greater available resources. Perkins, in discussing the system in the UK, notes that the benefit cap of 2013 means that the limit is still double a full-time minimum wage job and this limit can be reached by having lots of children. He further notes qualitative evidence that welfare recipient families require far less money than they are given but, rather than putting money aside for their children, they seem to spend the money on unnecessary luxuries such as alcohol, cigarettes, and electronic equipment instead.[53] Perkins also presents evidence showing that children raised on welfare are far more likely to be neglected than those who are not. They are even spoken to less by their parents.
Perkins concentrates on personality and argues that the welfare state is, in effect, causing those with an ‘employment resistant personality’—low in Agreeableness and low in Conscientiousness—to be more fertile than those with a work-oriented personality, and he notes the heritability of personality. However, much of the research he cites would seem to imply that it is also those with low intelligence whom the welfare state is effectively encouraging to have children. For example, an analysis of low income families in the northern English industrial town of Sheffield in the 1970s showed that the 33 families regarded as ‘problem families’—those requiring assistance from social services and other government agencies—were more impulsive, apathetic, paranoid, and aggressive.[54] These characteristics are associated with low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness as Perkins rightly argues. However, they are also associated with low intelligence.[55] Perkins emphasises that personality can be just as important as intelligence for succeeding in employment, but he does not show that it is more important. He provides discussions of highly intelligent people who only go so far in the world of work due to low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness. But he might have equally provided examples of highly Conscientious and Agreeable people who are never going to be promoted beyond a certain level by virtue of simply not being clever enough.
Perkins also cites the so-called Dunedin Study, a New Zealand longitudinal study which began in 1972. It began by presenting children aged 4 and 5 with a marshmallow and telling them that they could get the marshmallow now or wait 15 minutes and receive a second marshmallow in addition. This is a standard ‘delay of gratification’ test and, as we have seen, it correlates with intelligence. The children who were able to delay gratification, unsurprisingly, were rated by their parents as ‘more academically and socially competent, verbally fluent, rational, attentive, planful, and able to deal well with frustration and stress’.[56] Again, these traits are associated with intelligence. Those who were found to be lower in this ability to delay gratification were more likely to find themselves unemployed or have low socioeconomic status as adults. Clearly, Perkins’ research, or that which he cites, demonstrates that a personality comprised of low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness is associated with elevated levels of unemployment and the welfare state may be assisting these kinds of people to have children. But much of it also implies that intelligence is highly relevant and this is congruous with the earlier research from the USA, which we have already discussed.
Indeed, there is evidence that would indicate that the impact of the welfare state on the fertility of those with low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness may be more complicated than Perkins thinks. As Perkins argues, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness are part of a constellation of inter-correlating characteristics known as a ‘slow life history’—or K—strategy; in essence, living for the future rather than living ‘fast’ and for ‘the now’. It has been shown that in Sweden (a strong welfare state) and the USA (a weaker welfare state), slow life history strategy actually positively correlates with fertility.[57] The researchers argue that the reason for this is that living ‘for the now’ involves having as many kids as you can as quickly as you can because you perceive the environment to be unstable; so you could be killed without warning. However, you invest little in the children and are, in essence, simply predisposed to seek out lots of sex with lots of partners. Modern contraception means you can avoid the resultant large number of children.
In earlier times, you could be a ‘drive-by parent’—effectively having these children whilst investing very little energy or resources in them. The large numbers produced coupled with the higher genetic diversity among children resulting from larger numbers of partners hedges the offspring against environmental instability. In other words, they are genetically diverse, so it is more likely at least some will survive. But, now, you do not want these children because modern society will compel you to invest resources in them, on pain of punishment. It has developed agencies to track fathers down and extract money from them, for example.
By contrast, the ‘slow’ strategists want to invest their energy in raising children, even if they don’t want many of them. Accordingly, in this kind of environment, the only way that a faster strategist would end up with lots of children would be by accident; if he or she was so lacking in intelligence that he or she couldn’t work out how to use contraception, for example. Intelligence and life history (K) are only extremely weakly correlated with one another—being largely distinct domains of cognition and behaviour respectively.[58] It is true, however, that for some traits, such as executive functioning and time preferences, in addition to certain personality traits, g and K make joint but distinct contributions to individual differences. Therefore, fertility patterns that apparently favour higher K yet also lower intelligence simultaneously, in the same populations, are not contradictory if they are acting on separate traits controlled by largely distinct sets of genes.
It could be argued that the welfare state discourages such a person from making the effort to use contraception, because it means that they don’t have to invest much of their limited resources in the resultant children. The welfare state will provide for them. Indeed, if we were rather cynically minded we could take this argument further, as Richard Lynn has. People of relatively low intelligence, such that they are unable to hold down all but low-paying jobs, are likely to be intelligent enough to rationally calculate that they are better off not working as long as they have lots of children. They can then fritter away the ‘child support’, to which these children entitle them, on their own pleasures, investing as little of it in the children as they can.
So, they are intelligent enough to deliberately have a large number of (neglected) children, in order to play the system, meaning that the welfare state encourages their fertility and contributes to declining intelligence. However, they are not intelligent enough to realise—or have the foresight to care about the fact—that their behaviour may lead to the collapse of the very system they rely upon if too widely adopted, and means that the system is potentially unsustainable in the long term. This is because low intelligence predicts low levels of foresight, empathy, altruism, and civic-mindedness.
Feminism
Another important contributory factor to the negative association between intelligence and fertility in industrial societies has been the rise of feminism and, in particular, the opening up of the professions to women, a point also raised by Richard Lynn. In the first half of the 19th century, routine discrimination meant that very few jobs were open to women at all. Women might be maid-servants, cooks, laundresses, cleaners, seamstresses, or factory workers of certain kinds. However, jobs such as teaching or nursing, which were relatively skilled, had to be abandoned if the woman got married. Obviously, professions such as medicine and law weren’t open to women. This began to change in the second half of the 19th century and accelerated after World War I, during which many women did the assorted jobs that men couldn’t do because they were away fighting. The percentage of women who worked increased dramatically not just in terms of women working in factories and the like but also in terms of women in the professions, such as teaching, medicine, and law.
This has led to a situation where most women now work, even if many give up work for significant periods when they become mothers. The more intelligent women will go to university and then enter one of the professions. By doing so, they will delay motherhood, often into at least their late twenties and, sometimes, significantly beyond that. They spend most of their twenties and maybe even the first half of their thirties concentrating on their careers. The result is that for purely biological reasons they can expect to have a relatively small number of children, as fertility declines with age and does so very rapidly from around 35 onwards.[59] And, indeed, they may find that they have left it too late and they cannot have children at all.
By contrast, we can expect that less intelligent women will be less likely to delay their fertility. Herrnstein and Murray have shown that in the USA, on the NLSY, the percentage married before the age of 30 decreases as IQ increases. Among those with an IQ classed as ‘dull’, 81% who had got married had done so before the age of 30 and the average age at marriage was 21.3. Among those classed as ‘very bright’, only 67% had married before the age of 30 and the average age at marriage was 25.4.[60] For these reasons, the entry of women into the professions can be seen as a contributory factor to the negative relationship between intelligence and fertility. More intelligent women will be more able to go to university, more willing to go to university, and more interested in their careers. So, when they have the options of becoming a professional—and so delaying or completely abandoning motherhood—they are more likely and more able to take it. Indeed, this may explain why, among younger cohorts, the negative relationship between intelligence and fertility is actually becoming stronger in some countries. It weakened as knowledge of contraception spread down the social hierarchy but has strengthened once more as meritocracy, which enforces equality of the sexes to a great extent, allows more intelligent women to become highly educated and enter the professions. In addition, with the rise of the pill and the coil, contraception has become extremely reliable, meaning that unwanted and excess pregnancies are likely to be associated, even more strongly than before, with low intelligence. And this has coincided with the same society providing very generous welfare payments to single mothers.
Immigration
The final factor that is reducing average intelligence in developed countries is by far the most controversial. That factor is immigration from less developed countries. It would usually be a factor that we wouldn’t mention or, at least, we would be extremely careful to whom we mentioned it for fear of people becoming ‘offended’ or even physically violent towards us.[61] One problem with science, which many people find difficult to get their heads around, is that the aim of science is to understand the nature of the world and to present the simplest explanation, based on the evidence, for what is going on. Science is not there to be reassuring, to make people feel good, or to help bond society together. There are some researchers who have argued that there should be a ‘moral’ dimension to science and that, therefore, some findings—that upset people or make their lives difficult—should be suppressed or such uniquely high levels of proof should be demanded before they can be disseminated that they should effectively be suppressed. This is a problematic argument because, until that stage is reached, we could be developing policy based on a false hypothesis and this may in turn lead to seriously damaging consequences for society. Those who call for suppression are, in effect, arguing that scientific pursuit is fine until it forces them to question the worldview that they hold to for emotional reasons. Once it does this it is ‘bad science’ or ‘a higher standard of proof should be demanded’ or ‘it is immoral’. Or it is ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’. Or it is one of numerous other vague, indefinite, emotive terms that are deployed to associate the research with deviance and thus intimidate researchers into ideological conformity.
But it would be unforgivably intellectually dishonest of us to censor this issue, particularly considering the substantial body of academic research on it. Moreover, we have detailed research into the kind of people who buy books like this. They are inquiring and highly intelligent and so we are confident that none of our readers will be intellectually unable to deal with scientific research, which might question how they have previously thought. So, let’s get down to it. We have seen that intelligence is distributed on a bell curve. The nature of that curve varies according to the group that we’re discussing. For example, you will find plenty of highly intelligent people who have never been to university and plenty of not especially intelligent people who have. However, if you were to plot the intelligence of these two groups on a bell curve you would find it was slightly different. The percentage of graduates with an IQ above 130 would be greater than the percentage of non-graduates with this IQ and above. The percentage of non-graduates with an IQ of below 100 would be greater than the percentage of graduates with this IQ and below. And the range of the graduate IQ would be narrower; less like a bell, in other words. This does not mean, we must stress, that non-graduates are stupid and graduates are clever. Anyone that has ever attended a British university will testify to the presence of some extraordinarily silly people. It simply means that a random graduate will probably be more intelligent than a random non-graduate, at least when controlling for age. Any non-graduate reading this who is highly intelligent should in no way be offended by this. And nor should any intelligent graduate feel a sense of pride. Feelings are irrelevant to this. We’re talking about facts.
In much the same way, there are average differences in intelligence between different ethnic groups in Western countries.[62] Northeast Asian (what in the old days would have been called Oriental) immigrants are the most intelligent. They are more intelligent than Europeans and they have an average IQ of 105. Europeans have an average IQ of 100. Immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East have an average IQ of about 90. Immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean have an average IQ of about 85. It cannot realistically be argued that IQ tests are unfair towards immigrant children. Northeast Asians perform better on them than Europeans, immigrant children perform the best on the least g-loaded parts of the IQ test even when the tests are stripped of parts that could be considered to be culturally-biased (such as the vocabulary scale, which will unfairly penalise those for whom English is not their primary language).[63] And these differences in IQ correlate in the right direction with group differences in reaction times, which are an entirely objective measure.[64]
So, let us turn to what is happening, using the example of Denmark. Emil Kirkegaard is a Danish researcher who began his career by doing a degree in linguistics. Indeed, his bachelor’s thesis looks at the exciting issue of Danish spelling reform. However, tiring of the academic quiet life, Kirkegaard has turned to the academic hot potato of group differences in IQ. Based on information from Statistics Denmark, he has shown two important things. Firstly, non-Western immigration in Denmark has risen substantially between 1980 and 2012, on an almost continuous upward trajectory. In 1980, 50,000 non-Western immigrants were living in Denmark. In 2012, 300,000 non-Western immigrants were living in Denmark. Secondly, drawing upon published Danish army conscript data he showed that if we set the average IQ of Danes at 100 then the average IQ of non-Western immigrants is roughly 86. He cites studies showing that in many different Western countries a comparable difference exists between the native population and immigrants, at least when putting aside immigrants from Northeast Asia. Kirkegaard argues that this difference is substantially genetic in origin because, in England for example, it has been shown to develop by a very young age among second-generation non-Western immigrants and it also fits with studies that show average differences in IQ between countries.[65] These, themselves, strongly correlate with national differences on the PISA scholastic test, which is administered every four years to representative samples of 15-year-olds from OECD countries.[66]
However, one issue at which Kirkegaard does not look is differential fertility between Danes and non-Western immigrants in Denmark. As of 2012, non-Western immigrants in Denmark produce an average of 1.8 children per couple, whereas this is 1.69 for ethnic Danes. However, second generation immigrants are defined as ethnic Danes for statistical purposes, meaning that the Danish number is likely to be significantly lower and the non-Western immigrant number significantly higher.[67] Clearly, therefore, immigration from non-Western countries into Western countries is a potential contributory factor to IQ decline in Western countries. This decline would have happened even if there were no immigration, however. Immigration is simply speeding the process up.
This fertility and intelligence differential is likely to be the same in all Western countries. Richard Lynn has presented evidence for this from the year 2000, which can be seen in Table 9 below.
Table 9. Fertility rate of Europeans and non-Europeans in 2000 (Lynn, 2011, p. 272).
