However, what I do see is a society today that requires higher abstract intelligence than 20 years ago, which in turn had higher requirements than 20 years before that.
This is partly a function of population going up. It means we need more complex systems for the world to be able to support that population and for human life to work.
In the time of President Lincoln, the average education level of a woman was about 2nd to 4th grade and most of them were homemakers. I used to talk to folks in Pakistan and they had similar education levels for their women. It's one of the youngest countries in the world in terms of demographics.
In my father's day, most people grew up on farms and it was common to stop formal education at the eighth grade. You typically completed high school if you were planning on going to college and becoming a doctor or lawyer or something.
My dad dropped out of the tenth grade. It was the Great Depression and he was a big guy and he could earn a man's wage and finishing school didn't make sense and it wasn't the stigmatizing failure that it is today.
He joined the Army and he had so many Army schools that he got out of going to Korea. He fought in WWII and in Vietnam and he had his bags packed for the Korean war and got a phone call the night before that he was the only guy in the battalion -- about a thousand people -- with all the military schools they wanted for teaching ROTC. She he and some officer got out of going and he taught college ROTC instead of fighting in the front lines of the Korean war, even though he was a high school drop out.
And in his day, enlisted soldiers like him never had college. That was limited to officers.
By the time my husband was well into his Army career, enlistees needed some college to make it to the higher enlisted ranks and I have seen articles that a lot of factory workers these days have college degrees.
It's not really shocking that we need more information in the system to make the same resources go further for purposes of letting 7 billion people occupy the same land mass that used to support a lot fewer people than that and make sure there is enough to go around. If you build up, you can fit more people in the same land area than if you build out.
And this is something that can be overcome to a large degree by education and "practice" so to speak.
Lots of people use tech today that would have been special tech only found at a university or in a research facility or whatever and now it is the norm. I think you are making a mistake to conflate that trend with some kind of measure about individual intelligence.
Ant colonies change over time. They mature and behave differently. The individual ants aren't anymore intelligent and they don't have books to read or whatever. The system of the ant colony undergoes what you might call cultural changes and the ants in a later stage colony inherit the accumulated wisdom and they aren't any smarter or better educated and they don't have a higher IQ individually, but the system becomes more intelligent in some sense anyway.
And that's kind of what you are seeing with humans, more or less.
I am not sure I agree with your analysis. I live in a country where most jobs requiring low-to-no qualifications have dwindled. I just googled a little and found quotes that 1 million jobs disappeared when most of the Swedish industry was relocated in other countries (due to lower salaries). This is in a country with 10 million inhabitants (with about 60% of those in "working age"). Sweden has among the lowest amounts of low qualification jobs in the EU.
At the risk of sounding argumentative, I fail to see how that's a rebuttal of anything I said.
I'm not trying to pick some kind of fight. I'm just talking on the internet with a stranger during a pandemic about a topic I know a fair amount about because it interests me. And that easily comes across as fighty and that's not really my goal.
So you aren't required to agree with anything. I'm not trying to "win" some argument. You said a thing. I responded. You chose to reply for whatever reason. Rinse and repeat and here we are.
This is partly a function of population going up. It means we need more complex systems for the world to be able to support that population and for human life to work.
In the time of President Lincoln, the average education level of a woman was about 2nd to 4th grade and most of them were homemakers. I used to talk to folks in Pakistan and they had similar education levels for their women. It's one of the youngest countries in the world in terms of demographics.
In my father's day, most people grew up on farms and it was common to stop formal education at the eighth grade. You typically completed high school if you were planning on going to college and becoming a doctor or lawyer or something.
My dad dropped out of the tenth grade. It was the Great Depression and he was a big guy and he could earn a man's wage and finishing school didn't make sense and it wasn't the stigmatizing failure that it is today.
He joined the Army and he had so many Army schools that he got out of going to Korea. He fought in WWII and in Vietnam and he had his bags packed for the Korean war and got a phone call the night before that he was the only guy in the battalion -- about a thousand people -- with all the military schools they wanted for teaching ROTC. She he and some officer got out of going and he taught college ROTC instead of fighting in the front lines of the Korean war, even though he was a high school drop out.
And in his day, enlisted soldiers like him never had college. That was limited to officers.
By the time my husband was well into his Army career, enlistees needed some college to make it to the higher enlisted ranks and I have seen articles that a lot of factory workers these days have college degrees.
It's not really shocking that we need more information in the system to make the same resources go further for purposes of letting 7 billion people occupy the same land mass that used to support a lot fewer people than that and make sure there is enough to go around. If you build up, you can fit more people in the same land area than if you build out.
And this is something that can be overcome to a large degree by education and "practice" so to speak.
Lots of people use tech today that would have been special tech only found at a university or in a research facility or whatever and now it is the norm. I think you are making a mistake to conflate that trend with some kind of measure about individual intelligence.
Ant colonies change over time. They mature and behave differently. The individual ants aren't anymore intelligent and they don't have books to read or whatever. The system of the ant colony undergoes what you might call cultural changes and the ants in a later stage colony inherit the accumulated wisdom and they aren't any smarter or better educated and they don't have a higher IQ individually, but the system becomes more intelligent in some sense anyway.
And that's kind of what you are seeing with humans, more or less.