National IQ levels drops as clever women spurn motherhood

By L.E. Nugroho

BANDUNG (JP): There are two population trends worth discussing. One is that of smarter children coming from better- educated families and the other is of women graduates remaining unmarried or having fewer children when they do marry. These two trends are the results of completely different developments. One can happen without the other. But when they occur together, the outcome is a decline in the average intelligence level of the population.

If smarter parents tend to produce smarter kids but fewer of the smarter women are getting married (or have fewer kids when they do marry) there must be proportionately fewer smarter people in the future. This hypothesis is likely to be controversial, but has been argued persuasively by a Harvard University psychologist, Professor R.J. Herrnstein, the author of IQ and Falling Birth Rates.

One theory defended by a number of researchers holds that birth rates drop when a society modernizes. One of the corollary effects is to free women from the cultural pressures that force them towards motherhood. Women become less dependent on men and more free to choose their own lifestyle. They will, if the theory is right, choose to have fewer children. They can just say no.

This theory implies a differential fall in fertility within a society. The number of offspring may decrease most among more intelligent women, since they are most aware of the costs of motherhood. Women from the higher social strata -- and more intelligent women -- are also likely to have fewer children because they are more likely to find rewarding occupations other than, and competing with, motherhood.

Prof. Herrnstein quotes a study which concluded that average IQ levels in the U.S. have fallen by an equivalent of four to five points over the period when successful American women were having fewer babies. This might not seem large, but a five- point drop in average IQ levels translates into a 60 percent reduction in the number of those with an IQ over 130 and a similar increase in those with IQ scores below 70.

In contrast, the Japanese population has a higher average IQ than the American. This, Prof. Herrnstein postulates, might be because upper-class, educated Japanese women do not have fewer children than those from lower down the social ladder. In public discussion this IQ differential is usually attributed to the superiority of Japanese schools, but the difference is already present in the earliest years of primary school. The IQ comparison test result between Japanese and American pre-school children will also prove this.

As a rule of thumb, better educated people in a modern society are more intelligent, as measured by standard tests, and vice versa -- chiefly because societies usually invest educational resources in the people who make the best use of them, and that usually means the people with the highest IQ scores.

Whether or not one approves of it, education and intelligence are thus correlated -- but they are not identical. Occupational success in modern societies is linked to education. For decades study after study has shown that people who do well in school are more likely also to do well socio-economically.

Therefore, one line of reasoning goes, the key to productivity and individual achievement is education rather than individual traits that predict educational success. This reasoning was challenged by Prof. Herrnstein. His study shows a different picture.

From 1900 to the present, the proportion of the American population completing high school rose from 10 percent to over 70 percent. About half of all high school graduates went to college. Germany and Japan fall short of the American figure, graduating fewer than 70 percent of their high school students and admitting far fewer of those graduates to college. Similarly, American school teachers have, on average, more years of post-secondary education than teachers anywhere else.

While America has been sending more people to school, it has been losing ground in work productivity. Independent studies have shown that Japanese and German workers have a higher work productivity rate compared with their American counterparts. The question now is, is it the education or intelligence which has a direct correlation with the workers' productivity level?

We know now, to our regret, that something more fundamental than schooling is behind work productivity. Overturning conventional wisdom, recent studies show that variations in intelligence predict job productivity to an extraordinary degree. Prof. Herrnstein shows one study which compared intelligence-test scores with 10 other plausible predictors of productivity (i.e. job tryout, biographical inventory, reference check, experience, interview, training and experience ratings, academic achievement, education, interest, and age) of entry-level employees in a variety of occupations. All the variables, except age, had some predictive validity, but intelligence scores, with a validity coefficient of 0.53 (1.0 is the maximum), had the most. Near the bottom, with coefficients of 0.11 and 0.10, were academic achievement and education respectively. For employees already in a job, intelligence scores predicted performance after promotion as well as, or better than, measures based on past performance.

Educational level may be a better predictor than intelligence for occupational attainment as many studies have shown, but for occupational performance, intelligence is the better predictor by far.

It's like talking about men in command and men in action. Prof. Herrnstein concludes that IQ scores are a reliable predictor of how well a person is likely to do in hundreds of common occupations. They show that almost 25 percent of the difference in job performance between one person and another can be accounted for by the difference in their IQ levels. This has serious consequences for the economic performance of a country since the job performance of workers has a direct bearing on how competitive the economy is.

The competing ideals of equality and efficiency create a dilemma. The goal of efficient production competes with the goal of a more equal distribution of wealth. What has happened to the rest of the population with mediocre intelligence? Many other factors apart from intelligence can be used to improve their productivity. Those factors include integrity, the drive to succeed and the ability to work hard under pressure.

As an economy develops, skills, apart from intellectual ability, will be in greater demand, and attract higher salaries.

In the meantime, other factors might work to improve competence levels all round: school teaching methods and facilities could be improved so as to develop the very intellectual skills that are so predictive of productivity, and perhaps to further other social purposes. We should be conscious of how public policy interacts, not just with education, but also with other influences on the intellectual quality of the population, such as the differential in the fertility rates of women of different intelligence. Nothing is more private than the decision to bear children, yet society has a vital interest in the aggregate effects of those decisions.

This issue demands informed public consideration, and probably also public action to lessen the tension between parenthood and one's career. At the very least, we should stop telling bright young women that they make poor use of their lives by bearing and raising children.