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is only the second generation of males in my family to wear underpants.
I wear them, and my Dad wore them.
Neither
of my grandfathers did, though. They wore shirts with long tails.
Before putting on their pants, they tucked the shirt tails round
underneath to establish the desideratum — apparently universal
in pants-wearing cultures — of having something between pants
and fundament.
More than you wanted to know? I'm sorry. I have been reading about
this new
study in Psychological Review that attempts to explain
the Flynn effect. Noticed as far back as the 1930s, but first researched
in detail by psychologist James R. Flynn in the 1980s, this is the
curious phenomenon of average IQ scores drifting upward over the
years. "Drifting" is a bit inadequate, in fact: There has been a
rise of 24 points in the U.S. since 1918, 27 points in Britain,
and comparable rises in other countries. Now, 24 points on standard
IQ tests is the difference between "average" and "very smart," so
the Flynn effect seems to say that the average Joe of today is as
smart, insofar as IQ tests measure smartness, as a very smart person
— a candidate for postgraduate study, say — in 1918.
This is not the proper place for a discussion of the Flynn effect,
which all the leading researchers, of all shades of opinion, seem
to find baffling. What set me thinking about underpants was a
discussion in Newsweek about the causes of the
effect. Flynn himself has suggested that one of the things that
has been lifting all IQ boats since our grandfathers' time is the
much richer and more challenging environment our minds must deal
with. We travel more; we have more, and more complicated, gadgets;
we do more intellectually difficult work. And, of course, we just
have far more stuff to cope with — including, in the
case of Derbyshire males, underwear. "Leisure and even ordinary
conversation are more cognitively demanding today," says Flynn.
Flynn is undoubtedly right about this. The sheer increase in compexity
of our lives over the past generation has been astonishing. In England
40 years ago, my father was paid, in cash, every Thursday, and was
broke by the following Wednesday. He had a quarterly gas bill and
a quarterly electricity bill. He paid weekly rent on a property
owned by the town. Since he did not believe in life insurance, own
a bank account or invest in the stock market, that was the entire
extent of his financial concerns. He read one newspaper, Cecil King's
Daily Mirror. He had two TV channels available to him, both
of course black and white. He owned one suit, and I think no more
than three sets of underwear. My wife, growing up in mainland China
in the 1960s, had an even more spare existence. She had just one
toy, which of course she adored.
Now look at us. I have just spent three days doing my income
taxes. My financial affairs — the affairs of a modest working
family — occupy an entire drawer in a set of filing cabinets.
(Filing cabinets! In my house!) Never mind a generation:
Just in the past eight years I have gone from having one telephone
bill to having five: One for a wireless service and two for fixed
lines — each of which, for reasons I cannot be bothered to
understand, is served by both Verizon and AT&T. With the help of
the Internet I read, or at least skim through, about 20 newspapers
or news websites every morning, ranging from the Wall Street
Journal to the Taipei Times. My house contains four working
computers. My kids' bedrooms are silted up with toys, to which they
pay little attention. When we take them to McDonalds, their place-mats
are decked out with puzzles, mazes and word games. A stimulating
environment? You could say so.
Also one I am getting a bit fed up with. It's not just me, either.
I know a Manhattan lady of a certain age. She comes from a good
family in the tidewater South, and for many years was married to
a gentleman of modest wealth and great respectability. Unfortunately
he died suddenly and she was left alone — they had no children.
Now the bane of her life is paperwork. "I simply can't cope,"
she moans, every time I see her. "I don't have a clue about his
affairs. I go to the attorney, I go to the accountant, and they
say: 'You can do this, or you can do this, or you can do this. What
do you want to do?' I tell them: 'I don't know. What's best?'
Then they start in with all this babble about growth funds and value
funds, liens and trusts and defeasances… It just makes my head
spin. Why does everything have to be so complicated? It seems
you need an MBA just to get through life nowadays."
Not all aspects of our lives have moved in the direction of increasing
complexity. Kingsley Amis, in a good English secondary school in
the 1930s, was required to compose Latin verse, a thing not expected
of any adolescents I am currently acquainted with. Some of the college
kids who fill their leisure hours with Doom and Ultimate Frisbee
nowadays would have been playing Bridge forty years ago. The elaborate
sumptuary codes of the middle and upper classes in former times
have mostly been jettisoned. ("This is very good port they have
given me," remarked Gladstone to the adolescent Bertrand Russell,
"but why have they given it me in a claret glass?") Even further
back, 18th-century arithmetic textbooks were filled with exercises
in converting from Massachusetts currency to Rhode Island currency,
a complication which, thanks to Alexander Hamilton, we do not have
to trouble ourselves with today. On balance, though, Flynn is right:
Our everyday lives have become much more intellectually demanding,
and the trend line is upwards.
Some of this complexity arises from new freedoms we have gained,
and must be not only accepted, but applauded. "You can do this,
or you can do this, or you can do this. What do you want to do?"
But why is it a lawyer or an accountant asking the question? Because
doing this as opposed to that has tax and legal ramifications
that only experts can understand. My lady friend probably has more
choices than she can easily handle, but the real source of her perplexity
is that the consequences of her choices can all too easily bring
her to the attention of the IRS or the courts, with potentially
devastating impacts on her time, money, and perhaps even liberty.
I therefore suggest that the stimulating environment of modern life
that is, according to Dr. Flynn, pushing our IQs up, has a private
aspect that we should welcome, and a public one we should deplore.
Choosing from among forty-four different breakfast cereals, or solving
the puzzles on a McDonald's placemat, are intellectually stimulating
tasks, but not otherwise stressful. Dealing with a 46,000-page Internal
Revenue Code is positively dangerous, unless you are an expert.
Wise law-makers could do a great deal to simplify our lives, and
the outline blueprints for this simplification have been written:
for the law, Richard Epstein's Simple
Rules for a Complex World, and for taxes, Amity Shlaes's
The
Greedy Hand.
But then, if we were to make our lives simpler, would we not, according
to Dr. Flynn's researches, get dumber? Yes, we would. We know, with
reasonable certainty, three things about IQ scores: they are 70-80
per cent determined by genes; a stimulating environment can raise
them; and when the stimulation is removed, they sink back to their
original levels (which is why Head Start doesn't work). Personally,
I would be willing to see my IQ drop a few points if it meant I
could get some of my time back, especially around mid-April —
and provided I can go on wearing underpants.
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