bridges vol. 10, June 2006 / Kalt's Corner
by Stefan Kalt

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News flash: Thanks to popular culture, America's IQ is rising! Tests prove it!! Steven Johnson's recent book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is making us Smarter (2005), seems calculated to infuriate those of us who have written off popular culture as dung for flies. But Johnson does more than simply infuriate - he almost convinces. Given the sorry appearance of pop culture these days, this is quite an accomplishment. How does Johnson do it? He begins by recounting how, in the 1970s, civil rights activist turned amateur scholar James Flynn vowed to show a conservative establishment that the gap between the IQ scores of blacks and whites reflected culture biases, not genetic differences. Confirming his hypothesis, Flynn's research revealed that as blacks had better access to education and cultural amenities, their IQ scores went up. But then Flynn discovered something unexpected. The scores of whites had been rising almost as quickly. In 46 years, the average IQ. of the American people as a whole had risen by 13.8 points. Since the time of Flynn's findings, psychologists and social scientists have documented a three point per decade rise in IQ scores in most developed countries. According to Johnson, the best evidence even suggests that the rate of increase is accelerating.

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