Bloggers Aretae and Foseti are debating moral decline. Foseti takes the classic reactionary position. He states that we are in a period of moral decline and warns of the dangers. Aretae mocks him, saying, "every single generation in the last three thousand years has complained about moral decay, and look we are doing great!"

Paradoxically, it's possible that both Aretae and Foseti are completely correct.

Let's use the reactionary definition of moral decline, which basically means decadence. By this definition, moral decline is when people stop valuing the traits that reactionaries believe make civilization grow and prosper. Indicators of moral decline include: sacrificing future investment for indulging today; not having kids so you can play beer pong at age 30; spending time at dilettante political book clubs rather than building a business; importing foreign castes to do hard labor; importing foreign castes to fight your war; unwillingness to use violence in the cause of justice and self defense; excess in drugs and alcohol; widespread promiscuity; rudeness and disrespect for elders; decay of patriarchy and hierarchy; etc, etc.

Now consider the following three assertions

• 99% of the people ever born in the history of the world were more morally decadent than their parents.

• reactionaries are absolutely right about the dangers of moral decay and decadence, and absolutely correct that a hard-core, disciplined morality is crucial for building civilization

• we are more prosperous and live in a more developed civilization than any previous time in history.

It is entirely possible that all three statements are true statements. How can that be you might ask? Well it's a fun puzzle so I'm going to refrain from answering for a bit. If any reader can figure out the solution to the paradox, leave your theory in the comments. Perhaps next week I'll write a post with the answer.

Over at Aretae's blog a discussion has flared up about IQ, the Flynn effect and Africa. It is fairly well established that the typical African IQ score is on the order of 2 standard deviations lower than the typical American. The question is what this means for governance and growth. Aretae argues that based on the Flynn effect, Americans in the 19th century probably had a similar IQ to the average African today. Therefore it is doubtful that low African IQ is the cause of Africa's woes. My reply exceed blogger's character limits, so I post here instead.

Both IQ and the Flynn Effect are very poorly understood. The first point to correct is this piece of conventional wisdom, repeated by Aretae: "On every test we've got...and every way we know how to measure things, IQ has been going up for at least half a century, and probably a lot longer than that." This is wrong.

The gains in scores vary enormously by particular test. For instance, picture arrangement has gone way up, while arithmetic has barely budged. See this chart:

Let's step back a moment and think through what IQ and intelligence mean. To do so, we will discard imprecisely defined words, and introduce three new terms. We can define three aspects of what we commonly call "intelligence":

cognitive power - the ability to solve novel problems involving abstract reasoning. What we commonly mean when we say, "he is sharp, he understands everything we explain to him really fast".

specialized cognitive skills - a specific skill involving abstract symbol manipulation - computer programming, calculus, writing poetry, etc.

base cognitive skills - a skill of abstract symbols that form the base of more complex skills - arithmetic, vocab, reading comprehension, etc.

Cognitive power is really hard to measure directly, because you have to control for how much the person already knows. The art of designing an IQ test is to create a test of a skill that most people have roughly equal exposure to. If everyone has roughly the same exposure to a cognitive skill, then differences in ability will tend to be a function how quickly each person learns - cognitive power.

In general, then there are two ways to design an IQ test: a) give a base cognitive skill test for a common skill that everyone in the group has large amounts of exposure to (vocab, arithmetic, word matching) b) give a base cognitive skill test for a skill that no one really practices (raven matrices, block manipulation).

Thus an IQ test is a test of a base cognitive skill, that proxies as a test for cognitive power. It will be a better or worse proxy, depending on how even the exposure to the cognitive skill is. If we give an English vocab test to both Americans and Japanese, that test will be a horrible proxy. But if we give a game of Tetris to both Japanese and Americans, it might be quite a good proxy. If we give that game of Tetris to Americans from 1950 and Americans in 2010, then it will suck as a proxy.

I don't think the Flynn effect represents a real rise in cognitive power. a) the rise in scores varied greatly by test, we'd expect the opposite if cognitive power rose b) for the scores that rose the most, I can think of plausible explanations. There is much greater test awareness today, I grew up playing block matching games both on paper and on the computer. But since knowledge of basic English and arithmetic were already saturated, there has not been much change on those tests. c) from talking with family members, I think my parents and grand parents were every bit as quick as my siblings and cousins d) if you look at the speeches and newspapers from 50+ years ago, they are just as sophisticated as our modern papers.

So my conclusion is that Americans of 50 or 150 years ago had similar cognitive power, and similar cognitive skills in the areas that matter (literacy and basic math). Thus they were able to create high levels of governance and growth.

As for Africa then, we have no idea how much of the 30 point IQ differential is due to lack of education in cognitive skills, how much due to environmental deficits lowering cognitive power, and how is due to genetic differences in cognitive power. But it is quite clear that, unlike 1850's Americans, Africans have substantial deficits in very relevant cognitive skills (literacy and math), not just test taking skills (like the Raven's matrices).

From the perspective of good governance and growth, the exact reason for the 30-point differential doesn't really matter. Whatever the reason, finding an internal elite to govern the country wisely and drive entrepreneurial and technological growth will be extremely difficult. The problem is made much more difficult by various historical events and the introduction of forms of government entirely unsuited to Africa's demographics and culture.