Good News: We Are Smarter Than Ever Before.
5 Feb
It’s easy to be negative about the state of the world, particularly if you are British. Moaning is our national sport and we a damn good at it (perhaps it’s the mostly rubbish weather, it’s hard to talk about cloudy sky and drizzle without being negative). We love to complain about young people, taxes, television, the French and how much football players get paid. We can’t go more than an hour without the feeling that the whole world is going to the dogs.
In our defence our economy is failing and the government seems typically unable to do anything about it. We are treated like dangerous criminals and will soon have to have ID numbers tattooed on our foreheads if Jacqui Smith has her way. But enough of this negativity, lets all be a bit more positive. There seems to be a sense that things are getting worse despite the fact that in most ways things have never been better.
For a start, people are getting smarter. According to the Flynn effect our average IQ is higher for each generation. We are smarter than our parents and our grandparents look positively daft by comparison. Maybe exam results get better each year because kids are getting smarter and working harder rather than exams getting easier. History for instance gets harder every year surely after all there is more of it than there used to be.
People are reading more books than ever before as well as having a wealth of information at our fingertips via the internet. There are so many interesting things to read online that you might never hear about otherwise. You could, for instance, read an article about The Third Age of the Internet, Nine Trends Shaping the Future of Social Interaction, The History of Techno, the phenomenon of Face Blindness or Why People in Iceland are so Happy.
Steven Johnson (the author of Everything Bad Is Good For You) says that television shows and films are becoming more original and complex than ever before. And (good news nerds!) computer games are testing us in new ways (scroll down).
So whilst some people seem to be getting stupider the general trend shows that we are smarter than ever before. Perhaps eventually we will be smart enough to fix the weather.
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