The average IQ in the United States is 100. It doesnt particularly matter if youre talking about mean or median average; either way, it means one-half of the people in the U.S. have IQs below 100, and the other half has IQs above 100. About five percent of all people in the U.S. have IQs of 125 and above. Less than ten percent have IQs above 120, which is the cut-off point for very bright.
What does all of this mean? Nothing good for the vast majority of people, which means nothing good for the United States.
As the political scientist Kevin Phillips has pointed out in several of his books, great countries go though three phases: agricultural, industrial, then in decline they develop financial industries. Actually, countries are already in decline when they enter that last phase.
Phillips used the now-gone empires of Spain, Holland and England as examples. All went though all three phases then collapsed. These days, he writes about the United States which mired deep in its financial bog is in decline.
If this decline isnt bad enough, its made worse by the exporting of our highly-paid industrial jobs, which the feds encourage because they delude themselves theyll be replaced by better financial or service (Do you want fries with that?) jobs. Which theyre not, and wont be.
Many of these now-gone jobs didnt require high IQs to do them. You dont have to have an IQ of 120 to work in a steel mill or on an auto-assembly line. In fact such an IQ would be a detriment in such jobs due to boredom.
Those high-paying jobs requiring average IQs are now gone. Whats left for these people? Jobs paying minimum-wage or slightly above. Either that, or welfare. Or crime.
The United States is stratifying itself by IQ. Were going to end up without much of a blue-collar middle-class since their jobs are being outsourced. Were going to end up with a poorly-paid lower-class partly supported by marginal welfare payments and a highly-paid upper class with higher IQs, who are partly supporting the lower classes through transfer payments.
Ill give one example of what happens when the middle-class collapses: in Germany the Nazis were bought to power by the economically-ravaged middle class. You can fill in the blanks about our future (it wont involve Nazis, contrary to the hallucinations of leftists).
Liberals, who delude themselves human nature is completely plastic, claim IQ can be raised substantially. How they think someone with an IQ of 85 can raise it to 125 is beyond me, but then, Im not a leftist, all of whom are about four years old emotionally.
Your IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 12 years old. It can go up and down a little bit but its not going to go up and down by 20 points. There is no way to make it go up 20 points, and barring some major neurological insult, it can't drop 20 points, either.
Education does help in developing what IQ a person has, but the public schools havent done that for a long time, not with a 50% drop-out rate. Its got to the point where if you have a lot of money you can get a fairly decent education but if you dont have money these days you cant even go to college unless you go into debt $30,000 and sometimes a lot more.
One of the things that the financial elites do is what to flood the country with low-IQ illegal immigrants. Why? To drive down wages, which means more money for the elites. The fact that many libertarians are too blind and ignorant to realize that by supporting open borders they are cutting their own throats and that of the nation would be amusing if it wasnt so tragic.
This stratification into socio-economic classes wont last, since the financial phase never lasts. If whatever administration that is in power had any sense, it would set up laws to reindustrialize the U.S. It wouldnt be that hard.
Only making things produces wealth. Shuffling money around is not wealth; for that matter, money is not wealth. Gold and silver are not wealth. Agriculture is wealth; manufacturing is wealth; a financial economy is an economy on its way down and out.
To use Thom Hartmanns phase, we need to reboot the country. That rebooting would in many ways take us back to the past, to ideas that worked for decades. The ideas of today are not working; they are destructive. The financial elites, for all their vaunted high IQs (which doesnt have much of anything to do with wisdom or even common sense) are extraordinarily short-sighted. They wont change their policies until there is revolt.
Which, of course, sooner or later, there will be.