http://www.sulekha.com/redirectnh.asp?cid=327840
http://www.business-standard.com/today/sto...=26&story=35048
WORM'S EYE VIEW
A âmoronâ theory that makes sense
Donât blame nature for below-average results. Nurture that which can be improved, says Devangshu Datta
Published : February 25, 2004
Set up a flag. Ask everyone in the world to goose-step past that flag in serried ranks, saluting as they go. The marchpast will continue until eternity.
There are more babies born every minute than people marching past the flag. The twin acts of procreation and birth take more time than walking two paces. But even soldiers devote more time to baby-making than to flag-marches.
And, more and more of those babies will be morons. Because most people are of below average intelligence and they mostly marry people of less than average intelligence and raise children of less than average intelligence.
It was in the 1940s that the theory of the Marching Morons (MM) was articulated. Itâs a linear, dystopic projection. The assumptions are interesting. âAverageâ is, of course, the arithmetic mean rather than the median or mode.
In terms of the mean, most people are âlower than averageâ. The mean is inflated by the presence of a few super-intelligent persons.
Itâs the same situation as with the Indian cricket team. Six members of the XI have personal averages lower than the team-average because Tendulkar, Laxman and Dravid score so heavily.
Another truth embedded in the MM theory: People of lower education have more kids. This is a basic axiom in development. Religion may matter.
But more highly educated people (if we can use education as a surrogate for intelligence) have fewer children. Italy versus Brazil, Iran versus Bangladesh and Bihar versus Tamil Nadu â the equation holds across large populations.
Hence, genetically, most people arenât super-bright. Whatâs more, people of lower education are also, by and large, less than brilliant at teaching their kids to be smart.
So, regardless of intelligence being created by nature or nurture (thatâs a heated debate), succcessive generations should show a trend towards increasing idiocy.
A reader of page three, if one can use the word âreaderâ loosely, would assume that to be the case. So would anyone who watches Star Plus or MTV. But successive generations donât really show a tendency to increasing stupidity.
It is part of the mores of the MTV generation to flaunt bizarre tastes in your face. But it takes real intelligence to structure and deliver that content as we access it.
Think of the range of arcane technologies that have matured over the last 20 years and recall that the research was done by young people. Nope, kids may be getting weirder but theyâre not getting dumber.
In the 1940s, people assumed that MM would mirror reality. Science-Fiction writers explored the consequences. Kurt Vonnegut in Harrison Bergeron postulated a society where bright people would be handicapped (by means of continuous distractions and electric shocks) to make them behave like âregular guysâ.
C M Kornbluth dreamt of an intelligentsia that ran ad-campaigns designed to lure morons into gas-chambers. John Brunnerâs Stand on Zanzibar, (written in 1967, when the global population could have stood on Zanzibar), conceptualised food-wars.
The current demographic assumption is: the more, the merrier. A rapid cut in growth rates leads to ageing unproductive populations.
This has occurred in Europe and Japan. China will see this happen in circa 2025. America has escaped only because of a relatively looser immigration policy.
Young people can be trained to be productive and the world can absorb larger populations. While we canât help genetics, we can improve nurture by making education available to everyone.
Food sufficiency isnât a problem â just improve distribution of the grain-mountains and butter-lakes that the First World destroys.
India has gained global mindshare along with Brazil because of the shift in demographic theory. Both are very young nations that can be trained to be global centres of production.
It is Dr Joshiâs task to ensure that training occurs. He is doing the best he can by cutting IIM entrance fees. It is not his fault that todayâs incumbent management trainees would rather see subsidies pumped into schools and take loans themselves to get through their MBAs. That merely bears testimony to their bizarre tastes.
Or perhaps kids are actually getting stupider?
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--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo--> , which is a sign of really high intelligence. But most of the people in the class were in the 100-130 range. We can get a rough measure of IQ from the 12th class results. In Maharashtra, 50-55% of the students passed the exam suggesting an IQ threshold of around 95. The rest of the population taking 12th exam apparently had a lower IQ than 95. Making sweeping statements about the average IQ of Indians as whole being greater than 100, may hence be a little too optimistic, but then the above is an indirect inference and not a direct test. Nobody has obejctively tested whether in India there is difference in IQ amongst different ethnic or socio-economic classes to find the correlations with these parameters.