Category: reason

People are getting dumber. So concludes a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Using military conscription data from Norwegian males born from 1962 and 1991, the authors find that the secular increase in population intelligence observed throughout the 20th century has peaked and has now gone into reverse.

Average IQs, as measured on standardized intelligence tests, increased for most of the 20th century. This astonishing fact was first reported in 1984 by the New Zealand political scientist James Flynn, when he analyzed the trend in U.S. test scores. This upward trend has since been dubbed the “Flynn effect.” As a 2014 review article in the Psychological Bulletin notes, “The Flynn effect implies that an individual will likely attain a higher IQ score on an earlier version of a test than on the current version.” Flynn’s study revealed a 14-point increase in IQ scores between 1932 and 1978, amounting to a 0.3-point increase per year, or approximately 3 points per decade. Subsequent research found similar upward trends across most of the rest of the world.

The new PNAS study finds that the average IQ score for conscripts rose from 99.5 for the 1962 birth cohort to 102.3 for the 1975 cohort. Following 1975, the average score trended down, reaching 99.4 for the 1989 cohort (then rising slightly to 99.7 for the 1991 cohort). In other words, average IQ rose at about the same decadal rate identified by Flynn in the first sets of conscripts and then fell at about the same rate in the second sets. The researchers restricted their analysis to individuals born in Norway to two Norwegian-born parents.

About a decade ago various researchers reported that the Flynn effect had begun to reverse in some countries, with average IQ scores starting to decline again. More recently, some observers have suggested that average IQs are coming down because of dysgenic fertility—that is, because less intelligent people are having more children than smarter folks—or because of lower-IQ immigrants and their children. These trends, they argue, are now beginning to swamp the IQ-boosting effects that improvements in nutrition, education, and falling pathogen stress had during the 20th century.

In trying to figure out what could be going on, the Norwegian researchers took advantage of another IQ trend. First-born children tend to have higher IQs than do later-borns. The Flynn effect tends to narrow the gap between first- and later-borns within families. The researchers found that this was in fact occurring in the pre-1975 cohorts. After 1975, the gap between first- and later-born brothers began to grow. Since siblings share genetics and environments, this “within family” decrease tends to rule out dysgenic fertility or immigration as significant explanations for falling average IQs.

For the 1962–1975 Flynn increase period, the researchers estimate a .2 average annual IQ point increase within families and a .18 increase across families. For the 1975–1991 decrease period, they estimate a .33 annual IQ point decline within families and a .34 decline across families.

“The results show that large positive and negative trends in cohort IQ operate within as well as across families,” note the researchers. “This implies that the trends are not due to a changing composition of families, and that there is at most a minor role for explanations involving genes (e.g., immigration and dysgenic fertility) and environmental factors largely fixed within families (e.g., parental education, socialization effects of low-ability parents, and family size). While such factors may be present, their influence is negligible compared with other environmental factors.”

If falling average IQ scores cannot be attributed to dysgenic or immigration effects, they must be the result of some environmental effects. But what? The researchers conclude that “our results remain consistent with a number of proposed hypotheses of IQ decline: changes in educational exposure or quality, changing media exposure, worsening nutrition or health, and social spill-overs from increased immigration.”

As George Mason University economist Tyler Cowan pithily puts it, “We have started building a more stupidity-inducing environment. Or at least the Norwegians have.”

On the bright side, a 2018 review article by Flynn and his University of Otago colleague Michael Shayer reports that America continued to show a steady rate of average IQ gain from 1989 to 2014 at about its historic rate of .3 IQ points per year.

Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a look at modern Western Yellowstone on the Paramount Network and ABC’s Take Two, which will be very familiar to fans of Castle. This is apparently deliberate. On Yellowstone:

At a moment of crisis in the Paramount Network’s new Western Yellowstone, rancher John Dutton’s sabre-toothed daughter pleads with him: “Just tell me who to fight.” Dutton’s snarled reply: “Everyone!”

And there in a nutshell—or maybe a spent .50 caliber cartridge—you have the entire ethos of the fiercely engrossing Yellowstone, a bloody and paranoid parable of anti-modernism.

An updated version of the late-’60s Western family melodrama The Big Valley, or maybe just The Sopranos reimagined as an oat opera, Yellowstone is set in 21st-century Montana.

There John Dutton (Kevin Costner) owns the largest cattle ranch in the United States. And though they may be waving subpoenas and court orders instead of guns—mostly, anyway—the bad guys are circling the fences just like in the old days: A developer dreaming of tract houses. A town looking to add property to its tax rolls. Greedhead greens from a national park. And even Indians, led by a new chieftain flush with casino money that he intends to employ in booting Dutton off old tribal lands.

View this article.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved a squeamish ban on the importation of sex robots and sex dolls that resemble children, claiming that they “normalize sex between adults and minors.” Now the bill—named the Curbing Realistic Exploitative Electronic Pedophilic Robots, or CREEPER, Act (because of course it is)—is moving through the Senate.

The bill claims “there is a correlation between possession of the obscene dolls, and robots, and possession of and participation in child pornography.” In an even more macabre passage, the bill says the “dolls and robots not only lead to rape, but they make rape easier by teaching the rapist about how to overcome resistance and subdue the victim.” A Change.org petition, signed by more than 165,000 people, echoes these fears.

There is not much evidence to support this, writes Liz Wolfe.

View this article.

The knives have come out for Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt. His deregulatory bona fides are being overwhelmed by a whole host of scandals that may have finally reached a tipping point.

Today The New York Times reports that Pruitt’s staff was under pressure to help the man use his status to get favors for his family and himself. To wit:

As an example, Mr. Pruitt, shortly after taking the E.P.A. job, reached out to the former speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates seeking help for his daughter, McKenna, in securing admission to the University of Virginia School of Law. William Howell, the former speaker, appears on Mr. Pruitt’s official E.P.A. calendar, and he confirmed in an interview that he was approached by Mr. Pruitt and subsequently wrote a letter to the school’s dean on the daughter’s behalf.

Mary M. Wood, a spokeswoman for the university, declined to comment on the letter, which has not been previously reported, citing student privacy. Mr. Howell said he doubted his letter tipped the scales for Ms. Pruitt. A spokesman for Mr. Pruitt said that he and Mr. Howell had known each other for two decades and that “letters of recommendation are normal process for an application to law school.”

For those who keep a close eye on government corruption, this probably seems like small potatoes, and it is. (And it’s very much in line with common Beltway behavior to try to use connections to get kids into schools.) Indeed, most of Pruitt’s scandals are pretty small potatoes—using his staff for all sorts of inappropriate purposes, like tracking down lotion and trying to get his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise. Some of these are Veep-level comically dumb. It’s easy to imagine Selina sending her toadyish personal assistant Gary off on a mission to track down a used mattress from a Trump hotel, just as Pruitt is accused of doing.

But with enough small potatoes you can make quite the hash. All these ethical lapses are overwhelming anything Pruitt might be accomplishing as a deregulator.

National Review is no fan of President Trump, but it’s very much a magazine for conservatives who’d like to see fewer federal regulations. Its policy goals align with Pruitt’s. But they’ve had enough, and they’re calling for Pruitt to step down:

This is no way for any public official to treat taxpayers. It also makes it practically impossible for Pruitt to make the case for the Trump administration’s environmental policies—a case that we continue to believe deserves to be made. It does not help that Pruitt’s conduct has left him nearly alone at the agency. Many of his top aides have fled and paranoia seems to consume those who remain.

We share most of Pruitt’s views about environmental policy. But the same could be said of many other people, including Andrew Wheeler, the agency’s deputy administrator, who would become acting administrator upon a vacancy in the top job. Pruitt is replaceable. And he should be replaced.

Reason‘s Ron Bailey has previously described how Pruitt’s attempts to personally benefit from his role at the EPA undermines his mission. Environmental activists regularly claim that deregulation is pushed by corrupt corporations. When the head of the EPA is clearly using his power to benefit himself and his family, this feeds the association between deregulation and corruption.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) claims he hasn’t been paying attention to Pruitt’s ethics issues. Today Trump gave a rather vague defense that should be considered a warning sign: “I’m not happy about certain things, but he’s done a fantastic job running the EPA, which is very overriding.” The subtext is that it can stop being “overriding” at any point. That Trump is “not happy” about some of Pruitt’s behavior is an issue.

But given Trump’s mercurial tendencies, it’s hard to predict what might happen or when. Maybe Pruitt will stay on for a long time. Maybe Trump will fire him over Twitter this afternoon.

“You needn’t be engaged in espionage, or anything illegal, to benefit from better digital privacy practices,” writes Associate Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown in the controversial, provocative “Burn After Reading” issue of Reason. In “Personal Encryption 101,” Brown lays out easy steps to keep your online communications safe from the clutches of “surveillance-happy state actors and data-harvesting advertisers.”

That said, since joining Reason in 2014, Brown’s writing has focused on all sorts of black- and gray-market activities—especially sex work—that definitely do benefit from being secured. In this Reason Podcast, we talk with Brown about her award-winning work debunking press hysterics who routinely misidentify all prostitution as “sex trafficking,” her belief that the psychological “harms that are unique to sex work right now are all harms that are related to the black-market aspects of it rather than the industry itself,” what libertarian feminism looks like, and more. Brown is one of the founders of Feminists for Liberty, a group that is “anti-sexism & anti-statism, pro-markets & pro-choice.”

This podcast was recorded live at FEEcon, the annual gathering in Atlanta sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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I often meet people who believe a magical thing called “government” can fix virtually anything. For example, many California officials want to replace the healthcare system with “single-payer,” which is another way of saying a system run by government. This column is designed to remind readers of how things work when “public-spirited” bureaucrats are in charge rather than “greedy” private folks who want to boost the bottom line.

There are far worse agencies than the Department of Motor Vehicles, but DMV remains the poster child for government inefficiency because we occasionally have to deal with it personally. The lessons it provides are enduring because DMVs seem impervious to change. No matter the decade, their field offices remain a cross between a bus station and a Soviet bread line.

But it’s hard to really fix government because the incentives are wrong, writes Steven Greenhut.

View this article.

Being a barber, an auctioneer, or even a “campground membership salesperson” in Pennsylvania requires a state-issued license.

That should change, says Gov. Tom Wolf.

Wolf, a Democrat, called Thursday for the state legislature to abolish 13 occupational and professional licenses, following the completion of a year-long review of Pennsylvania’s licensing laws. In place of some of those licenses, the Wolf administration says workers could be required to register with state boards. For others, such as hair-braiders, the administration has recommended eliminating the state’s role entirely.

“Requiring a government license to work in certain jobs helps to keep all of us safe, but those requirements should be fair,” said Wolf in a statement.

There are more than 1 million licensed workers in Pennsylvania, representing about 20 percent of the state’s workforce. Wolf’s proposals are more limited than the licensing reforms passed this year in Louisiana and Nebraska, but they’re another sign of the rebellion against onerous licensing laws.

The Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce welcomes policies that “remove barriers to work, simplify the process for individuals entering the workforce, and make it easier for employers to fill positions,” says Gene Barr, president of the Chamber. “As with any shift in policy, the details matter. We are still reviewing the reforms outlined by the Wolf administration.”

Wolf also asked lawmakers to ease licensing requirements for military spouses, who run the risk of losing their state-issued permission slips if they have to move across state lines.

As Reason has previously noted, licensing rules can be particularly problematic for military families. According to the American Legion, more than 35 percent of military spouses work in professions requiring state occupational licenses. Military families are 10 times more likely to relocate across state lines than civilian families in similar professions, according to the Department of Labor.

The state will pursue options including licensing reciprocity—accepting out-of-state licenses as legal for work in Pennsylvania—and will look to streamline in-state licensing rules for military families. Those are good places to start, but the same changes should be applied to all workers, not merely to a privileged class of individuals connected to the military.

Wolf also called for the passage of “Second Chance” legislation to ease licensing requirements for individuals with criminal records. Specifically, Wolf wants to repeal Pennsylvania’s automatic 10-year ban on licensing for anyone convicted of a drug felony. The 13 state boards that rely on that ban could consider criminal history as part of an overall decision about whether to license an individual, but would not be able to block an application merely because of a drug conviction.

This is a crucial aspect of licensing reform—and one that has caught on, with at least 12 states passing similar bills this year—because having a job is the best indicator of whether someone with a criminal record will commit another crime. Blocking individuals with criminal histories from a wide range of professions is counterproductive for both the economy and the criminal justice system.

Wolf isn’t pushing anything that goes beyond what other states have done, but his middle-of-the-road proposals should not face much hostility from the Republican-controlled General Assembly. Elsewhere, licensing reform has been a bipartisan project, and it will have to be the same in Pennsylvania.

Let’s start with a disclaimer: If you have little to no experience with guns, it’s probably not wise to try assembling your own. It can be dangerous to make a mistake—even deadly. There’s no shame in buying a firearm from a reputable manufacturer and then taking a class to learn how to handle it safely, defensively, and intelligently.

But do-it-yourself has its appeal as well. For those who already have basic firearm know-how and competence with common tools, it’s easy to make a gun that’s just as safe as one bought from a store.

It’s also perfectly legal in most American jurisdictions, writes Reason‘s Mark McDaniel.

View this article.

The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, released his report yesterday on the actions taken by former FBI chief James Comey and his team during their investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. The report described Comey as “insubordinate” but did not find any evidence of bias.

The report was particularly critical of Comey’s decision to hold a press conference announcing that Clinton wouldn’t face charges for using a private email server. “We found none of his reasons to be a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by department leadership.”

The report also criticized FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Strzok and Page, who were involved in the investigation, frequently texted each other about their manifest dislike of Donald Trump. Strzok even asserted that they “will stop” Trump from becoming president. This raises the possibility that Strzok improperly prioritized the Russia aspect of the investigation in hopes of turning up information that would damage the Trump campaign, but the inspector general didn’t find hard evidence to support this theory. Still, “we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias,” the report said.

If Strzok wanted to keep Trump out of the White House, his strategy backfired badly. By failing to act swifty on the Weiner lead, he merely delayed matters, which meant that Comey’s eventual decision to publicly announce the discovery ended up happening just days before the election. It’s not actually clear whether this was what swung the election, though Clinton certainly believes it is. From her perspective, then, she should be pretty angry at a faction within the FBI that was possibly trying to help her.

15/ In other words, IG suspects Strzok was biased against Trump, and that may have influenced the decision to sit on the Weiner laptop for a month. Which might have ultimately set a course of events in motion that cost Clinton, his preferred candidate, the presidency.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 14, 2018

Reacting to the news that Comey himself used a private email server, Clinton tweeted:

But my emails. https://t.co/G7TIWDEG0p

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 14, 2018

Comey says he respects the inspector general but believes he did nothing wrong.

FREE MINDS

A New York Times story highlights how Republican politicians in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina have created new laws that force universities to punish students for heckling speakers. Ostensibly intended to protect free speech on campus, these laws create free speech problems of their own: They establish mandatory minimums for students who shut down speakers, and they prohibit university administrations from taking positions on controversial issues. But the line between heckling, which should be impermissible, and civil disagreement, which should be permissible, is not always clear, and universities don’t always do a good job of extending due process protections to students accused of violating university policy. It’s possible these laws will prompt universities to take actions against students who were themselves engaged in free speech, and this could have a chilling effect.

The Times notes that not everyone on the right favors such policies:

The model is not without disagreement on the right, however. Its mandatory punishment provisions drew a rebuke from the Charles Koch Institute, one of whose directors said conservatives were “giving in to the same fragility of which they so freely accuse their liberal counterparts.”

FREE MARKETS

Steve Bannon is a fan of Bitcoin. The former Trump advisor described it as “disruptive populism” in a recent interview. According to The Wrap,

Bannon has been talking to investors and hedge fund managers about launching new coins. He threw out the idea for a “deplorables coin”—playing off the dig Hillary Clinton took at half of Trump supporters in 2016—recently at Harvard University.

Bitcoin’s true believers look at the banking system with a wary eye, blaming it for financial crises like the 2008 collapse of the housing markets. Digital currencies have also attracted libertarians and others dubious of regulatory oversight of the monetary system—something that Bannon seems to side with.

“It was pretty obvious to me that unless you got somehow control over your currency, all these political movements were going to be beholden to who controlled the currency,” Bannon told the NYT.

QUICK HITS

• Rob Rogers, a longtime cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was fired after an editor rejected several of his anti-Trump cartoons.

• Karl Rove discusses his mother’s suicide in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

• A roller coaster at Daytona Beach Boardwalk broke down, seriously injuring six people.

• A prominent feminist and literary theorist has been accused of violating Title IX—the reason is unknown—and celebrated feminists such as Judith Butler are rushing to her defense. The College Fix thinks there’s some hypocrisy there.

• Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown is getting married today, and the many, many D.C. journalists in attendance at the wedding have been instructed to avoid checking Twitter every five seconds. If you’re a Trump official mired in scandal and hoping to avoid bad press when everything comes crashing down, now is the time.

Last we reported on Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, she was locked in a staredown with the U.S. attorney for Vermont over supervised injection facilities.

George, whose district includes Burlington and the University of Vermont’s flagship campus, is among a group of county leaders who support opening a supervised injection facility (SIF), where opioid users would be able to get a fix and talk to health workers without fear of judgement, arrest, or a fatal overdose. In countries where they are legal, SIFs have been shown to lower mortality and reduce the spread of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B.

Yet when folks in Chittenden County began talking in earnest about establishing a SIF back in 2017, U.S. Attorney Christina E. Nolan released a statement suggesting her office would prosecute anyone who tried to open a SIF and seize the property. Nolan’s thinly veiled threat seems to have put the plan on ice. Vermont’s legislature declined to take up a bill that would have legalized such facilities.

But George has not given up on the opioid users in her district. In a memo she sent this week to Chittenden County police chiefs, George announced her office would no longer prosecute “any citations or arrests for Misdemeanor Possession of Buprenorphine and related compounds such as suboxone,” adding that “these drugs are intended to be life-saving.”

Like methadone, buprenorphine and Suboxone (which combines buprenorphine with the opioid antagonist and overdose remedy naloxone) act on the opioid receptors in the brain to satisfy cravings without endangering or incapacitating users. Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb supports the use of these therapies, as do most medically trained officials in the federal health bureaucracy.

Yet law enforcement agencies tend to take for granted that these drugs, as controlled substances, should be kept off the black market. Users who possess, share, buy, and sell drugs proven to fight heroin and opioid addiction are breaking the law if they don’t have a prescription. Law enforcement agencies view bottom-up addiction treatment as so offensive that Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services recently tried to restrict shipments of books to inmates because they can be used to smuggle Suboxone strips into prisons.

George has demonstrated compassion and courage by stepping up for these life-saving interventions, particularly in the face of Nolan’s interference. Back in March, George attended a meeting where her fellow harm reduction advocates in county government suggested they not do anything more to provoke Nolan. That led to the following exchange, as reported by Seven Days:

Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo counseled that the benefits of an injection site to the community may not be as widespread as they seem. “To go to war with the U.S. Attorney [to reduce about] 2.3 percent of the fatal risk—I think that’s a conscious decision we’d have to make in comparison to other interventions,” he said.

In response, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George asked nine audience members—an estimate of how many lives a safe injection site may save in a year—to stand up. “Is there anyone here willing to say how much one of their lives is worth?” she queried, surveying the audience. “Ten thousand dollars?”

George encouraged the community to not let the cost of the proposal drive their decision. “Frankly, if I knew the amount [it cost], I’d go out and fundraise it for it,” she said.

George may be a typical prosecutor in other ways. But on this issue, she is displaying the kind of leadership that could save lives if so many other people in government were not so hell-bent on stopping her.