Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Since intelligence brings good things, and intelligence has been increasing, can we see a dividend from increasing intelligence in improvements to the world? Some skeptics (including, at the outset, Flynn himself) doubted whether the 20th century really produced more brilliant ideas than the ages of Hume, Goethe, and Darwin.⁴⁰ Then again, the geniuses of the past had the advantage of exploring virgin territory. Once someone discovers the analytic-synthetic distinction or the theory of natural selection, no one can ever discover it again. Today the intellectual landscape is well trodden, and it’s harder for a solitary genius to tower above the crowd of hypereducated and networked thinkers who are mapping every nook and cranny. Still, there have been some signs of a smarter populace, such as the fact that the world’s top-ranked chess and bridge players have been getting younger. And no one can second-guess the warp speed of advances in science and technology of the past half-century.

Most dramatically, an increase in one kind of abstract intelligence is visible all over the world: mastery of digital technology. Cyberspace is the ultimate abstract realm, in which goals are achieved not by pushing matter around in space but by manipulating intangible symbols and patterns. When people were first confronted with digital interfaces in the 1970s, like videocassette recorders and ticket machines in new subway systems, they were baffled. It was a running joke of the 1980s that most VCRs eternally flashed “12:00” at owners who couldn’t figure out how to set the time. But Generation X and the Millennials have famously thrived in the digital realm. (In one cartoon of the new millennium, a father says to his young boy, “Son, your mother and I have bought software to control what you see on the Internet. Um . . . Could you install it for us?”) The developing world has thrived in that realm as well, often leapfrogging the West in its adoption of smartphones and of applications for them such as mobile banking, education, and real-time market updates.⁴¹

Could the Flynn effect help explain the other rises in well-being we have seen in these chapters? An analysis by the economist R. W. Hafer suggests it could. Holding all the usual confounding variables constant—education, GDP, government spending, even a country’s religious makeup and its history of colonization—he found that a country’s average IQ predicted its subsequent growth in GDP per capita, together with growth in noneconomic measures of well-being like longevity and leisure time. An 11-point increase in IQ, he estimated, would accelerate a country’s growth rate enough to double well-being in just nineteen years rather than twenty-seven. Policies that hurry the Flynn effect along, namely investments in health, nutrition, and education, could make a country richer, better governed, and happier down the road.⁴²

What’s good for humanity is not always good for social science, and it may be impossible to unsnarl the bundle of correlations among all the ways that life has improved and trace the causal arrows with certainty. But let’s stop fretting for a moment about how hard it is to disentangle the strands and instead take note of their common direction. The very fact that so many dimensions of well-being are correlated across countries and decades suggests there may be a coherent phenomenon lurking beneath them—what statisticians call a general factor, a principal component, or a hidden, latent, or intervening variable.⁴³ We even have a name for that factor: progress.

No one has calculated this vector of progress underlying all the dimensions of human flourishing, but the United Nations Development Programme, inspired by the economists Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, offers a Human Development Index that is a composite of three of the major ones: life expectancy, GDP per capita, and education (being healthy, wealthy, and wise).⁴⁴ With this chapter we have now examined all of these goods, and it’s an appropriate point to step back and take in the history of quantifiable human progress before we turn to its more qualitative aspects in the next two chapters.