I grew up in the early 70s and while the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present, it rarely impinged on every day life. Meanwhile we were playing in the streets after school and riding our bikes around during the school holidays from 10am until 5pm.
Bullying was restricted to the playground and the few kids that you kept away from. If you were lucky, your folks probably had a job that they would stay in until they retired, and there was far less homework and exam pressure than these days.
The fact is that no-one really understands why the Flynn effect is apparently reversing. It's likely that the extraordinary increases in from the 1948s until 2008 were prompted by improvements in nutrition, education... or possibly that people got better at the skills needed to do well in the test.
The hypothesis that improvements were down to hardship and adversity is certainly a novel one. Novel and speculative. Novel, speculative and unsupported. Still, if it makes you happy, make sure you scare your kids every night.
A couple of the things. The first is that if your explanation, which is the most convenient, to explain the Flynn effect was correct we'd expect to see a decline approaching some asymptotic zero as we experienced diminishing returns from things like nutrition and education. But this is not what's happening. IQs are getting literally lower (not growing more slowly), and substantially so. 84% of people fall within the first standard deviation, which in IQ is normalized to 15 points, and we're seeing declines of multiple points that don't seem to be stopping. That's really something that I think should be extremely concerning, but socially we seem to have a bit of head-in-the-sand defense mechanism in play.
On support. I'd say my hypothesis is just about as supported as the average view in social sciences. I could certainly formulate an experiment of passable merit to confirm my biases. Of course that by no means means the hypothesis is right, but rather that the notion of scientific support in social views is something I think we should take as a default to be practically meaningless. There are so many ways to quantify and qualify various aspects of society that near any hypothesis can be proven if you play with the data enough. This paper is evidence of such:
"To date, however, research on the relationship between adherence to masculine norms and fathering has yielded mixed results, which
may be due in part to the fact that many studies use measures of masculinity that do not fully capture hegemonic masculine norms. ...we address this question and extend the literature in three key ways. First, we use a multidimensional and more comprehensive indicator of masculinity than used in prior studies... we consider whether masculine norm adherence influences fathering in different way...."
Or to put another way, 'previous research has not yielded the results we wanted to see, so we spun the data in a way such that we could get it.' It's really quite absurd.
Bullying was restricted to the playground and the few kids that you kept away from. If you were lucky, your folks probably had a job that they would stay in until they retired, and there was far less homework and exam pressure than these days.
The fact is that no-one really understands why the Flynn effect is apparently reversing. It's likely that the extraordinary increases in from the 1948s until 2008 were prompted by improvements in nutrition, education... or possibly that people got better at the skills needed to do well in the test.
The hypothesis that improvements were down to hardship and adversity is certainly a novel one. Novel and speculative. Novel, speculative and unsupported. Still, if it makes you happy, make sure you scare your kids every night.