Generation Z has shown a quantifiable,documented declinein foundational cognitive and physical skills, including mathematical logic, verbal reasoning, visual problem-solving, and baseline physical fitness, driven largely by the displacement of deep-focus activities by thousands of hours of digital consumption.
Liberal think tanks, however, claim that the results are mixedrather than abysmal. To offset these measurable losses, they point to areas where Gen Z has allegedly gained ground, such as environmental awareness, social inclusion, and digital fluency.
Pride parades, protests for open borders, and a war on oil are now considered replacements for reading, writing, and reasoning. In fact, if the powers-that-be decide that inclusion and climate outweigh math and science, then Gen Z is way ahead.
Don’t you feel foolish now for believing Gen Z was becoming dumber? They are actually evolving into socially aware, inclusive beings.
For most of the 20th century, each generation of Americans scored higher on intelligence tests than the one before. The phenomenon, documented by New Zealand researcher James Flynn and known as the Flynn Effect, showed average IQ rising by roughlythree points per decadeacross developed nations. Researchers attributed the gains to improvements in education, nutrition, and public health.
That upward trend has now reversed, and the reversal is concentrated in Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, who have become the first cohort in the modern era to score measurably lower than their parents across a range of cognitive, physical, and behavioral metrics.
The foundational evidence for the IQ reversal comes from a2018 studypublished in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Norwegian economists Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg of the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research at the University of Oslo. Analyzing cognitive ability scores from military conscription data covering more than 730,000 Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991, they found that IQ scores peaked for the 1975 birth cohort and declined approximately 0.2 points per year afterward.
Their most consequential finding was that the decline appearedwithin families, brothers born later scored lower than brothers born earlier, ruling out genetic selection or immigration as explanations. Their conclusion: “Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused.” A parallel2023 study, confirmed a reverse Flynn Effect in the United States, with declining scores in matrix reasoning, letter and number series, and verbal reasoning, and the steepest declines among adults aged 18 to 22.
Compulsory military IQ data extend the pattern across eight countries. Testsfrom Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Australia all show declines beginning in the mid-1990s, before the smartphone era and the rise of social media, suggesting that screens may have accelerated an existing trend rather than caused it. The aggregate decline across these analyses is estimated at approximately 2 to 5 IQ points compared to peak cohorts.
The standardized testing record reinforces the IQ data. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment, known asPISA 2022, recorded the largest single-cycle decline in mathematics performance in the assessment’s 23-year history, an average drop of roughly 15 points across OECD countries, equivalent to three-quarters of a year of schooling lost. Reading scores fell 10 points; science scores dropped comparably. OECD noted that downward trends in reading and science were observable before the COVID-19 pandemic, placing the cause well ahead of the disruptions of 2020.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
