CLEA Study Group: Cognitive and Social Progress

The following excerpt from a book being prepared by F. Heylighen provides some more info about the theme of the study group.

Developing Nations

To better understand the overall effect of different social developments, we need to take a step backward and look at the larger picture. In this picture, the different effects are aggregated over the long term. Instead of examining the violent swings of a particular country's stock market, we might consider the aggregate gross product for the world. This index of overall production of goods and services shows a remarkably stable growth over the past four centuries. Economic crises in certain countries are usually counterbalanced by accelerated growth in other countries. Of course, there are temporary slowdowns, like the 1930's depression, but the overall trend is unmistakable.

Though it facilitates many things, economic growth is not necessarily good. Because of its exponential character, it can lead to rapid exhaustion of natural resources. That is why the emphasis has shifted from growth per se, to sustainable growth. This means that all resources consumed should be replenished in some way, by nature or by society. For example, the depletion of ocean reserves by overfishing may be compensated by "farming" fish in fjords or freshwater basins. Although depletion has made the average price of fish increase over the last decade, the price of farmed species, such as salmon, has dropped spectacularly.

This example illustrates the general principle that when resources become rare, new technologies are developed that diminish the need for these resources. Such technologies either produce more out of the same amount of resources (ephemeralization, e.g. fuel-saving engines), use wholly different resources (e.g. solar energy), or even start producing the resources themselves (e.g. fish farming). The rarer a resource gets, the more research will be devoted to developing such technologies, and the more likely a breakthrough becomes.

That is why simple quantitative extrapolations of growth or exhaustion processes often turn out to be wrong. The famous 1972 "Limits to Growth" model, which proposed a gloomy view of the world's future, is a case in point. Twenty-five years later, its basic premise that unbridled exponential growth leads to collapse is still eminently applicable. However, its concrete predictions were often far off the mark. In many respects, the world is in a much better shape than the one predicted by the model. This is because the model did not take into account either technological innovation or changing attitudes. No model can predict the effect of discoveries that did not yet exist when the model was made. The only thing we can predict is that discoveries will be made, and that they will be applied to solve problems. The extent to which they will succeed, however, is beyond anybody's guess.

Again, the best we can do is to look at the widest possible picture, where the effects of multiple events and trends are averaged out. Not just wealth, but health, shows a remarkably steady progress for the world population. Both rich and poor countries experience a continuing decrease in mortality. In the developing nations, child death rates have fallen, over the past half century, from 300 per 1000 births to less than 100. Average life expectancy has risen with 50%, from 40 to over 60 years. In the wealthy nations too, average life expectancies of 75 to 80 years continue to increase, in spite of new "civilisational" diseases, such as stress-induced heart problems and cancers caused by smoking or pollutants. At present, life expectancy increases with some three years for every ten years that pass. Together with a decrease in the birth rate this brings about an overall ageing of the population.

Of course, there are exceptions to this general pattern. Because of the social and economic crisis accompanying the transition to a market economy, the countries of the former Soviet Union have witnessed a decrease in wealth and life expectancy during the last few years. But it is likely that that will be merely a temporary blip in the statistics, which will be redressed as soon as society has adjusted to a new mode of functioning.

The steady increase in life expectancy is perhaps the most reliable measure of overall progress. Good health and long life are universal values, to which all people and cultures aspire. The increase is caused by a combination of factors: antibiotics, better hygiene, better nutrition, increased safety, stronger awareness of dangers to health, better education, extended health care, more free time, advances in medical technology, etc. Each of these factors itself results from a combination of causes. For example, the number of deadly accidents in the USA has decreased with some 50% over the past half century. This is the result of a multitude of safety improvements, including seat belts, better highway design, smoke detectors, and window guards in apartments.

Why does such a diverse array of interacting factors lead to such a regular and predictable outcome? We know that well-intended innovations often have unpredictable and damaging side effects. For example, the pesticides used to increase crop yield leave residues in the human body. Yet, until now the lives gained by increased food production certainly outweigh the lives lost by pesticide poisoning. Calculations show that the elimination of all cancer deaths due to pollutants, additives and nuclear materials would increase life expectancy by a mere 90 days, which is negligible compared to the gains of over 25 years made since the beginning of this century. The increasing life expectancy seems to imply that this is a general trend: statistically, the positive effects of innovation are much larger than the negative ones.

The reason may simply be that once a negative effect appears, it triggers changes in attitude, policy measures and research aimed at redressing the situation. For example, use of pesticides is being replaced by the introduction of disease resistant plants, and other biological technologies. The stress of modern life is being tackled by advanced relaxation techniques, such as meditation or biofeedback. Not all countermeasures will be effective, but on average they seem to be more often successful than not.

What all these developments have in common is that they require a more complex organization. A high level executive job, together with a relaxation program, requires a more complex life style than quiet, predictable farm labor. Countermeasures and countermeasures to the side effects of earlier countermeasures just add complexity. Such an intricately balanced development requires a system of controls and supports, rooted in a reliable infrastructure. A nation's infrastructure has physical, social and cultural components. The physical infrastructure includes things like roads, railways, hospitals, communication networks, factories, houses, ... The social infrastructure includes institutions such as government, democratic representation, markets, police, the legal system, health care, schools, universities, social services, ... The cultural infrastructure includes the general knowledge, values and attitudes of the population. All of these systems help people to lead healthy and prosperous lives.

These different types of infrastructure, contributing to a nation's level of organization, tend to develop together. In most countries, when one of these important systems is underdeveloped, other systems tend to be underdeveloped too. Nations with poor health care usually also have low education levels, poor road systems, lack of democracy, unstable or rigid governments, lack of individual ambition, low trade, and deficient communication networks. Examples in different continents include Haiti, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan.

That is why institutions such as the United Nations can use abstract development indicators to measure how far a country has advanced. These indicators are statistical measures that combine several of the factors we have noted, such as level of education, GNP per head of the population, number of telephones per inhabitant, availability of running water, etc. Some of the best known are the Physical Quality of Life Index, which aggregates child mortality, life expectancy and literacy, and the Human Development Index which moreover includes GNP and average duration of schooling, but excludes child mortality. However diverse or seemingly subjective these factors may seem to be, the combined index is reliable because all these factors tend to go up or down together.

That is because they all measure components or aspects of the general infrastructure or social organization. If one of these components is missing, the rest will not be able to function properly. For example, it does not make sense to try to boost trade in a nation that lacks roads to transport the goods. You cannot teach people how to live more healthily in a region where no one can read and where TV's and telephones don't exist. Again, there will be exceptions to the general rule: regions where some aspects are much better developed than others. A classic example is the Indian state of Kerala, where the physical quality of life index is close to the one of the USA, while the income per head of the population is 70 times smaller than the American one. But these exceptions tend to be unstable: sooner or later a corrective process will either push up the underperforming factors, or push down the inflated ones.

Perhaps the most interesting combination of factors is wealth versus education level. A 1979 book by a Brussels colleague of mine, Peter Peeters, provides a chart where income per head of the population for developing countries is plotted against the percentage of people who can read and write. Using data for the early 1970s, Peeters found that almost all countries are situated in a narrow band in which income increases almost proportionally with literacy. Two small groups of countries lie outside that band. A group of oil producing countries, including Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lybia and Saudi Arabia, lies on the side where income level is much higher than literacy. On the opposite side, where literacy is higher than income level, lie a number of South East Asian and Latin American countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Uruguay and Costa Rica. Peeters ventured the prediction that the latter group would become much wealthier, thus correcting the inbalance. It seems that his prediction has come true. More unexpectedly, some of the outliers on the other side have performed the opposite movement: because of war or international isolation, the relative wealth of Lybia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait has seen a marked decline over the past years.

The development indexes used to classify nations aren't very informative when applied to the most advanced countries. This is because these indicators in a sense measure the distance between the "developing" and the "developed" nations. The richest nations function as a yardstick against which progress is measured. With measures such as illiteracy or child mortality there is not much progress to be made once these variables are close to 0%. Measures of availability, such as number of cars, telephones or tv sets per head of the population, also lose their usefulness once a certain level has been reached. Going from one to five cars per person does not look in any way like progress. Even a more abstract measure of wealth, such as Gross National Product (GNP), is questionable as an index of progress. Increased production can be negative if it implies increased resource exhaustion. But GNP does not even represent the actual production of goods or services. It rather measures the amount of market transactions, in which a good or service is paid for by a consumer. This can lead to weird distortions.

Imagine a country in which the people are wealthy and content. They earn quite some money, but spend little, saving most of their income for later, so that they can buy a house or other durable property. In their free time, they work in their garden, have discussions with friends, play musical instruments, or draw pictures and generally get the best out of life without really consuming much. Now, imagine a second country where people are wealthy but stressed. The moment they get money they spend it: they go shopping, buy and sell. Not content with the car they have, they will sell it within a year as a second-hand and buy a more fashionable model. Since they don't have the savings that would allow them to buy property, they need to pay large amounts for rent and interests on the sums they borrowed from the bank. Because of their stressfull life, they are often ill and spend a lot of money on doctors, medicines, hospitals and stress-relieving programs. If something does not go the way they want, they will blame it on the firm or person who delivered the service, and sue them for compensation. They may win or lose the court case, but whatever the outcome, a lot of money will have been spent on lawyers, judges, and simply lost time and energy. In this country, large amounts of money are constantly changing hands, thus boosting its GNP. In the first country, on the other hand, the GNP will be much lower, even though the inhabitants' actual wealth and overall level of comfort will be much higher, while growth will be much easier to sustain. It is clear that in this case GNP is quite the opposite of a measure of progress.

A better candidate to measure economic progress may be productivity, the amount of goods produced for a given amount of labor. Productivity is rising at a stable rate of over 3% a year worldwide. Technological innovation ensures that this increase will continue steadfastly, undisturbed by the wild upward and downward swings of the capitalist economy that affect GNP. Since productivity indicates the degree to which we can do more with less, it is also a good measure for sustainable growth: increasing production with stable or decreasing use of resources. But the most important variable, quality of life, remains elusive. Although the increase in life expectancy seems to indicate that life is in an objective sense getting better, it is still not clear how or why that happens. Instead of focusing on material growth, we should perhaps pay more attention to mental development.

The Cognitive Revolution

We have seen that literacy is a good indicator of potential for economic development. In the last 50 years, adult literacy rates in the developing countries have doubled, from 35 to 70%. This is just a symptom of a more general phenomenon: the level of education is increasing everywhere in the world. People go longer to school, get higher diplomas, have better access to books, newspapers, TV programs and other carriers of information, and are more stimulated to permanently continue their education, at work or in their free time. For example, in Belgium the average duration of schooling has risen from 6 to 14 years over the past century. This has profound effects on economical, social and physical well-being.

Jan Bernheim has called this development the "cognitive revolution". As a doctor specialized in cancers, he has been seeing thousands of patients in his career spanning thirty years. Especially in the beginning, he had great difficulty explaining the sometimes complicated treatments needed to tackle abstract diseases. He often was frustrated at the misunderstanding of his patients, who ignored important guidelines because they did not see the connection with their particular situation. But that has changed. Patients nowadays seem much better informed and have a quicker grasp of the implications of different treatments and life styles. Bernheim saw the same evolution in his students, who seem much less naive when entering university than their predecessors a generation ago. He concluded that something fundamental is taking place: the general level of knowledge and thinking in the population has risen dramatically. As a result, people are generally more sophisticated, rational, and broad-minded, and less inclined to believe in the simplistic explanations proposed by fanatics and ideologues.

The effects of this cognitive revolution may be illustrated by the 1989 collapse of the former Eastern Block. After the reforms of Gorbachov in the Soviet Union had created a more open and liberal atmosphere, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the starting shot for a rapid succession of revolutions transforming all Eastern European states from communism to democracy. It culminated in a failed hard-line coup against Gorbachov, the replacement of Gorbachov by Yeltsin, and the break-up of the Soviet empire into independent countries. Apart from the revolt against the dictator Ceausescu in Romania, all these transitions were remarkably peaceful. Never before in history have such dramatic changes of regime been accompanied by so little violence. Bernheim's interpretation is that both the men in power and the people rebelling against them were generally intelligent, well-educated and reasonable individuals. These participants understood that the course of history cannot be stopped, and that there is little sense either in trying to violently suppress the changes, or in taking revenge on those that maintained the status quo until then.

The often chaotic developments in Eastern Europe after 1989 show a less rosy picture. Bloody wars have erupted in regions like Bosnia, Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet it is undeniable that there is a correlation between peacefulness and the level of education, information and general development. The regions where violence broke out were also the regions where the level of development was lowest: Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Caucasus. Within the old Yugoslav federation, the most developed region, Slovenia, was spared from all troubles, while the war concentrated in the least developed one, Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the other hand, the transition to a Western style democracy occurred most smoothly in the countries with the highest levels of openness and development: Eastern Germany, Czechia, Hungary and Poland.

This same pattern can be found world-wide: the countries where war breaks out have typically a low level of education and economic development. Examples include Afghanistan, Somalia, Ruanda, Haiti and Angola. The countries involved in the two Gulf wars, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait, were economically rich because of their oil reserves, but intellectually underdeveloped, as I noted earlier. One of the main theses of the book of Peeters which I mentioned then, is that militarism is characteristic for a low level of development. Once a nation has surpassed that level, the motivation to solve problems by war disappears. That is why the rich nations of the West are so reluctant to involve their troops in any conflict, even when everybody agrees that intervention is needed to avoid worse. Although Peeters puts more emphasis on economic development, arguing that wealthy people have more to lose and less to gain in a war, I would add intellectual development as a primary factor.

The First World War will remain in memory for the naïvety, if not downright stupidity, with which young, enthusiastic soldiers jumped out of the trenches and ran to their death. The war itself was started by the Europeans powers after a round of collossal miscalculations, where every party expected quick gains, but instead got into a quagmire that lasted four years, at a staggering cost in human lives, money and equipment. The absurdity of the war sent shockwaves through the intellectual establishment, but it took the Second World War before this awareness would reach the population at large. Since then, involvement in war has become increasingly unpopular in the West, with the Vietnam war as the final example of a war that had to be stopped in part because of popular resistance at home. This development has certainly been fueled by the fact that people are better informed of how damaging a war really is, and how little there really is to gain. The media, which show the destruction and blood live in people's living room, have played an important part in this evolution. But another factor is certainly that the naive patriotic, religious or ideological reasons given to start a war have lost their appeal to an increasingly sophisticated public.

Such a cognitive interpretation of world events leads Bernheim to conclude that history does not repeat itself. Though lessons are sometimes forgotten, most of the time knowledge and awareness accumulate irreversibly. Never before have so many people known so much about so many domains. Each of the three components in this expression continues to increase: the number of people being educated and informed; the amount of education and information each of them gets; and the breadth of the domain about which science and the media provide useful information. This may seem trivial if education is seen as mere accumulation of data. However, there is reason to believe that a more fundamental transformation is taking place.

The Riddle of Increasing IQ

James Flynn, a political scientist working in New Zealand, observed in the 1980's that the scores of different groups of people on standard intelligence tests had consistently augmented over the past decades. Earlier researchers had failed to pay attention to that trend, because IQ scores are always calculated with respect to the average score for the present group. By definition, the average is set to 100. Someone who scores 20% more than the average would therefore get an IQ of 120. But if that person's score would be compared with the average for the corresponding group, tested one generation earlier, the final score would be about 130. Flynn was the first to systematically make such cross-generational comparisons.

Since then, the so-called "Flynn effect" has been confirmed by numerous studies. (see e.g. the APA report on intelligence) The same pattern, an average increase of over three IQ points per decade, was found for virtually every type of intelligence test, delivered to virtually every type of group. The pattern applied to some 20 countries for which data were available, including the USA, Canada and different European nations. The increase was highest, 20 points per generation (30 years), in Belgium, Holland and Israel, and lowest, 10 points per generation, in Denmark and Sweden. Although the data are limited, it moreover seems that the increase is accelerating. In Holland, for example, scores went up most (over 8 points) for the last measured period, 1972 to 1982. For one type of test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, Flynn found data that spanned a complete century. He concluded that someone who scored among the best 10% a hundred years ago, would nowadays be categorized among the 5% weakest. That means that someone who would be considered bright a century ago, should now be considered a moron!

Such a result has unexpected implications for the relation between intelligence and age. Older people tend to have lower scores on IQ tests than younger people. Until now, it was always assumed that this means that intelligence diminishes with age. However, this observation can be explained as well by noting that older people were raised in a period when the general level of intelligence was lower. Flynn showed that if people's IQ is evaluated with tests calibrated for the period during which they grew up, an old person scores as well as a young one. The reason that older people do less well on IQ tests is not that they have become more stupid with age, but that the younger generation simply got a head start.

One might expect that the Flynn effect would be more clear for tests that emphasize culture or education. The opposite is true, however: the increase is most striking for tests measuring the ability to recognize abstract, non-verbal patterns. Tests emphasizing traditional school knowledge show much less progress. This means that something more profound than mere accumulation of data is happening inside people's heads. None of the scientists who have studied the effect can offer a simple explanation.

Flynn himself admits that he is baffled by the results, and that he finds it hard to believe that his generation is significantly more intelligent than the one of his parents. He proposes the following argument. Compared to the previous generation, the number of people who score high enough to be classified as "genius" has increased more than 20 times. This means that we should now be witnessing, in Flynn's own words, "a cultural renaissance too great to be overlooked". Because he finds this conclusion implausible, he suggests that wat has risen is not intelligence itself but some kind of "abstract problem solving ability". But if we look at the ever accelerating production of scientific discoveries, technological innovations and cultural developments in general, the "cultural renaissance" does not seem such an absurd idea anymore. And whether you call the factor that rises "intelligence" or "abstract problem solving ability", the conclusion that people have become intellectually more capable remains the same.

To me, it seems likely that this intellectual progress is caused by a combination of factors, just like the increases in life expectancy and in productivity which we discussed earlier. Some factors may have a negative influence on intellectual development, but most developments are positive and reinforce each other. The most obvious one is longer schooling, but this cannot explain everything, as Flynn found that the IQs of American children have been rising even during periods when the time spent in school remained the same. Stimulation by the media, and in particular by television, may be another one, but this cannot explain progress before the advent of television in the 1950s. Generally improved health and nutrition is likely to contribute too. It has been shown that poor nutrition in early age impairs intellectual development, but this only applies to children who have been severely underfed. A factor that may have been overlooked is that parents nowadays tend to pay much more attention to their children, thus stimulating their cognitive development. This is possible because parents tend to have less children to care for, to have more free time, to be more wealthy, to be better educated, and to have a better insight in the needs of their children.

A more general factor is that society as a whole functions at a higher intellectual level, proposing to the curious child more information, more intellectual challenges, more complex problems, more examples to be followed, and more reasoning methods to be applied. Just using everyday devices, such as VCRs, microwave ovens, and thermostats, demands a more abstract type of reasoning, of which the older generation is often incapable. The increased complexity of life is likely to stimulate an increased complexity of mind. The growing use of computers for education or games at an early age is likely to further boost general knowledge, abstract reasoning and intellectual agility.

General: Julian L. Simon's optimistic view of population and resources; Quality of Life; World Database of Happiness; IS Quality of Life Studies
IQ raise
Development Trends

CLEA Study Group: Cognitive and Social Progress

Developing Nations

The Cognitive Revolution

The Riddle of Increasing IQ

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