Data: Nonwhite IQ is falling

If you believe that people basically can't be changed and children are like their parents, you should be concerned with the kinds of people who are coming into the US with plans to stay here for good.

The picture does not look good when we focus on IQ.  I typically use a vocabulary test given to participants of the bi-annual General Social Survey.  One problem with this measure is that it is biased against people who weren't raised speaking English.  For this blog post, let's focus on non-whites who also not black as a rough way to capture people born in this country whose family came to the U.S. in recent decades. It's crude (for example, American Indians get included), but we do what we can. Here is the mean IQ for this group listed by decade:

Mean IQ for nonwhites (blacks excluded, N = 764)

1980s  88.4
1990s  93.0
2000s  94.0
2010s  92.4

(If you're familiar with the GSS, you know surveys were conducted in the 70s, but not enough native-born non-whites were surveyed to be included.)  Mean IQ improved for this group for 30 years (80s, 90s, 00s) but that has reversed in this decade.

This is consistent with most of the IQ trends I've looked at recently. This past decade has seen a downturn for every group I've looked at (all whites, English/Welsh, German, Italian, Mexican, East Asian) except for blacks and the Irish.

The cause of the fall in IQ is, I imagine, different for different groups, and I assume that the drop for non-whites (excluding blacks) is due to changes in the mix of immigrants.  Whatever the reasons, most trends do not look good for America. 

Despite what Nassim Taleb thinks, average IQ predicts quite well how a country performs, and the US seems headed for mediocrity.  This, of course, could be reversed if we were picky about who gets to come to America, and if intelligent citizens had more babies, while dull ones had fewer.