Politics and intelligence...

Politics and intelligence...  You may remember the study from a few years ago that prompted headlines like “Conservatives stupider than liberals!”  The progressives had a field day with that.  I was skeptical of the result, partly because the test design seemed rather simplistic and prone to error.

This morning I ran across another study, with quite different results – and results that comport more closely with my own experiences.  The last sentence in the linked article is one that resonates particularly strongly with me:

As gratifying as Carl's research findings are, it is still a deep puzzle to me why it apparently takes high intelligence to understand that the government should stay out of both the bedroom and the boardroom.

If it's true that only people with higher than average intelligence love liberty (of all kinds), then demographics are dooming this country – because at least since the beginning of the 20th century there's a well-documented inverse correlation between IQ and fertility (that is, the higher one's IQ, the fewer children one tends to have).  Isn't that the drums of doom I'm hearing?

I'll add to the discussion this post I ran across a while back: basically it shows that the members of the Triple Nine Society (whose members have IQs above 99.9% of the overall population) hold very libertarian views on average.  One must add a strong caveat to this survey, though: it's from a self-selected group of triple-niners who want to be in such an organization.  I have no idea how that skews the data, but I'm pretty sure it does :)