You Can't Blame MAGA Entirely On Lower IQs
Last year, New Scientist published a report by Clare Wilson, Leaded Petrol May Have Lowered The IQ Of Over Half The U.S. Population. Well, there you go… that helps explain how Trump was elected, why 74,223,975 Americans voted for him after 4 years of his disastrous time in the White House and why he’s running away (57.4% in the Real Clear Politics polling average) with the Republican nomination this time. “Their results suggest half the current US population had elevated lead levels in their blood as children. Across the country, they estimate that lead exposure may have caused an average IQ drop of 2.6 points. People born in the mid-to-late 1960s may have lost an average of 5.9 points.”
I asked a Member of Congress if she thinks the IQ problem is a specifically Republican problem. She didn’t answer directly but noted that in The Fall, Michael Wolff quoted Rupert Murdoch saying that Sean Hannity is stupid: "He’s retarded, like all Americans," said Murdoch. The congresswoman also told that "Massive amounts of CO2 in poorly ventilated rooms is also a problem. CO2 interferes with brain functions starting at 850-900 ppm." She also suggested I read the actual study itself. Does this sound like they're describing MAGAts?
Childhood lead exposure has devastating lifelong consequences, as even low-level exposure stunts intelligence and leads to delinquent behavior. However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits. Personality influences nearly every aspect of human functioning, from well-being to career earnings to longevity, so effects of lead exposure on personality would have far-reaching societal consequences. In a preregistered investigation, we tested this hypothesis by linking historic atmospheric lead data from 269 US counties and 37 European nations to personality questionnaire data from over 1.5 million people who grew up in these areas. Adjusting for age and socioeconomic status, US adults who grew up in counties with higher atmospheric lead levels had less adaptive personality profiles: they were less agreeable and conscientious and, among younger participants, more neurotic. Next, we utilized a natural experiment, the removal of leaded gasoline because of the 1970 Clean Air Act, to test whether lead exposure caused these personality differences. Participants born after atmospheric lead levels began to decline in their county had more mature, psychologically healthy adult personalities (higher agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower neuroticism), but these findings were not discriminable from pure cohort effects. Finally, we replicated associations in Europeans. European participants who spent their childhood in areas with more atmospheric lead were less agreeable and more neurotic in adulthood. Our findings suggest that further reduction of lead exposure is a critical public health issue.
I also asked a professor friend of mine if an average drop in IQ is what accounts for the MAGA movement. She said that “A drop of a few IQ points may lead to slightly reduced cognitive abilities in areas such as problem-solving, abstract reasoning, and memory but, let's face it, political beliefs and affiliations are complex— influenced by a wide range of social, economic, and cultural factors. Sure, there’s no doubt at all that cognitive abilities play a role in political decision-making and that lower IQs mean, for example, less of an ability to discern the difference between real news and fake news. Anyone who reads your blog already knows that the QAnon members of Congress, Taylor Greene and Boebert, are ‘high functioning morons,’ if you’ll pardon the characterization. I’m guessing they have below average IQs, especially Boebert, but both of them… Neither has the capacity to figure out that QAnon is a joke. It's as real to them as actual news is to normal people.”
I grok; I grok. And that said, did you watch the new John Oliver show? He seems to be going in an entirely different direction in explaining why Trump has so many supporters— home schooling. Watch this:
But going back to what my friend said about “a wide range of social, economic, and cultural factors.” Yesterday, Reuters published a piece by Howard Schneider, US wealth, income concentration resume upward climb in post-pandemic era. Can that be creating MAGAts? “The richest Americans,” he wrote, “are emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with their share of wealth and income on the rise again despite some thought that the tight job market and hefty wage gains spawned by the crisis might narrow the gulf between rich and poor… For the bottom 40% by income that means a smaller slice of the pie even as their net worth has risen at the swiftest pace in years. While the collective net worth of the bottom one-fifth was up 27% to $4.2 trillion at the end of the second quarter from $3.3 trillion in 2019, their share of the country's wealth shrank to 6.7% from 7% during that time.
After a tumultuous period in which labor market leverage seemed to swell among lower-income families and less educated workers, with double-digit wage increases offered by companies struggling to fill less-skilled positions amid a broad worker shortage, the latest data shed a different light on what that has meant.
"If you think they have any leverage, it is leverage to what end?" said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank focused on labor issues. "Share matters because if profits have been so high, wages could have done even better."
Indeed, distributional questions have figured prominently in the ongoing United Auto Workers strike as union members try to claim a bigger share of automakers' earnings. They've also been a centerpiece of Biden administration efforts to bolster middle-class wages.
The pandemic economy started on a grim note of deep recession and a 14.5% unemployment rate in the spring of 2020. But a historic fiscal response boosted stock prices, real estate values and savings to produce a record of nearly $153 trillion in household net worth— the difference between all that is owned and all that is owed— by early 2022. A bear market for stocks as the Fed in 2022 kicked off an aggressive campaign to hike interest rates briefly clipped that by about $8 trillion, but a rebound this year ushered it back to a new high of $154 trillion.
The newest data suggest that trends of higher wealth and income concentration survived pretty much intact.
…Economists are looking for which pre-pandemic trends have resumed, which ones have changed, and which new ones are emerging.
The increase to 23.5% in the share of income going to the top 5% of earners, for example, seems to extend an income-concentration trend that began around 1980, when the highest paid households received around 16.5% of all income. The bottom 40% at that point received around 14.4% of earnings, versus the current 11.2%, while those in the 40th to 80th percentiles saw their share shrink to 36.5% from 41.5%.
Even though the bottom one-fifth have seen a robust increase in net worth since 2019, there have been times when that group has done better: Over a comparable period from mid-2016 up to the pandemic, its share of net worth rose 67% as the sluggish rebound from the 2007-2009 recession gave way to an era of low unemployment, low interest rates, low inflation and rising wages at the bottom of the scale.
What had been outsized gains for that group that topped 20% in some quarters earlier in the pandemic, roughly double that of other quintiles, have now slowed to a relative crawl.
Ever since Bill Clinton was president, Democratic policies have been more and more friendly towards the wealthy and— certainly in trade policy— catastrophic for the struggling working class. Clinton shoved through a trade agenda that George Bush the First tried and failed to do. Ever since, the Democratic Party’s grip on the working class has looseened, particularly working class whites (but that has been spreading out). Today’s Democratic Party is not an FDR coalition by any stretch of the imagination, which encompassed urban working-class voters, farmers, members of labor unions, progressives, Catholics, Jews, Southern Democrats and ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans.
Economic populism, stoked up anti-Establishment anger, a new permissibility to express racism, xenophobia and nationalism and shifts in GOP priorities (as well as the media landscape and personality-centric/cult leadership have all played a role in the rise of the MAGA movement.
Victoria Luevanos is one of the best candidates in Virginia trying to flip a Republican-held swing district state Senate seats. Yesterday, discussing an entirely different topic, she noted that “Voters must focus on what party and candidates are putting working people's interests in the forefront; economic indicators are showing Democrats and progressives are the ones promoting and passing legislation for the working class.”
Please consider helping Luevanos win her race— where she’s being outspent ten to one! You can contribute to her campaign here. She added that “This is such a unique year, it's a real game changer for the type of security and protections voters can achieve with the right candidates. We can get career politicians out, we can get corporate backed politicians out, and get candidates in who want to put you and your family first.”