The Bow of Ulysses

Why We’re Innovating Less and What It Means for Nationalism

Ever since I was a child, the presence of decline has weighed heavy about me. I think most people feel it too, but for whatever reason they can just ignore it—maybe they have to ignore it. But if you ask them a few questions, point out a few obvious things, most people will admit that by almost any metric that matters, we live in a worse world than our parents did.

Except in terms of technology. That seems to be getting better, right? Our parents didn’t have the internet, nor iPads with nicely rounded corners—but we do. Modern medicine is better than ever. Cars are more complicated, but generally more reliable with better fuel efficiency and less maintenance. All true. But if you look closely, you will notice that the rate of technical advancement has declined. Between 1880–1950 we went from most people burning whale oil and getting news from gossip to having TV and splitting the atom. In the same span, from 1950–2020, what have we achieved? Not nearly as much.¹ 1950 is a lot closer to 2020 than to 1880.

Technological advance follows scientific advance, and disruptive (quantum leap) science has declined since the 1950s.² This explains why we are now experiencing technological slowdown—there’s some lag between scientific and technological advance, and this decline is now being felt. But why is disruptive science declining?

One common progressive cope is that we’ve mastered all the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and only the really hard stuff is left. This is nonsense and betrays a non-understanding of how science works. We have more people working on these problems than ever, with better scientific instruments.³ Discovering the 3-4-5 triangle was way harder than Euclidian geometry because you have to invent mathematical abstraction. Developing Euclidian geometry was way harder than Newtonian physics because you have to formalize abstract objects, which aren’t real. Discovering Newtonian physics is harder than relativistic physics because etc. If we abstract away the human elements, scientific advance should be exponential because discoveries are a positive feedback loop.

But we can’t abstract away human elements because humans are entangled with their technical achievements. As Spengler says, to ask the question “since when has man invented?” is to ask the question “how long has man existed?”⁴ We are the technical animal. Between man and tool is a negative feedback loop—the more intelligent we are, the better our tools; the better our tools, the less selective pressure we face; the less selective pressure, the less intelligent we become. Technology is dysgenic. So much for the Fermi paradox.

Before I was political, I was worried about dysgenics. Even my untrained eye could see that Boomers, however gaslit about our founding mythos, were generally smarter and fitter (in their prime) than Gen X, Gen X more than Millennials, etc. In our lifetimes the decline has become so rapid that you can now see it, almost decade after decade. Decline is becoming harder to ignore, even if you have to ignore it to get out of bed in the morning.

Some people try to explain away decline by saying it can’t be happening. Typically, the reason given is that there are more smart people now than before, so innovation must be happening, maybe even faster than ever. Even apart from the counterargument of “just look around”, this explanation doesn’t make sense. It’s true that there are more very bright people than ever (~130 IQ), but very bright people don’t move the ball very far forward in science—you need genius for that (~180 IQ). Better technology depends on scientific paradigm shifts, and scientific paradigm shifts depend on genius. There are probably fewer geniuses today than ever.

To understand why there are fewer geniuses than ever, we have to understand two things:

1. How normal distribution works, and

2. That IQ has been trending downward for well over a century.

Let’s start with (2).