You think we’re stupid? Just because we let a smirking doofus steal our presidential election and lead us into a bogus war? Come on, that was years ago! Let bygones be bygones. Besides, didn’t we just elect the most fab president ever? Maybe you think we’re stupid because a bunch of slicks who went to our fanciest schools just trashed the banking systems from here to Iceland (sorry ’bout that), after which we gave them a ton of money so they could take home huge bonuses and laff it up while the rest of us eat tainted peanut butter. OK, OK, mistakes were made. But we gave you the Internet, didn’t we? Jeez, cut us a little slack.
Actually, Geert, as unbelievable as it seems, you can’t find much solid evidence that Americans are any dumber than Europeans or the rest of the world, for that matter. Not saying we’re not—just that proof is hard to come by, mostly because of the utter impossibility of even defining, let alone measuring, smartness and dumbness.
In IQ and Global Inequality (2006), a couple of European academics named Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen took a stab at ranking the intelligence quotients of 190 countries. Not surprisingly (given that Western scientists cooked up the tests), they found the United States and other industrialized nations clustered right around the average score of 100. They listed the mean IQ of the United States, France, and Denmark at 98, Germany at 99, the UK and the Netherlands at 100. At the top of their list were Japan, Taiwan, and China at 105, North and South Korea at 106, and Hong Kong and Singapore at 108. Of course, the very idea of the intelligence quotient is highly controversial, and some of the authors’ figures have been roundly criticized; in certain cases, they seem to have been little better than guesses. If you want proof that Europeans are smarter than Americans, help yourself, but me, I’m not so sure. Maybe we can use literacy as a measure of smarts. According to the CIA (and we all know how smart they are: Intelligence is their middle name), adult literacy in the United States is about the same as in Australia, Canada and Europe. If you want to use higher education as your yardstick, the U.S. fares a little better: a 2005 study by the Educational Policy Institute showed the U.S. had the highest college attainment rate of 13 peer countries (10 in Europe plus the U.S., Canada, and Australia), with 31 percent of those between ages 25 and 34 having completed a four-year degree.
But even if Americans aren’t innately dumber than Europeans, that doesn’t mean we ain’t ignorant. The question before us asks if Americans are “stupid and/or blind as far as the rest of the world is concerned,” and on the second part of that formulation we have to plead guilty as charged. All it takes is a vacation to know that Europeans are way more likely to speak our language than we are to speak theirs, and to know and care a lot more about our business than we do about theirs. Why? Probably because we’re greedy, smug and self-centered. But in our defense, let me point out that we live in a big, big country. Travel 500 miles in Europe and you might go through several languages and national histories. (And only 10 years ago, you would have needed several currencies.) If I travel 500 miles, I’m in Pennsylvania. Or Nebraska. Same language, same money, same media, same bad food. As a nation we’re just a little unclear on the concept of foreign countries.
Besides, we apparently don’t really need to know much about the rest of the world. According to Baylor University polling, 55 percent of Americans believe they have an advantage that surely outweighs any intellectual deficiencies: A guardian angel.
Comments, questions? Take it up with Cecil on the Straight Dope Message Board, StraightDope.com, or write him at the Chicago Reader, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611.
