Cremieux Recueil vs. Flynn Effect: Charles Dickens vs. Charles Babbage distinction

Why did raw scores on IQ tests go up in the second half of the 20th Century?

The extraordinary human sciences analyst Cremieux Recueil offers two analyses of the inordinately complex question of the Flynn Effect: as political philosopher James Flynn admirably documented in an epistolary debate with psychometrician Arthur Jensen during the 1970s and 1980s, in, roughly, the second half of the 20th Century, average raw scores on IQ tests tended to go up about three points per decade, forcing publishers to renorm (i.e., toughen) scoring standards every couple of decades or so.

In the more general first post, Cremieux Recueil documents that it’s far from proven that people were getting more intelligent while their IQ test scores were rising. In the more specific second post, he (or she, I have no idea who Cremieux Recueil is) rejects the most bread-and-butter explanation for the Flynn Effect, Richard Lynn’s theory that just as better nutrition was making people taller, so was it making them smarter.

Note that James Flynn and Richard Lynn were, despite the similarity of their names and intellectual interests, (very) different people.

I know vastly less about the Flynn Effect than Cremieux Recueil does, but my theory for the last decade, has been that the developers of IQ testing in the first half of the 20th Century did a good job of anticipating how the world would develop in the second half of the 20th Century, so by 1950 IQ tests were more attuned to how people on average thought in 2000 than how they thought in 1950.

Thus, the Flynn Effect tended to be much larger on the futuristic-looking Raven’s Progressive Matrices than on the traditional Information, Arithmetic, and Vocabulary subtests of the Wechsler IQ test.

My guess is that IQ test designers like John C. Raven in 1936 went out of their way to design tests that were much less culturally biased than you’d expect.