[chabes]

> IQs within the country are going down, and nobody really knows why.

I’m no expert, but I have seen the public education system attacked and defunded for decades, at home and abroad. Even libraries are being shut down in places with enough anti-intellectual sentiment. This goes much deeper than the fluoride in water.

If you can point to IQ values of New York specifically, going down more significantly starting with the introduction of fluoride into the water system, then you might have something there.

Until then, policy discussions like this will continue to take focus from the things that actually have an impact on IQ, like public education, healthcare/nutrition, and poverty.

[somenameforme]

Education stuff is more of a political talking point than reality. In reality US education spending per student has continually increased and is always near the top of the world. As of 2019 we're 4th in the world for spending on elementary/secondary spending $15,500 per student contrasted against $11,300 for the OECD average. [1] Of course we are having increasingly poor educational outcomes in spite of spending more, more, and more. So if there is a causal relationship between the reversal of the Flynn Effect and poor educational outcomes, it would seem much more likely that the former is causing the latter.

And I'm certain one could trivially dig up data correlating the decline of IQ in New York to fluoridation. The Flynn Effect reversal began in the 90s, and New York began fluoridating their water in 1965, so there's an excellent age correlation there. But that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. What matters are more controlled studies determining definitively whether fluoride is intellectually harmful by using fluoride levels in urine to control for various confounding variables (people in the same regions getting fluoride from multiple sources, consuming more/less products with fluoride, etc). And we do have those studies, and the answer is yes it is.

That certainly doesn't mean it's the sole cause for the reversal of the Flynn Effect as its seen across the developed world, and many countries do not add fluoride to their water. But it is likely a contributing factor. In recent decades we have begun moving far faster than we're capable of evaluating the consequences of, and long-term consequences may well be stacking from multiple sources of mistakes.

[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

[chabes]

> Education stuff is more of a political talking point than reality. In reality US education spending per student has continually increased and is always near the top of the world.

This is disingenuous, and itself a political talking point.

> In reality US education spending per student has continually increased and is always near the top of the world.

It is much more nuanced than “money in equals IQ out”.

Where does the money end up? Not in classrooms, unfortunately.

What is the average ratio of teachers to students? Is this number going up, up, up?

Now do counselors, nurses, etc.

How much are teachers spending out of pocket for classroom supplies? Has this number gone down, down, down?