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Cities are IQ shredders theory I believe, except Jews were hit by it early so those with the highest fertility in urban environments have survived and now produce higher.
I think you mean to say that cities are fertility shredders. And yeah, I think it's very reasonable to hypothesize that (1) for hundreds if not thousands of years before the 20th century, if you lived outside of the city, chances are you and your family worked in agriculture; (2) if your family works in agriculture, there's a lot of incentive to have a lot of children since it means a very inexpensive source of labor for the farm; (3) if most of the community works in agriculture, then the culture will tend to value high fertility; (4) if a person (or a family) moves to the city, there is far less incentive to have a large family (and in fact there is the opposite incentive); (5) city culture can be expected to reflect this after a while, until of course cultural and genetic selection get you people and cultures who value large families even though it means cramped living conditions and spending a lot of time and money without much economic return; and (6) one would expect to see this change first in groups which have gone through the "fertility shredder."
That's why I think the idea of just copying Israel might not be all that effective as one might expect. Besides which, a large and fast-growing subset of the Israel population consists of ultra-religious types who don't contribute all that much to Israeli society.
The term "IQ shredders" was invented by Spandrell and popularized by Nick Land. It's a combination of fertility shredding with the attraction that cities present to young, intelligent, ambitious people.
If you are a talented young man or woman from the countryside or suburbs, chances are you move to New York or Singapore to make it, then fail to reproduce. Hence, IQ shredders.
I understand. My objection to this concept is that in the modern era most people live in and around cities. I don't know about Singapore, but in the last 150 years, lots of people (both smart and stupid) moved from rural areas to New York and their fertility took a hit as a result.
I concede that there might be an add-on effect of modernity which is that (perhaps) unusually smart and ambitious people are presented with opportunities that depress their fertility and that those opportunities are heavily concentrated in cities. That being said, I think it's pretty likely that if you researched the subject you would find that (1) among men in cities, IQ does not have much of a correlation with fertility; and (2) among women in cities, higher IQ definitely is associated with lower fertility. If that's so, the perhaps we could call cities "female IQ shredders"
Well, IQ is heritable from both parents, so a "Female IQ shredder" is just an IQ shredder.
Of course, the other element of the metaphor is that you're not just shredding for the sake of it: there have been a lot of productivity gains from the agglomeration effects of cities. "IQ shredders" points to the trade-offs present in urbanization.
To a large extent, I agree, but I think genetic and cultural evolution are flexible enough to select for different traits in men and women even as those men and women are combining their genes. So for example, it's very common to meet highly intelligent women who nevertheless have terrible senses of direction. So common that the difference is very obvious even without doing a formal study.
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I’ve seen the term IQ shredders but it’s close to what you are referring as fertility shredders. Cities also attract higher IQ folks. Then the population shredding kicks in. Which makes them at a society level IQ shredders since the new city folks are higher IQ then the people that stayed rural.
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They're called IQ shredders (by those who do) because the smart people move to the city and don't reproduce there, thus providing selection against IQ on a population basis.
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