>>24868766
>However that still doesn't explain the fact that they say that the vocabulary of the population hasn't gone down.
It has gone down, for 40+ years. They literally said as much. The only way to reconcile those statements is that they meant, "on average, vocabulary hasn't gone down", or they're wrong. Those are the two options. The former implies significant growth of the vocabularies of some members of those younger cohorts and growth of the vocabularies of older cohorts to keep that number balanced. The latter is just as, if not more likely.
>The older people arent getting smarter, so the average would still be declining.
That's not true, vocabularies tend to increase until the age of about 65.
>>24868781
There's no reason whatsoever to believe those things are mutually exclusive of one another.
>>24868793
>why do they do this?
Simply put, because nobility and aristocracy are not based on merit. People with larger vocabularies are more capable of forming complex thoughts, expressing them to others, organizing others, and so more capable of creating problems for the people in charge. This is a problem itself, but a significantly more pronounced problem if the people in charge are not all that intelligent. That's an old problem in Europe that's led to all sorts of revolutions and in general suppressed intellects finding refuge in the new world. It's a newer problem in America, where many of those people fled to Largely, these people, the great thinkers and industrialists and movers and shakers, were fathers and grandfathers etc of the people in power now, and they've ridden their coattails into the halls of power and desperately seek to maintain their power. That's made even more difficult in the age of the internet, when nearly the whole of the world's collective knowledge is at the tips of an ever increasing numbers of people's fingertips. Censorship, panopticon surveillance, police states, the dumbing down of the general population through any means possible - chemicals, education, fear, etc. - and replacement of more intelligent, less compliant populations with less intelligent, more compliant ones - massive immigration, reduced birthrates through all sorts of means like feminism and birth control, destroying economic well being through exporting labor, etc.. Basically every social problem that we face conveniently meets the needs of a not-all-that-intelligent hereditary aristocracy desperately trying to cling to power.
