It is a modern conceit that intellectual progress has made modern generations smarter than those that preceded them.<p>A hundred years ago, far fewer people got advanced educations but those that did were thoroughly well-versed in the liberal arts (as classically defined), meaning that they had been grounded in Latin, rhetoric, and similar subjects that trained them to be highly articulate in their forms of expression (as is easily seen from a glance at these hearing transcripts).<p>Those who went on to become lawyers, politicians, etc. were indeed elitists but the best among them were highly talented, very bright, and quite capable of making many of our modern politicians look pathetic by comparison in their forms of expression.<p>The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is widely regarded as a classic high point in the venerable lineage of that work - whose aim, it is worth recalling, was to gather all the world's knowledge in an advanced and erudite state.<p>They may have used pen and paper back then, or sometimes typewriters - and their knowledge base was far smaller than what we have today - but we have nothing over them in terms of innate intellectual capacity.
100 years ago, education was rarer, but very strong. The records we have from those days are from the best and brightest.<p>Today, education is more broadly available. We can read the words of the brightest of our time, and the dimmest. They are all online for our reading pleasure.<p>So are we smarter? Are they smarter 100 years ago? Odds are, no to both questions. But we certainly have a visibility into the full spectrum of today's people. We don't have that view of olden folk. Our perspective will be skewed.
Summary: Accounts of the legislative hearings over the 1909 Copyright Act (which dealt with the newfangled invention of mechanically reproduced music) cover many of the same issues that are relevant today, but with all parties engaging in a much higher level of debate than is currently evident.<p>Guess they did better before we let the TV cameras in :-)
In computer terms: the CPU(s) and RAM of humans -- the wetware, if you will -- are presumably much the same, on average, as they were 100 years ago.<p>But it seems indisputable that we know how to deal effectively with more of life's threats and opportunities than we did back then.<p>(Again in computer terms, our libraries of event-detection and -handling routines are much more sophisticated than those of a century ago.)<p>As a simple example, just think of how much more more the average person knows about, say, healthy eating and the downside of smoking -- this isn't to say, of course, that there isn't still a lot of work to do in disseminating that knowledge.<p>So yeah, there seems little question that we are indeed 'smarter' (in the sense used above) than we were 100 years ago.