U.S. jobs may be requiring more intelligence than the labor force can provide, driving employers to automate low-paying service and manufacturing jobs.

In a presentation at the International Society for Intelligence Research in San Francisco, Earl Hunt, professor emeritus of psychology, said the intelligence required by current jobs does not match the distribution of intelligence in the population.

The brightest people in the population outnumber jobs that require such intellect, while there are too many jobs that require people with slightly below average intelligence, and not enough people to fill them.

"It's not politically correct to say we need people with more intelligence, yet it is P.C. to say we need more problem-solvers," Hunt said. "But we're saying the same thing."

Hunt, along with co-researcher Tara Madhyastha, used the Department of Labor's O*Net dictionary of more than 700 job titles to analyze the abilities accountants, asparagus sorters and zoologists for their particular jobs.

An accountant, for instance, may need to be good with numbers, but doesn't need good spatial orientation, while the reverse may be true for a crane operator.

Hunt and Madhyastha used these descriptors and available intelligence testing data to assign a required general intelligence, or IQ, for each of these jobs.

When Hunt and Madhyastha looked at the distribution of required IQs for the entire labor market and compared them with the actual IQ distribution of the American population, they found small mismatches.

"There are more people than jobs at the high level, but at the middle we're beginning to get short," said Hunt. "It's an employer's nightmare. You need people who are there in the population, but those people are already employed, so you take people below the desired level. They'll just be a little harder to train."

This shortage is driving employers to eliminate domestic, low-skilled workers through automation, outsourcing and immigration, he said.

On the other end of the spectrum, the shortage of highly-trained specialists is not due to a lack of talent, Hunt said.

"The reason we have a shortage is because we're not offering enough inducements to get highly intelligent people to take the training," he said. "Other things than your intellect determine what job you take."

Madhyastha said the data provides a strong argument for vocational structure and routing through the UW.

Instead of taking high school courses that offer few concrete job skills, students could learn a trade like carpentry or sewing, she said.

"If you have a highly available workforce that is trained quickly, employers have much less motivation to automate," she said.

Intelligence distribution across populations is not fixed, and actually varies between different countries, Hunt said.

"You increase your general mental capacity with schooling," he said.

Therefore, it is possible to increase the number of bright people in the population by simply offering them a good education in the first place.

Overhauling the school system, however, won't solve the immediate problem of a labor shortage for lower-skilled workers, Hunt said.

Even if the United States completely restructured the educational system immediately, it would take 18 years before those students entered the workforce.

"The problem is the low quality of schooling and the attitudes of the students," Hunt said. "Improving education is a massive effort that will take a long time, and requires social changes that many people won't want to make."

Reach reporter Tia Ghose at news@thedaily.washington.edu.