Ah, this should be good, I thought when I saw that somebody had assembled a list of “Ten States That Are Running Out of Smart People.” It’s the one thing that separates human beings from beasts – the ability to ridicule.

But, just as you’ll soon learn all over again in your NCAA tournament pool, things often don’t turn out as expected. There at No. 8 in the hall of shame, accompanied by a photograph of a barn and a windmill, was my favorite state, Iowa.

Literate, brow-furrowing Iowa, running out of smart people? It can’t be; we went to all that effort to brag about education on our state quarter, when we easily could have featured Herbert Hoover or a Berkshire hog.

It was bad enough when they tried to claim that our sweet, delicious high-fructose corn syrup is making America fat. America is just big-boned, that’s all.

But according to 24/7 Wall Street, we rank 35th among the states in the percentage of citizens with a bachelor’s degree or higher, and “reading scores among Iowa’s eighth-graders underwent the third-greatest decrease in the nation between 2003 and 2009 … With regards to math scores, the state ranks 49th out of all 50 states.”

I didn’t know it was that bad, but I knew trouble was coming.

When my kids first reported that they were learning how to round off and estimate the answers to math problems, which is like using a Ouija board to design a cantilever bridge, my trouble sense started to tingle. When I found out they were being allowed to use calculators to take tests, ominous music began to swell.

Finally, when the school board decided that it’s not crucial to find out exactly what “x” stands for as long as “x” is happy, I was suddenly able to shoot webs from my wrists. Now, in between meetings, I swing from one skyscraper to another in downtown Des Moines, fighting educational deficiency. Unfortunately, this limits me to just a couple of blocks, so it really isn’t helping very much.

It’s obvious that Iowa is on the wrong track, math-wise, which helps explain the state’s current budget situation. Maybe we should start out asking candidates about their stance on gay marriage but then at the last second demand to know the answer to 12 times 9.

Iowans have always seemed relatively intelligent, as long as you avoid stadium parking lots in the hours preceding football games. But maybe we really aren’t as sharp as we used to be. Instead of trying to get smarter, we’ve been trying to act more sophisticated.

Sophistication is OK, but the time required for thinking about art and wine leaves precious few hours for curling up with the latest best seller on algebra. Sophisticates go straight from work to cocktail parties, leaving it up to undocumented workers to clean up any unsolved equations lying around the house.

Even Iowans who have resisted sophistication have changed their habits. A couple of decades ago, we spent our weekends playing basketball, which calls for the ability to count by twos; or changing our oil, which requires you to count by quarts.

Now a perfect Iowa weekend centers on a trip to Jordan Creek Town Center, where shoppers can kill half a day looking for the perfect pair of blue jeans and don’t have to deal with numbers at all. That’s MasterCard’s problem.

Evolution brought us to this point, then ran out to the car to get something and never came back.

Let’s not ignore the issue. We should form math support groups. Concerned parents should speak up at school board meetings. Somebody should create an ad campaign comparing differential calculus to Lady Gaga in a favorable manner.

By the way, it’s 108. The answer to 12 times 9, I mean. It took a couple of sheets of paper, but still – not bad for a native Iowan, huh?

Jim Pollock is the editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by e-mail at jimpollock@bpcdm.com