I agree that there seems to be, on the whole, a downward trend of educated, critically thinking populace. The statistics and anecdotes align to make this clear. But I struggle to pick the cause. Certainly I don’t buy into the idea that there are rooms of politicians and school board members discussing how to keep the population uneducated.

Behind every outcome is an incentive. So what do you think is the incentive that’s behind the decline?

Realize first that there is no single incentive, there is a diversity of incentives to "let others do it", "let others worry about it" and various other variations of "let others...". A nearly helpless person is good for business, a frightened with money person is also good for business, and a reasoned careful, informed consumer is not good for business. These basic truths end up running nearly all of society, which creates the drive to prevent consumers from ever becoming discriminating informed and critically aware in virtually all things they are not paid to be "the expert".