The Bigger Bell Curve: Intelligence, National Achievement, and The Global (a bit longish)

[Rick Parkany <rparkany@BORG.COM>]

Hmmmm..thanks for this from CyberCowGrrl, Karen Ellis...this research certainly
offers some food for thought and a whole lot of grist for a few grinding
wheels, doesn't it?

The important thing is to separate the grist from the meal in this, another
great triumph and delicious repast concerning the fruits of *measurement
theory* and what it tells us concerning public education and other such social
experiemtns...

.again, the strongest correlations seem to based upon *zip code* and other
economic factors, leaving asie the whole myriad of other intervening factors
that really don't add up to much of a difference at all, aside from those good
ol' boy indicators and predictors: wealth and power.

BTW:  no small coincidence that this article alludes to Adam Smith's great
treatise on Industrial Morality: *The Wealth of Nations* and that old *rising
tide lifts all boats* pap...   ;-} rap.

 Message 366 of 367
 From: CyberCowGrrl <duc@edu-cyberpg.com>
 To: DUC <duc@yahoogroups.com>
 Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 12:12:36 -0500
 Subject: [DUC] BOOK REVIEW: IQ and the Wealth of nations


 IQ and the Wealth of nations
 The Intelligence Of Nations
 A review By Philippe Rushton
 IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Richard Lynn and Tatu
 Vanhanen, Westport, CT: Praeger (2002), 256 pp., U.S.
 $64.95 (Hdbk.) ISBN 0-275-97510-X
 (Available from amazon.com)

 IQ and the Wealth of Nations. is a brilliantly-conceived, superbly-written,
 path-breaking book that does for the global study of economic prosperity
 what The Bell Curve did for the USA. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen examine
 IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 countries. They document that
 national differences in wealth are explained most importantly by
 the  intelligence levels of the populations. They calculate that mean
 national IQ correlates powerfully-more than 0.7-with per capita Gross
 Domestic Product (GDP). National IQs
 predict both long-term and short term economic growth rates. Second in
 importance is whether the countries have market or socialist economies.
 Only third is the widely-credited factor of natural resources, like oil.

 One arresting fact emerges: the average national IQ of the world is only
 90. Fewer than one in five countries have IQs equal or near the British
 average of 100. Almost half have IQs of 90 or less. This poses a serious
 problem if the book's conclusion that IQ = 90 forms the threshold
 for a technological economy is correct. Lynn and Vanhanen review the
 theories advanced over
 the last 250 years to explain why some countries are  rich  while others
 are poor.

 These include:
   climate theories (temperate zones are said to be best);
 geographic theories (an East-West Axis is said to be best);
 modernization theories (urbanization and division of  labor are said to be
 good);
 dependency theories (exploitationand peripheralization of poor nations are
 said to be bad);
 neoliberal theories (market economies are said to be good);
 psychological theories (cultural values like thriftiness, the Protestant
 Ethic, and motivation for
 achievement are said to be good). Some of these factors no doubt play a
 role. But it turns out that IQ that  does the heavy lifting.

 Next, Lynn and Vanhanen review the scientific literature and find that IQ
 is an important determinant of educational attainment, earnings, economic
 success, etc. In the United States and Britain, the correlation between IQ
 and earnings for individuals is approximately 0.35. (That is, cleverness is
 a fairly loose guarantee of economic success for an individual, but is
 significant across an entire population. If you bet on it at a gaming table
 you wouldn't win on every throw,but you would make a lot of money over an
 evening.) Of course, it makes sense that intelligence determines earnings.
 Moreintelligent people learn more quickly, solve problems more effectively,
 can be trained to acquire more complex skills, and work more productively
 and efficiently.
 Nations whose people have high IQ levels also have high educational
 attainment and large numbers of individuals who make significant
 contributions to national life. On
 the flipside, nations with low levels of intelligence  have  low levels of
 educational attainment and few individuals who make significant
 contributions. Low intelligence leads to unfavorable social outcomes like
 crime, unemployment, welfare dependency, and single motherhood.

 Lynn and Vanhanen prove that the widespread though rarely stated assumption
 of economists and political scientists-that all peoples and nations have
 the same average IQ-is wildly wrong. Their evidence documents substantial
 national differences in average intelligence.

 The highest average IQs are found among the Oriental countries of North
 East Asia (average IQ = 104), followed by the European nations (average IQ
 = 98), and the mainly White populationsof North America and Australasia
 (average IQ = 98). Further behind are the countries of South and Southwest
 Asia, from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia (average IQ
 = 87), as are the countries of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands
 (average IQ = 86), and Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85). Lowest
 are the countries of Africa (average IQ = 70). Lynn and Vanhanen find that
 some countries do have higher or lower per capita incomes than their
 national IQ averages would predict. This is where having a market or
 socialist economy or sitting atop a sea of crude oil comes in.

 Some of the countries with a higher per capita income than would be
 predicted from theiraverage IQs are Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium,
 Canada, Denmark,France, Ireland, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa,
 Switzerland, and the U.S. Except for Qatar, South Africa,
 and Barbados, all of these are technologically highly developed market
 economies. Qatar's exceptionally high per capita income comes from oil
 exporting, which is actually managed and controlled by corporations and
 people from European and North American countries. South Africa's much
 higher than expected per capita income derives from the high performance of
 the industries established and managed by the country's European minority.
 Similarly, Barbados's above average wealth comes from its well-established
 tourist industryand financial services, which are owned, controlled
 andmanaged by American and European countries.

 Some of the countries with lower per capita income than would be predicted
 from their average IQ: Bulgaria, China, Hungary, Iraq, South Korea, the
 Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and Uruguay. Most ofthese
 are present or former socialist countries. Iraq
 has suffered from losing the Gulf War and a decade of UN trade sanctions.
 The large amount of ethnic conflict inthe Philippines decreased growth.

 Lynn and Vanhanen provide a detailed examination how well IQ theory stacks
 up against its competitors. For example, two significant exceptions to the
 view that a tropical climate is detrimental to wealth are Singaporeand Hong
 Kong, which lie in the tropical zone but are
 rich. Conversely, Lesotho and Swaziland are temperate, lying slightly south
 of the Tropic of Capricorn, but poor. These differences, however, can be
 explained in terms of intelligence theory. The people of Singapore and Hong
 Kong belong to the ethnic group with the highest average  IQs; the people
 of Lesotho and Swaziland belong to the ethnic group with the lowest.
 Modernization theories, according to which all economies would evolve from
 subsistence agriculture through to various stages of urbanization and
 industrialization,
 have worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim but have failed for the
 four remaining groups of nations (South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Latin
 America, and sub-Saharan Africa).
 IQ and the Wealth of Nations proposes that modernization theories describe
 Western Europe and the Pacific Rim because these countries have appreciably
 the same or somewhat higher IQs than in the United States. But they did not
 work for the other four groups of countries because average IQs are below
 the technological threshold. But why did the peoples of East Asia, with
 their high
 IQs, lag behind the European peoples until the second half of the 20th
 Century? Well, China's science and technology were generally more advanced
 than Europe's for around two thousand years, from about 500 B.C. up to
 around 1500 A.D. But in the 15th century, Chinese inventiveness came to an
 end and from that time on virtually all the important advances were made by
 Europeans, first in Europe and later in the U.S. The explanation may be
 that Europeans developed the market economy, while China stagnated through
 authoritarian bureaucracy and centralplanning.

 The failure of Japan to develop economically until the late 19th century is
 largely attributed to a regulated economy and isolation from the rest of
 the world. By 1867-68 a revolution occurred and the new rulers embarked on
 a program to modernize Japan by adopting Western education and technology,
 and by freeing up theeconomy by transforming state monopolies into private
 corporations. Much of the Japanese economic success in the 20th century was
 built by adopting inventions made in the West, improving them, and selling
 them more competitively in world markets. Japan thereby built up its
 motorcycle, automobile, shipbuilding, and electronics
 industries. Although it is sometimes asserted that the Japanese have not
 made any significant scientific and technological innovations of their own,
 this underestimates their technological achievements: the fiber-tipped pen
 (1960), "bullet" trains traveling at 210 km per hour, much faster than any
 Western trains (1964), laser radar (1966), quartz watches (1967), VHS video
 home systems (1976), flat screen televisions using liquid crystal display
 (1979), video discs (1980), CD-ROM (read only memory) disks (1985), digital
 audio tape (1987), and digital networks for sending signals along coaxial
 cables and optical fibers (1988).African countries are at the opposite pole
 from China and Japan in national IQ. This may explain why they are such a
 major anomaly for modernization theory. The low rate of economic growth of
 African countries following theirindependence from colonial rule in the
 1960s is one of the major problems in developmental economics. During the
 years 1976-98, the average rate of economic growth per capita GNP of the 41
 countries of sub-Saharan Africa for which data are available is much lower
 than in the rest of the world. Many of the African countries actually
 suffered negative per capita growth rate. Economists have quantified all
 possible factors, such as climate, ethnic diversity, geography,
 mismanagement, unemployment and the like, and compared the situation
 to elsewhere in the world, especially Asia. They concluded that these
 factors do not provide a complete explanation and that there is some
 "missing element."

 Some have suggested the low level of "social capital," i.e., the widespread
 corruption and lack of trust in commercial relationships, poor roads and
 railways, unreliable telephones and electricity supplies, and the
 prevalence of tropical diseases such as malaria. IQ and the Wealth of
 Nations identifies IQ as the missing link. Some of these "social capital"
 are actually manifestations of a low level of intelligence in the
 populations. Poor telephone services and electricity
 supplies, low agricultural yields, and the poor advice given by government
 advisory boards reflect low averageIQ. With a mean IQ of 70, the
 populations of Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic
 growth achieved elsewhere in the world.
 Finally, Lynn and Vanhanen peer into the future. They predict future growth
 is most likely in countries with high national IQ scores but currently bad
 economic systems.

 The countries of the former Communist Bloc-Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and
 Romania, and the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam-are good bets.

 What else can be done? Lynn and Vanhanen also list some of the factors,
 some environmental and some genetic, that might raise IQ scores and
 somewhat alleviate the disparities in national average IQ. Theseinclude:
 better nutrition, education and health; and ending the dysgenic fertility
 trends where the lowest IQ people produce the most children. (Obviously,
 immigration policy has a role to play too.) The take-home message of IQ and
 the Wealth of Nations: national differences in IQ are here to stay and so
 is the gap between the rich and the poor countries.
 Political promises that the gap is temporary, and will be remedied by aid
 from rich countries to poor countries, or even by poor countries adopting
 appropriate institutions, will not be fulfilled. Such promises assume that
 all human populations have equal mental abilities to adopt modern
 technologies and to achieve equal levels of economic development. They do
 not. The authors sound a clarion call for the recognition of national and
 race differences in intelligence.

 Adapted from:
 The Bigger Bell Curve: Intelligence, National Achievement, and The Global
 Economy, 22 October 2001, (PDF version) in Elsevier Science journal
 Personality and Individual Differences)
 Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University of Western
 Ontario and the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History
 PerspectiveFebruary 27, 2002

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