Survival of the Fittest?
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| The Global Bell Curve (Dec. 2002) |
| The Definitive Word on Intelligence (Sep. 1998) |
| Race and Intelligence: The Evidence (Nov. 1992) |
| Research That Was to Prove Jensen Wrong Proves Him Right (Mar. 1994) |
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| IQ and Global Inequality By Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen Washington Summit Publishers, 2006 316 pp.; $34.95 (hardcover). $17.95 (softcover) |
Ever since the time of the ancient Greeks—and probably well before—people have wondered why some people are rich and others are poor. For most of human history, they assumed it was because people are not born with the same abilities. In The Republic, Plato wrote that babies come into the world with different inherited natures, and that if the most able men had children with the most able women they would produce an intelligent ruling class. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who planted many of the seeds of liberal foolishness, believed abilities were fixed. Alexis de Tocqueville was impressed by the equality of conditions in America, but thought there could never be complete equality because people are innately unequal: “differences of ability originate from God or from nature.”
Today, of course, the fashion in the West is to claim that environment counts for everything and that the right “programs” would ensure equality.
IQ and Global Inequality, is a return to common sense. It demonstrates virtually irrefutably that just as differences in intelligence largely explain individual differences in wealth and social status within societies, differences in average intelligence explain national differences in wealth and well-being.
Together, the authors bring great wisdom and scholarship to the question of inequality. Tatu Vanhanen, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Tempere, Finland, has written many books, among them the little-known classic, Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism (reviewed in “The Anatomy of Ethnic Conflict,” AR, June 2002). Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster in Ireland, has written no fewer than four books that have been reviewed in AR—a record. IQ and Global Inequality is an expanded version of IQ and the Wealth of Nations, which the same authors wrote in 2002 (see “The Global Bell Curve,” AR, Dec. 2002), but is now out of print.
Conventional Theories
Ever since decolonization in the 1960s, the wealthy white nations have made two key assumptions about poor countries: that bad government policies have made them poor, and that the West must help them get rich. White countries have therefore poured billions of dollars into the tropics and endlessly lectured Third-World dictators on market economies, capital formation, and deregulation. The West has tried debt forgiveness, foreign investment, subsidized education, and birth-control clinics, but many countries are still poor. In 2002, William Easterly wrote in The Elusive Quest for Growth that nothing really works, that “aid will not cause its recipients to increase their investments; they will use aid to buy more consumption goods.” Still, many people persist in believing that if rich countries tried harder, the whole world would be middle class. As the head of the United Nations Development Program said in 1997: “Poverty is no longer inevitable. The world has the material and natural resources, the know-how, and the people to make a poverty-free world a reality in less than a generation.”
Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen argue otherwise. First they note that regional inequality is only a few centuries old. Up until about 1400, virtually everyone everywhere barely got by. Since then, in some countries, whole populations have climbed well beyond the subsistence level, and in the last 200 years a few nations have pulled sharply ahead. The authors also note that some poor countries made good progress in the last 60 years while others went backwards. Before the Second World War, hunger was mostly limited to non-colonized Asia. Now it is mainly a problem in decolonized Africa. In East Asia, the number of people living on less than one dollar a day has dropped sharply, while it has risen in South Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen point out why conventional theories about underdevelopment cannot explain these things: “they do not pay any serious attention to human diversity.” Some societies stay poor because their populations are not, on average, intelligent enough to run an efficient economy.
The authors begin their analysis of intelligence with a short history of IQ testing, and explain concisely why IQ has a heritability of approximately 0.88 and is so little subject to environment. Aside from twin studies, some of the most persuasive evidence comes from ordinary families. IQ scores in childhood predict adult socio-economic status better than parental status does. Some 25 percent of children will end up with higher or lower status than their parents, and IQ is the best indicator of which way they will go. Likewise, within the same family, children with the highest IQs tend to be the most successful. IQ, then, is one of the best predictors of virtually every desirable—or undesirable—social outcome. Smart people tend to make more money, get more education, commit fewer crimes, have fewer illegitimate children, stay healthier, and live longer than dim people.
The main argument of this book, as it was with IQ and the Wealth of Nations, is that just as an individual’s intelligence explains a great deal about him, the average intelligence of a nation’s population explains a great deal about it. The central methodology of this book, therefore, is to compare IQ data for different nations to national well-being. The authors have found good testing data for no fewer than 192 countries, and have left out only tiny places like Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino, Lichtenstein, Nauru and Tuvalu.
Clearly, there are better IQ data for some countries than others, but this book probably reflects the most thorough compilation of world-wide intelligence testing reports available anywhere, and includes an extensive listing of the sources. Where possible, Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen have cross-referenced IQ data to international comparisons in such things as mathematics ability; high national IQ scores correlate closely with high academic ability.
There are many measures of national well-being, and the authors have chosen a mix of five such measures against which to plot IQ. The first is per capita gross national income. This is modified to reflect purchasing power parity because the same dollar often buys more in a poor country than in a rich one. The second measure of national well being is adult literacy, and the third is the percentage of the population with post-secondary education. The authors note that above a certain percentage, the number of people in college probably has little impact on the economy. Higher education becomes a consumer good rather than career training—especially in rich countries where large numbers of college-educated women are mothers first and workers second—but the extent to which it is a self-improving luxury is a sign of a nation’s wealth and priorities.
The fourth measure of well-being the authors chose is life expectancy at birth, and the fifth is the level of democratization. Democracy will strike many readers as both hard to measure and of secondary importance in evaluating a nation, but one theory is that representative governments arise when wealth is so widespread that no single group can dominate the others.
Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen have calculated a composite of these five measures, which they call the Index of Quality of Human Conditions. They crosscheck this index and its components against the UN’s Human Development Index, which includes such things as undernourishment and infant mortality. They also mention other measures like the corruption index (Mohammed Suharto is reported to have embezzled as much as $34 billion from Indonesia at a time when its gross domestic per capita income was less than $700 per person), and measures of national happiness.
The theory of this book is that IQ has a strong positive correlation with the Index of Quality of Human Conditions (QHC), and of course it does. The chart immediately to the left plots QHC on a scale of 0 to 100 against IQ for 192 countries. The regression line on the chart shows a very solid correlation, which will surprise only the most militant IQ-atheists. Countries full of smart people are better places to live than countries full of dullards.
The chart above plots national IQ against national per capita gross income alone. Here, the regression line is a curve, and suggests that an increase in average IQ at the lower levels—from the 60s to the lower 80s, for example—does not produce much economic benefit. It seems that only in societies with an average IQ at least in the mid-80s is there the capacity to build a modern economy that produces real wealth. IQ increases from that point produce very significant gains.
Perhaps the most interesting results, however, are the outliers—the countries that fall well above or below the trend lines. Which countries are more of a success or failure than one would expect from the intelligence of their populations—and why? The The table immediately below lists the outliers in both directions. Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen use the term “residuals” to describe either negative or positive distance from the trend line, and have measured that distance in standard deviations.
According to this table, which some readers will find the most fascinating in the book, there are four countries with positive residuals of as many as four or five standard deviations (SDs) as calculated by plotting IQ against the five components of the Index of Quality of Human Conditions. This does not mean that Barbados and St. Kitts, for example, outscore Norway and Switzerland in QHC. It means that these four countries are vastly better off—by four or five SDs—than national IQ alone would have predicted. The authors note that they are all island nations and popular tourist destinations. A huge influx of wealthy whites has been a great benefit to these countries.
Otherwise, the 34 countries with positive residuals of two or three SDs are the ones one would expect: advanced Western democracies and oil producers. Equatorial Guinea is two SDs better off than expected, not because it is a pleasant place to live—it is a pesthole—but because oil money has pushed it above the level at which its low national IQ would otherwise have kept it.
The countries with substantial negative residuals also show certain patterns. Many have fought civil wars, and many are former communist countries. Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen note that Muslim countries tend to end up among the underperformers because they do not educate women, and thus deny themselves the benefits of a more capable population. Also, they have generally kept out Christian missionaries, who educated the early leaders of many former colonies. Two countries—Singapore and Hong Kong—are in this group, not because they are miserable places but because they fall short of what is promised by very high average national IQs in the 105—110 range.
China has great potential in terms of IQ but has been held back by terrible government. From about 1000 to 1500 AD it was more advanced than Europe but it stagnated under imperial rule and suffered grievously under Communism. Now that its rulers have understood the importance of private initiative it is catching up quickly.
The table above has grouped the 192 countries of this study into regions so as to offer a racial comparison. The headings in the table repeat the five components of the Index of Quality of Human Conditions. N is the number of countries in the group or region, IQ is average IQ for the group, QHC is the Quality of Human Conditions score, PPP GNI is per capita gross national income expressed in dollars, Literates is the percentage of the adult population that can read, Tertiary Enrollment is the percentage of adults who have gone to college, LE is life expectancy, and ID is index of democratization.
The comparisons are instructive. Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen find that the Middle East and North Africa, with an ID of 6.0 is even less democratic than Sub-Saharan Africa with an ID of 7.7. Otherwise, back Africa is at the bottom on all counts. East Asia is clearly not meeting the potential that is suggested by a regional IQ that is almost 10 points higher than that of Europe and its offshoots.
The graph above plots the average IQs of the six regions set out in the previous table against Quality of Human Conditions. The results are not surprising, expect perhaps for the large positive residual for Latin America and the Caribbean, which are probably explained by tourist activity in the Caribbean and close American involvement in Latin America. Although the authors do not say so, the graph also explains the direction of mass immigration. People move out of areas with low QHC scores into white countries with high scores. They would be pouring into Korea and Japan if those countries would let them. If enough lower-IQ immigrants arrive they will, of course, lower the QHC scores of the receiving nations.
One interesting peripheral finding in this book is that IQ correlates better with life expectancy than with any other measure of well-being. High national income simply by itself does not seem to improve life expectancy. For example, oil producing countries may have high incomes but this does not mean their populations live any longer than would be expected based on national IQ.
In this connection, the authors note that in the year 1000, life expectancy at birth is thought to have been essentially the same everywhere in the world: about 24 years. By 1820, the regional variations were as great as they are today, though since the 19th century life expectancy has doubled everywhere.
Profs. Lynn and Vanhanen report a number of interesting parallels, one of which is the very strong correlation of 0.806 between national IQ and what is called the Monaco-Uganda index, or the shape of the population pyramid. Uganda is at one extreme, with a young population and a squat pyramid. Monaco is at the other, with a population “pyramid” that looks like a telephone pole: Each age group survives largely intact into old age, and each generation essentially replaces itself rather than reproduce frantically. The closer a country is to the Monaco model, the higher its national IQ is likely to be.
Another measure of national well-being can be constructed by asking people to rate themselves on various scales of how happy they are. The results, at least at the national level, have no correlation with IQ. The smartest populations are no more likely than the stupidest to say they are happy. There is a modest correlation between happiness and per capita income—extreme misery must make people unhappy—and a weak one with life expectancy.
The authors point out that if neither wealth nor intelligence are necessary for happiness, international development efforts may be misguided. It is hard, probably impossible, to drag most poor countries out of poverty. But if rich countries insist on believing it is their responsibility to help the poor, it may be possible to shore up whatever it is in poor countries that makes people happy.
No one will try this, however, because the people of rich white countries think everyone wants to be just like them: rich, urban, college educated, only moderately religious, sexually “liberated,” and committed consumers who have small families and representative government. An inability to imagine that anything else could be fulfilling is part of the unacknowledged arrogance of the West.
The Heart of the Question
As usual, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have gone straight to the heart of a vitally important question. They have shown the folly of trying to implement development policies without regard to the limits set by national IQ. Nations, just like individuals, differ dramatically in their abilities, and in the kind of instruction from which they can profit.
The great obstacle these remarkable authors face is hysterical liberalism that refuses to recognize group differences in IQ. An American society that thinks—or at least pretends to think—that Congress can pass laws that will bring black test scores up to the white level is too deluded to understand why Africa is poor and Japan and Korea are rich. This book should have been published by a major New York house. Instead, it bears the imprint of a plucky but small regional publisher that does not have the muscle to get it widely reviewed or carried in book stores.
This book is mainly about the inability of the West to understand Third-World economies. At a deeper level, it is about the inability of the West even to understand itself.
(Posted on November 30, 2007)
Comments
“…The chart above plots national IQ against national per capita gross income alone. Here, the regression line is a curve…”
The alleged “curve” in the regression line is due to the failure to take the logarithms of the per caput income data. Taking the logs makes each equal portion of the scale show the same PERCENTAGE change, and would remove the curve. (That is, the curve would become a straight line.) (I have done this.)
I pointed this out to La Griffe du Lion, and he became snotty and accused me of playing games with numbers. I guess that’s more fun than admitting to being wrong.
btw Capita is plural, caput is singular. Per caput means per person…
Posted by belle kerve at 8:17 PM on November 30
“An American society that thinks—or at least pretends to think that Congress can pass laws that will bring black test scores up to the white level is too deluded to understand why Africa is poor and Japan and Korea are rich”
I have faith in the social workers. I think the same social workers (themselves deluded) who have convinced us, the west is backward while the third-world is noble, that women, not men, are unprotected by society, and are singularly in need of even more protections, and that whites, with higher IQ’s, are the ignorant ones; I think these same social workers can close the IQ gap.
The longer the achievement gap exists, the more the educators re-double their efforts at blaming the failure on whites. The more they pass laws and fund programs that disadvantage whites. We (the social workers) are really talking about erasing the achievement gap, not the IQ gap. It’s already been brought up here: non-whites with the same IQ and education as whites, out achieve (out earn) whites. I think the social workers can achieve their goal.
Kurt Vonnegut, in his story ‘Harrison Bergeron’ envisioned a world of ‘political correction’ gone mad. In the story, fast people were made to carry heavy weights around in order to make them slow. The fastest were made to carry crushing weights. Beautiful people were surgically altered to make them ugly. Harrison, who was a genius, was surgically fitted with an instrument blaring loud noises in his head so he could never think.
They’ll close the gap, brilliant as his arguments are, even if it means bringing us all down.
Maybe I haven’t been keeping up with current events here, but, isn’t this program well under way?
Posted by at 1:31 AM on December 1
When equal opportunities finally come my way and I get myself a decently paid civil service job here in the UK (and some decent accommodation) this book will be one of the first on my agenda of ‘must reads’.
Posted by at 8:59 AM on December 1
My theeory is this: Take all the money away from everyone. Divide it equally among everyone. And within one year the Rich would be Rich again and the Poor would be right back where they started. It’s an attitude about money and the ability to manage it.
Posted by Economical Facts 101 at 9:57 AM on December 1
The “Liberal” (what an ironic oxymoron) establishment will strive to ban searching for truth in this area because new discoveries may prompt racial profiling and discrimination.
Dark ages of Inquisition are comming.
Posted by A Reader at 11:57 AM on December 1
from the article - “The main argument of this book, as it was with IQ and the Wealth of Nations, is that just as an individual’s intelligence explains a great deal about him, the average intelligence of a nation’s population explains a great deal about it.”
If the above is true the best days for the United States are long gone. The IQ average of our nation must be going down with this mass migration of hispanics from the third world.
Posted by Robert at 12:48 PM on December 1
My theeory is this: Take all the money away from everyone. Divide it equally among everyone. And within one year the Rich would be Rich again and the Poor would be right back where they started. It’s an attitude about money and the ability to manage it.
Posted by Economical Facts 101 at 9:57 AM on December 1
> I disagree, mainly with the timeline. Much longer, and perhaps a generation turn would be required. Anyway, who thinks Paris Hilton is a good money manager?
Posted by Whiteplight at 2:48 PM on December 1
“Anyway, who thinks Paris Hilton is a good money manager?”
She knows that spending drives the economy…
Posted by juan manured keynes at 4:07 PM on December 1
Anyway, who thinks Paris Hilton is a good money manager?
Actually she is. And if she doesn’t do it herself she is intelligent enough to pay someone who is good to do it for her. Paris Hilton is actually one of the smartest celebrities out there(not hard, I know, but bear with me). Everything she does is calculated for the maximum amount of media and money. Say what you want about her, but she earns.
Posted by at 6:07 PM on December 1
The authors have not fully accounted for cultural factors. IQs are indeed high in the Far East but the people have a strong inclination for authoritarian governments and social institutions. These institutions repress wealth-creating attitudes and individuals (this has been true for thousands of years). They also misjudge what factors should be considered as indices of social well-being. The wealthy Western nations they rate so highly all have negative population growth and high immigration rates. These are indices of social degeneration, not well-being!
Posted by at 12:39 PM on December 2
Economical facts 101 is quite right. Being rich and aquiring wealth is partly about having a certain mentality and outlook. By the way, although it is true she was born on third base Paris Hilton has done much to accumulate wealth for herself. She made a lot of money from that fast food commercial and from the sex tape. She is using her name recognition to grow her inherited wealth very nicely. She is a lot smarter then she seems.
Posted by at 12:49 PM on December 2
I won’t say intelligence isn’t important, but I believe that work ethic and initiative are equally important traits.
It seems that Africans can’t feed themselves. Agriculture is a science, but farming at its most basic level doesn’t require a post-secondary education or immense intelligence; so why are third-world countries starving?
Posted by Dylan at 2:17 PM on December 2
“so why are third-world countries starving?”
Ah - the enlightened would blame this all on the evils of capitalism, and on a vast, perhaps racist, conspiracy, and, apparently, on the evil brain waves emanating from racist whites in America. The simple version of this appearing in the paper, is: Foreign loans and foreign aid is economic controlling, and the exploiting of third world countries. Of course, not, giving aid or loaning money, is economic controlling and the exploitation of the third world, too.
There may actually be truth in the conspiracy theory. I don’t see what it has to do with individual whites wanting to feel good about themselves, not wanting to be a victim of crime or stereo-typing, not wanting to be shoved aside, and not wanting to see their population being replaced.
Posted by at 7:09 PM on December 2
The authors have not fully accounted for cultural factors. IQs are indeed high in the Far East but the people have a strong inclination for authoritarian governments and social institutions. These institutions repress wealth-creating attitudes and individuals (this has been true for thousands of years).
Posted by at 12:39 PM on December 2
?? We need to be realistic, Japan is #2 wealthiest country in the world, Koreans are 11th and China is one of the biggest economies in the world and will be a wealthy economic powerhouse. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan are also some of the wealthiest economies in the world. These people are working even harder now to enlarge their economic sphere.
We need to compete and not delude ourselves into complacency by thinking we are doing so well. Other posters have commented that we are trying to reassure ourselves by repeating the mantra “East asians are not so creative” click on link below.
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_11_05/article1.html
Brilliant highly skilled and educated lawful immigrants have a place in american society, otherwise we will lose for our children what we have now. Someone else posted they would prefer to be in a lily white society even if it were a poor society. No thank you. I want my children to be on top of the world, not begging asians for jobs, geopolitical diplomatic immunity, or approval!!!
Posted by at 10:49 PM on December 2
Pais H is one of the many things wrong with american amoral society. No problem with how slutty or skanky you behave, you are judged to be “smart” in everybody’s eyes as long as you make money. No, there is a difference in how you make money. I have no respect at all for Paris for taking the easy way and cashing in on her notoriety. She has nothing to offer the children of our country except that it’s ok to act like a baboon as long as you have designer clothes and money. She is a shame. I respect people who made a contribution to society to improve our mind and our lives.
Posted by at 10:54 PM on December 2
Didn’t Machiavelli say that ambition was the most important quality of those pursuing power?
I think the same can be said of income. Those who most desire wealth, will pursue it at any costs.
That’s not to say there isn’t an IQ difference, there is, or that IQ isn’t important, it is, but I think it’s important not to oversimplify this. And it’s vital not to praise the rich as being superior to the poor. It is the virtuous who are truly superior, and truly the greatest asset to a nation.
Posted by Frank at 2:54 PM on December 3
Whether Asians are talented or not, the white American people are who matter, not the strength of the state.
To import Chinese into America in order to boost the state’s strength is not to defend the nation but to surrender it up to another nation.
A true patriot would wish to work with his own people and not import in a different people… There a word for the latter: traitor.
Posted by Frank at 2:57 PM on December 3
“We need to compete and not delude ourselves into complacency by thinking we are doing so well.”
Well, who’s at fault for our decline? It’s our White elite. It is they, the Bill Gates and Intels that have decided that American tech people are essentially worthless. It is they who have created the mantra of the “Stupid American that can’t do math, engineering or science” and need to be replaced by Indian H-1Bs. American tech workers are replaced at will by Indian imports. AT&T imports Indians to run the 5ESS telephone switches.
Only American tech workers stand still while Congress let’s in any number of H-1B job thieves from India. While American industry plots the destruction of the American tech worker
http://www.itaa.org/newsroom/viewpoint.cfm
“The boards of directors of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) and the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) have agreed to enter into discussions toward a potential merger of the groups’ memberships and programs in 2008.”
our so-called politicians continue to advocate for MORE Indian job thieves.
Want to learn MORE about the Foreign Job Thieves?
Get Rob Sanchez’s Job Desctruction Newsletter
Posted by at 11:12 PM on December 3
America became the envy of the world and it did so without resorting to the use of cheap imported labor and never forget that…
Posted by at 3:06 PM on December 7
America became the envy of the world and it did so without resorting to the use of cheap imported labor and never forget that…
Posted by at 3:06 PM on December 7
Well, that was in the days when we exploited cheap imported white labor & US domination of other territories & countries for favorable trade.
Posted by at 5:01 PM on December 7