IQ and the Wealth of Nations | Hacker News Reader

IQ and the Wealth of Nations

dekorte.com

5 pointsmaxwell21 comments

Surely there are not entire nations where the average IQ is 60. To me this indicates broken tests.

I believe you'd find a correlation between learned skills like literacy and GDP. And Occam's Razor implies that's what's being measured here. Any "leaks" in the IQ tests, in the sense of accidentally testing learned rather than innate qualities, would tend to produce a graph this shape.

Sixty is impossibly low, but you have to remember a lot of countries have pervasive iodine deficiency as well as other nutritional deficiencies. Combine this with a lack of proper cognitive stimulation in the first five years and it becomes pretty easy for an entire country to score poorly. Clearly a country whose real IQ averaged sixty wouldn't be able to survive and reproduce, but if you combine the factors above with the inherent biases in (esp. early) IQ tests then it seems plausible that a country could score pretty low.

"Worldwide, about two billion people — a third of the globe — get too little iodine, including hundreds of millions in India and China. Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html

The entire book is bogus. About 1/3 of the wikipedia article is dedicated to the criticisms of the book, and they seem pretty damning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations#Cr...

A Farewell to Alms [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?_r=1&#...] covers similar territory, and its data is very thorough. I haven't seen any refutations.

Of relevance to this forum are the findings on entrepreneurship in the industrial revolution. The people who built the companies and science that made it possible and greatly elevated Britain never made anywhere near enough to compensate their investments of time and money. They were irrational actors. Clark argues they acted this way because of genetic predisposition -- a predisposition that was not widespread in other societies.

Well, I haven't read the book, but the article that you point to seems to indicate that "A Farewell to Alms" actually makes the opposite point:

'What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

Also, the article points out that many people are skeptical of his view that the behavioral changes have biological causes and not just cultural. For instance:

'The natural-selection part of Dr. Clark’s argument “is significantly weaker, and maybe just not necessary, if you can trace the changes in the institutions,” said Kenneth L. Pomeranz, a historian at the University of California, Irvine.

> actually makes the opposite point

It's a related theory, not the same bit on IQ and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

> biological causes and not just cultural

I know I mentioned the word "genetic", but really all that matters is we're talking about a set of heritable traits; nature vs nurture is kind of moot. That we're talking about something heritable is detailed in the book.

wouldn't most people in our society act quite different from how they act today if expected lifespan was 35-40 years instead of 75-85?

> expected lifespan was 35-40 years

This is a bit of a myth. Very high childhood and teen mortality brought average lifespan down, but once you were 20 making it to 65 was not rare at all. In places like America where plenty of good food was affordable old age was fairly common. Take a walk through an old cemetery and see for yourself.

i have to swim over an ocean to do that, but i do think that for a long time after the transformation from hunter/gatherering to farming a lifespan of 65 was quite rare.and a leap from hunter/gathering to industrialization is a lot to ask(: if their chances of being 65 had been that great here in europe do you really think they would have taken their chances in those ships(to reach america)?

Plus, it'd be very difficult to get a good IQ statistic from some of those countries.

Modern business favors the traits that accompany literacy.

yeah, in sweden an iq of 70 suggests that you are unable to participate in a normal school and you are labelled as mentally retarded.most refugees from countries with these supposedly low iq:s attend normal schools in spite of their disadvantages regarding language.

In my experience, people do have different kinds of intelligence (e.g., creative vs analytic ability).

However, the research literature seems to disagree on this point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor

I found an article at one point that claimed there were multilpe intelligences, but g indicates a general ability in all areas. A person with a high g will be good in all or most areas, but it is possible for people to be very good in particular areas and not so much in others. Sorry I don't have a link handy.

Another strange thing about IQ is that it isn't normally distributed.

Do you have a link to a study showing that IQ isn't normally distributed?

The best reference I could find is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant Search for "fat tail"

It seems to me rather obvious that if reducing one's physical abilities to a score called "sports" is far too vague, then the reduction of the multidimensional capabilities of the human mind to a scalar is pretty silly.

I think you have 1 up on the literature.

Sounds reasonable... but so what? To me it seems pretty clear that high GDP causes higher IQ, not IQ causing high GDP (assuming the findings in this book are accurate). We need to remember that IQ is a measure of how well you score on IQ tests, and not a measure of "intelligence" (whatever that is).

yeah, from an article in the economist: during 20th century every large group of european immigrants(italians, germans, swedish...) in america have had iq:s of about 90 shortly after arrival which in all cases have risen to 100 after a couple of decades when they have been fully integrated into society.this also explains why there are other groups who have failed to experience this rise.they have failed to integrate, or society has failed to let them integrate

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88074

That comment doesn't pick up on how much of an impact the low quality of the data has on the outcomes. For instance the commentator points out that there should be a larger difference between the average IQ's of Hong Kong and mainland China, given China's massive peasant population. However, the wikipedia page points out that the Chinese rural population was never tested, and that the differences in scores was artificially added by the authors:

"For People's Republic of China, the authors used a figure of 109.4 for Shanghai and adjusted it down by an arbitrary 6 points because they believed the average across China's rural areas was probably less than that in Shanghai. Another figure from a study done in Beijing was not adjusted downwards. Those two studies formed the resultant score for China (PRC).

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