Hacker News Reader

Comment by hemabe | Hacker News Reader

China could not only be ‘equal’ but ‘better’ than the USA - we should get used to the idea. China has an average IQ of 104 out of 1.4 billion people, while the USA has an IQ of 97. In purely statistical terms, this means that the USA has around 700,000 people with an IQ >= 140. China has 11,480,000 people with this IQ. This human capital will make the difference.

View on HN

None of this is meaningful. IQ as national population-level statistic is folkloric. China may well have a human capital advantage over the US; that's what you'd expect from a country with over 3x as many people. But it has nothing to do with biological differences between Americans and Chinese people.

Nobody mentionned biology. It is policy and culture.

In the USA it is less fashionable and more frowned upon every year to show intelligent traits. And it has been the case for the last 20 years.

Maybe; I have no opinion about that. But China's human capital advantage in the coming century seems pretty clear just from the numbers.

IQ isn't much of a proxy for anything, especially in this context.

It's especially related in this context, which is engineering success. IQ is directly related to academic achievement in STEM, which is directly related to engineering career success.

Well we're not talking about career success, we were talking about comparisons of nation states. Having an IQ advantage there might prove marginally more helpful, but it's not really that important. I'd argue physical size and strength of a people are even more important than IQ when we're looking at across the board averages. Plus you have things like, idk, access to raw materials, geographic advantages, cultural advantages or disadvantages, systemic advantages or disadvantages including strong or weak institutions, training programs, etc. In fact, if you wanted to do a comparison between America and China you'd really have a lot better things to look at to show China as better than IQ.

With respect to "career success" you can have 50 million people in your country with IQs >140 and there's still a limited market to sell to. There are diminishing returns on capacity - you can have business analysts or call center folks with the IQ of Einstein and they'll be limited by the systems they are placed in.

The other side of this is that just because you are smart doesn't mean you are capable of doing well in the real world. Recall how there are a lot of "dumb rich people" and "smart poor people".

China has a millenia-long history of organizing a very large amount of people fairly well. They basically invented bureaucracy. Not everything is better in China of course, but don't forget about that aspect.

Yep, the Chinese basically invented the State and bureaucracy as we know it. In fact it was so good (despite its faults) that when China was invaded by outside forces and occupied, those forces themselves adopted the Chinese state to administer their new holdings.

I'm not being critical of China here though, I'm just being critical of the original discussion point. Quantity has a quality of its own, but it has trade-offs.

Performance IQ and verbal IQ create the compound IQ figure.

due to immigration, USA draws talent from global population of 8.2 billion, so the top limit of people with IQ>140 that can live in USA should be drawn from 8.2 billion, not 340 mln

Not anymore it shouldn't.

why? has any immigration law been changed?

The orange dude is kind of putting people off.

yes, donny woke up the ancient racist anti-immigration, the blood & soil type crowd, but the economic benefits of immigration are still there (albeit with higher risks and higher hurdles).

I suspect this will simply make labor more expensive on top end of the talent curve

Revoking visas and deporting University students and professors.

Worse: the law has become irrelevant

So does every other immigration based country. Why do you think most talented people wouldn't choose a easier way and live somewhere with a higher living standard and less racism and hate?

There are a lot of sleeper or new accounts in this discussion. I’m afraid there’s a bunch of astroturfing.

Oh, hackernews, how you’ve fallen :(

Average IQ is probably the most bullshit metric to compare two countries. Literally anything else would be better.

this has to be one of the most illogical hedges

Reply on news.ycombinator.com