Category Archives: Human Biodiversity

The Return Of Sublime Oblivion

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In recent weeks, I began a new blog at http://sublimeoblivion.com/, which (confusingly?) had once been my sole website where I blogged about the things that I now blog about both here and at Da Russophile.

You might be wondering about what’s it about. You might also be concerned that with three blogs, I might be stretching myself too thin. No worries on the latter account – the Sublime Oblivion blog is very much a side project, and will mostly consist of the occasional sci-fi or fantasy book review. But in the very long-term perspective I think it will assume increasing prominence, because really one of my life ambitions is to be a best-selling speculative fiction writer.

That blog can also be followed on Facebook.

I have several ideas floating around. One of those that is closest to realization is a sci-fi / “Deadly Game” that is preliminarily titled 100 YEARS TO VICTORY. I’m not very happy with it (unlike with DARK LORD OF THE KREMLIN) so it is highly likely to change. It is, essentially, a fictionalization of the Limits to Growth scenarios of industrial development, ecological stresses, and civilizational collapse.

I have written a possible prologue to it here: Rats!. If you are interested, please read it, and comment on it here or there. I am most interested in finding out whether you would continue reading it, or whether I should give up on this fantasy/sci-fi thing straight off the bat so as to avoid embarrassing myself any further.

Mapping The Dark Enlightenment

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I’m a sucker for classification graphs, so I was delighted to see that someone had compiled a “map” of the neo-reactionary / “Dark Enlightenment” thinkers. It’s reproduced below:

dark-enlightenment-map

I’m not disappointed not to see myself there, as I blog about a lot of different things making classification quite hard.

If I had to try to place myself there, I’d probably be somewhere east of the Derb, west of Steve Hsu, and north of Taki. If I had to pick just one school, I probably best fit into the HBD community, but I’m interested in Techno-Futurism (incidentally, I met up with Mike Anissimov last week) and “Masculine Reaction” – or at least its “game” component, I don’t much care for the MRM - as well.

Birth Defects, FBD Marriages

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While researching a different topic I stumbled upon the following 2006 report on the Internet. It contains comprehensive estimates for the prevalence of birth defects all around the world. The relevant graph is reprinted below (you can click on it to get a bigger picture).

birth-defects-by-country

What leaps out at first sight is the sheer extent to which the worst affected countries are Muslim ones. Of the 29 countries with a birth defects prevalence of over 70/1,000 births, only 5 are not majority Muslim. 9 of the worst 10 are Muslim. Furthermore, whereas those five are all very poor African nations, the Muslim ones include very rich Arab states like the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

What explains this? Is it something in the water?

Almost certainly this is due to high rates of consanguineous marriages. As hbd* chick has frequently pointed out, the institution of father’s brother’s daughter is prevalent and commonly accepted pretty much only within the historic borders of the 8th century Caliphate. This is arguably a very regressive custom: While it promotes familial loyalty, the side cost is high rates of clannishness, nepotism, depressed national IQ’s… and, as graphically illustrated above, birth defects.

The country with the least amount of birth defects per newborn is estimated to be France.

The Farewell To Alms Theory – Older Than We Think

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I am currently (re)reading The National System of Political Economy by Friedrich List (published in 1841), and this jumped out at me:

In no European kingdom is the institution of an aristocracy more judiciously designed than in England for securing to the nobility, in their relation to the Crown and the commonalty, individual independence, dignity, and stability; to give them a Parliamentary training and position; to direct their energies to patriotic and national aims; to induce them to attract to their own body the élite of the commonalty, to include in their ranks every commoner who earns distinction, whether by mental gifts, exceptional wealth, or great achievements; and, on the other hand, to cast back again amongst the commons the surplus progeny of aristocratic descent, thus leading to the amalgamation of the nobility and the commonalty in future generations. By this process the nobility is ever receiving from the Commons fresh accessions of civic and patriotic energy, of science, learning, intellectual and material resources, while it is ever restoring to the people a portion of the culture and of the spirit of independence peculiarly its own, leaving its own children to trust to their own resources, and supplying the commonalty with incentives to renewed exertion. In the case of the English lord, however large may be the number of his descendants, only one can hold the title at a time. The other members of the family are commoners, who gain a livelihood either in one of the learned professions, or in the Civil Service, in commerce, industry, or agriculture. The story goes that some time ago one of the first dukes in England conceived the idea of inviting all the blood relations of his house to a banquet, but he was fain to abandon the design because their name was legion, notwithstanding that the family pedigree had not reached farther back than for a few centuries. It would require a whole volume to show the effect of this institution upon the spirit of enterprise, the colonisation, the might and the liberties, and especially upon the forces of production of this nation.

So perhaps Gregory Clark wasn’t quite as original as many make him out to be.

PS. I myself am quite skeptical about the theory. As Ron Unz summarized it, “And I agree that Clark’s evolutionary model for England suffers from similar problems, namely that he’s produced an interesting theory explaining why the English are smarter and longer-time oriented than all the other Europeans. Except they aren’t.”

Flynn Effect DOES Apply To South Korea

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Regular readers of this blog may remember my comments regarding Ron Unz’s theory that East Asians have high IQ’s independent of time/nutrition/urbanization whatever it is that causes the Flynn Effect. Here is his original article on his theory of the “East Asian Exception” and my two responses are here and here.

Anyway a new paper (well, July 2012) I think finally puts this theory to rest: The Flynn effect in Korea: large gains by Jan te Nijenhuis et al. Here is the abstract:

Secular gains in IQ test scores have been reported for many Western countries. This is the first study of secular IQ gains in South Korea, using various datasets. The first question is what the size of the Flynn effect in South Korea is. The gains per decade are 7.7 points for persons born between 1970 and 1990. These gains on broad intelligence batteries are much larger than the gains in Western countries of about 3 IQ points per decade. The second question is whether the Korean IQ gains are comparable to the Japanese IQ gains with a lag of a few decades. The gains in Japan of 7.7 IQ points per decade for those born approximately 1940 1965 are identical to the gains per decade for Koreans born 1970 1990. The third question is whether the Korean gains in height and education lag a few decades behind the Japanese gains. The Koreans reach the educational levels the Japanese reached 25 30 years before, and the gains in height for Koreans born 1970 1990 are very similar to gains in height for Japanese born 1940 1960, so three decades earlier. These findings combined strongly support the hypothesis of similar developmental patterns in the two countries.

So, similar processes (height is of course strongly associated with nutritional quality) leading to the same pattern of steady IQ gains that have been observed for all Western societies.

Incidentally, back during my discussion with Unz, I wrote: “Anyhow, I wish we could do tests on North Koreans. Their meat consumption is at less than 10kg a year and they have periodic famines. They are also directly comparable to South Koreans. They would conclusively prove your theory right or wrong!” The study authors concur on the benefits of testing the Norks:

Theoretically, it would be very interesting to do a study of secular score gains in IQ in North Korea. It appears that height has not increased in North Korea since the end of the Korean war. However, it may be that the quality and number of years of education has improved. This experiment of nature could throw some light on the question to what degree nutrition/hygiene and education influence score gains.

Antisocial Punishment: Why China Will Defeat Corruption, But Russia And The Arabs Won’t

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The “resurrection” of this blog isn’t coming along as fast as I want to. Partly it’s because the bulk of my attention is going to Da Russophile and RossPress right now, but partly it’s just plain bad luck. Not the best year for me health-wise. Just as I was getting back into the grove of things, my skis decided to give way on a large jump and planted my face onto icy snow. I’d say that on balance (something I haven’t had a lot of since then HAR-HAR) concussions are better than panic attacks, but not by much.

Anyway the flip side is that I’ve been doing a lot of reading out of lack of anything better to do while resting, and one of the books I’ve been reading is Steven Pinker’s massive door-stopper The Better Angels of Our Nature. Incidentally, I found it a very interesting read with tons of cool factoids, although it could have done with a third of its text and a tiny fraction of its liberal sanctimonious. But that’s for the forthcoming review; in this post, I will focus instead on a reference I found there to a very fascinating and revealing paper about Antisocial Punishment Across Cultures (Herrmann et al.) – and by extension, its implications for social cohesion.

Power summary: The shrinks got a bunch of university students, divided them into teams of four, and got them to play a “public goods game.” They were given 20 tokens at the start of each of ten rounds, and they were told they could invest any number of them into a pot, with a return of 0.4 tokens to each player – regardless of whether or not he participates – to each token invested in the pot. So if everyone was to contribute all 20 of their tokens, each player would walk away with 32 tokens; on the other hand, if only two players were to contribute all their tokens while the other two got a free ride, the altruists would walk away with only 16 tokens, whereas the free riders would get their 16 tokens plus their original 20 which they had kept back.

no-punishment-contributions

In this version of the game, there were no interesting patterns; across all cultures, contributions plummeted as free riders enjoying impunity undermined the morale of productive contributors. However, that’s not how the game works in real societies, which actively punish many forms of free riding: Tax evasion, benefit fraud, dodging fares on public transport, etc. The game was then modified to include a punishment option, in which any player could choose to spend one token to remove three tokens from any other player of his choosing. The results changed drastically.

Continue reading →

Five Years Of Blogging

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It all began on January 9, 2008.

It began, as it is now, as Da Russophile over at blogger. And I was a Russophile then, perhaps unreasonably so. That said I did do some useful work back then. I am most proud of the demographic models by which I predicted:

  1. Russia will see positive population growth starting from 2010 at the latest.
  2. Natural population increase will occur starting from 2013 at the latest.

Bullseye!

I was not nearly so accurate on the economy. The severe recession in 2009 forced me to readjust my expectations.

At the end of the year, I moved my blog to WordPress and renamed it to Sublime Oblivion. From now on I would no longer write exclusively about Russia.

Around 2009, I also started having a major ideological shift that in retrospect was regrettable and wrong. It was a weird fusion of eco-leftism, Stratforian realism, and even mysticism (remember the “belief matrices“?). Back then my ideological/political arguments were not firewalled from my Russia stuff – as they are today with the Da Russophile / AKarlin division – and as such there appeared many downright bizarre articles like this, this, and this. Despite a few gems, foremost of which was perhaps the translation of the infamous “Stalinist” textbook, this was a year best forgotten.

This pattern continued into 2010. Recall Green Communism and the Collapse Party? By the way, it’s not like I abandoned my views on Limits to Growth/unsustainability and the necessity of radical solutions. I just stopped caring about them.

I also initiated a series of interviews with leading Russia watchers back then, taking over from Andy Young of Siberian Light. But I didn’t keep it up.

2011 was a very productive year. I dropped a lot of the ideological nonsense in favor of practicalities, wrote a great series comparing the US/UK/Russia, and tilted my Russia coverage away from the unalloyed Russophilia of 2008 and the weird splashes of Spenglerian mysticism and obsession with geopolitics that marred it in 2009-10. It also marked my outbreak into mainstream journalism with me appearing on RT and starting to write op-eds for Al Jazeera.

The most interesting and critical year so far was 2012. It began ingloriously with a pharma hack of my blog. This destroyed my SEO ratings, but also presented an excellent opportunity to start over. I split the blog into Da Russophile (Russia stuff) and AKarlin aka this one (everything else).

Up to that time, my blog had enjoyed almost 800,000 visits. Since then, AKarlin.com has hosted a further 178,347 visits, and Da Russophile a further 164,745.

The Russia stuff continued on its upwards ascent. I continued with op-eds for Al Jazeera, wrote the classic 5 Types of Russian American, and started writing short pieces for the US-Russia.com Experts Panel (now regularly translated and republished at Voice of Russia).

The everything else part tilted into a sharply controversial direction. This was defined by my definitive embrace of Human Biodiversity theory with all the inevitable attendant consequences stemming from that decision (before I had avoided explicitly engaging with it by talking in terms of “human capital”). And if I’m going to openly write about HBD then I might as well openly write about game. I lost some regular readers, including a few who have since developed a visceral hatred for me, but I see that as no big loss. On the plus side I got many new ones thanks to associations with the HBDsphere. More importantly, I would not have to tiptoe around topics that I felt were important and highly relevant (by way of their explanatory power) to the world around us.

But then I had a few problems. The blog went into limbo for a few months.

This is not a permanent death and never will be if I can possibly help it. The aforementioned “problems” have now been solved, so regular blogging will return here in the near future – hopefully by the beginning of February.

As 2013 dawns on us, and I am finally free of the RL time constraints that held me back in previous years, there are five main directions to my work:

  • Continuing what I’m doing at Da Russophile.
  • Writing the book Dark Lord of the Kremlin.
  • The “Russian Inosmi” project called Russia Voices.
  • More journalism at Al Jazeera and Voice of Russia.
  • Resuming regular posting at AKarlin.com.

So please continue checking back here on this blog too. There will soon be a fun piece on my trip to Las Vegas.

Violence Against Women By Country

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Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man. Forty six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.

At least according to ultra-leftist Stieg Larsson (of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fame).

But thing is, if you actually ask women if they’ve been experienced violence sexual or physical violence from a partner, one will find that it is actually East Asian and White countries that have the lowest rates. Via The Inductivist:

In the WHO study, the lowest prevalence of lifetime and current partner violence was found in urban Japan and Serbia and Montenegro, which suggests that rates of abuse may reflect, in part, different levels of economic development.

Japan yes, but Serbia, with a GDP (PPP) per capita of $12,000, isn’t all that rich; at least, not significantly more so than Brazil or Thailand. And yet rates of abuse in the past 12 month are as low as in Japan, and far lower than in any other of the other surveyed areas: Brazil, Ethiopia, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Thailand, Tanzania.

Even the lifetime risk of assault in Serbia was lower than in any of those other places bar Japan – this despite it being lawless and war-torn for much of the 1990′s.

In short this appears to be primarily an HBD thing, and not so much an economic development thing.

Minorities’ Cognitive Performance In The UK

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Here is data from the Cognitive Abilities Test for UK students in 2009/10 via Ambiguous.

Some interesting things to take away here:

(1) The sample is very large. Verbal IQ has the highest correlation with academic performance in most subjects, followed by Quantitative IQ, and then Non-Verbal Reasoning (recognizing patterns and such, I imagine).

(2) Indians do almost as well as Whites, although the structure of their cognitive abilities are a bit different: About 4 points lower than Whites in Verbal, but almost 2 points better in Quantitative. As rec1man said, “The Patels and Sikhs are Upper-Shudra / Vaishya and this is 80% of the diaspora in UK.” So this is highly encouraging for India’s eventual prospects; in indicates that the broad middle can in principle build a reasonably wealthy, middle-class society.

(3) The Pakistanis and Bangladeshis also don’t do too badly – certainly better than I would have expected (I visited a Pakistani school once in the UK and it was horrific).

(4) This might imply we are actually looking at the following average-IQ groups in India: Lower 40% – 93; Middle 40% – 99; Top 20% – 105, for an overall average of 98 (once Flynn Effect is done with them). That’s better than Greece today and certainly good enough  to have a developed society. But there’s tons of challenges: Malnutrition, slums, poor education, widespread vegetarianism (both voluntary and involuntary – due to poverty) that have to be sorted out for India to perform to its potential.

Continue reading →

Policy On Racism

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As I noted in my old post on the false dichotomy between race denial and racism, there is a regrettable degree of overlap between racism and race realism. This shouldn’t however blind us to the real distinctions between the two, which were very succinctly summarized by Half Sigma thus:

The race realist understands The g Factor, The Bell Curve, and other works of scientific research. The racist apparently thinks that because Barack Obama is half black, it’s impossible for him to have a significantly higher g than John McCain.

This applies to comments such as this one joking that only 12 or 13 US Blacks have the cognitive capacity to learn Mandarin, with Obama not among them. This is obviously false. Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law on the basis of blind grading, which implies elite cognitive cognitive ability. And for that matter, I know two Blacks who speak fluent Mandarin. Are they two of the Elite 13? LOL.

That said, I will not as a general rule be censoring “racist” comments, unless they are couched in the most explicit and offensive language (for that there is Stormfront if you are so inclined). Part of the reason is that the line between racism and race realism is blurry and open to debate. For instance, arguing on the basis of statistics that apartheid wasn’t all that bad for Black South Africans probably isn’t racism. What about calling for its return? I do not know. As I said, blurry lines. I have neither the time nor wish to subject individual comments to such detailed scrutiny.

I do however urge commentators to exercise restraint and good taste. After all, the HBD-sphere is plagued by accusations of racism, and not entirely unfairly either; and this is used to stifle valid and much-needed discussion on racial differences. Let’s not give the PC brigade any more ammo if we can possibly help it.

PS. I am following with interest the discussions in the posts on Indian and Chinese IQ. I cannot participate, as I’m now writing a lengthy piece on Pussy Riot, but rest assured the comments will be read and the more interesting ones examined further.

Analysis Of Russia’s PISA 2009 Results

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A few months ago I posted a table and map of Russian IQ’s as derived from regional PISA performance. Those figures are based on Jarkko Hautamäki’s slideshow comparing regional PISA performance in Finland and Russia.

That material is a bit inadequate because, as had been my custom up that point, I was only making IQ estimates based on the Math and Science components of the PISA tests, and avoiding Reading to maintain reverse compatibility with my (now disused, in favor of just IQ) Human Capital Index. In light of some realizations that verbal IQ is no less important than numerical, I have updated the figures to include the verbal component as well. This doesn’t create any radical changes – the overall IQ only drops by 0.3 points – so I reuse the same map.

(Note that the legend on the map isn’t converted to IQ. “PISA scores, mean 500, SD 100, have to be transformed into IQ values, mean 100, SD 15, by adding or subtracting the deviation from the mean in the relationship 100 : 15 = 6,67.”)

Commentary

There are any numbers of comments one can make, but I will confine myself to the most important ones:

(1) In some regions, margins of error are high, as samples were low. Nonetheless, it is still possible to identify some concrete patterns. The overall estimate is very accurate because the sample was N=5,308 and representatively distributed across the country.

(2) Moscow pupils performed very well, at the level of the highest scoring OECD countries like Finland, Taiwan, and Korea. This is especially impressive considering the significant numbers of immigrants in that city from the North Caucasus and Central Asia, who come from poorly-scoring countries and rarely have good Russian. This is surely the result of a century of attracting Russia’s (the USSR’s) cognitive elite.

(3) St.-Petersburg and Tyumen oblast performed above the OECD average, while a few other regions performed at or only slightly below the OECD average.

(4) Among ethnic Russian republics, Siberian regions performed well, while the Urals and southern regions performed badly.

Continue reading →

rec1man On Indian IQ

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My post on Indian IQ (max potential is low to mid 90′s) spawned an interesting analysis by commentator rec1man. It is not very well organized but he does have a ton of useful information that deserves to be highlighted. It’s reprinted in full below interspersed with occasional commentary by myself:

Caste Analysis

75% of the Indian population gets affirmative action quota in India and is genetically low IQ.
25% of the Indian population is upper caste and higher IQ and does not get quota.
Most of the upper caste population has Y-DNA = R1A = Russian / Slavic.

AK: The Slavic max. potential IQ appears to be around 100.

In North India there are 3 levels of quota, each quota level corresponding to a different IQ level:
In North India Upper caste > Other Backward Caste > Dalit – Untouchable – Tribal.

In South India, there are 4 levels of quota:
Brahmin > Dravidian Backward Caste > Dravidian Most Backward caste > Dalit-Untouchable-Tribal.

Upper castes and Brahmins dont get quota. In North India, upper castes and Brahmins are genetically the same of Aryan origin. In South India, the only Aryan origin caste is Brahmin.
The others are Dravidian.

5% of the Indian population is of Oriental race and they dont have a high IQ.

Continue reading →

Disagree With Ron Unz’s Conclusions On Chinese IQ

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He writes:

These scores are indeed truly remarkable, and completely confirm the apparent pattern of Lynn’s IQ samples, in which desperately poor East Asians tend to score at or above the levels of the most successful and well-educated Western populations… But since the total population is at least well into the hundreds of millions, heavily rural as well as urban, the average PISA score of 520—corresponding to an IQ of 103—cannot be too dissimilar from the overall Chinese figure. And with China’s per capita GDP still only $3,700 and well over half the population still living in rural villages when the tests were conducted, these are absolutely astonishing results… Although opinions may certainly differ, I regard this new evidence as very strong support for my “East Asian Exception” hypothesis.

China isn’t anywhere near as backward as he portrays it.

(1) The urban-rural ratio was essentially 50/50 according to the 2010 Census. Furthermore, rural Chinese don’t really suffer from the absolute destitution common to peasants in Third World countries. They own their own land and it is almost impossible for them to lose it. Malnutrition is now close to non-existent. Slums are now very rare. According to a Gallup poll, Chinese now actually struggle less than Americans to buy food.

(2) Total Chinese meat consumption overtook US meat consumption in 1990, signifying a nutritionally adequate figure (as Americans eat a lot of and perhaps a bit too much meat anyway). Today Chinese meat consumption is half the US level. The PISA 2009 cohort would have been born in 1993, when Chinese nutrition had already essentially converged with the First World.

(3) He uses nominal GDP per capita which is quite meaningless. The PPP level of Chinese GDP per capita is $8,400 and that figure is probably underestimated.

Basically, if we adjust for the fact that in terms of basics (food, education, housing) China is now essentially equivalent to developed countries, it would make sense that its average IQ level is now only about 5 points from its potential maximum.

But really my fundamental problem with the “East Asia Exception” hypothesis is the huge paradox it exposes: Why was it Europe, and not China, that first underwent the Industrial Revolution? And the (initially unrelated) Scientific Revolution, for that matter? If as Ron Unz says the Flynn Effect barely applies to East Asian populations, then what you’d have had five centuries ago is 100mn Chinese, 20% of them urban – with an average IQ of maybe 95; and 100mn Europeans, only 5% of them urban – with an average IQ of 75. Sure Europe had various advantages (as chronicled by Jared Diamond, Kenneth Pomeranz, etc) but surely it couldn’t have trumped the effects of a 1 S.D. IQ advantage? That is why I believe the East Asia Exception to be historically implausible.

National Foresight, Or: Why Russia Needs A Strong Hand

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In a 2010 paper on time preferences*, the authors Mei Wang et al. conducted an experiment in which participants could choose either $3400 now or $3800 a month later. Now I would choose the latter option but maybe it’s just because I’m intelligent and have been living in the West for quite a while. In other countries this is not the obvious choice however.

We see the usual correlates. Countries that are richer; more Germanic; less corrupt; more intelligent – they all have more future time orientation. In countries that have a Communist legacy future time orientations are perhaps lower than we might expect them to be otherwise.

This all of not insubstantial relevance because time preference can have an impact on economic structure and social life. For instance, as the paper notes, societies with higher future time  orientation are likely to devote more attention to the environment. They are also likely to devote a greater share of their GDP to R&D.

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The Puzzle Of Indian IQ: A Country Of Gypsies And Jews

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The question of Indian IQ is a big puzzle. Far trickier than China’s IQ which I think I’ve basically figured out (101-102 today; 106-108 genetic ceiling).

The PISA-adjusted IQ of India – as extrapolated from the states of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, which are relatively rich and are reputed to have good school systems by Indian standards – is a miserly 75.4; Richard Lynn, in his latest estimates based on an international standardized test from 1970 and a more recent TIMSS study in the states of Rajasthan and Orissa is 82.2. The chart above compiled by Steve Sailer from Lynn’s data on numerous IQ tests also indicates it is the low 80′s. In my opinion the low 80′s figures given by the IQ tests is more accurately reflective of today’s Indian g because PISA is after all an academic test and Indian schools leave a lot to be desired.

Regardless, the differences between Indians, and East Asians and Europeans, are huge. India is in fact at the upper level of sub-Saharan African IQ which typically ranges from 65 to 80. There are lots of factors holding India back: Malnutrition (which is on average perhaps worse than in sub-Saharan Africa), vegetarian diets, poor education system, a moderately high rate of consanguineous marriage. But all that said the sheer size of the gap makes me skeptical that all of it is down to environmental factors alone.

On the other hand the average IQ of Indian immigrants to the US is an Ashkenazi Jewish-like 112. Ramanujan was assessed by G.H. Hardy, no lightweight himself, as the most gifted mathematician of his age. Going back further in time, India has a pretty stunning religious, linguistic, mathematical, and philosophical heritage. Only a continuous stream of very high IQ individuals could have both created and sustained such a heritage.

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Analysis Of China’s PISA 2009 Results

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As human capital is so important for prosperity, it behoves us to know China’s in detail to assess whether it will continue converging on developed countries. Until recently the best data we had were disparate IQ tests (on the basis of which Richard Lynn’s latest estimate is an IQ of 105.8 in his 2012 book Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences) as well as PISA international standardized test scores from cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. However, the problem was that they were hardly nationally representative due to the “cognitive clustering” effect. The Chinese did not allow the OECD to publish data for the rest of the country and this understandably raised further questions about the situation in its interior heartlands, although even in 2010 I was already able to report a PISA representative saying that “even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average.”

As regards Chinese intelligence

Happily (via commentator Jing) we learned that the PISA data for Zhejiang province and the China average had been released on the Chinese Internet. I collated this as well as data for Chinese-majority cities outside China in the table below, while also adding in their PISA-converted IQ scores, the scores of just natives (i.e. minus immigrants), percentage of the Han population, and nominal and PPP GDP per capita.

Reading Math Science Average (native) IQ (native IQ) %汉族 GDP/c (n) GDP/c (P)
China* 486 550 524 520  ~ 103.0  ~ 91.6% 5,430 8,442
China: Shanghai 556 600 575 577 589 111.6 113.4 99.0% 12,783 19,874
China: Zhejiang 525 598 567 563 ~ 109.5 ~ 99.2% 9,083 14,121
Hong Kong 533 555 549 546 557 106.9 108.6 93.6% 34,457 49,990
Macau 487 525 511 508 514 101.2 102.1 95.0% 65,550 77,607
Singapore 526 562 542 543 550 106.5 107.5 74.1% 46,241 61,103
Taiwan 495 543 520 519 534 102.9 105.1 98.0% 20,101 37,720

* Twelve provinces including Shanghai, Zhejiang, Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangsu totaling 621 schools, 21,003 students. Results have been released for Shanghai, and later on for Zhejiang (59 schools, 1,800 students – of which 80% were township-village schools) and for the 12-province average.

(1) Academic performance, and the IQ for which it is a good proxy, is very high for a developing nation. Presumably, this gap can largely be ascribed to the legacy of initial historical backwardness coupled with Maoist economics.

(2) The average PISA-converted IQ of the 12 provinces surveyed in PISA is 103.0. (I do not know if provincial results were appropriately weighed for population when calculating the 12-province average but probably not). We know the identities of five of the 12 tested provinces (Shanghai, Zhejiang, Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangsu). They are all very high-income and developed by Chinese standards. Furthermore, these five provinces – with the exception of Tianjin – all perform well above average according to stats from a Chinese online IQ testing website.

Continue reading →

Olympic Observations

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Now that the Olympics are drawing to an end, it’s now time for me to weigh in with my HBD / game perspective.

(1) What is up with India? Only 5 medals. Record-setting (3 in Beijing, 0-2 in all previous Olympics) but that’s still atrocious for a country of 1.2 billion people – even a poor and malnourished one. Michael Phelps alone has won almost as many Gold medals as India has done as a nation for as long as the Olympics existed. Why? Ryan G. will be along to lecture me soon enough on my Indophobia :) , but I think it’s due to a perfect storm of negative HBD, economic and cultural reasons. Indians like East Asians have low testosterone; they are malnourished, and it doesn’t help that many are follow an inferior diet i.e. vegetarianism; the Commonwealth Games showed them to be pretty disorganized which doesn’t bode well for athlete training programs; and finally it appears that many Indians disdain sport and physical activity (their love of cricket actually proves this: Not exactly the most physically intense sport out there). I’m sure as India gets richer they’ll start earning more medals but I doubt they’ll ever do much better than 10th or so.

(2) Russia didn’t perform badly, contrary to popular opinion. Vancouver was a disaster. This wasn’t. As of the time of writing, its total medal count (78) exceeds Beijing 2008 (73) and Atlanta 1996 (63) and isn’t far from Sydney 2000 (89) and 2004 Athens (92). It’s still third overall and given the population and commitment of China, and the advanced training facilities and Black population (let’s be realistic) of America, coming third on total medal counts is entirely respectable. This time it was overtaken by Britain in the gold medals tally, but this reflects an astoundingly good British performance rather than Russian under-achievement.

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IQ Bell Curves, Diasporas, Market-Dominant Minorities

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The reason that some go on about Jewish financial dominance is that because in some sense it actually exists (although unlike the anti-Semites/ZOG’ers I see no evidence that it is achieved with under-handed, coordinated, or conscious methods on the part of Jews as a group). The blogger race/history/evolution notes recently compiled two tables analyzing the ethnicity of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. The first two columns describe their share of the Forbes 400 list in 1987 and 2010, while the third calculates their total wealth as a share of everyone on that list.

n% (1987) n% (2010) wealth% (2010)
Northwestern European 72 50.5 55.8
Jewish 23 36 35.4
Italian 2.25 4.25 2.6
East Asian 0.25 2.0 1.6
Middle Eastern 1.5 2.0 1.6
Greek 0.5 1.75 1.2
Eastern European 0.25 1.75 0.8
South Asian 0.0 1.0 0.4
Hispanic 0.25 0.5 0.2
Black 0.0 0.25 0.2

Immediately striking of course is the presence of American Jews, who constitute more than a third of The 0.0001% by both wealth and number. We know of course that there is a correlation between intelligence and income though it’s not overly strong (about 0.3). An IQ of 120 or at most 130 is typically assumed to be the cutoff point at which additional gains in intelligence cease to have much of an effect on earning power.

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Hamburgers And Rednecks: IQ Estimates Of US Ethnic Groups

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Via The Audacious Epigone: IQ scores by US ethnic groups. It is not very useful I think in theoretical or practical applications but it is interesting as a showcase of why IQ is more than just genetic inheritance, incorporating also Flynn, sampling issues, sense of popular identity, selection bias, etc.

Wordsum is basically a vocab test of 10 words (example). While one might not expect such a quick and simple test to accurately reflect IQ it actually does – the correlation between Wordsum scores and IQ is about 0.71. Respondents got to choose the one or two ethnic groups to which they belong. (See table below)

By and large, the results are as we would expect:

(1) Many of the Russians (about 50%) are, of course, Ashkenazi Jews. Explained.

(2) At first puzzling is the fact that Germans score considerably below the Irish, Mediterraneans (Italians, Greeks, French) and Slavics (Poles, Czechs). This is an inversion of European PISA results in which native Germans got 105 compared to France’s 101, Poland’s 100, Italy’s 98, Greece’s 96, etc. There are two reasons for this I think:

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Did Ron Unz Score An Own Goal Too?

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In recent days Ron Unz’s article Race, IQ, and Wealth (The American Conservative) has been making the rounds in the HBDsphere. Broadly speaking it argues for the predominance of cultural and environmental factors as opposed to genetic in forming IQ. It is fairly long but it’s also one of the best statements of that position out there, and I highly suggest you go and read it in its entirety (as well as the good discussions it spawned at thanks to hbd* chick, Peter Frost, David Sanders, etc).

(Incidentally, part of the reason it is so good is that it avoids throwing round the racism card in addressing proponents of the genetic-determinist model of IQ, as do all too many mainstream commentators. That is really a kind of trolling, and by and by, will as such no longer be tolerated on this blog as it once was.)

To prove his case Ron Unz takes data from Lynn and Vanhanen, the two foremost compilers of global IQ data (along with Rinderman), and turns it against their own position that national IQ levels – barring a universal Flynn Effect – are essentially fixed: “… I would suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn and Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither of the competing ideological teams ever noticed. … Given that Lynn and Vanhanen rank as titans of the racial-difference camp, perhaps their ideological opponents, who often come from less quantitative backgrounds, are reluctant even to open the pages of their books, fearful lest the vast quantity of data within prove that the racialist analysis is factually correct after all. Meanwhile, the pro-racialist elements may simply skim over the hundreds of pages of dry and detailed quantitative evidence and skip to the summary text, which claims that the data demonstrate IQ is genetically fixed and determines which nations will be rich and which will be poor.”

In support of his thesis Ron Unz cites the wide dispersion seen in IQ results for European populations, which are genetically close. Many East-Central European societies that scored low during the 1950′s-80′s have since come close to converging with results from Western Europe. Furthermore, South Europeans and East Europeans who migrated to the US in the 1920′s scored in the mid-80′s – a 1 S.D. discrepancy that is about as big as that which continually separates Blacks from whites. I.e., very significant. However, these folks all managed to integrate into American society and now have IQ’s higher than those of longer established (and more rural) groups such as the Germans and Dutch. In particular, he cites a test administered to 3,500 Irish schoolchildren in 1972, which showed an average IQ of just 87. That is almost 1 S.D. lower than the IQ of Irish-Americans, or for that matter, more recent PISA results which now show the Irish to be well within the European cognitive mainstream.

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