Today is the publication date of Hive Mind, a book by economist Garett Jones on the intimate relationship between average national IQs and national success, first and foremost in the field of economics.
I do intend to read and review it ASAP, but first some preliminary comments.
This is a topic I have been writing about since I started blogging in 2008 (and indeed well before I came across Steve Sailer or even HBD) and as it so happens, I have long been intending to write a similar sort of book myself – tentatively titled Apollo’s Ascent – but one that focuses more on the historical aspect of the relationship between psychometrics and development:
My basic thesis is that the rate of technological progress, as well as its geographical pattern, is highly dependent on the absolute numbers of literate high IQ people.
To make use of the intense interest that will inevitably flare up around these topics in the next few days – not to mention that rather more self-interested reason of confirming originality on the off chance that any of Garett Jones’ ideas happen to substantively overlap with mine – I have decided to informally lay out the theoretical basis for Apollo’s Ascent right now.
1. Nous
Assume that the intellectual output of an average IQ (=100, S.D.=15) young adult Briton in the year 2000 – as good an encapsulation of the “Greenwich mean” of intelligence as any – is equivalent to one nous (1 ν).
This can be used to calculate the aggregate mindpower (M) in a country.
Since sufficiently differing degrees of intelligence can translate into qualitative differences – for instance, no amount of 55 IQ people will be able to solve a calculus problem – we also need to be able to denote mindpower that is above some threshold of intelligence. So in this post, the aggregate mindpower of a country that is above 130 will be written as M(+2.0), i.e. that aggregate mindpower that is two standard deviations above the Greenwich mean.
2. Intelligence and Industrial Economies
There is a wealth of evidence implying an exponential relationship between average IQ and income and wealth in the United States.
Click to enlarge.
There is likewise a wealth of evidence – from Lynn, Rindermann, La Griffe du Lion, your humble servant, etc. – that shows an exponential relationship between levels of average national IQ and GDP per capita (PPP adjusted). When you throw out countries with a legacy of Communism and the ruinous central planning they practiced (China, the Ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, etc), and countries benefitting disproportionately from a resource windfall (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, etc), there is an amazing R2=0.84 correlation between performance in the PISA international standardized student tests and GDP (PPP) per capita. (In sociology, anything about R2=0.3 is a good result).
The reasons for this might be the case are quite intuitive. At the most basic level, intelligent people can get things done better and more quickly. In sufficiently dull societies, certain things can’t get done at all. To loosely borrow an example from Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, assume a relatively simple widget that requires ten manufacturing steps that have to be done just right to make it commercially viable. Say an 85 IQ laborer has a failure rate of 5% for any one step, while a 100 IQ laborer has a failure rate of 1%. This does not sound like that big or cardinal of a difference. But repeated ten times, some 40% of the duller worker’s production ends up being a dud, compared to only 10% of the brighter worker’s. Consequently, one is competitive on the global markets, whereas the other is not (if labor costs are equal; hence, of course, they are not).
Now imagine said widget is an automobile, with hundreds of thousands of components. Or an aircraft carrier, or a spaceship. Or a complex surgery operation.
More technical way of looking at this: Consider the GDP equation, Y = A * K^α * L^(1-α), in which K is capital, L is labour, α is a constant that usually equals about 0.3, and A is total factor productivity. It follows that the only way to grow per capita output in the longterm is to raise productivity. Productivity in turn is a function of technology and how effectively it is utilized and that in turn depends critically on things like human capital. Without an adequate IQ base, you cannot accumulate much in the way of human capital.
There are at least two further ways in which brighter societies improve their relative fortunes over and above what might merely be implied by their mere productivity advantage at any technological level.
Source: Swiss Miss.
First, capital gets drawn to more productive countries, until the point at which its marginal productivity equalizes with that of less productive countries, with their MUCH LOWER levels of capital intensity. First World economies like Germany, Japan, and the US are extremely capital intensive. It is probably not an accident that Japan, Korea, and Taiwan – some of the very brightest countries on international IQ comparisons – also have by far the world’s highest concentrations of industrial robots per worker (and China is fast catching up). Since economic output is a function not only of pure productivity but also of capital (though subject to diminishing returns) this provides a big further boost to rich countries above the levels implied by their raw productivity. And as the age of automation approaches, these trends will only intensify.
Second, countries with higher IQs also tend to be better governed, and to effectively provide social amenities such as adequate nutrition and education to their populations. Not only does it further raise their national IQs, but it also means that it is easier to make longterm investments there and to use their existing human capital to its full potential.
All this implies that different levels of intelligence have varying economic values on the global market. At this stage I am not so much interested in establishing it with exactitude as illustrating the general pattern, which goes something like this:
- Average IQ = 70 – Per capita GDP of ~$4,000 in the more optimally governed countries of this class, such as Ghana (note however that many countries in this class are not yet fully done with their Malthusian transitions, which will depress their per capita output somewhat – see below).
- Average IQ = 85 – Per capita GDP of ~$16,000 in the more optimally governed countries of this class, such as Brazil.
- Average IQ = 100 Per capita GDP of ~45,000 in the more optimally governed countries of this class, or approximately the level of core EU/US/Japan.
- Average IQ = 107 – Per capita GDP of potentially $80,000, as in Singapore (and it doesn’t seem to have even finished growing rapidly yet). Similar figures for elite/financial EU cities (e.g. Frankfurt, Milan) and US cities (e.g. San Francisco, Seattle, Boston).
- Average IQ = 115 – Largely a theoretical construct, but that might be the sort of average IQ you’d get in, say, Inner London – the center of the global investment banking industry. The GDP per capita there is a cool $152,000.
Countries with bigger than normal “smart fractions” (the US, India, Israel) tend to have a bigger GDP per capita than what could be assumed from just from their average national IQ. This stands to reason because a group of people equally split between 85 IQers and 115 IQers will have higher cognitive potential than a room composed of an equivalent number of 100 IQers. Countries with high average IQs but smaller than normal S.D.’s, such as Finland, have a slightly smaller GDP per capita that what you might expect just from average national IQs.
These numbers add up, so a reasonable relationship equilibrium GDP (assuming no big shocks, good policies, etc) and the structure and size of national IQ would be:
Equilibrium GDP of a country ≈ exponent (IQ) * the IQ distribution (usually a bell curve shaped Gaussian) * population size * the technological level
Which can be simplified to:
Y ≈ cMT
… where M is aggregate mindpower (see above), T is the technology level, and c is a constant denoting the general regulatory/business climate (close to 1 in many well run capitalist states, <0.5 under central planning, etc).
To what extent if any would this model apply to pre-industrial economies?
3. Intelligence and Malthusian Economies
Source: A Farewell to Alms
Very little. The problem with Malthusian economies is that, as per the old man himself, population increases geometrically while crop yields increase linearly; before long, the increasing population eats up all the surpluses and reaches a sordid equilibrium in which births equal deaths (since there were a lot of births, that means a lot of deaths).
Under such conditions, even though technology might grow slowly from century to century, it is generally expressed not in increasing per capita consumption, but in rising population densities. And over centennial timescales, the effects of this (meager) technological growth can be easily swamped by changes in social structure, biome productivity, and climatic fluctuations (e.g. 17th C France = pre Black Death France in terms of population, because it was Little Ice Age vs. Medieval Warm Period), or unexpected improvements in agricultural productivity e.g. from the importation of new crops (e.g. the coming of sweet potatoes to China which enabled it to double its population over the previous record even though it was in outright social regress for a substantial fraction of this time).
All this makes tallying the rate of technological advance based on population density highly problematic. Therefore it has to be measured primarily in terms of eminent figures, inventions, and great works.
Distribution of significant figures across time and place. Source: Human Accomplishment.
The social scientist Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment has suggested a plausible and objective way of doing it, based on tallying the eminence of historical figures in culture and the sciences as measured by their prevalence in big reference works. Societies that are at any one time intensively pushing the technological frontiers outwards are likely to be generating plenty of “Great People,” to borrow a term from the Civilization strategy games.
To what extent does the model used for economic success apply to technology?
4. Intelligence and Technology Before 1800
A narrow intellectual elite is responsible for 99%+ of new scientific discoveries. This implies that unlike the case with an economy at large, where peasants and truck drivers make real contributions, you need to have a certain (high) threshold level of IQ to materially contribute to technological and scientific progress today.
The Anne Roe study of very eminent scientists in 1952 – almost Nobel worthy, but not quite – found that they averaged a verbal IQ of 166, a spatial IQ of 137, and a math IQ of 154. Adjusted modestly down – because the Flynn Effect has only had a very modest impact on non-rule dependent domains like verbal IQ – and you get an average verbal IQ of maybe 160 (in Greenwich terms). These were the sorts of elite people pushing progress in science 50 years ago.
To really understand 1950s era math and physics, I guesstimate that you would need an IQ of ~130+, i.e. your typical STEM grad student or Ivy League undergrad. This suggests that there is a 2 S.D. difference between the typical intellectual level needed to master something as opposed to making fundamental new discoveries in it.
Moreover, progress becomes steadily harder over time; disciplines splinter (see the disappearance of polymath “Renaissance men”), and eventually, discoveries become increasingly unattainable to sole individuals (see the steady growth in numbers of paper coauthors and shared Nobel Prizes in the 20th century). In other words, these IQ discovery thresholds are themselves a function of the technological level. To make progress up the tech tree, you need to first climb up there.
An extreme example today would be the work 0f Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. At least Grigory Perelman’s proof of the Poincare Conjecture was eventually confirmed by other mathematicians after a lag of several years. But Mochizuki is so far ahead of everyone else in his particular field of Inter-universal Teichmüller theory that nobody any longer quite knows whether he is a universal genius or a lunatic.
In math, I would guesstimate roughly the following set of thresholds:
| Mastery | Discovery | |
|---|---|---|
| Intuit Pythagoras Theorem (Ancient Egypt) | 90 | 120 |
| Prove Pythagoras Theorem (Early Ancient Greece) | 100 | 130 |
| Renaissance Math (~1550) | 110 | 140 |
| Differential Calculus (~1650+) | 120 | 150 |
| Mid-20th Century Math (1950s) | 130 | 160 |
| Prove Poincare Conjecture (2003) | 140 | 170 |
| Inter-universal Teichmüller theory (?) | 150 | 180 |
This all suggests that countries which attain new records in aggregate elite mindpower relative to their predecessors can very quickly generate vast reams of new scientific discoveries and technological achievements.
Moreover, this elite mindpower has to be literate. Because a human brain can only store so much information, societies without literacy are unable to move forwards much beyond Neolithic levels, their IQ levels regardless.
As such, a tentative equation for estimating a historical society’s capacity to generate scientific and technological growth would look something like this:
Technological growth ≈ c * M(>threshold IQ for new discovery) * literacy rate
or:
ΔT ≈ c * M(>discovery-threshold) * l
in which only that part of the aggregate mindpower that is above the threshold is considered; c is a constant that illustrates a society’s propensity for generating technological growth in the first place and can encompass social and cultural factors, such as no big wars, no totalitarian regimes, creativity, etc. as well as technological increases that can have a (generally marginal) effect on scientific productivity, like reading glasses in Renaissance Italy (well covered by David Landes), and the Internet in recent decades; and the literacy rate l is an estimate of the percentage of the cognitive elites that are literate (it can be expected to generally be a function of the overall literacy rate and to always be much higher).
Is it possible to estimate historical M and literacy with any degree of rigor?
Source: Gregory Clark.
I think so. In regards to literacy, this is an extensive area of research, with some good estimates for Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire (see Ancient Literacy by William Harris) and much better estimates for Europe after 1500 based on techniques like age heaping and book production records.
One critical consideration is that not all writing systems are equally suited for the spread of functional literacy. For instance, China was historically one of the most schooled societies, but its literacy tended to be domain specific, the classic example being “fish literacy” – a fishmonger’s son who knew the characters for different fish, but had no hope of adeptly employing his very limited literacy for making scientific advances, or even reading “self-help” pamphlets on how to be more effective in his profession (such as were becoming prevalent in England as early as the 17th century). The Chinese writing system, whether it arose from QWERTY reasons or even genetic reasons – and which became prevalent throughout East Asia – surely hampered the creative potential of East Asians.
Estimating average national IQs historically – from which M can be derived in conjunction with historical population sizes, of which we now generally have fairly good ideas about – is far more tricky and speculative, but not totally hopeless, because nowadays we know the main factors behind national differences in IQ.
Some of the most important ones include:
- Cold Winters Theory – Northern peoples developed higher IQs (see Lynn, Rushton).
- Agriculture – Societies that developed agriculture got a huge boost to their IQs (as well as higher S.D.s).
- Inbreeding – Can be estimated from rates of consanguineous marriage, runs of homozygosity, and predominant family types (nuclear? communitarian?), which in turn can be established from cultural and literary evidence.
- Eugenics – In advanced agricultural societies, where social relations come to be dominated by markets. See Greg Clark on England, and Ron Unz on China.
- Nutrition – Obviously plays a HUGE role in the Flynn Effect. Can be proxied by body measurements, and fortunately there is a whole field of study devoted to precisely this: Auxology. Burials, conscription records, etc. all provide a wealth of evidence.
- Parasite Load – Most severe in low-lying, swampy areas like West Africa and the Ganges Delta.
This old comment of mine to a post by Sailer is a demonstration of the sort of reasoning I tend to employ in Apollo’s Ascent.
All this means that educated guesses at the historic IQs of various societies are now perfectly feasible, if subject to a high degree of uncertainty. In fact, I have already done many such estimates while planning out Apollo’s Ascent. I will not release these figures at this time because they are highly preliminary, and lacking space to further elucidate my methods, I do not want discussions in the comments to latch on to some one figure or another and make a big deal out of it. Let us save this for later.
But in broad terms – and very happily for my thesis – these relations DO tend to hold historically.
Classical Greece was almost certainly the first society to attain something resembling craftsman level literacy rates (~10%). Ancient Greeks were also unusually tall (indicating good nutrition, for a preindustrial society), lived in stem/authoritarian family systems, and actively bred out during their period of greatness. They produced the greatest scientific and cultural explosion up to that date anywhere in the world, but evidently didn’t have quite the demographic weight – there were no more than 10 million Greeks scattered across the Mediterranean at peak – to sustain it.
In 15th century Europe, literacy once again begun soaring in Italy, to beyond Roman levels, and – surely helped by the good nutrition levels following the Black Death – helped usher in the Renaissance. In the 17th century, the center of gravity shifted towards Anglo-Germanic Europe in the wake of the Reformation with its obsession with literacy, and would stay there ever after.
As regards other civilizations…
The Islamic Golden Age was eventually cut short more by the increasing inbreeding than by the severe but ultimately temporary shock from the Mongol invasions. India was too depressed by the caste system and by parasitic load to ever be a first rate intellectual power, although the caste system also ensured a stream of occasional geniuses, especially in the more abstract areas like math and philosophy. China and Japan might have had an innate IQ advantage over Europeans – albeit one that was quite modest in the most critical area, verbal IQ – but they were too severely hampered by labour-heavy agricultural systems and a very ineffective writing system.
In contrast, The Europeans, fed on meat and mead, had some of the best nutrition and lowest parasitic load indicators amongst any advanced civilization, and even as rising population pressure began to impinge on those advantages by the 17th-18th centuries, they had already burst far ahead in literacy, and intellectual predominance was now theirs to lose.
5. Intelligence and Technology under Industrialism
After 1800, the world globalized intellectually. This was totally unprecedented. There had certainly been preludes to it, e.g. in the Jesuit missions to Qing China. But these were very much exceptional cases. Even in the 18th century, for instance, European and Japanese mathematicians worked on (and solved) many of the same problems independently.
Source: Human Accomplishment.
But in the following two centuries, this picture of independent intellectual traditions – shining most brightly in Europe by at least an order of magnitude, to be sure, but still diverse on the global level – was to be homogenized. European science became the only science that mattered, as laggard civilizations throughout the rest of the world were to soon discover to their sorrow in the form of percussion rifles and ironclad warships. And by “Europe,” that mostly meant the “Hajnal” core of the continent: France, Germany, the UK, Scandinavia, and Northern Italy.
And what had previously been but a big gap became an awning chasm.
(1) In the 19th century, the populations of European countries grew, and the advanced ones attained universal literacy or as good as made no difference. Aggregate mindpower (M) exploded, and kept well ahead of the advancing threshold IQ needed to make new discoveries.
(2) From 1890-1970, there was a second revolution, in nutrition and epidemiology – average heights increased by 10cm+, and the prevalence of debilitating infectitious diseases was reduced to almost zero – that raised IQ by as much as a standard deviation across the industrialized world. The chasm widened further.
(3) During this period, the straggling civilizations – far from making any novel contributions of their own – devoted most of their meager intellectual resources to merely coming to grips with Western developments.
This was as true – and consequential – in culture and social sciences as it was in science and technology; the Russian philosopher Nikolay Trubetzkoy described this traumatic process very eloquently in The Struggle Between Europe and Mankind. What was true even for “semi-peripheral” Russia was doubly true for China.
In science and technology, once the rest of the world had come to terms with Western dominance and the new era of the nation-state, the focus was on catchup, not innovation.This is because for developing countries, it is much more useful in terms of marginal returns to invest their cognitive energies into copying, stealing, and/or adapting existing technology to catch up to the West than to develop unique technology of their own. Arguments about, say, China’s supposed lack of ability to innovate are completely besides the point. At this stage of its development, even now, copying is much easier than creating!
This means that at this stage of global history, a country’s contribution to technological growth isn’t only a matter of the size of its smart fractions above the technological discovery IQ threshold. (This remains unchanged: E.g., note that a country like Germany remains MUCH more innovative per capita than, say, Greece, even though their aveage national IQs differ by a mere 5 points or so. Why? Because since we’re looking only at the far right tails of the bell curve, even minor differences in averages translate to big differences in innovation-generating smart fractions).
It also relates closely to its level of development. Countries that are far away from the technological frontier today are better served by using their research dollars and cognitive elites to catch up as opposed to inventing new stuff. This is confirmed by real life evidence: A very big percentage of world spending on fundamental research since WW2 has been carried out in the US. It was low in the USSR, and negligible in countries like Japan until recently. Or in China today.
Bearing this in mind, the technological growth equation today (and since 1800, more or less) – now due to its global character better described as innovation potential – would be better approximated by something like this:
Innovation potential ≈ c * M(>threshold IQ for new discovery) * literacy rate * (GDP/GDP[potential])^x
or:
I ≈ c * M(>discovery-threshold) * l * (Y/Y[P])^x
in which the first three terms are as before (though literacy = 100% virtually everywhere now), and potential GDP is the GDP this country would obtain were its technological endowment to be increased to the maximum level possible as dictated by its cognitive profile. The “x” is a further constant that is bigger than 1 to reflect the idea that catchup only ceases to be the most useful strategy once a country has come very close to convergence or has completely converged.
Japan has won a third of all its Nobel Prizes before 2000; another third in the 2000s; and the last third in the 2010s. Its scientific achievements, in other words, are finally beginning to catch up with its famously high IQ levels. Why did it take so long?
Somebody like JayMan would say its because the Japanese are clannish or something like that. Other psychometrists like Kenya Kura would notice that perhaps they are far less creative than Westerners (this I think has a measure of truth to it). But the main “purely IQ” reasons are pretty much good enough by themselves:
- The Nobel Prize is typically recognized with a ~25-30 year lag nowadays.
- It is taking ever longer amounts of time to work up to a Nobel Prize because ever greater amounts of information and methods have to be mastered before original creative work can begin. (This is one consequence of the rising threshold discovery IQ frontier).
- Critically, Japan in the 1950s was still something of a Third World country, with the attended insults upon average IQ. It is entirely possible that elderly Japanese are duller than their American counterparts, and perhaps even many Europeans of that age, meaning smaller smart fractions from the Nobel Prize winning age groups.
Japan only became an unambiguously developed country in the 1970s.
And it just so happens that precisely 40 years after this did it begin to see a big and still accelerating increase in the numbers of Nobel Prizes accruing to it!
Extending this to South Korea and Taiwan, both of which lagged around 20 years behind Japan, we can only expect to see an explosion in Nobel Prizes for them from the 2020s, regardless of how wildly their teenagers currently top out the PISA rankings.
Extending this to China, which lags around 20 years behind South Korea, and we can expect to see it start gobbling up Nobel Prizes by 2040, or maybe 2050, considering the ongoing widening of the time gap between discovery and recognition. However, due to its massive population – ten times as large as Japan’s – once China does emerge as a major scientific leader, it will do so in a very big way that will rival or even displace the US from its current position of absolute primacy.
As of 2014, China already publishes almost as many scientific papers per year as does the US, and has an outright lead in major STEM fields such as Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. (Though to be sure, their quality is much lower, and a significant fraction of them are outright “catching up” or “adaption” style papers with no new findings).
If we assume that x=1, and that c is equal for both China and the US, then it implies that both countries currently have broadly equal innovation potential. But of course c is not quite equal between them – it is lower for China, because its system is obviously less conductive to scientific research than the American – and x is higher than 1, so in practice China’s innovation potential is still considerably lower than that of the US (maybe a quarter or a third). Nonetheless, as China continues to convege, c is going to trend towards the US level, and the GDP gap is going to narrow; plus it may also be able to eke out some further increases in its national average IQ from the current ~103 (as proxied by PISA in 2009) to South Korea’s level of ~107 as it becomes a truly First World country.
And by mid-century it will likely translate into a strong challenge to American scientific preeminence.
6. Future Consequences
The entry of China onto the world intellectual stage (if the model above is more or less correct) will be portentuous, but ultimately it will in its effects on aggregate mindpower be nowhere near the magnitude in global terms of the expansion in the numbers of literate, mostly European high IQ people from 1450 to 1900, nor the vast rise in First World IQ levels from 1890-1970 due to the Flynn Effect.
Moreover, even this may be counteracted by the dysgenic effects already making themselves felt in the US and Western Europe due to Idiocracy-resembling breeding patterns and 80 IQ Third World immigration.
Radically raise IQ. And no need for pesky neural implants!
A lot of the techno-optimistic rhetoric you encounter around transhumanist circles is founded on the idea that observed exponential trends in technology – most concisely encapsulated by Moore’s Law – are somehow self-sustaining, though the precise reasons why never seem to be clearly explained. But non-IT technological growth peaked in the 1950s-70s, and has declined since; and as a matter of fact, Moore’s Law has also ground to a halt in the past 2 years. Will we be rescued by a new paradigm? Maybe. But new paradigms take mindpower to generate, and the rate of increase in global mindpower has almost certainly peaked. This is not a good omen.
Speaking of the technological singularity, it is entirely possible that the mindpower discovery threshold for constructing a superintelligence is in fact far higher than we currently have or are likely to ever have short of a global eugenics program (and so Nick Bostrom can sleep in peace).
On the other hand, there are two technologies that combined may decisively tip the balance: CRISPR-Cas9, and the discovery of the genes for general intelligence. Their maturation and potential mating may become feasible as early as 2025.
While there are very good reasons – e.g., on the basis of animal breeding experiments – for doubting Steve Hsu’s claims that genetically corrected designer babies will have IQs beyond that of any living human today, increases on the order of 4-5 S.D.’s are entirely possible. If even a small fraction of a major country like China adopts it – say, 10% of the population – then that will in two decades start to produce an explosion in aggregate global elite mindpower that will soon come to rival or even eclipse the Renaissance or the Enlightenment in the size and scope of their effects on the world.
The global balance of power would be shifted beyond recognition, and truly transformational – indeed, transhuman – possibilities will genuinely open up.
Does Emil’s short article say anything to the effect of skepticism about Hsu’s claim? I can’t see anything like that.
[AK: See better http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=5388 (edited article). The animal breeding article originally quoted is more an illustration of why that would be the case.]
Confirming that Perelman had proved the Poincaré conjecture didn’t take anything like years. Within a couple of months after the claim had become public it was generally accepted.
[17th C France = pre Black Death France in terms of population, because it was Little Ice Age vs. Medieval Warm Period]
I’m not sure exactly what you are claiming here, but certainly the much exaggerated variations in climatic conditions, say between 1200 and 1700, had nothing to do with the uncorrelated population changes over the same period.
I think it possible to go beyond current max IQ with (we do not know the exact mechanism for many drugs) but at first it would would tend to imbalance the brain’s social perception to favour mechanistic cognition, thereby ending up with an autistic savant type intelligence. Aspergers is common in intellectually gifted families. One could also get a psychotic savant type IQ (there are certain tests that psychotic or borderline personalities are better than normals at). https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201409/the-complex-cognitive-plane-and-new-measure-iq
As a generalisation I would say highly intelligent Western people seem to be inherently sceptical of genetic explanation for intelligence, and they are not without influence. One could speculate of some self interested motives for that anti-genetic IQ mind-set, such as supply and demand. I don’t know that much about China but it seems to me that the main objective of the Chinese elite and the thing the have invested their wealth in (schooling) is for their children to get good jobs and any successful genetic engineering for IQ would virtually eliminate the main (genetic) advantage of the Chinese elites’ offspring over the masses and make expensive education a waste of money; it would be not necessarily welcomed by the ruling class that the supply of super high IQ people was massively increased In the short term tinkering with IQ will be risky, and I doubt many top elite parents would chose to do it. Those that did would face extreme disapproval and possible discrimination.
China is going to be the most powerful country in the world anyway, and the natural cognitive elite wish to keep their advantage. I think genetic engineering would be supressed in China because it would damage important class interests. Japan’s abandonment of firearms shows this kind of thing can be done if the sectional interest is powerful enough.
“It is entirely possible that elderly Japanese are duller than their American counterparts, and perhaps even many Europeans of that age, meaning smaller smart fractions from the Nobel Prize winning age groups.”
-You can look it up:
http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/country-specific-material.htm
And it doesn’t appear that they are. Koreans, though….
[AK: Thanks this is very useful data.]
Love your unit of measurement
Japan is remarkably homogenous in skill distribution indeed. The difference to Korea’s massive gaps is obvious.
On the European side, Finland shows a massive skill gap between age groups, quoting the national report found from the link:
“The skills of older age groups are generally weaker than those of younger ones, but the differences between age groups vary considerably by country. In Finland, the performance gap in literacy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments between the oldest age groups to the best performing age groups is the widest in the survey, and second widest in numeracy too.”
It also is a former part of the Russian Empire and used to be much poorer and less educated in comparison to Scandinavian and other NW European countries than it is now. These kind of peculiarities explain low GDP relative to IQ much better than low standard deviation theory, which fails to explain it in cases like Ireland and Denmark which also have low SD, or Japan/Taiwan which do not have low SD (see PISA 2012 math results for instance). An extension of the Czech/Slovakia-East European cline in the Education and Economic Growth graph in other words, not part of the traditional West European cline.
Spain and Poland also show a considerable skill gap between ages, Ireland’s gap is relatively wide but North Ireland’s is almost nonexistent. Could the differences in the number of immigrants be the sole reason for this? Slovakia’s low numeracy gap also stands out among Eastern European countries, immigration can’t really be the reason for difference there.
An obvious example of this would be Jewish elites, who are a very high IQ elite that tends to promote policies that lower IQ among their host populations and thus potential competitors for elite positions. It seems unlikely that this is deliberate or conscious, but it’s obvious how such tendencies could evolve.
Although the evolutionary dynamics with Jews are a bit different because they are a diaspora group with a history of frequent migration among different host populations, and thus have been subjected to less evolutionary pressure to co-evolve with specific populations, which would mitigate evolutionary incentives to dumb down the populace. Other elites haven’t been under this sort of evolutionary pressure, but contemporary globalization does incentivize it more everywhere and among all populations now since mobility is so much easier now.
In the late 19th century, towards the end of the Qing dynasty, the last traditional dynasty that ruled China, about a third of the “degree holders”, those who passed the exams and became members of the government elite, were sons from peasant backgrounds whose fathers and families were not “degree holders”. This was the norm throughout Chinese history. The connection between the elite and landed peasantry wasn’t severely divorced, and much of the elite was drawn directly from the peasantry. Even today, the Chinese Communist Party elite is mainly internally recruited, developed, and promoted. To ascend the CCP hierarchy, one has to work in China in the party for a long time and have close connections and outsiders are generally excluded, whereas in the US, a career at Goldman Sachs in NYC or London can be good for the resume if one wants elite government policy or advisory positions in the future. This is also the case in Japan, where studying and working abroad can actually hurt one’s career prospects in Japan.
OT: Anatoly, have you seen this recent article on Putin’s family connections: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/russia-capitalism-daughters ?
The research seems adequate enough.
[AK: Yes I have. It does and I see no problem with the research or the Chinese princelings comparison. It all stands to reason; standard age-old tale of political power merging with economic power. The 1488 crowd aren’t going to be happy about Tikhonova’s choice, needless to say, but who cares, in any case Putin’s philo-Semitism has never been a secret.]
I think the elite see the lower orders as the enemy as long as there is not an an actual enemy state to fight, which would require the cannon fodder to be appeased. Without external threats the elite look on the proles as potentially a danger. The economic motive comes to the fore and the elite become free riders on the masses and break working class organisation such as unions, and remove their only trump card (ethnic homogeneity). Germany is now cocooned within Nato states and look what happened. In a hypothetical scenario of Russian armies re-conquering east Europe, or threatening to, those Pegida marches of early this year would not have been anathematised by Merkel (and Schroder) because the political class would need the ethno-Germans.
To get little more on topic I think genetic engineering of IQ might indeed be used by the US if a powerful rival such as China was thought to be using it, and any objection to genetic engineering of high IQ by Chinese elites who wanted to maintain their natural superiority might be overruled, if China had some external threat reason of its own. But, China faces no such threat, and why should it start a scientific contest with the US, one Chinese could not hope to win? The Chinese don’t want to get pegged as a genetic enginering version of master race nuts in the way north Korea has been. Everything is going swimmingly for China and they are not going to take any clutch-the-pearls inducing initiatives.
Also, the elite genuinely don’t believe in genetically limited IQ. The people that matter sincerely disbelieve it. Maybe it is Triver’s style self deception for self interested motives, or something else.
http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/20151031_CNM902_595.png
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21677267-new-study-casts-new-light-chinas-progress-noodles-longevity
FYI, the first tier Chinese cities already achieved first world quality of life despite of pollution. Or the pollution might not so bad or harmful at all (wild speculation). Basically Han regions are bordering to developed countries. If China disintegrated back to waring national states 200o years ago, the eastern state countries were developed nations like nearby Korea, Japan ect.
Biological markers are objective.
France in 1700 had approximately the same population (~20 million) as it did during its peak medieval phase.
During both periods it was demonstrably close to the edge of subsistence; the Sun King’s reign was full of famines.
However, agricultural technologies surely didn’t stay in the same place during this 500 year period, so we might reasonably posit that the reason population didn’t move ahead was on account of the climate becoming worse and depressing crop fertility (Little Ice Age vs. Medieval Warm Period), plus maybe a change in social structure also played a role (the Sun King maintained an unprecedentedly vast army of 400,000 men, which must surely have exercised an unprecedented load on the food production system; armies need much more food than civilians).
This is the obvious Malthusian explanation, but it might well be wrong, maybe someone has a better one.
I seem to recall it taking a couple of years of intensive study by high-flying mathematical teams but that might be wrong. I will be sure to examine this in more detail and perhaps illustrate it with a better example if necessary. But the general point I think still stands: In regards to the most outstanding mathematics achievements of the past couple of decades, such as the proof of the Poincare Conjecture (and for that matter to Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem), only a very, very narrow cognitive elite – threshold mastery IQ being perhaps 145 – is capable of understanding them in principle.
Has anyone worked on making this an investible thesis or backtested it? For example, take the top 25% by human capital versus the bottom 25% over the last 50 years.
I’m guessing the top 25% outperformed, and one could enhance this buy applying valuation or momentum metrics to further enhance returns..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Poincar%C3%A9
Poincaré’ of the conjecture’s cousin, Raymond Poincaré, played an interesting part in the genesis of WW1, (and 2). Pyrrhic victories at best. We shouldn’t assume that super high IQ elites will be more adept at common sense strategy.
Unless by circular reasoning, one cannot maintain anything like the simple Malthusian thesis that population always expands to the limits of subsistence. Idealisations based on equilibrium models fail to do justice to historical facts. Population was no higher after 500 years because it had been set back so far in the century when plague epidemics were most intense. Their severity was not due to cold, nor to warmth. Delay of marriage took over steadily as the social norm, despite the drastic change plague was making in the pressure of people on resources. There was steady growth from the late 1400s to the mid 1600s, then a century of stagnation. All these remarks apply to England as much as to France, despite the higher level of agricultural prosperity enjoyed throughout by the former. This is enough to show that we are not dealing with a hard restraint imposed on reproduction by the climate, but with an endogenous development of society enduring biological shocks.
I should have been more explicit about what I meant by saying Perelman’s success was quickly accepted. Mathematicians qualified to judge were soon confident that his outline could be filled out without real problems. The completion of papers doing that did take a couple of years, but the claims of the Chinese team that published one of them to have added important elements that Perelman didn’t have are not taken seriously outside of China. Something similar can be said about Wiles’s proof of the FLT, although there a more serious gap was found and had to be plugged. But in Mochizuki’s case, as you say, more than three years after his ideas were published only a couple of mathematicians, all of whom have studied with him personally, are ready to accept them.
“An obvious example of this would be Jewish elites, who are a very high IQ elite that tends to promote policies that lower IQ among their host populations and thus potential competitors for elite positions”
-Like, say, Mark Zuckerberg. Surely a great enemy of New Jew* immigration.
*Mostly Indian, Korean, Chinese
Countries like the US vacuum up the smart fraction of other countries (brain drain) like China, India and even west european countries, strengthening their own human capital at the expense of others.
This brain drain can confound the correlation between average IQ and development because it is driven by a smart fraction that doesn’t impact the average IQ of either country as it’s numerically too small.
1) As I’ve said before, I disagree with you about planned economies. The more market-oriented an economy is, the more economic activity it will produce. Some of the additional economic activity will be harmful and some will be irrelevant to the real standard of living. In socialist countries you couldn’t add to the GDP by scamming and annoying people.
In terms of the real standard of living (not the same things as per capita GDP), the former socialist countries are now recovering from the loot-tastic, oligarchic, neoliberal 1990s more than from the legacy of state planning.
2) The complexity of Greek mathematics and geometry kept increasing for centuries after the Pythagoras Theorem was proven. Archimedes’s stuff was quite complex.
I don’t know of any reasons for thinking that the intellectual and artistic elites of the past, going back to at least Greco-Roman times, were less intelligent on average than modern intellectual elites. There were fewer elite individuals in the past – the populations were smaller and the well-fed, literate share of those populations was small. Larger numbers will lead to higher peaks, more geniuses. But the average quality of the elites might not have changed for many centuries. The increase in the complexity of STEM fields might be entirely explainable by the shoulders-of-giants effect plus larger optimally-fed populations leading to higher peaks while maintaining the same mean IQ.
3) Arguments about, say, China’s supposed lack of ability to innovate are completely besides the point. At this stage of its development, even now, copying is much easier than creating!”
Russia innovated while catching up. Mendeleyev, Lobachevsky, etc.
“A very big percentage of world spending on fundamental research since WW2 has been carried out in the US. It was low in the USSR, and negligible in countries like Japan until recently.”
Mathematics thrived in the USSR. What can be more fundamental?
As for the idea that Korea and Taiwan will soon start winning lots of Nobels and that China will start winning them in the 2040s and 2050s, one would have to look at the innovation record of Asian-Americans. There have been some Japanese and Chinese in America since the 19th century. They’ve enjoyed the same access to first-world living standards as Whites. OK, there’re hit by affirmative action harder, but that won’t affect the sort of geniuses that are likely to win Nobels, Fields Medals, etc.
I haven’t looked at this data so I don’t know if Asian-Americans have been as innovative per capita as European-Americans.
Some very good points here, my criticisms regardless.
I am not unsympathetic to your arguments on central planning vs. capitalist economics in the loose sense that I too dislike advertising, scamming, etc. but otherwise arguing that they were comparable in the sorts of affluence and productivity they enabled is rather stretching it to put it mildly.
But this is an argument we’ve had before so no point in continuing it here.
Indeed. The brilliant methods Archimedes developed for the calculation of areas under curves and circular areas and spheres can almost be said to anticipate those of integral calculus in the 17th century, though neigher he nor his fellows ever quite managed to connect all the dots. I think that sort of cutting edge Greek math was on approximately the same intellectual level as 16th century Renaissance mathematics like the solution of the cubic equations.
All the evidence to date suggests that Flynn’s magic has affected all parts of the IQ bell curve in more or less equal degree.
While we will never be able to know who was brighter, Archimedes or Newton or Perelman, evidence from performance in the Olympics this past century – a huge in performance even at the most elite global leveln, with diminishing returns setting in around 1980 – suggests that the intellectual elites have also started to perform better and that this was not simply a function of their increased numbers.
(1) The intellectual gap then was still much smaller. An intelligent person of means could read up on the latest European research on a particular sphere and start making contributions to it. Now you first need to build up a big technical and human ecosystem to generate progress. Regrettably, the era of eccentric polymaths and gentleman scientists has long been over. (Ironically, a field like psychometrics might be a partial exception, because the taboo against it has made sure it has advanced much less relative to other social science spheres since the 1940s with the result that there are far fewer barriers to entry than, say, econometrics).
(2) The economic/development gap was also smaller. Even today, China is at 25% of US GDP per capita (and recall that it now takes a very long time for achievements to be translated into recognition – around 25 years for Nobel Prizes; for them to filter through into things like university rankings, even more). A couple decades ago it was at less than 10%. In contrast, Tsarist Russia was at about a third of Britain’s level during the 19th century, because Britain despite its industrial revolution was still rather poor.
(3) Russia innovated – but very little! As you would recall from Human Accomplishment, its per capita share of significant figures was an order of magnitude lower than those of the leading European countries such as Germany, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland.
It did, although it was still eclipsed by US achievements during the same era. And math was pretty much the subject the USSR was best at. Physics was also respectable but at best on the level of midsized countries like Germany, France, the UK. Chemistry was altogether more modest. Biology and genetics? Very little.
They have been more innovative than European-Americans actually. I looked at the data and IIRC they outperform 2-3x on Nobels and Fields Medals. Not quite as high as you might expect from their IQs, which are midway between those of Whites and Jews, so there is very probably something to Kenya Kura et al.’s hypothesis that East Asians have a systemically lower q factor (curiosity) than Whites, but ultimately it only knocks them back the equivalent of a few IQ points. (Of course with bell curves even a few IQ points can make a big difference).
Your thinking style is very much rememble to scientitists. I do not know whether you have PhD training or not. As scientitists, you always think based on objective evidences (data).
Rational thinking with perception only and little ojective evidence only lead to false belief, superstition, baseless accusation ect. Dataless thinking is for pure fictions or fantacies. If pure fiction considered as creativity, then some people are quite capable of that.
There is nothing wrong with dataless rationalization to create fictions/fantacies which can be quite entertaining. But you just can not take such thing seriously. However, average folk might do. Well, that is why they are average.
As a number 0f people including Ron Unz have noted, Scots and Scottish Americans had a very high level of achievement, but it faded out completely and even reversed.
Technology has never been a thing with elites, they prefer pure science, so technology advances have been left to self made types. As is well known the ancient Greeks had steam engine toys, while the Maya (world lead in maths) had wheeled toys but no carts. Germany (Teknik) verses Britain (pure science) suggests emphasis on prestigious advanced science leads to loss of productive capacity, and an ominous loss of ability to meet future challenges.
The host population of the US was mainly gentile northern European. This population provided the WASP elite that dominated elite positions and institutions in the US until about half a century ago, and was the primary competition against Jews for elite positions and excluded Jews from them. They no longer dominate them nor pose any serious competition for them as a group.
Zuckerberg wants to increase H-1b visas and the supply of labor in order to have cheaper and more compliant employees.
http://www.forbes.com/asap/1997/0825/102.html
And engineering has only declined in viability and prestige as a profession since then. Political, business, and financial elites don’t view engineering as a profession but more like labor and a cost-center to be minimized by throwing more insourcing, outsourcing, and women and minorities at it.
All of these guys had PhDs in physics, as did Noyce — “high status” even back east.
They were not engineers. Whoever wrote this piece is very confused.
They worked in engineering and research, not as, say, theoretical physicists. And their Nobel was in engineering work, not theoretical physics.
Bardeen was a theoretical physicist. New inventions like this are in the domain of Physics. It becomes engineering later as it is better understood / more applied. (For example the entire field of Electrical Engineering used to be part of Physics.) The Nobel for this work was in Physics — there is no Nobel for engineering. Work that wins the Nobel is “high status” even on the east coast and back in Europe (where the prize is in fact awarded by a committee of Europeans).
Please try to learn as you proceed through life.
Bardeen’s other Nobel was for theoretical physics. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs where they were trying to develop a semiconductor to replace vacuum tubes.
Please try to stop being a pedantic asshole.
The math doesn’t seem right here. 4% failure rate each time for 10 steps – if the steps are separate from one another, isn’t it 1.04 to the power 10 rather than 4% times ten? Same with the 1%. The results are a 48.0% duds if each step has a potential of 4% to fail, and 10.5% dud for 1%, roughly. Please dismiss if I’m wrong.
[AK: 0.95^10 vs. 0.99^10 ].
That smacks of psuedo-science to me. Eskimos would be Einsteins if this theory was true. For most of history northern peoples = northern barbarians.
Both the hardware and the software of the northern barbarians of europe was transformed by the superior southerners before they became capable of civilization.
For your information, India has a much lower GDP per capita than the MENA nations which all have similar average national IQs to India’s.
India even has lower per capita income than subsaharan africa…
As per Lynn, northern hunter-gatherers (the Arctic peoples) have a mean IQ of 91. Southern hunter-gatherers like Bushmen and Australian Aborigines have mean IQs in the 60s.
There is a north-south intelligence gradient among agriculturalists as well. Finns have a higher mean IQ than Spaniards, who have a higher mean IQ than Egyptians, who have a higehr mean IQ than Bantus. The Chinese have a higher mean IQ than SE Asians who have a higher mean IQ than Papuan agriculturalists.
Classic-era Greeks and Republican-era Romans were of a northern European physical type. There are many literary references to light hair and light eyes among them. The stereotypical early Roman was held to be red-haired. The Greek gods were typically described as blond. They were depicted that way too – there are microscopic remains of paint on some of the old statues. The hair was painted light.
Ancient Greeks and Romans also had a typically northern-European, egalitarian political set-ups. Elections, popular assemblies, term limits. Their military successes were made possible by discipline and altruism. The Romans fought Germanics to a standstill along the Rhine. It’s impossible to imagine later Italians competing with Germans as equals in the military sphere.
Light hair, high IQ and egalitarianism must have been brought to Greece and Italy by conquest from the north in pre-historic times. The warm climate allowed the notherners to increase their population density. Eventually cities were born, and with them the first Western high-IQ civilization.
High IQ, writing and civilization (though not light hair or egalitarianism) were brought to southern China from northern China in historical times.
Modern Greeks and Italians are to a large extent descended from Middle Eastern slaves whom ancient Greeks and Romans imported as cheap labor. As Greece and Italy became more Middle Eastern, egalitarianism was gradually replaced by despotism in them. As the levels of discipline and altruism decreased, native troops had to be replaced by Germanic mercenaries.
When high IQ occurs among southern peoples, it is among merchants and aristocrats, not among farmers. High latitudes only select for high IQ among hunter-gatherers and farmers.
Read Point 2 directly below it (agriculture).
And as would be predicted by intelligence/”hive mind” theory, India is growing far faster than most of them.
Also that is simply not true for SSA.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/665255549873750016
On the topic of Indians, IQ and GDP. The previous chess world champion was an Indian, then there was that Indian who learned advanced maths all by himself (Srinivasa Ramanujan). India is also where things like concept of zero in maths and chess originated. I am not saying that India does not have a low IQ population, but its past history shows that it has far more potential than sub Saharan Africa has ever shown to have. I also don’t think this is down to sheer numbers, nobody is really surprised by an Indian or Chinese world chess champion, even if there are 4 billion Africans one day, it would really be surprising to see an African world champion.
As mentioned in passing here (and far more detail elsewhere), India has a very broad distribution of intelligences thanks to its caste system. The Brahmins are in some sense India’s Jews.
Nigeria – the maybe second most populous country in the world after India and before China by the end of the century – is slightly above India in the PPP GDP per capita ranking. Anyway when the recent boom in India prevails India could take over
I don’t know if that’s completely accurate. Pure math and theoretical science were heavily emphasized in France, Germany, and Russia. And there was lots of emphasis on experimental and empirical science in Britain that was quite symbiotic with developing productive capacity.
But at any rate, I don’t think the emphasis on the kind of science is a major factor relatively speaking because, as you note, technology isn’t a really a thing with elites and advances tend to come from self made types. I think what was important for Britain was that it had a relatively robust yeomanry and had large New World colonies open up, which made labor relatively more expensive, which increased the supply of potential independent, self made types and laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. John Harrison was a clockmaker with no scientific training, and he solved the longitude problem technologically and won the Longitude Prize by building an accurate clock. He bested the royal astronomers and academics, many of whom derided Harrison as a mere mechanic and even tried to sabotage him, and who favored the cumbersome and science based lunar method of finding longitude. Newton himself favored the lunar method and thought that building a sea going clock accurate enough to determine longitude was impossible. Lord Kelvin was one of the greatest physicists of the late 19th century and claimed that heavier than air was impossible, shortly before the Wright brothers, self made bicycle mechanics, made the first flight.
There seems to be some sort of structural factor that tends to inhibit elites from pursuing technological advance. It could be that people in general, and perhaps elites most especially, are primarily motivated by social status, and social status is by definition a zero sum proposition. What matters is relative social status. Once one is elite, there’s less incentive to pursue technological advance. If you risk your wealth pursuing tech, you might fail and lose relative social status. And even if you succeed, tech is a tool or instrument that increases wealth and power for its user, and if it gets in others’ hands it can increase their social status and diminish your own relative social status. This may be why elites tend to prefer using labor and cheapening labor rather than pursuing technological advance.
Perhaps that claim really is based on some statistics published by Nigeria, but if so they are even more laughably absurd than the rest.
I don´t know about Nigeria but I have always had the impression that the official GDP data underestimate the economy of India.
south Chinese are more intelligent than north Chinese.
James Clerk Maxwell (whose father’s line real name was Clerk) must be accounted the greatest, and he was very interested in practical technology and experiment design. He was also very religious, as was Isaac Newton who interpreted the bible to predict to future (rather successfully as he predicted the decline of the Ottoman empire). True creative genius has that otherworldly hermeneutic side to it, that is why I very much doubt there is any easy way to come up with people smarter than Einstein (who fathered a schizophrenic son, as did James Watson) though genetic engineering could likely mass produce a Freud or a John B. Watson type intelligence, those who could bamboozle the wider society.
Correlli Barnett wrote quite extensively on the British failure to parlay its science achievements into useable technology and national power. This had embarrassing consequence when Britain was up against Germany. Basically sucessful merchants and inventors had their sons educated to rule. Britain is still pursuing the same path as proved by the Chinese being brought in to designing and building a nuclear reactor. The ideal life is still the man of independent means.
India had been mentioned. I think the Indian merchant class (Ghandi’s caste) are the scientists while the top politicians are all Brahmin. India may avoid some problems that way.
Independent means foster independent thought. A robust supply of men of relative independent means may be important. See ” Yeomen As Foundation of Scientific Revolution”:
http://jimbowery.blogspot.com/2007/01/yeomen-as-foundation-of-scientific.html
Victor Davis Hanson has made a similar argument with respect to the Greeks and the Athenian golden age:
http://people.bu.edu/bobl/samons1.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%E2%80%93Wedgwood_family Darwin was rather inbred
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201002/identical-genetically-different-and-why-you-can-thank-your-mother Charles Dawin got his brains from Joshua Wedgwood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Wedgwood He belonged to the fourth generation of a family of potters. That kind of cottage industry with linkage between success and big families (offspring are workforce) is where intelligence is ratcheted up. In addition to being a skilled potter by age 9, he was a groundbreaking businessman industrialist and invented many modern sales techniques such as 2 for 1 offers.
Wedgwood’s metalistic side led to radical activism
South Chinese are to a large extent descended from immigrants from north China. The Chinese language, writing system and state originated in the north, in the Yellow River basin. The south was still being conquered during the Han dynasty. There are ethnic minorities in southern China who are more indiginous to it than the southern Han. It’s my impression that these ethnic minorities lag behind the Han economically and culturally.
The Hakka, a very sucessful group of the southern Han, say that they originally came from northern China.
India has been independent for almost 7 decades yet it still lags way behind the MENA nations with similar IQs. Other than Afghanistan and Yemen every MENA nation has a significantly higher per capita income than India. Does that not contradict your claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
In this age of globalization you should be looking at nominal per capita income when measuring national competitiveness. India has lower per capita income (nominal) than subsaharan Africa.
And since you think the hindu caste system is such a great advantage for India you need to explain not only why casteist India is poorer and hungrier than every region on earth but also why the aryan cow belt of north india (where the great majority of upper caste hindus live) lags behind the rest of india.
Typical nordicist nonsense. Both the greeks and the romans saw the nordic tribes of their time as primitive, alien barbarians.
The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of
Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill…The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit….But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent. [Aristotle, in Politics]
The peoples of Asia were primarily the persians to the ancient greeks, a people who today have an average IQ in the low 80s.
By rejecting the Trinity Newton rejected mainstream Christianity. He could have been burned at the stake as a heretic as were the anti-trinitarian scientists Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus
This says nothing about the ancient Greeks’ physical type. Aristotle claimed two things in that passage:
1) Europeans are inclined towards freedom while Middle Easterners are inclined towards despotism. This is still true.
2) Middle Easterners are more intelligent and skillful than Europeans. This is not true today.
Perhaps Aristotle was misled by the material fruits of civilization. A warmer climate produces greater population density, which produces a more complicated economy with specialization of labor. A colder climate selects for intelligence, but you need high population density for a civilization to develop.
Full passage:
The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity.
The Arctic peoples have a mean IQ that’s higher than those of many Middle Eastern or SE Asian peoples, yet their native material culture is much simpler. Why? Because their harsh environment couldn’t support a complicated civilization with the hunter-gatherer (or agricultural) lifestyle.
The Finns of the 18th century hadn’t contributed much to civilization either. Yet we can be quite sure that 18th century Finnish farmers were more intelligent than 18th century Persian farmers because modern Finns are more intelligent than modern Persians, the nutritional gains would have been similar at the lower class level and natural selection doesn’t work that fast. It’s just that sparsely populated farmland isn’t conducive to civilization.
By itself intelligence isn’t enough to create civilization. One shouldn’t always judge intelligence by civilizational output. That may have been Aristotle’s mistake. As you probably know, he made many others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
Of course Northern Europe was sparsely populated compared to Southern Europe and the Fertile Crescent. If you’re curious about what’s known about demographic history, I would recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0140510761/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1447790203&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=atlas+of+population+history&dpPl=1&dpID=51HNu%2BGF%2BjL&ref=plSrch
Not true. There were millions of northern european barbarians. Julius Caesar killed a million Gauls and enslaved another million, and that together was less than half their population. That’s a lot for >2000 years years ago. Then there were the millions of germanic barbarians. How many millions of people do you imagine are required to jumpstart a civilization?
LOL! You must be an African (or maybe a Chinaman) to say something so retarded.
And BTW, there is Aryan-Land and Dravidian-Land in India, with nary a ethnic, linguistic or cultural component betwixt them. The whole country is re-building from a massive Islamic/Colonial hangover that lasted about 500 years, like a communist era eastern bloc country, except that went on for centuries.
As per McEvedy and Jones in 400 BC there were 3 million people within the modern borders of Greece. In 500 BC there were only 0.2 million people in what’s now England and Wales and 0.15 million in Scandinavia. By 200 BC England and Wales had 0.4 million people. Germany (modern borders) reached 1 million in 700 BC and 2 million in 200 BC, France (modern borders) had 3 million in 400 BC and 4 million in 200 BC. Italy had 4 million in 400 BC, 5 million in 200 BC and 7 million in 1 AD. Iberia had 4.5 million in 200 BC.
In summary ancient Greece had by far the highest population density in ancient Europe. Italy was second.
Those figures are IMO a gross underestimation.
The Finns of the 18th century quite possibly contributed to civilization in spades.
It’s just that they did it in the New World, having gotten free of Swedish rule in both Finland, Sweden, and the mid-Atlantic.
http://www.amazon.com/American-Backwoods-Frontier-Ecological-Interpretation/dp/0801843758/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447833472&sr=8-1&keywords=american+backwoods+jordan
What exactly do you find so retarded in the data?
Per capita income of India: $1570 (http://data.worldbank.org/country/india)
Per capita income of subsaharan Africa: $1699 (http://data.worldbank.org/region/SSA)
We have keep in mind definitively that rationality IS NOT a universal potential for human beings, ”smart fraction ones” included. Wisdom/rationality seems to be very rare and my tip is that a balanced brain, mechanicist/mentalistic seems to be a important trait to compose a natural rational mind.
Many ”aspergers” seems to be attracted to the left spectrum because their common ”weirdness”, of course, we are attracted by certain political affiliations firstly because our personality/motivation types. And as human beings tend to have lower adaptatibility/adaptative creativity so generally cyber punks will be anarcho-left in the political ‘choices” and white heteronormative, unicultural (uniracial) and omnivorous will tend to fit naturally with right wing.
The existence of brighter people who are insanely left wing (and little less about right wing, the primitive-logical deductive party) show us partially why higher (technical) intelligence will not be ”always”as result the higher rational thinking disposition (rational thinking= critical-analytical-holistic , systematic thinking)
If you had the least bit of actual knowledge about history, statistics and the touchstones of economic development, gayboy, you would already know how retarded it is.
Why do you think that? Do you know of a source of better figures? If so, what makes it better?
Archaeological results, especially aerial surveys, are the main support for my position.
I see a documentary of Celtic people during roman era and they don’t appear “barbaric” as you said. Civilization obviously have many superior traits than “non-civilizations” but also have a lot of very bad traits. Roman Empire could be easily compared with USA today. A epicenter of high culture, intellectuality and civility?? Not so much.
Funny how thinskinned you and foo9 are about data on India. Makes you lose your frickin minds. Once again, what the hell is “retarded” about the World Bank’s data that shows that India has lower per capita income than Subsaharan Africa? Do you two even know what the word retarded means?
Do you think that economic development can exist on paper alone, without changing anything non-monetary about a country? Without more energy or electricity being consumed there, without its people buying more of any actual product? Only if you believe all these things can you for one second entertain the idiocy you have endorsed. If ignorance is bliss, then your username is very well earned.
Despite our recent differences 🙂 , I do agree with you that equilibrium models cannot hope to capture historical outcomes, especially discordant “patterns”, even if somehow exogenous shocks were introduced through some variant of Gaussian or non-Gaussian distributions. I cannot immediately think of any non-equilibrium scheme that would do justice either.
I have not studied NT with enough devotion to say anything remotely useful on the impact of Mochizuki’s papers, but did attempt to read Wiles on FLT and was wondering if you could comment if Mochizuki turned out to be existentially correct, would that immediately offer an avenue for Goldbach’s strong to exist? And additionally is there anything additional to be gained other than to split a Googolplex, at least in this phase of human capabilities!
cheers
Your comment seems to be a kind of parody, but for the life of me I cannot tell what of. So all I can say is, play it again, Sam))
It’s not just a matter of intelligence but integrity.
And Jews are very low in integrity when it comes to dealing with gentiles.
Look at this story:
http://www.jta.org/2015/11/15/news-opinion/united-states/hillel-chapter-joins-amherst-protest-against-alleged-bias-on-campus
White gentiles stand with Jews against Muslim ‘anti-semites’ and others—whites will also always side with Jews against blatantly anti-Jewish blacks—, but Jews stand with violent black thugs against whites.
What is the point of sucking up to Jews when Jews act like this?
Jews are high intelligence, low integrity. Of course, not all Jews are like this, but plenty are. Too many Jews are like Jordan Belfort in WOLF OF WALL STREET.
Also, even good Jews are not to be trusted in most cases. Why? Even though they are conscious of bad Jewish behavior and sincerely wish it to stop, they are afraid that airing dirty laundry will give voice to ‘anti-semites’.
They feel caught between bad Jews(who keep giving ammo to ‘anti-semites’) and ‘anti-semites’ who simply hate, hate, and hate Jews.
Nations with intelligence and integrity are the best. Generally speaking, integrity is easier to come by in a homogeneous society of high intelligence since the issues are less about tribalism than about right and wrong(corruption, clean government, and etc.)
But then, excessive integrity-ism can lead to something like Sweden. Swedish obsession with becoming a ‘moral superpower’ made it completely blind to its self-demise as a race, nation, and tradition. Integrity goes beyond tribalism, but integrity that ignores the power of race and tribe(especially of other peoples who are still driven by identity politics) is bound to lose, and Sweden is finished.
In Sweden, homogeneity and integrity made for a peaceful and prosperous society. This made people complacent and unworried about their well-being and survival. Taking their own security for granted, they came to idealize the world as something to save. Success led to naive idiocy.
In the end, one must choose nativity over naivete.
When it comes to race and abilities, I think we also need a bit of Racial Relativism.
The problem of the world is too many peoples judge themselves in relation to others. It should be obvious that some races are stronger, smarter, cleverer, creative-er, individualistic-er, and etc., but it’s all relative, and people should think and live within their own general limitations.
For example, the notion that white men are slow or can’t jump is purely relativistic. White men are not slow and they can jump among their own kind. It is only a ‘problem’ relative to blacks who can jump higher and move faster.
Mexicans are not short among their own kind. They are ‘short’ relative to white gringos who are generally taller.
Blacks are not dumb among their own kind. They are ‘dumb’ relative to whites, Asians, and especially Jews.
So, all racial assets and abilities are relative, and we keep bumping into problems cuz we judge various races by norms of other races.
We need to establish the norms of each race, and make members of that race feel comfortable within those norms. And there is bound to less problem if we keep the races apart.
For instance, in a white world, white men can run fast and jump high… by their own standards. White men begin to feel inferior relative to blacks. So, the solution is a Closed System that keeps blacks out of white nations.
As for black nations, they should focus on their intellectual limits and work within those norms instead of constantly looking at richer non-black nations and bitching, “sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiit, why they richer than us? Must be ‘racism’, shoo.” Okay, the bongo wongo Africans don’t speak American ebonics, but then maybe they do nowadays since rap music is big in Africa too.
Keep races apart and let them become accustomed to their own norms.
Diversity exacerbates the problem of Racial Relativism.
Haha. Allright, I’ll play it again. I meant that (perhaps an oversimplification) Malthusian theory cannot be invariant and thus applicable over very different and distantly separated periods in history.
[On the Mochizuki part, basically that if someone was actually able to internalise his new “language” then many as yet unattained proofs would be immediately available. Among them, Golbach’s Strong Conjecture may be one and in which case we might have closed-forms to split a Googolplex, like say 10^10^100, leading to a complete understanding of very large primes.] …it is somewhat OT. No big deal.
Overall, very good post! There are some key weak points I need to point out, though:
Yes, but the overwhelming bulk of that accomplishment was concentrated in a certain corner of Europe – largely in the Northwest. This is the single best piece of evidence that IQ is far from the whole story. Average IQs are similar across Northern Europe and in East Asia, let we see less accomplishment from Northeastern Europe and from East Asia.
This is well before communism and true even for Japan (vis-a-vis NW Europe), which was never communist.
Obviously, there’s more going on here. I would direct readers to my posts:
Clannishness – The Series: Zigzag Lightning in the Brain
National Prosperity
I know we’ve talked about this before. It’s helpful to remind readers that that is not exactly proper to do.
True but IQ is a much smaller part of the story here – see above posts.
Daniel Dennett made a point whenever someone says “surely”. This is one of those instances.
The alternative (and more parsimonious) explanation is that both are expressions of the East Asian cognitive package.
Partly.
Yes.
You know, I don’t think a history of inbreeding, in and of itself, leads to lower IQ. The problems with inbreeding can be partly mitigated if a society does it long enough. In reality, I think inbreeding tends to lead to lower average IQ primarily thanks to clannish dysgenics.
This falls under agriculture – at least, agriculture is cold-weather climates.
I am not so sure about that, actually.
Probably.
Except this sounds like a feeble attempt to explain once piece of the puzzle that doesn’t seem to work when you look at the overall picture. The overall picture of Nobel accomplishment is clear, and jives with much else, as I’ve mentioned.
Put it this way: the East Asian (and Eastern European) countries have a long way to go to catch up to NW European-derived ones in scientific achievement.
Want to bet?
It’s not clear that fertility in either the U.S. or many NW Euro countries is dysgenic for IQ.
Subsaharian Africa is a country**
So i will compare France with North America!!
per capita is a result of division GDP/ population size. The differences between the ”continent” and the ”subcontinent” in per capita is not considerably great to be used for any precocious and silly ”afro-triunphalism” that can be translated as ”the future of Africa will be bright… even than India… you pseudo-science racist theory will be proved wrong” 😉 .
African ”elites” will use/exploit their cheap labour to enrich ”the nation” too** Just to know.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrition/by-country/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_India
For me, desnutrition and crime rates are the worst social problems. In geography, we learn that per capita is far to be a perfect measurement to compare social indicators.
Also there are differences between standard living and quality of life which are correlated but not synonyms.
India seems much better than ”Subsaharian Africa”.
You can see that indian states report lower crime rates if compared with most of ”Subsaharian states”.
Also can be important analyse the demographic density of both ”country”, India and Subsaharia, but i think could be interesting analyse Nigeria with India.
India (385 hab/km2) seems have higher DD than Nigeria (188 hab/km2). Greater population and greater demographic density can be negative factors to produce SOME social harmony.
Quite literally, LOL.
Anatoly was not necessarily making an argument there, was he? I think it was Samuelson who wondered : “Surely a sentence that starts with the word ‘surely‘, can validly contain a question mark at its end?”
The first part made more sense this time. Viz. Mochizuki, as someone said, the worse your logic, the more interesting its consequences. Not that I pretend to understand his papers, but there it is.
Well a while ago Razib did a survey on GNXP that included questions about children, and he seemed taken aback by how few of his readers had reproduced.
“they averaged a verbal IQ of 166, a spatial IQ of 137, and a math IQ of 154.” Were those actual measurements, or just made up numbers?
Why do you ape Greg Cochran’s style with these substance free rejoinders and appeals to authority? Even Cochran can only get away with it on his own blog where he can censor comments.
It wasn’t exactly a controlled experiment. The centrally planned economies were cut out of global financial markets. The bad results were more the result of autarky than of planning. (Or at the least, this needs to be considered.) Where this is otherwise, namely today’s China, central planning has outperformed the capitalist countries.
It’s just as likely that a high level of development causes high IQ levels as the converse. Development means increased access to education, better nutrition, and more frequent practice of the types of cognitive skills that IQ tests measure. Hence, the Flynn effect: as societies develop further, IQ levels rise. There is also the incalculable effect (on wealth) of the legacy of culture, an accretion of centuries of history, which brings, besides knowledge, established methods of thinking. What else explains how the West overtook China, despite the latter’s higher level of IQ?
I do not claim that g does not exist or is determined entirely by environment. But the thesis that high IQ explains high development is simplistic, and satisfies those who hope providence assures their positions than those who seek truth.
Where does style come from?
I certainly agree with China’s success, but I’d definitely place that country pretty far down along the “capitalist” road, just as I would Singapore, Japan, and South Korea, despite a considerable degree of governmental planning and guidance. I think the biggest problem with America’s situation is that it’s allowed the least productive and most parasitic elements of the economy to seize control of the central government and begin digesting the rest of society, aided and abetted by a very effective Ministry of Propaganda. Economist Michael Hudson recently had a very perceptive analysis of this situation, and I wrote a long article on the China/America comparison a couple of years ago:
http://www.unz.com/mhudson/parasites-in-the-body-economic/
http://www.unz.com/article/chinas-rise-americas-fall/
It’s not really fair to compare a normal capitalist society with a parasitized one, though I suppose you could argue that the former frequently tend to become the latter.
Sorry for the delay in replying. I really appreciate the criticism since it allows me to round off the rougher edges of the theory and make some clarifications.
That is true.
But neither do I see how it undermines the AA theory. Let us compare Sweden and Russia. Sweden achieved near universal literacy in the 18th century. In the 19th, it joined the ranks of the European nations providing high per capita scientific/cultural output. In contrast, Russia was only ~25% literate in 1900 (not to mention far more malnourished). How is an illiterate peasant supposed to invent anything in the industrial age?
Why did Sweden become mass literate so early? In very significant part for the same reasons that the rest of Northern Europe soared past the old cultural center, the Mediterranean, in literacy: Protestantism. More specifically, its emphasis on private reading of the Bible. Why did Protestantism take root in the north and not in the south? Here is where your and hbdchick’s arguments have the most merits, I think – relatively low tolerance for corruption, which in turn was likely a product of all the centuries of outbreeding (plus the gruff, straight talking character type generally associated with colder climes).
Nice reference, but off the mark. I studied Chinese myself and it is very obvious to me that for any society (all else equal) achieving mass functional literacy with a characters based writing system is far, far harder than with an alphabetic one. So far as most technological progress is concerned, it doesn’t matter how outbred or otherwise intelligent you are if you can’t read and write.
Here is a classic (and highly entertaining) account of why that is the case: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
I only posit a direct relationship between inbreeding and IQ decline in the Islamic world especially with its emphasis on FBD marriage.
I would also – considering that communitarian families are the human default – place the stress more on the eugenic effects of Malthusian societies
(e.g., Gregory Clark’s England, the Dutch Republic, to a lesser extent China as per Ron Unz, etc).
See immediately above – not all agricultures are created equal.
Incidentally, did anything come out of this?
https://twitter.com/JayMan471/statuses/521012147271524353
What particular aspect of it is feeble?
Of course they have a long way to go. The post-1600 European scientific explosion was enabled by a drastic expansion of aggregate mindpower, first via literacy, then in pure IQ during the 20th century. It is unlikely that such conditions would ever be recreated in our globalized world (barring sci-fi computer AI explosion scenarios).
What are your conditions? Because of the very low starting base, and the lag mentioned above, it will take a long time for China to overtake the US outright (though I suspect it will eventually, perhaps 2050).
If you want falsifiable predictions: Serious Nobel Prizes accruing to China and Korea will display an exponential upwards trend in the years ahead.
No problem on the time. I totally understand these things.
Anotaly, in general, it seems that you’re treating many of the features of various peoples around the world as exogenous – the result of fate or historical accidents. The explanation for these things then becomes much more complicated. But what if these seemingly disparate features are in fact endogenous to people? Many are are obviously related:
Yes, but you’re looking at it in the wrong way. Why was Russia and Eastern Europe so late to the game? Southern and Eastern Europe have long lagged behind the Northwest, in many measures. Indeed, a map of the spread of literacy and numeracy in Europe shows it follows the typical Hajnal line pattern.
History of literacy in Western Europe [1567×925] (i.imgur.com)
Yes. But I would take it a step further. Where did Protestantism come from?
Yes, but once again, why did East Asians develop logographic systems of writing?
Future post.
Literacy helps a lot of things, but really, I’m not sure the causal role of literacy in scientific advancement is necessarily as big as you think. If a certain core of elite/intelligentsia were literate, that might be most of what you need, because they’d be ones doing the science anyway.
I don’t think the Flynn effect reflects much of a “real” increase in cognitive ability.
Here’s my bet: the rank order of scientific and other achievement per capita will be largely unchanged (“largely” being that China certainly won’t overtake the U.S.) by 2050. If you and I still care by 2050, the winner will pay the loser one dollar U.S. (2015 value).
I think Occam’s Razor comes to bear here. If a single factor (or a set of related factors) serves to explain the many disparate differences between different peoples around the world that go over and above average IQ (namely, innate differences in inventiveness, related to trust/conformism/clannishness/creativity), is that more parsimonious that trying to attribute the differences to multiple (apparent) historical “accidents” – which would then themselves be in need of explaining.
Here’s another on the spread of literacy/numeracy in Europe:
https://twitter.com/JayMan471/statuses/529740241561993216