Why is the HBDsphere so damn interested in IQ, anyway?
While I can’t speak for the “movement” at large, in my own case the interest stems from the fact that it explains so much about our world. (In fact, I was interested in this topic long before I discovered HBD, Charles Murray, Jensen, Lynn, Rushton, etc). In particular, it convincingly answers the central question of political economy since the days of Adam Smith – why are some nations poor and some nations rich? After all the long debates about the merits of free markets over industrial policy, over the influence of institutions versus geography; after all the human miseries suffered from zealous adherence to some ideology or other, from the Great Leap Forwards in China to the capitalist disaster zone that neoliberalism made of the ex-Soviet Union in the 1990s, after all these blunders, mishaps, and occasional horrors committed in search of the Answer, we find that it mostly boils down to just one ultimately rather banal thing: Some peoples are more intelligent than others, work more efficiently, and hence enjoy greater wealth; and as a result of said greater efficiency, capital naturally flows towards them, further multiplying their output relative to the backwards countries.
In extreme cases, institutional factors do make a huge difference. Countries with a socialist (central planning) legacy – that is, East Central Europe, the ex-USSR, China, Vietnam – are still systemically much poorer than countries where markets have long functioned with at least some minimal degree of freedom, even though their IQs do not differ much from those of the US, Western Europe, and Japan. Stress on the “minimal” – beyond some fairly modest point of economic freedom and basic political stability, it appears that institutions and economic openness offer rapidly diminishing returns; for instance, the Belorussian economy, which is still 90% state owned and a dictatorship, was actually the most successful of all the ex-Soviet economies after 1991, including even economic reform stars like Estonia (actually Azerbaijan performed even better, but it was helped by a massive oil windfall). Speaking of which, on the other side of the correlation curve you have countries with a very big resource windfall per capita – Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Norway, etc. – which are much richer than the level “warranted” by the quality of their human capital. But once we take these two groups out of the equation, and also get rid of tiny finance-orientated city-states, the correlation between national IQ and economic wealth becomes extremely close – a fact all the more remarkable when we consider that estimates of both national IQ and GDP per capita (PPP) can vary fairly widely.
Here is a graph I made from 2013, which shows a correlation of R2=0.84. This is entirely in line with other similar calculations by professional psychometricians like Heiner Rindermann.
That said, as I noted even back then, there are some curious outliers in the “capitalist normal” countries. Moreover, these outliers tend to be concentrated at the wealthy frontier: The US is a positive outlier, whereas Japan, the East Asian countries, Finland, and to a lesser extent, the “Anglo offshoots” (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) are negative outliers.
As economic historian pseudoerasmus pointed out on many occasions, while national IQ is central to the growth story for low-income and middle-income countries in catch-up growth, for already developed nations with their standard 100±5 IQs the benefits accrue overwhelmingly to those with more “marginal” advantages, such as those having somewhat better institutions, or conditions for doing business. This is a hypothesis that makes good theoretical sense, but a closer examination reveals that things might not be that simple. The Anglo nations have what are widely regarded as very good institutions, courts, and conditions for business, but they are relative underperformers, even (especially) when productivity is taken into account. Japan has a 5-7 IQ advantage over, say, Italy, but its GDP per capita (PPP) is similar, while its productivity is significantly lower – even though Japan rates higher on ease of business and perception of corruption indices. There must be other factors that are at play, and I will admit that I am unsure as to what they are. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s examine the data in greater detail.
This is the data table I used in the charts in this article:
I limited myself to countries that satisfied the following list of conditions:
- Those that had a substantial population, at least 5 million or more (smaller countries tend to be financial/tourism hubs with too much artificially inflated wealth).
- Did not have a central planning legacy that depressed their wealth (so, no country from the socialist camp during the Cold War) or a big resource endowment per capita (so, out go countries like Saudi Arabia and Norway). We are talking primarily of the old OECD members minus Mexico and Turkey.
- Are wealthy, i.e. have a GDP per capita of at least $20,000. We already established that the correlation between national IQ and wealth in poorer countries is very good; the question we now want to answer is why it begins to break down at the edge of the graphs.
GDP per capita is measured in purchasing power parity terms because it better reflects the real level of production and living standards in any country and accounts for short-term currency fluctuations. Productivity is the GDP per capita (PPP) adjusted for the labor participation rate and average hours worked per country, i.e. GDP per hour worked. Most of the data I got from the World Bank or the OECD, though I frequently had to look for other sources in the cases of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The regional averages were calculated as a weighted population average of each regional label. National IQs were derived from the average of the Math, Science, and Reading component in PISA 2009.
The first series of graphs show regional and country national IQ versus GDP per capita (PPP) data, with the bubbles scaled for population size.
Here, at an amalgamated level, we already see a distinct pattern: Americans are much richer than they “should” be, whereas East Asians are much poorer. But curiously, the Anglo offshoots are closer to East Asia here than they are to European-stock populations, so it is not at all obvious that it is an HBD issue.
And now for the country specific data.
While all the countries of Western Europe hew close to the line of best fit, again there are three major exceptions: The US to the upside, and Japan and South Korea to the downside.
The obvious and immediate explanation is that some countries have greater labor participation rates, and/or work more hours. So a natural adjustment would be to calculate the GDP per capita generated per manhour of work and see if that explains American and East Asian exceptionalism relative to Western Europe.
I would note at the outset a few caveats to bear in mind. First, in many cases – certainly regarding the US vs. Western Europe – a large share of the differences in overall labor participation is explained by the greater percentage of American youth and the elderly in the workforce by dint of its less generous welfare state (left-wing view) and less restrictive labor laws (right-wing view). Increasing the labor participation of both of these groups will yield only marginal improvements in total output because they are far less productive than people in their prime. Likewise, working longer hours is of questionable value, because workers will presumably either get more tired and less productive, and/or end up wasting time due to Parkinson’s Law (“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”). On paper, Greeks work far longer than Germans… if by “working” you mean drinking coffee. The Japanese have it even worse; extra hours “worked” there means pretending to work until the boss leaves. Germans, on the other hand, actually get all the important stuff done quickly and efficiently, and get to enjoy a big chunk of the rest of the day. Americans tend to work long hours and productively.
Even so, on average, productivity is probably more impacted by national IQ than the level of GDP per capita. At the very least, by far the biggest discrepancy – that between the US and Western Europe – largely vanishes after this adjustment.
Although the gap between the Westerners (barring the Anglo offshots) and East Asia then becomes even wider.
Now that I’ve laid out all the data, time to consider some hypotheses for American exceptionalism and Asian mediocrity. At the outset, I should thank pseudoerasmus and James Thompson for participating in the Twitter discussion where many of these ideas were initially raised, analyzed, and critiqued.
1) Historical Leadership. The US has been at the technological edge since its inception; Britain industrialized a bit earlier, but there was never a significant gap in per capita output. Moreover, it burst clear of everyone else in the wake of World War Two, which devastated most of Europe. But 70 years is more than enough time to recover and catch up. In fact, that is precisely what happened: The first part of the period was of the Wirtschaftswunder, the Trente Glorieuses, Il Sorpasso, the Japanese Miracle, and the East Asian Tigers. But ever since 1990 or thereabouts, longterm per capita growth rates in developed Europe, the US, and Japan – for all the rhetoric about “European stagnation” and “Japan’s lost decade” – have basically converged. Here is Paul Krugman’s famous chart on this:
The only two major countries for which uncompleted convergence could still be a significant factor are South Korea and perhaps Taiwan. But any further relative gains on their parts, if the past five years are anything to go by, are going to be slow and marginal. For all its dazzling PISA performance and blisteringly rapid economic catchup, Korea’s productivity levels are still equivalent to those of Portugal, which has traditionally been the poorest country in Europe with the exception of a few Balkan backwaters, and Greece, which is at the tail end of a multi-year depression. Both Portugal and Greece have national IQs almost 10 points below Korea’s.
2) Immigration, Population Composition, and IQ Structure. But if anything, this makes the puzzle even more acute. We know that in recent decades Europe received a lot of immigrants, whose IQs are far lower than those of the natives and show no signs of convergence. The US, meanwhile, is host to two major population groups – Blacks and Non-White Hispanics – with consistently subpar IQs that together make up more than 20% of the population. If anything, that should depress productivity, which probably partially explains New Zealand, where ~90 IQ Maoris and Pacific Islanders also make up slightly more than 20% of the population. In contrast, high IQ and ethnically homogenous Japan, Korea, and Finland all underperform, as do Canada and Australia, which are not ethnically homogenous but do make sure to have cognitively elitist immigration policies.
That said, there are two reasons why this effect might not be all that powerful for both Europe and the US. First of all, in both Europe and the US, these NAMs (Non-Asian Minorities) have a relatively greater demographic preponderance amongst the youngest cohorts, whose members are either not in the workforce at all (infants, schoolchildren, students) or aren’t able to contribute much anyway (they are younger workers with less experience; while they might be quicker on the uptake, older workers often beat them with experience, especially in the more cognitively intense professions). This will likely do Europe and the US no good in the longterm, as they develop ever larger, ethnically distinct cognitive/economic underclasses that will pull down overall GDP per capita and productivity, but this probably just doesn’t play that big of a role… for now.
Moreover, at least in the US, the situation is further improved by the presence of sizable “smart fractions,” which have a disproportionately large positive effect on overall GDP per capita according to many psychometricians like Heiner Rindermann. These smart fractions are both ethnic – most notably, the 2% of the population that is Jewish – as well as the result of a global cognitive clustering effect (many of the world’s brightest and most ambitious people are inordinately drawn to US universities and Silicon Valley). It would also explain Israel’s overperformance – while the national IQ is depressed by Arabs and Sephardic Jews, and the economy is burdened by Haredi welfare bums, the Ashkenazi Jewish cognitive elite still manages to compensate for all that and elevate GDP per capita above the global correlation curve.
Some thinkers have speculated that the reason for East Asian underperformance is that although they have higher IQs than Whites, they have fewer very high IQ people (“smart fractions”) because of narrower distributions. The only problem with this very plausible and reasonable theory is that it is almost certainly completely wrong. The PISA tests show that East Asian S.D.’s are no different from those of European countries (though Finland’s, curiously enough, is lower at a statistically significant level). This theory could furthermore be disproved by a cursory glance at a list of names of members of the US Mathematical Olympiad teams – since 2010, fully 75% have either Chinese or Vietnamese last names.
Another, more plausible theory, advanced by Griffe de Lion as well as Rindermann, is that some forms of IQ, most notably verbal, in which the European-East Asian gap is very modest or even non-existent, are relatively more important for economic success than mathematical aptitude, where the gap is substantial, or visuospatial ability, where it is as big as 10 points. (Lynn actually claims that Europeans are verbally smarter, but PISA shows otherwise, though it does confirm that the Asian/European gap in verbal IQ is much less than the mathematical one). This would largely though not fully resolve the puzzle of East Asian underperformance, though you would still have to convincingly explain why verbal IQ in particular is more important for economic prosperity than, say, just g.
Finally, we must also bear in mind that gaps in cognitive ability can increase or decrease with age. Most tests of intelligence are performed on children or teenagers because it is easy to get big, representative samples from them. But what is true for under-18s may no longer be true for the mid-25s, when fluid intelligence is maximized (the ability to learn), or the 50s, when crystallized intelligence (total stock of applicable knowledge and experience) is maximized. For instance, while male and female IQ tends to be similar, though the latter have famously narrower distributions, it appears that at least on progressive matrices tests, a 5 point gap opens up during the 20s in favor of men and persists thereafter. Just as a significant part of the Flynn Effect can be explained through faster maturation due to better nutrition and parasitic disease control during the past century, so the biological reality that men fully physically mature about five years later than women could explain the appearance of a gender IQ gap in adulthood. Could there be similar processes at work in regards to different ethnic groups? Certainly it seems to pertain to the famous Black-White IQ gap, which increases with age, and very substantially so. Note that productivity in most smart fraction professions peaks in the 50s, when crystallized intelligence is maximized.
Could it be that the Asian IQ lead over Europeans in childhood and adolescence closes or even reverses with age? I have no idea. I was unable to find any hard statistical data on this. (Do tell me in the comments if you have). So for now it must remain but a stab in the dark hypothesis. However, if this is indeed the case – that the Caucasian/Asian IQ gap diminishes or even reverses with age, or put another way, that the much maligned “old white man” really is the smartest dude around – would be able to fully explain Asian underperformance, especially if paired with the observations on the relatively greater importance of verbal IQ as it pertains to economic prosperity.
3) Institutions and Economic Freedom. We know that in the most extreme cases – for instance, central planning under Communist regimes – lack of economic freedom leads to substantially inferior economic outcomes relative to what they might have been under market conditions. Beyond some minimal level, however, the role that increasing economic freedom plays seems to be subject to rapidly diminishing returns. Chile is one of the freest economies on the planet thanks to Señor Pinochet, Argentina is the exact opposite – but their GDP per capita is virtually the same, as – who’d have guessed it? – are their national IQs. But Chile and Argentina are middle-income countries, so institutional differences might not be making themselves felt as much as in fully developed countries.
So let’s look at the biggest outliers and the quality of their instutitions and business environment, as proxied by the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business indicator and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
Now this is hardly a rigorous statistical test, but it’s clear that there’s little or no evident connection. All negative outliers are well within the world’s top quintile by ease of doing business – unlike, say, Italy (56th) and Greece (61st), which although poor by OECD standards are not however major outliers on the IQ charts. Finland, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are some of the freest economies and best places for business on the planet.
The only two negative outliers which might have a significant problem with corruption are Taiwan and Korea. Now Taiwan is… a strange case. According to one poll, also carried out by Transparency International, 36% (!) of them said they paid a bribe in the past year. This is almost certainly a statistical fluke. On the other hand, only 2% of Koreans said they paid a bribe in the past year; only Denmark, the UK, and Norway, all countries that everyone agrees have minimal levels of everyday corruption, claimed to have paid fewer bribes. Assuming they weren’t lying, perhaps Korea’s rating on the CPI is overly pessimistic. Regardless – that’s still a lot better than most of the rest of the world, including rich non-outlier countries like Italy and Greece, both of whom are joint 69th on the CPI rankings.
4) Economies of Scale. The US is a single integrated market of more than 300 million people with a common language and set of laws and institutions, which enables massive economies of scale. To a lesser extent, this is also the case in the EU, which now has common markets but is still divided by political-fiscal barriers that are make life very difficult for at least some of their members, such as Greece and the Mediterranean countries generally. While Japan might not be of continental proportions, it does have a very substantial population – at 127 million, it is more than one and a half times as big as Germany’s – so it should enjoy most of the benefits from this as well. This factor would have a negative effect on Australia and especially New Zealand, which have low populations themselves and are geographically distant from other big markets.
5) Geography. The US has some of the best geography for industrial civilization on the entire planet: Multiple excellent ports on both seaboards,and the massive Mississippi River and Great Lakes water network that interconnects the entirety of its central core at next to no cost. Europe has middling geography, while Japan’s is poor and prone to natural disasters. Australia and New Zealand are very isolated, making economies of scale unrealistic. That said, the role of geographic factors in our days of dirt cheap oceanic bulk transport and dense railway networks is presumably quite modest.
6) Resource Windfalls. I purposefully excluded those countries where the economy is very clearly radically inflated by large resource windfalls per capita, such as Norway, but even so this factor is still significant for Canada, where natural resource rents as a share of GDP is at 4.4%, and Australia, where it is 8.0%. Combined with their relatively high national IQs and careful immigration policies, their “underperformance” becomes more puzzling, if anything. Even though the US also has a very substantial resource endowment, its effect is swamped by the overall size of its economy; natural resource rents as a share of GDP are a mere 1.3%.
7) Financial Windfalls. Might be a factor in Singapore’s good (relative to the rest of East Asia) performance. Why not Hong Kong? Because after it rejoined its motherland, China had no particular reason to favor it over, say, Shanghai or Guangdong, and quite a lot of disincentives to, considering the pro-Western tilt of many of Hong Kong’s elites. Singapore, however, was free to continue its project of becoming the world’s third major financial hub after London and New York, and its skyhigh GDP per capita (though unremarkable productivity) is a result of that. However, as mentioned at the start, I purposefully excluded places that were so small that a financial or tourism sector could play a dominant role, such as Luxembourg, Monaco, and Liechtenstein, all of which have ridiculously inflated GDP per capitas. Once you get to a British scale, let alone an American one, the impact of global financial centers like London or New York on GDP per capita becomes swamped by the overall economy.
8) American Alpha. Artificially lower risk premiums in the US means foreigners are willing to “irrationally” invest in American bonds at rates well beyond equilibrium. Here is Willem Buiter’s explanation of this phenomenon:
Some of the excess returns on US investment abroad relative to foreign investment in the US may have reflected true alpha, that is, true US alpha – excess risk-adjusted returns on investment in the US, permitting the US to offer lower financial pecuniary risk-adjusted rates of return, because, somehow, the US offered foreign investors unique liquidity, security and safety. Because of its unique position as the world’s largest economy, the world’s one remaining military and political superpower (since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991) and the world’s joint-leading financial centre (with the City of London), the US could offer foreign investors lousy US returns on their investments in the US, without causing them to take their money and run. This is the “dark matter” explanation proposed by Hausmann and Sturzenegger for the “alpha” earned by the US on its (negative) net foreign investment position. If such was the case (a doubtful proposition at best, in my view), that time is definitely gone. …
There is no chance that a nation as reputationally scarred and maimed as the US is today could extract any true “alpha” from foreign investors for the next 25 years or so. So the US will have to start to pay a normal market price for the net resources it borrows from abroad. It will therefore have to start to generate primary surpluses, on average, for the indefinite future. A nation with credibility as regards its commitment to meeting its obligations could afford to delay the onset of the period of pain. It could borrow more from abroad today, because foreign creditors and investors are confident that, in due course, the country would be willing and able to generate the (correspondingly larger) future primary external surpluses required to service its external obligations. I don’t believe the US has either the external credibility or the goodwill capital any longer to ask, Oliver Twist-like, for a little more leeway, a little more latitude. I believe that markets – both the private players and the large public players managing the foreign exchange reserves of the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the Gulf states, Japan and other nations – will make this clear.
Such a painful adjustment is indeed what has been occuring in Mediterranean Europe. But note that his pessimistic and falsifiable predictions specifically in regards to the US – that there would be “a global dumping of US dollar assets, including US government assets” – have yet to happen.
9) Cheaper Land and Energy Inputs. Land in the US tends to be pretty cheap, outside the North-East, the SF Bay Area, and a few other prestige locations. Much cheaper than in developed Europe or in Japan. Energy inputs are also lower, specifically in relation to fuel, which is taxed at much lower rates than in Europe or Japan. This should lower the cost of business across the board and increase overall thoroughput.
The only problem? The countries right next to the US here are Canada, Australia, and Japan – some of the biggest negative outliers.
10) Hedonics and GDP Fiddling. There are various claims that the US is really… generous at calculating its GDP. Perhaps “American exceptionalism” is just a statistical artifact? I haven’t studied national accounting practices on any detailed level, though pseudoerasmus has and he is skeptical, and I’m also a bit put off that a lot of the sites that make these claims tend to be libertarian goldbugs and LaRouche types. That said, I will admit to an intuitive sense that there might be something behind this. As the commentator Lazy Glossophiliac has pointed out a few times, many things that are either free or cheap in Europe and most of the rest of the world can be pretty damn expensive in the US. The healthcare industry is just the most blatant (and perhaps grotesque) example, accounting for a prodigal share of American GDP while delivering population health outcomes that are, in general, nothing to write home about. Americans dine out much more frequently than Europeans – the labor of chefs and waiters appears in GDP, while creating a home cooked meal does not. You can probably extend this to quite a lot of different things.
American Exceptionalism, East Asian Mediocrity
To sum up: At the technological edge of high IQ/high wealth per capita, there appears an interesting and puzzling disjoint between the US, which is a big positive outlier, and Japan and the rest of East Asia, which are big negative outliers. Adjusting for labor participation and hours worked, to get in effect a measure of productivity, largely resolves “American exceptionalism” relative to developed Western Europe, but if anything widens the chasm between the West and East Asia even further. Moreover, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – all Anglo-derived settler societies that are culturally close to the US and enjoy low corruption and good institutions – are moderate negative outliers.
In general, possible explanations are either critically flawed in some way, or only partially explain some difference while deepening the puzzle around some other difference. For instance, cheaper energy inputs might appear to partially explain why the US is a positive outlier, but then it would make the question of why Canada and Australia are negative outliers – even though their fuel taxes are also low – all the more inscrutable. Beyond some fairly minimal conditions like having free markets, the quality of institutions do not appear to play any significant role.
Still, it is possible to identify a few factors that likely play some important role:
1) Economies of Scale – Clearly give the US and to a lesser extent, continental Europe, a boost. Many of the negative non-East Asian outliers are relatively isolated island nations with small populations, especially Australia and New Zealand.
2) Smart Fractions and the US – The two biggest rich positive outliers, the US and Israel, have many duller ethnic minorities but also enjoy an Ashkenazi Jewish cognitive elite. Moreover, a significant percentage of the world’s smartest and most ambitious people immigrates to the US.
3) Personality, Culture, IQ Structure – Apart from the partial exception of Singapore – a fact that is mitigated by its status as a financial city-state – all East Asian states economically underperform relative to where they “should” be at. This is The (Other) East Asian Exception. This leads me to believe that the cause of this must be something that is culturally or even biologically common to the region. Maybe it has something to do with a relative lack of creativity in terms of personality (in Nobel Prizes per capita, as in GDP per capita, Japan far more closely resembles Italy than Germany; while Korea has yet to win a single real, i.e. non-Peace, Prize); maybe it is a consequence of East Asia’s shame culture, which is more socially stultifying than Europe’s guilt culture, and can lead to inefficiencies like paying undue respect to an incompetent boss who just happens to be older; maybe it is simply that East Asian IQ is simply “worth” about 5 points less than European IQ due to its particular quirks or structure (specifically, the fact of the Asian advantage in verbal IQ being much more relatively modest relative to Whites); and/or maybe – and this is by far the most tentative hypothesis here – it might be that the East Asian IQ advantage over Europeans disappears in adulthood, meaning that Europeans still retain a relative preponderance in the fraction of smart 40-50-60 year olds who are responsible for most of the greatest scientific and cultural accomplishments.
4) Other Factors – This leaves only Finland and Canada to explain. Finland’s underperformance might be due to the lower S.D. of its national IQ, if the PISA tests are accurate. Moreover, Richard Lynn pegs Finnish IQ at a standard British 100. Perhaps, for whatever reason, Finns simply perform unduly well on PISA. If Lynn is correct, it would not even be an outlier. Or it could be their particular psychological profile, which might be unfavorable for the expression of ingenuity. Canada could be a modest negative outlier because it borders the US and loses too big a percentage of its smartest fractions to its giant southern neighbor.
Comments can begin.
Could you put data for the various proposed non-IQ explanations in a datasheet? If so, then we can test them statistically instead of merely discussing them.
Specifically, we can use this method: https://thewinnower.com/papers/using-bayes-factors-to-get-the-most-out-of-linear-regression-a-practical-guide-using-r and the equivalent frequentist version (fitting all possible models given a set of predictors, then finding that with the highest R2 adjusted value). I will write the code for analysis if you/someone makes me a nice dataset.
Japan has, in my opinion, the second strongest pop culture on Earth after the Anglophones. Their animation films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli
pop music http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasutaka_Nakata
and computer games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon
show a lot of creativity.
My guess would be that East Asian confucianist traditions stifle innovation with their strict social order based on age and seniority. I remember (but I can’t source) an article that stated that being an innovator in a japanese business brought much bigger risks and far fewer advantages than in an american company.
The US is an outlier because not only attracts the global smart fraction, but has clusters (Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street) that have specialized in discovering and harnessing talent in a manner that amplifies it’s effect.
Reservations:
1) not so sure about the national IQ calculation. More about referring to it as IQ.
2) not so sure whether Anglo offshoots is a useful category. May be useful to drop all the data into a cluster analysis and see what the natural clusters of countries are.
Also, perhaps compare with average wage or wealth rather than GDP per cap. Average wage captures the value of what people are incentivized to do, GDP perhaps some measure of productivity beyond what is transferred to the worker.
Again chapeau for this overarching post. Very comprehensive. Re: American exceptionalism my money’s on economies of scale, flexibility (cognitive self-sorting), statehood (of the Federal Government), the “smart fractions” and self-sustaining legacy leadership. Combine two or three of these attributes together and you can explain Silicon Valley (flexibility + size), the Military-Industrial Complex (size + statehood) or most of the other world-class attributes of American power.
I suspect that even if American immigration is dysgenic overall, that this is more than made up by these other factors, and especially all the (very) bright people who come. The U.S. really leads an amazing “global brain drain” (or global cognitive sorting..). The low-performers don’t do too much damage so long the historic majority runs the middle and lower rungs of administration. When the low-performers start taking over entire cities, counties or even states, then their corruption and dysfunction could take its toll. And of course, the gap between the self-segregating cognitive elite and the teeming masses is likely to become a real chasm..
what is the IQ of Sephardic Jews?
Lynn estimates it’s around 98. Basically Sephardic Jews didn’t undergo the same level of selection for higher IQ as the Ashkenazi in Europe because they were not allowed to monopolize the high IQ demanding jobs by the Muslims. (Also I suppose that the higher IQ level of Germans, Poles, etc. relative to Arabs meant that the Sephardi could be smarter relative to the locals just by merely being about as smart as the duller European groups).
I can try but I don’t know to what extent the exercise will be useful, because many of these factors are quite hard to quantify (e.g. geography).
Anyhow, I think it’s best to carry on this conversation by email. I’ll try to send it to you tomorrow or on Sunday.
@M,
Please expound on your IQ criticism. Do you object to using PISA figures? They correlate closely with other estimates including those by Lynn and Rindermann anyway. Personally I prefer them because of how standard, high sample, and internationally comparable they are.
Finding international wage data is harder than for GDP and I don’t see how they would be more useful, quite the contrary in fact.
Well, to quote the venerable HBD Chick, where do institutions come from?
But, as I’d said, there’s a good reason for that, and it’s not just because of a “legacy of communism” (after all, communism is largely gone now):
To quote myself:
The World Values Survey (among many other data) backs me up:
http://twitter.com/ValuesStudies/status/559818162129338369
Everything is an HBD issue, Anatoly.
In that instance, it just appears that it is really both the U.S. and East Asia that are outliers. The rest of the Anglosphere doesn’t seem anomalous then.
It might have been helpful to do your analysis with the ex-communist nations included. That might have revealed if there was a deeper pattern. Especially since, unlike you, I don’t think there’s anything special about the legacy of communism for the outcomes in today’s world.
That doesn’t appear to be actually true. This is an artifact of more attrition of males on the lower end and the greater male SD. Getting truly representative samples of adults is very difficult.
Bingo! Funny, the ABC series Fresh Off the Boat is based on this idea.
I have more data to support this idea that I will reveal at a later date.
But, primarily, it’s hard to argue with the World Values Survey data, or other data showing the same results like the GLOBE study. Success is a result almost entirely of the traits of the people in question. This affects not just intellectually ability, but institutional structure, worker productivity, etc. This all begins at basic day-to-day interaction, which ultimately gives you the structure of everything that follows. What might be interesting is if you could see if you could plot your outliers on the WVS map. It seems to more they are drawn towards one pole of the map and/or pushed away from other poles. Indeed, there’s this (opens image).
There are many posts of mine that are clearly relevant here:
Welcome Readers from Portugal! | JayMan’s Blog (on the inability of local wealth/resources to explain IQ gaps – causation clearly goes IQ -> development, not the other way around)
“Racial Reality” Provides My 150th Post | JayMan’s Blog (more on national development and the fact that national differences long pre-date 20th century upheavals, like the World Wars or the rise of communism)
Predictions on the Worldwide Distribution of Personality | JayMan’s Blog
Anyways, very good post. This is an excellent point of reference, and if anything, serves to dash PC theories about national differences and highlight the importance of innate differences between people (which goes well beyond IQ and are in fact responsible for “institutions”) – as the example of Israel illustrates, which likely arose as per HBD chick’s theory.
I don’t know if mentioned but what about “hegemonic” premium; maybe being the sole hyper power has an effect on national wealth? Also re Israel the aid donations capital transfers from the U.S., as Noam Chomsky states, are not insubstantial.
Studies have shown that Asians infants are more passive than are European (or European-American) ones:
https://books.google.com/books?id=vHrCuqliNQ8C&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=infants+passive+asian+european&source=bl&ots=7KQ4eO_YV0&sig=PMn24cRyBOhXQeb4agl5RSSq8K4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GCcpVY66GomeNu-MgOgF&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=infants%20passive%20asian%20european&f=false
Asian cultures also tend to be more collectivistic.
It may be that slightly higher average IQs do not compensate for greater passivity and less individualism, with respect to national “performance” or “achievement.”
“Why is the HBDsphere so damn interested in IQ, anyway?” for me there are hbd issues which are at least as intersting, especially differences in physical strength and differences in sexual attractivity. These issues do impact everyday life probably stronger than IQ differences. But still, of course, IQ is fascinating.
A few points: I can not really imagine that east asians do cognitively mature faster than caucasians, while this is of course an important questions which should be studied further. At least the folk-sociology among east asian immigrants to my home country is that they see themselves maturing slower. This of course mainly reflects differences in the behavior in numerous social situations, on the partner market etc., but still is does not hint in this direction.
Also, as it is already stated in the article, it is quite unlikely that verbal IQ has better economic returns than mathematical / spatial IQ, if anything the trend should be reversed. Engineering builds up more wealth than law.
All in all I would say that GDP is determined by two factors: ability and capital. When ability is equal and GDP is different this leaves differences in capital. In the article those aspects are already included in the categories geography, resources and energy prices. Although this leaves a question about the underperformance of Australia etc. those differences still can probably explain in part the east asian underperformance. Although I think postcolonial studies etc. are 99% crap I also think western countries, and especially the USA somehow still profit of the fact that Europeans conquered and settled huge territories with fertile soils etc.
And one maybe a little bit ridiculous idea: maybe physical strength also plays a role? Of course this is unlikely in a modern, automized, IT-based economy, but still an average 180 cm / 80 kg caucasian guy with strong hands and a IQ of 100 can work more than an average 170 cm / 60 kg japanese guy with an IQ of 103. And still today many people work with their hands.
One last issue which is as far as I see omitted in the article: dependancy rates are not only different between different countries because of different labour participation, but also because of fertility. East Asian countries with extremely low fertility have low dependancy rates – for the moment, not in future, they are living some kind of demographic credit. So this makes their underperformance even more striking.
Could it be that the Asian IQ lead over Europeans in childhood and adolescence closes or even reverses with age?
No. Japan was at the top in the OECD adult skills study.
All I have argued is this. The United States, unlike most other rich countries, has all three elements : high hours worked per worker, high productivity (output per hour of work), and high employment-population ratio (mostly because of higher ratios for youth and old). Most other rich countries do not have all three in combination. Some have only 1, others have 2.
The above are tautologically true decompositions. So the fact which need explaining is why the United States has all three elements, and most other rich countries do not. Any explanations which do not proceed from that observation, does not work.
I think voluntarily chosen policy differences account for most of the differences in the rich countries’ GDP per capita. The reasons different policies are chosen by different rich countries of course must cite differences in culture, historical experience, personality traits, etc.
The non-policy factors cited by Anatoly are either irrelevant, or make small contributions at best. (They can be calculated.)
As for Chile and Argentina, Anatoly simply repeats an argument I have already refuted.
Chile’s and Argentina’s GDP per capita are similar, but the underlying components are quite different. Chileans work longer than Argentinians and have lower productivity.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AVHWPECLA065NRUG
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RGDPTHCLA630NUPN
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RGDPTHARA630NUPN
Also, Argentina and Chile have had very different GDP/capita for most of their history :
https://pseudoerasmus.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/southamerica1.gif
What’s the only thing which has truly changed in Chile in the past 30 years ? Policy.
How does one measure reading scores or verbal ability across different languages? It doesn’t seem possible to me. Is there any meaningful way to measure whether a person at the 90th percentile of reading ability in Japanese is better or worse than someone who is at the 90th percentile in English?
Regarding verbal skills, of all foreign students I’ve seen at universities, East Asians are by far the worst at picking up English and speaking it well. They seem significantly worse than students from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Lating America.
How does this “hegemonic premium” work ? Explain the mechanism.
Silicon Valley does not preferentially contribute to US GDP. It contributes to world GDP via technological diffusion. Therefore, there is no reason, a priori, to cite the existence of SV-style high-tech culture as an important reason behind the US lead over other rich countries in GDP/capita.
Thanks for writing this detailed post. I will add few things.
-Sephardi Jews-
Nobel per million stats: http://i.imgur.com/9qVfKCt.png
As you can see Sephardi success is quite high. Either they have very high SD with avg iq of 98-100 (Italian Sephardi seem extremely successful) or their avg iq is higher, when you calculate it by taking nobel winning threshold as 140 Sephardi iq looks like 105-108. Also Lynn estimates Sephardi iq 98 and Ashkenazi iq 110. I think Ashkenazi avg iq is 115 and Sephardi iq would be higher too. Another problem may be difference between Sephardi Tehorim (Spanish then later Dutch/Ottoman Sephardi) and the recent more ”Mizrahi Sephardi”.
-Iq and Income-
Interestingly when you look at the relationship btw iq and income in US there are almost no exceptions.
White American: IQ 100 / $ 54,857 (includes White Hispanics – probably closer to 60,000)
East Asian: IQ 105 / $68,088
Indian: IQ 110-112 / $86,135
Ashkenazi: IQ 115 / $100,000
5 point IQ difference equals to something like $14.000 income difference.
-East Asian mediocrity-
Only at highest levels (nobody knows why, may be related to hierarchy/authoritarian culture (selection), testosterone levels) but that really matters a lot. In Israel and US Ashkenazi smart fraction are extremely accomplished and has great impact on economic success.
This post is really important to understand the importance of smart fraction:
http://infoproc.blogspot.com.tr/2014/12/quantum-gdp.html
Very few people discovered quantum mechanics and few people understand it. But ”today a third of GDP is attributable to quantum mechanics” – in developed countries. (If the mean is low you won’t have the necessary smart fraction to produce tech related to QM)
-Spatial iq-
Spatial iq doesn’t seem to be as important as verbal/mathematical iq. I’m seeing different numbers but Ashkenazi verbal/math iq are probably between 115-125 (verbal esp high) and spatial btw 98-100. (their non selected iq from Middle Eastern times) It doesn’t seem to effect Ashekanazi success in todays math/machine civilization.
And one last thing: there doesn’t seem to be a European pop with avg iq higher than 100 maybe except Huguenots. (assimilated today)
Regarding East Asia, Anatoly and most other commenters completely ignore that productivity in manufacturing is VERY high in East Asia — much higher than its GDP/capita would suggest. Japan basically converged with the United States in manufacturing productivity around 1990. Almost all of the difference in the economy-wide labour productivity between the United States and Japan is therefore due to differences in non-manufacturing, mostly services.
From this paper
http://scholar.harvard.edu/jorgenson/publications/industry-origins-us-japan-productivity-gap
I’ve uploaded a chart illustrating the above :
https://pseudoerasmus.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/tfp-gap-japan-usa.jpg
This, again, points to voluntarily chosen policy differences as a major determinant of the gap in GDP/capita between Japan and the United States. Japan strongly regulates its service sector in ways which preserve small scales and multiple layers of distribution. The Japanese have had many opportunities to deregulate in this area, but have declined. People want it kept that way.
This needs to be kept in mind when generalisations are made about East Asia.
I forgot Argentina’s hours worked
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AVHWPEARA065NRUG
I would guess it’s not possible to really map, but how does risk-taking factor into it? Certain western European populations are portrayed as more risk-taking, more free-spirited, more adventurous. If nothing else, free of group consensus, strict social codes and a sense of limits that is present in the relevant Asian populations. Can it come down to desire as the defining factor?
“Señor Pinochet, Argentina is the exact opposite – but their GDP per capita is virtually the same, as – who’d have guessed it? – are their national IQs”
-I seriously doubt this is any longer true. Argentina has been notorious for understating its inflation since 2007. Also, Chile was, for most of its history, known as a mining country, and Argentina as a first-world country. Give it time.
As for the explanations in this post, I only find the cheaper land and other natural resources one plausible. Argentina and the United States had huge productivity premia in the late 18th century due to the large amount of land per worker there.
https://books.google.com/books?id=KFZHAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=wealth+of+nations&hl=en&sa=X&ei=B38kVYaCG5LZoASch4DIBQ&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=north&f=false
There’s another big missing explanation in this post: protectionist policies in Japan and Korea. According to The Korean, protectionism pays a large role in services productivity in South Korea:
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2014/10/koreas-labor-productivity-and-how-to.html
And in Japan, trade as a percentage of GDP has always been surprisingly low. Also, as Noah Smith points out, Japan never had a neoliberal revolution.
All this IQ gobbledegook is fine and IQ as one of the metrics, definitely, has its place in the economic assessments. What missing, however, from all these economists’ efforts to employ mathematics in the issue, is:
Huntington’s 14 points are as relevant today as they ever were, as well as Rifkin’s argumentation in “The End Of Work”. No matter the goodness of best fit lines–in the end it is what one can and can not produce, which defines a real weight.
Interesting topic and a lot of fascinating hypothesis, for what its worth I think the adult stage Iq variance is the least likely explanation. I’m confident if we had large accurate sample size testing of whites and east Asians in there late 20’s to early 50’s we would find the current pattern more or less repeated. A point of consideration in this is that Iq correlates within nations regarding wealth( as you well know) and east Asians earn on average more than whites in America , and as far as I know, Canada, Australia etc.
I think it highly likely that whatever the explanation its likely to be multifaceted. I do wonder about how much of GDP is a statistical artifact. Given that Europeans have so many things covered by the government. Obviously GDP proxies strongly with wealth, BUT to whatever extent GDP isn’t an accurate proxy for wealth, then looking at GDP to uncover the relationship between wealth and IQ will have some inaccuracy built in.
Another consideration is Social capitol, I have heard (and I confess ignorance, I don’t have data, perhaps you do) that in many parts of east Asia corruption runs higher. They are less trusting of each other. And i think more importantly -LESS CARING OF EACH Other-which might be a different animal all together from being distrustful or likely to rip off. In my estimate whenever you encounter a large variance in behavior between two groups, genes probably play a role. So it could be something like social capitol bio diversity at work. Social intelligence then? Which might be a reason for the importance of verbal iq, at any rate this is of course speculation.
I know people think homogenous societies have more social capitol than diverse ones like the US. Putnams famous detractions on diversity come to mind. But consider the following point, populations that can tolerate and trust outgroups to such an extent to create succesful diverse socities probably have high social capitol. IF indeed social capitol is a largely heritable trait that may bode poorly for such countries as there population changes. But not because of diversity per se, but because of the new groups with lower social capitol moving in.
You point to countries that have a lot of diversity, like Isreal and the US, and consider the possibility of a smart fraction lifting the countries NET GDP. I suspect this explains a small part of the variance , but not all of it. A very left wing person might point to this as evidence of diversities benefits. But maybe more accurate conceptualized as the benefits of having a society that can tolerate, welcome and allow diversity. I know this still leaves some countries as negative outliers, like Canada etc-which would seem to plausibly have high social capitol.
Which brings me to looking at basic cultural factors. The US is a brand name, and might enjoy an inflated value to its product. Petro dollars and what not. Maybe like how our keyboard is QWERST instead of ABCD, history plays a role. The US got to top as an investment spot and it has a lot of inertia behind it. Perhaps this is a hard thing to change. Surely, we have all seen signs in the past decade that it is changing, that relative to the rest of the world america is less exceptional. At any rate, fascinating article, and should give a small pause to the Iq fanatics. NOt because IQ isn’t important-it is probably the most important variable we can concretely lay hands on- but because we have good evidence to show other factors at play.
@ Cpluskx
that was an interesting post. I have a few questions:
is the high medium IQ of the south asian population in the USA the result of selective immigration or does it reflect a medium IQ of the south asian population as a whole which is only in our times temporary depressed by poor living conditions in south asia?
I thought spatial and mathematical IQ were more or less the same or at least highly correlated and verbal IQ – while of course still correlated to both via general factor g – would be something different. Know you say mathematical and verbal IQ are one category and spatial IQ is something else. Do you have any literature I could read about this? Also I wonder now it is even possible to measure mathematical IQ. As far as I see regular IQ Tests do have two types of questions: verbal questions as for example analogies and ravens matrices. The latter measure spatial IQ I think.
Many excellent replies all round. I will be tackling them in approximately the order they appear from now on.
@Jayman,
The reason I excluded ex-Communist nations right now (as opposed to, say, in 2035) is that 25 years just isn’t long enough for them to finish their convergence from the artificially depressed economic state they were in under central planning. This is especially so when you consider that for some of them, especially the ex-Soviet states, most of the 1990s were “wasted” on the structural transition from a rigidly centrally planned system to free markets with some semblance of enforceable legal noms. Once their average growth rates for some reasonable period of time, such as a decade, stop gaining relatively on Western Europe/The US, only then can we say that their convergence has finished and we can start making comparisons.
Example – Estonian society is less clannish and has considerably greater trust than, say, Italy. It also has better institutions, greater ease of business, and lower corruption. It is frequently cited as a star reformer. It is in the Eurozone. It has a high IQ, higher than Italy’s and not far behind Finland’s (the gap is mostly due to the Russian minority). I hope you will not dispute any of that. But it still has a considerably lower GDP per capita and a very considerably lower productivity level than Italy. As you would expect, the gap between them is closing at a considerable rate. Relative to 2003, Italy’s real output per capita has declined by close to 10%, whereas Estonia’s has grown by 40%.
Now one problem is that the area where Communism came to power is coterminous with areas which were outside of the Hajnal Line and had an exogamous community family system. This makes it easy for people who insist on looking at things from too much of an HBD prism to be confounded. They should bear in mind that other factors like unfinished convergence could (and are) playing a very big role as well. One really obvious way to illustrate this is to ask why despite broadly similar IQ and trust profiles, the European Med (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) is still considerably wealthier and very considerably more productive than the Visegrad (Czech/Slovak, Hungary, Poland) and Baltic nations. And why the latter are closing the gap.
This seems like a plausible explanation. Is this a hypothesis or is there a citation/quote?
Nota bene :
https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/586921198921060352
@Jayman
“Where the institutions came from?”
In that case, Jayman, the institutions came with the Red army and where not the result of the local population propensity.
Anatoly,
How would you explain the phenomenon of highly successful diasporas from some of the less well-performing countries? For example, people from Greece and Italy (where nutrition and other factors that affect IQ are satisfactory) tend to be very upwardly mobile when they immigrate or work abroad. Is this because mostly high-IQ nationals are impelled and succeed in going abroad? Or does it point to systemic problems outside of cognitive considerations, such as corruption, within the countries that prevent a more stable, prosperous economy?
High avg iq of South Asian population in US is a result of selective immigration. Avg iq in South Asia will increase with better nutrition / iodine sufficiency / becoming more machine society but it won’t reach 110. I think 95 would be ceiling for South Asia. (if no recent strong selection for iq or artificial intervention)
For the verbal/math/spatial iq you can look at this and references:
http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
Yes, see my comment above on Japanese manufacturing productivity, which is much higher than its overall productivity. The same with South Korea.
@ Cpluskx: thanks
Great post Anatoly
Jayman as always providing good insights. You might to take a look at the work of Jayman and Hbdchick. They have gone beyond the casual focus on IQ to see what else lies behind differences in economic(and other) differences but they remain within the HBD sphere. Turns out there is more to HBD than just IQ. 🙂
On the question of East Asian’s lagging behind I believe the great statistician La Griffe du Lion figured this out:
SMART FRACTION THEORY II: WHY ASIANS LAG
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm
@Jayman
When can we expect this new post of yours? Been waiting for an update for a while now and it sounds right down my alley
Anatoly, Krugman’s chart only shows growth in GDP per working-age adult since 1993. It does not show convergence in the level of GDP/waa. The USA is still higher than Europe or Japan in this respect :
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-EMpadQx4hM/S_sDwsxWuaI/AAAAAAAAARg/N9g-psKyWKI/s1600/japan3.png
If there’s one thing I know about MANOVAs, it’s their resistance to solving the validity question.
This article is a very good case in point.
Sorry AK, but anyone seriously interested in socio-economic solutions – which have to include the crucial biometric of mortality/disease rates – would dismiss these correlations as ‘noise.’
BTW, American ‘exceptionalism’ wasn’t an envious nod at ‘Manifest Destiny :’ it was Uncle Joe quipping about Yankee hubris/delusion. Perhaps currently best manifested as General Breedlove.
Plain ole ‘nutjob’ does it for me. 🙂
White people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy on how whites have a higher iq than blacks. And this is supposed to explain everything you need to know about black people. With blacks, IQ is king and explains everything.
With Asians, white people cannot just look at IQ because Asians have higher IQs and they do not want to be pigeon holed by IQ like black people are. So they invent a lot of reasons why IQ matters with blacks, but not with Asians.
They I’ll say things like creativity and collective society, ignoring that relative to black people whites are more collective and less creative than black people. Yet this is seen as a positive for whites.
What does this all mean? It just means that white people are trying to game the system by trying to prove that their race is the superior and deserves this or that.
That is all. Welcome to America in the 21st century. 🙂
Anatoly mentioned my hunch about the cause of the US per capita GDP exceptionalism. I’ll expand on it here. He’s seen me do it before, but this is a bigger audience, so there are more opportunities for criticism.
The US has a more market-oriented economy than most other rich countries. I think that a more market-oriented system will tend to throw up more economic activity, while not necessarily achieving more customer satisfaction.
The US healthcare system spends much more money on the last year of life than other rich countries’ healthcare systems. Why? It’s largely a for-profit system. It maximizes revenue and profit, not the number of healthy man-years. The general breakdown of the body in the last year of life is a great excuse to order up more machines. Medications are overprescribed, procedures are overperformed, the amount of economic activity is maximized. Spending per patient breaks world records while life expectancy stays safely behind them.
The US has less public and more private transportation than most rich countries. We can debate for a long time what’s better, but obviously the car model spends more money per passenger-mile than the train model.
The US higher education system is more market-oriented than those of most rich countries. At the highest end it’s better than them too, at the middle and low ends it’s worse. Without looking it up I suspect that even at the low end the US system spends more money per student than the educational systems of most rich countries simply because it’s more market-oriented. The more lawyers colleges can put out, the more money they make. Who cares if the economy needs that many lawyers? The silent hand? Tell that to all of those unemployed law school grads.
Overproduction is the common thread here.
The US retirement system is more market-oriented than those of most rich countries. The silent hand maximizes the amount of trading in the stock and bond markets, the brokerage fees, the salaries of the mutual fund managers. Are American retiress living better for all that economic activity than the retirees in less market-oriented rich countries? I doubt it.
Thanks.
I guess that particular theory goes out of the window, then.
A few additional observations:
Although that’s the result of Flynn.
pp. 103: Table showing gap between 16-24 yo’s and 55-65 yo’s. Korea has the highest gap, which is not surprising because out of all these countries it was the only one that was truly a Third World country in 1950. (Also: A strike against Unz’s theory of the East Asian Exception to socio-economic influences on IQ). Japan also has a gap, but it is moderate and comparable to that of France, the Netherlands, Spain, Finland, Poland, Italy, Germany, and Estonia. This is not too surprising either since its level of socio-economic development in 1950 was not to dissimilar from that of Spain, Poland, and Italy (though Germany, France, and the Netherlands were considerably richer and more advanced).
pp. 108: Brightest 55-65 yo’s in the US, as measured by problem solving capacity in technological environments. So some support for theory that US exceptionalism is a legacy thing. Though it should be noted that the Anglo countries, Sweden, and the Netherlands are not far behind. (Though Sweden and the Netherlands are very productive).
… Okay, this report is really fascinating. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Better to continue this in another blog post.
You can never look at things too much from the “HBD prism”, I say. 🙂
The data back me up. We know that the heritability of key behavioral traits, views and attitudes, and major life outcomes are all highly heritable. What’s more, and much more key here, these things aren’t heavily affected by within cohort environmental variation (between is a different story). This is affirmed by large behavioral genetic studies from national samples (of “diverse” countries, like the U.S. or Italy). If local conditions were a factor in affecting key variables of interest, then it’d show up in the shared environment, since children growing up together should be more similar than those growing up in completely different parts of the country. Of course, extended twin studies break it down even further (see The Son Becomes The Father | JayMan’s Blog).
Fair enough.
Northern Italy or Southern Italy? Italy is like two (or perhaps three) countries in one. In terms of GDP per capita, Estonia seems more comparable to Southern Italy right now than Northern Italy. In terms of corruption, it seems more in line with Northern Italy, though.
To be sure (I’ll come back to that). But taking a look at the map of GDP per capita in PPP across Europe (2008, seen here A Tale of Three Maps | JayMan’s Blog), it seems the West Slavs and the Balts fit in with southern Iberia and southern Italy (the low IQ areas), though Greece is somewhat ahead, all things considered (though, so is Ireland).
However, all that said, along the lines of what J. P. Rushton said about India, development is no guarantee of the eventually matching Western levels. I don’t doubt that the economies of these nations are still “recovering”, however, I don’t expect them to get very far, over all. But sure, we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
But back to this point:
It’s not like the deficiencies – or broadly, the differences – between East and West (and North and South, for that matter) end merely at economics. They are visible in a whole suite of national characteristics, many of which are regularly featured on my Twitter feed (one of which was recently discussed by Steve Sailer):
Which country would be the perfect setting for a “Fast & Furious” / “Mad Max” crossover sequel?
Even driving behavior follows the Hajnal line. Sailer gave video samples of Russian driving in an earlier post. Road Rage, clean water, views on homosexuality, drinking, homicide, etc. aren’t just the legacy of communism.
Interestingly, in many of these characteristics, South Korea clusters with the other countries in that corner of the World Values Survey map. It’s not just the commies.
It’s entirely possible that even a high IQ society is stunted from reaching Western levels by a lack of high trust (or other features that make life difficult in clannish honor societies). Perhaps Russia and China will never match nearby nations for that reason. I will also argue that low openness to experience (a hallmark of a clannish society) seems to correlate with low creativity; societies that score low seem to lack the ability to produce like Western nations can (this will be part of a future post).
Here’s the cite on the sex gaps in IQ:
Are apparent sex differences in mean general intelligence created by sample restriction and increased male variance? (2009)
How Sephardic are they?
Robots?
Sephardim aren’t arab jews. Most of iberian or real sephardim “immigrate” for other european countries as Netherland and Britain during “inquisition”. Italiots and greek jews also seems to be a two particular jewish collectivities. Stop generalizing “sephardic” term for all of jews in middle east.
If XIX physiologists, criminologists and psychologics are really right, then geniuses are more like “neurosis”. East asians are too “perfect” to have a lot of unbalanced outliers. Perfect in a evolutive perspective, not moral.
You sure about that?
Curious people spend a large amount of time trying to figure out how the observed distribution of scientific and technological achievement, as well as of wealth, came about. IQ is an important tool in that search. It explains a lot, but not everything.
“relative to black people whites are more collective and less creative than black people.”
Creativity is best measured by results. What have blacks created?
Nice, Anatoly! A comprehensive post covering a long list of interesting issues.
Panda’s 2 cents:
There’re many conflicting ( or “conflicting”) data suggesting potentially many conflicting conclusions. How come? One of the major reasons that has been overlooked is perhaps what’s the comparison basis, without which one can easily reach the conclusion that American Exceptionalism, East Asian Mediocrity.
The Americans and the East Asians were/are not at the equal comparison basis, not then 300 years ago, not now (slightly better though).
As we all know that whenever 2 things are compared at a different basis, we’re comparing apple and orange, then of course conflicting conclusions.
Here Panda has to repeatedly introduce two key concepts that are almost completely missing in all the major scholar works Panda comes across – “Civilisational Advantage” , longwith the “Multiply Effect” it carries.
One shall have no problem understanding why we were/are not at the equal basis after knowing what is “Civilisational Advantage”:
Do we clearly realise when discussing HBD, don’t we, that we’re been living under the absolute world dominance of Western Civilisation (by and large Anglo-Saxon-German-Franco-Ashkenazi) for the last 300 years at least?
We are under the financial structure (e.g. fundamentally basic issues like what are the general practices of Finance, what is counted as GDP? how nominal GDP is calculated, how much each wroth in the market, what’s the productivity and how it’s valued, etc, all the data comparison points) theoritically set up by Anglo-Saxon authors almost exclusively…
THIS is what Panda would call “Civilisational Advantage” and its “Multiply Effect” (both reasonable and unresonable, across board in economics, market, culture, geopolitics, etc ) that the Western civilisation currently enjoys.
Our comparison basis therefore, is not the same!
Of course, as a civilisation dominated by Western “Civilisational Advantage”, the East Asia (led historically by Chinese Civilisation, recently spearheaded by Japan) can make things at the similar universal value as Western civilisation , such as a hammer, a sewing maching, a computer, etc, yet for the vast majority of services (which are priced heavily in nominal GDP, hence weath calculation), it is not only noy universal valued and but also contains large differences in market prices – hence“Multiply Effect” of “Civilisational Advantage”. This has immense impact on all the “conflicting “data that Anatoly described. Simplely consider some of the most obvious:
while the market value of this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXALGD7G25Q), produced by people with perhaps combined IQ of 120 , is about multi-millions?
Mind you these count as “GDP, GDP/per cap”, and “productivity” in today’s world.
while the market value of a RL Polo suit or a pair of Pepe Jeans worth 10 or 100 times more?
Mind you these count as “GDP, GDP/per cap”, and “productivity” in today’s world.
Mind you these count as “GDP, GDP/per cap”, and “productivity” in today’s world.
Mind you these count as “GDP, GDP/per cap”, and “productivity” in today’s world.
etc.
Because of “Civilisational Advantage” , longwith the “Multiply Effect” it carries, not strictly according to IQ ranking though, : )
To suggest that the average American real productivity is higher than, or almost catch up with, that of Japan, or even that of South Korea, is a joke, if you have ever lived in these countries. Mind you 1990’s Japan had almost demolished the entire high tech industry of the US prior to the “Plaza Accord” under the gunpoint.
“Average productivity”? Pauleez! If USD is not the world’s reserve currency today, or even English not the langue franca any more of the world communication, the differences would be even much larger.
2 things in the begining made the Anglo-Saxon dominating the world:
The generation of Britain’s Industry Revolution (and perhaps 2 or 3 generations thereafter) soemhow had WAY MORE THAN 100 average IQ, Panda guesses.
A historical coincidence that Ming China burned their entire fleet voluntarily and closed the border to the outside world eversince, before conquered by the barbarian Manchus (hence China – the leader of East Asia Civilisation was gone to dogs), while at the almost the same era, the West discovered the New World (Americas+Australia – the size of entire the old Eurasia) , together with all the minerals, real estates/value, natural resources…, without any competition at all, hence the sheer size of almost freelunch-alike wealth basis laying the firm fundation for its later on industrialisation and world-wide empire building, in order to form this “Civilisational Advantage” we see today.
Selective migration. The bigger the barrier, the better the immigrant (compare Muslims in the U.S. vs Muslims in Europe), typically.
I continue with my theory that smart east asian fraction are overwhelming composed by “high achievers” ( kind of gifted) and lower proportion of the gifted-gifted and creative-gifted types. A qualitative difference cause by personality differences.
“Spatial iq doesn’t seem to be as important as verbal/mathematical iq.”
I’m not aware of any Jews who contributed to the Industrial Revolution. Jewish contributions to science have been almost entirely in theory. Experimental science, discovery through tinkering with physical objects, the sort of stuff that Edison and Tesla did, even the sort of stuff that Korolyov and von Braun did – I don’t think that Jews have ever done that. And I’m Jewish by ancestry.
I doubt all science and technology will ever be confined to theory.
From the current 81 to supposely 95 – 1SD that is, it’s a heck of a lot of Flynn 🙂
Where South Asians originated from? Originally from ME Arabs, Persians and Turks ( all with mid 80s IQ, yes, they are now better nutritioned, with iodine sufficiency, many, such as the Irianians and Turks, are becoming more machine societies, but hey, still mid 80s IQ currently), before mixing with South Asian indigenous tribes (mid 70s IQ).
The combination of people of mid 80s IQ and people with 70s IQ reaching 95, or like some said 110, is an revolutionarily giant leap forward for the mankind, don’t you think?
I just realized that I typed “silent hand” instead of “invisible hand”. Funny.
If I recall correctly, only one is half-Ashkenazi, others are all completely Sephardic.
If I do a caste-name analysis of the annual National Merit Semifinalist list for California
( same pattern applies for other states )
South Indian Brahmin = 35%
North Indian Brahmin = 10%
North Indian Merchant ( inc Jains, Sindhis ) = 20%
Forward Caste Dravidians = 20%
Kayasth ( North Indian scribe ) = 5%
All these castes add up to 15% to 20% of Indian population and less than 50% of South Asian diaspora
the rest ( inc Sikhs, Patels, Caribbean hindus ) = 10%
the rest category of non-elite castes, easily account for about 50% of the total Indian diaspora
and win just 10% of slots
The same applies to most spelling bee winners, Intel science talent winners
Indian IQ is caste dependent
About 70% of the Indian population gets affirmative action quota and is genetically lower IQ and lower caste
The 112 IQ study for Indian IQ, I dont know the caste composition
If you do caste name analysis of winners of elite contests like California National Merit Semifinalist, you will find 90% of the winners are from the elite castes, about 15% to 20% of Indian population
Japan has low productivity because Japanese are less likely to fire unproductive workers. There are both institutional and cultural(some commenters have used terms like “collectivist” earlier) incentives for this, but whichever one emphasizes, the point is that much of the unproductivity has to do with what you could call less cut-throat ruthlessness on the part of employers. Incidentally, when most people write about “productivity” it is implied to be a good thing which one always want to raise. But one can argue that not firing people as often leads to greater social cohesion, less instability, etc. Due to their obsession over particularly narrow economic metrics, economists and financial “experts” have been saying bone-headed things about Japan for decades now, how it’s a basket case economy, how productivity is low, and all this crap about how things are going to be a disaster for the in the future as a result of these things(“bug in search of a windshield” is one useful idiot’s phrase). But the country remains one of the highest GDP per capita in the world, high life expectancy, low crime, low unemployment, etc.
Also in Japan it’s common for workers to stay at the same firm for their career instead of changing companies more often as you see in the U.S. for example. This is obviously strongly related to firings being less common, but this tendency should be pointed out because it’s important in its own right. It has the same impacts as well, it tends to have a downward impact on productivity and dynamism but arguably is good for stability and cohesion.
I do not see the evidence that a lack of innovation is the “problem”(I put problem in quotes because it’s not clear to me high productivity is as important as most people assume it to be). That annoying buzz word, innovation, is not something easily measured. When people do come up with ways of trying to measure, like patents per capita or something(I’m skeptical how well these actually measure “innovation”) Japan usually ranks high. So I think that explanation of East Asians not being creative is based on little more than stereotypes and Western wish-fulfillment.
East Asians often innovate in ways that are not as valued by Westerners by the way. An example are production practices. Look up what “Kanban” is if you want a quick example, but suffice to say, Japanese have been extremely innovative in these less sexy ways and it has a lot to do with why a lot of for example American manufacturing has lost out since the 70s. But most people dismiss this type of innovation because they personally do not value it. Of course they value the consumer products that these methods allow to be produced in an affordable way, but that’s not going to get in the way of talking about how awesome we are and how East Asians are stifled, not creative, passive, and other vulgar nonsense.
On the point about how Japanese are not creative I could also make points about the impact of Japanese culture, but some other commenters have already pointed this out so I don’t have to bother.
I focus on Japan in this post but much of what I say is probably true to varying extents in South Korea and other northeast Asian countries.
More data is needed on gini and income distributions in these countries. The USA and UK benefit disproportionately from having large firms headquartered in their cities, which in turn is an artifact, to some extent , of their recent civilizational dominance. If much of apples manufacturing is done in China, back office work in India and research in Israel that artificially inflates american GDP.
And as another comment above noted, traditional societies are going to have lower gdps than atomized consumer countries. A businessman and his strong independent career woman wife who spends all day at her government job are going to hire a nanny and pay for daycare etc. Not so in traditional Malaysia or somewhere where young girls don’t dream of snagging the corner office, where grandparents stay nearby, where public transport is common, where ghetto thugs and white flight haven’t forced people to buy and sell houses every few years. Atomized consumerism began in Europe and was perfected in America. The rest of the world cannot be judged until capitalist liberalism has destroyed their family networks and other traditional non monetized social systems and replaced everything with trade and contact.
Also the claim by Willen Buiter that the U.S. will need to generate surpluses to meet the demands of its borrowing abroad is economic nonsense. It is based on a misunderstanding of how money is created(and it is created, there should be no confusion about that) and also ignores that every transaction is two-sided. For the U.S. to be unable to continue to “borrow abroad” by being the consumer giant it is, buying stuff everyone else produces, that means China and the rest will not longer be able to produce and sell all the stuff they do, which isn’t good news for their economies either. Were the U.S. to suddenly be unable to consume at current levels, that would be a disaster for producers as well.
But since the U.S. has control of its own currency, unlike the Mediterranean countries of Europe(the main reason that comparison is worthless), there is no threat of the United States running out of dollars or being unable to finance its debt(inflation, empirically is not a significant either). There is also not much threat of a global dumping of U.S. dollar assets any time soon.
Thiel says the world is concentrating too much on bits, and not enough on atoms, which could be a way of saying too much theory and not enough objects.
https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/peter-thiel-on-the-future-of-innovation-77628a43c0dd
Perhaps the European genius is (or was) more closely connected to the physical world, while the Jewish genius is more theoretical (and verbal). No doubt this has to do with differing occupations in history.
There is also some evidence that within the same country people from traditional wheat growing regions are are more individualistic than people from rice growing regions (even if they are city dwellers with no connection to agriculture).
I wonder how a GDP comparison between rice and wheat growing regions in China would look like.
Anatoly Karlin: Please expound on your IQ criticism. Do you object to using PISA figures? They correlate closely with other estimates including those by Lynn and Rindermann anyway. Personally I prefer them because of how standard, high sample, and internationally comparable they are.
Finding international wage data is harder than for GDP and I don’t see how they would be more useful, quite the contrary in fact.
I don’t have any beef about using a measure that is a composite of “the average of the Math, Science, and Reading component in PISA 2009.”
I’m not keen on calling it IQ though. There’s no real evidence of that – that the Australians have a 3 point IQ advantage on the US, or Finland practically has IQ 107.
With Finland for instance, when it’s actually tested, it falls average. E.g. see Roivainen – “Are Cross-National Differences in IQ Profiles Stable? A Comparison of Finnish and U.S. WAIS Norms” or the standardisation samples cited by Flynn – http://tinyurl.com/ls64847.
Moreover, when you break down their PISA, their advantage is strongly female – http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2015/03/24-brown-center-report-loveless?cid=00900015020089101US0001-03281. Do they have this large sex difference with much smarter women or something, or is the PISA not actually capturing “IQ” that well?
Re: wages, it depends on what you want to know about wealth.
If you want to know how productive and economically busy a country is on the world stage relative to its population, you probably do want GDP per capita.
If you want to know how much value people living in those societies are capable of getting the international market to transfer to them in the form of wages and wealth, then you may want to know about their wages and their wealth.
Annual GDP reflects value of “all final goods and services produced within a country in a given year”. If a country’s people are perhaps involved with markets that don’t necessarily have the end result of final production of anything in their country, yet are clearly being highly compensated for their work (so clearly its very valuable to people who actually own the wealth), GDP per capita could give an varying result from wages and wealth.
Either way, I think the comparisons of wealth and wages to PISA and “IQ” would add context, so if you’re interested, data for a subset of OECD that has these indicators and overlaps with your dataset:
http://i.imgur.com/qb0ZcGQ.png / http://i.imgur.com/vzKJlqa.png – average 2009 wage vs PISA09 PPP / Exchange Rate
http://i.imgur.com/tCTN35V.png / http://i.imgur.com/XtQHTMY.png – average 2009 wage vs “IQ” PPP / Exchange Rate
http://i.imgur.com/VezoXsR.png – 2014 median disposable household income vs PISA09
http://i.imgur.com/DJgORDf.png – 2014 median household wealth vs PISA09
The shapes are similar – low correlations between the variables among the OECDs, some differences worthy of note.
Another problem may be difference between Sephardi Tehorim (Spanish then later Dutch/Ottoman Sephardi) and the recent more ”Mizrahi Sephardi”.
There’s a lot of confusion about these terms. There are the Dutch and Ottoman Sephardi but there are also Sephardic groups that settled in the Arab countries. A Jew from Morocco for example might be a Sephardic Jew or a Berber Jew. Algerian Jews are also predominantly Sephardic but the Tunisian and Libyan Jews are not.
However, I would think it’s difficult to measure the average IQ of various Jewish groups from Arab countries, since those communities don’t really exist any more, with their best and brightest settling and doing well in France, Canada and the US, and those with less opportunities going to Israel. The average IQ of these groups’ descendants in Israel wouldn’t accurately reflect the average IQ those groups had back in their Arab host countries.
Iraqi Jews seem to do well in Israel compared to other Israeli groups from Arab countries and it seems likely to me that the reason is that their community was not fractured in the dramatic way the other communities were and more of their brightest ended up in Israel. The Iraqi Jews are Mizrahi and not of Sephardic origin, btw.
Its civilisational advantage hypothesis don’t work to China during european middle age??
You don’t need to know their cast composition really.
Are these 112 IQ Indians NE Asians(105)? or Europeans(100)?
Clearly they are not, so it is impossible for them to have avg IQ as high as 112, unless for 1 out of the following 3 reasons:
it is due to very selective immigration (i.e. it is reasonable to suggest that avg IQ of H1B1 Indians in US is about 2 SD above Indians avg IQ in India), or
their “casts” are extraterrestrial beings originated in another planet.
You choose.
BTW, on 2: H1B1 Indians in the US having avg IQ of about only 112 is a kinda of proof that Indians in India does have low 80s avg IQ. Why? because if Indians in India had avg IQ of close to 100,for instance, then the avg IQ of highly selective Indians in the US would have avg IQ of about 130, with avg of 112 being way too low.
Of course it worked , the other way around though. The Civilisational Advantage at a time was in China’s favour.
The reason why it didn’t appear as apparent as it is today in Anglo-Saxon world was the fact the world back then was not globalised, with China and Europe having little direct contact with each other.
How Sephardic are they?
I think 1 or 2 of them were half Ashkenazi.
@Glossy
I’d say probably Jewish population during Industrial Rev was very small / not very integrated to rest / were usually in finance / there were lots of oppression. I certainly don’t think Jews are only good at theory, John Von Neumann single handedly created sizeable portion of modern civilization.
@[email protected]
Your post contains a lot of false information but yes i also think it’s a giant leap forward for the mankind.
@Anonymous
You are probably right and Iraqi Jews seem really successful (Sassoon, Kadoorie families)
Von Neumann was a mathematical physicist. He dealt with theory.
/ were usually in finance / there were lots of oppression.
These excuses are self-contradictory. If Jews were allowed to become big-time bankers, then surely they would have been allowed to become inventors.
there doesn’t seem to be a European pop with avg iq higher than 100 maybe except Huguenots. (assimilated today)
I wonder if anyone has ever measured the mean IQ of the European aristocracies. The British upper classes seem to have assimilated less than the others. I’m sure GSS wordsum data can be broken down by Christian denomination. Episcopalians would surely score above 100.
Would be delighted to know which I said in the post are false info.
Care to share how this “giant leap forward for the mankind” came into being all of a sudden? Climate Warming or The New Ice Age perhaps?
Would be delighted to know how exactly “a lot of” what I said in that post “are false info”.
Care to share how this “giant leap forward for the mankind” came into being all of a sudden? Climate Warming or The New Ice Age perhaps?
And what is the secret that this “giant leap forward” only appear to occure to South Indians in the US? Why didn’t it make E Asian IQ into 140 , or Africans into IQ 95, or Europeans into 130, at the same time? Just curious.
Fascinating thread. Worth reading multiple times and mentally chewing on for some time to come. You said it, IQ and it’s variation explains a lot about our world. I hope that in the future people that see this are not pigeon holed as being simply HBDers.
I’m hardly an expert on the topic, but I feel the persistent issue of “brain drain” is not given adequate consideration in the article.
It could very well explain part of the apparent advantage the US has over other nations.
Because East Asian usually don’t have Jesus in their heart? …. nah (I am currently Agnostic), if the prosperity theology were a factor here, S.Koreans would rank better as they are quite more Christian than other East Asians.
You see things like this in the U.S., back when the immigrant fraction of the workforce was low, as it is in Japan today…
This entire post is riddled with false assumptions, metrics and analysis.
1) GDP isnt success. It includes prison economy, obesity economy, depression & narcotic economy, whore economy, bloated legal paperwork economy, hedge fund economy.
2) policies weigh more than IQ. Even in a low median IQ country there must be some high IQ people. If these high IQ people design, implement good policies, IQ loses its predictive and causal power.
3) north Korea vs south Korea: high mean IQ is worthless with bad policies. Same people, same genetics, same language, same heritage. But huge differences in outcomes.
4) cheap land: borrowing costs, access to capital and kmow-how, regulations and policies, and implementation speed weighs perhaps as much or more than cheap land.
5) geography: california with 12% US pop. is earth quake prone. And Katrina? Japan’s geography has advantages. Natural barrier to mass immigration, secluded location in one corner of the world (do your own thing), surrounded by competent, genetically similar neighbors.
6) financial windfall: vague term. What do you mean? Stock market? Bond market? Currency trading market? Tax free safe haven? Insurance market? Real estate trust market?
This post is as bad as CNN & fox. I thought Unz.com would be different.
Bad Nobel chart. Literature, peace, economics, are worthless in these measurements, highly politicized.
Measure only sciences.
Absolutely. The manufacturing efficiency in places like Japan and South Korea is astounding. They are quite innovative and maintain extremely low error rates.
And don’t forget that the agriculture sectors in Japan and South Korea remain politically very sensitive and important, and are thus highly protected by both tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Because of these political reasons, their agricultural sectors are incredibly inefficient compared to the capital-intensive agribusinesses in the United States, for example.
The Toyota luxury brand in the United States, Lexus, was an attempt to introduce the basic yet exceptional Toyota customer service in Japan to a select segment of the automobile buyers in the United States.
In both Japan and South Korea, the level of personal aftermarket service for even inexpensive manufactured goods is incredible compared to the buy-and-throwaway culture that Americans have. East Asian service sectors are financially very inefficient by American and even Western European standards, but for cultural reasons seem to have retained “small scales and multiple layers of distribution.” If your LED TV or Blu-ray breaks in the U.S., you pretty much throw it away and buy another one (unless it broke shortly after purchase), but in East Asia, the manufacturer will often send out a repair man to fix it free or charge a very nominal cost. It’s just culturally impossible to have nonexistent service (in order to have cutthroat prices) and survive as a business in these countries. Clearly they prefer a price-inefficient, but qualitatively-better service. That may lower their PPP GDP per capita and such, but probably makes life easier and less aggravating.
By the way, another thing to keep in mind about some of these metrics is to look at beyond the snapshot picture and examine the changing patterns over, say, 20-30 years. I am sure Mr. Karlin is aware of these number: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Patents-granted
They are from 1998. I would almost guarantee that South Korea was not number 2 twenty to thirty years prior to that time. Remember that there is considerable lag between human (and economic) development and mass affluence.
Nice comments on Japan.
Yes, excessive inference from cross-sections is a bad habit in these precincts. That was a point I also tried to make about Argentina and Chile. People keep saying they have approximately the same GDP/capita, even though that was clearly not true for most of this century.
I wouldn’t blame immigration for all of that (though obviously it depresses wages). There have been other changes in the economy, among them greater competition.
Your numbers don’t tally with Lynn’s:
http://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/2/Lynn_Meisenberg_2010_National_IQs_calculated_and_validated_for_108_nations.pdf
For example: you got Australia at 102.9, Canada at 104.1, Ireland at 99.6, Finland at 106.6, Greece at 96.0…….. while Lynn measures them at 98, 99, 92, 99, 92 respectively. Big difference.
You are over-estimating european IQs for some reason. Lynn has got East Asia more than half a SD ahead of Europe.
Could it be relevant that the USA (together with Canada) basically stole an entire continent from its previous inhabitants, virtually exterminated them, and thus had a whole continent’s worth of untouched virgin mineral, forestry, fishery and agricultural resources at its disposal? While all these resources exist worldwide, the low-hanging fruit has mostly been gathered wherever large populations have lived for thousands of years. On top of the successful resource theft, the USA was disproportionately colonized by “go-getters” – people who were tough, unscrupulous, determined and practical. Last but not least, the USA has been characterized since its foundation by the world’s most money-centric culture. In the USA, your worth as a person is directly proportional to your financial net worth. That means gangsters, extortionists and banksters get more respect than teachers, scientists, doctors and nurses (except for the tiny subset of scientists and doctors who also happen to be extortionists – “he became a doctor specializing in diseases of the rich” – Tom Lehrer).
If a tiny difference in average IQ makes such a big difference in prosperity, why are members of Mensa (who have IQs over 130 by definition) if anything less prosperous than average people? Obviously because high intelligence tends to open your eyes to the many interesting things in life other than money.
The correlation between IQ and income at the individual/personal level is substantially lower than the correlation between IQ and income at the country level. There is some kind of multiplicative effect, which suggests that a large part of the impact of IQ on national productivity is not just via individual worker quality, but via people’s impact on institutions, policies, etc.
Value added as by agriculture, fishing, forestry, fossil fuels, and mining is …. less than 4% of GDP in the United States. This cannot be an important determinant of the USA’s unusually high GDP/capita.
http://www.bea.gov/industry/gdpbyind_data.htm
@ pseudoerasmus
but the share of agriculture, mining, etc. was much bigger some time ago, and this enabled the USA to build up a huge stock of capital which nowadays is invested in production and services
Nice post. A few quibbles. GDP is income, not wealth. They go hand in hand, but you’re not showing wealth statistics. Some countries have high wealth (Sweden, Denmark) but fairly low income, at least compared with America or Switzerland. Wealth is a stock, valuable things like land and oil and art, income is a flow, cash money. The outliers you speak of are selling their wealth to boost their income.
Also, R^2 is not the same as a correlation coefficient. In a simple linear model with one regressor, R^2 is the squared correlation coefficient. So your 0.84 figure is a bit unclear to me, is it the R^2? or is it the correlation coefficient? If it is the R^2 then this is a tight association indeed. It doesn’t matter much, point taken, but it is good to be careful with language.
My observation as an engineering manager is that you needed an IQ of above 120 before you were productive. (OK, there are a few exceptions, but not that many.) Thus it is not the average IQ that matters but the number of people in the upper reaches of the spectrum.
If these high IQ people design, implement good policies, IQ loses its predictive and causal power.
Not really, the projects today are too big for just a few people to do all the heavy lifting. It took Airbus the combined resources of 4 countries to make something competitive with one company who essentially owned the business. I doubt some African country with a few guys who went to Cambridge and got a degree in aeronautical engineering could take their degree back home and do the same.
Even the jobs for the guys on the shop floor require some level of skill and intelligence due to their complexity.
People who argue against average IQ always try to make it about some hidden force holding all these people in the third world down in some way. Yeah, that might have been true 200 years ago before information was widely available. However, nothing is stopping Kenya from developing viable industries. Pakistan was willing to do whatever it took to build a nuclear weapon yet the rest of the country is very backward.
Chile has fewer % Jews than Argentina. And that may have something to do with perpetual currency crisis in Argentina, and the solution to GDP riddle.
Also, number of patents may not correlate well with quality of patents or their industrial impact.
In all these years working in high tech, my overall impression has been that japanese are refined, aristocratic, understated, whereas Koreans tend to be pompous, conceited, and very often overestimate their abilities. Chinese tend to be malicious and not quite trustworthy.
Informal chats with many colleagues & friends confirmed these assessments.
Of all the nobels in sciences, japanese have won 19, yet not a single Korean, and only 8 Chinese.
Have you ever been to Japan? Clearly your statistics are missing much. What’s the value of safe and secure public spaces? There is no street crime in Japan. Streets, under ground malls, subways, etc. are safe to be and conduct commerce. That’s got to be worth many points on your scale of economic performance.
I didn’t say anything about patents.
Chile also used to have a lot of financial crises — including 2 big ones under Pinochet.
There’s no GDP riddle regarding Chile and Argentina.
If you read carefully, I do not argue against average IQ differences.
Its that in the overarching equation, IQ might not be a major factor.
As for Airbus, Germans are the prime movers, and Francé etc offer a European veneer and collaborative posture. Due to historic tragedies.
Also, one need not conflate high-tech with material success. New zealand sells butter around the world. Does it require a 105 average IQ?
With good policies, primary and tertiary sectors, and low tech manufacturing can thrive even in modest IQ populations, generating high GDP.
Ex: Barbados is 95% black. Due to reasonably satisfactory policies, it has fairly high human development index.
Capital accumulation faces diminishing returns. So you need improvement in total factor productivity, which merely having a lot of capital does not give you. As it happens, the US convergence with Great Britain circa 1900 in per capita income was driven by productivity growth in the nontradeable sector — mainly transportation, communications, and utilities. In manufacturing productivity, the United States was already far ahead of Great Britain in the 1860s.
The Barbados depend on a fixed resource: sea/beaches. It’s as dependent on tourism as Saudi Arabia is on oil.
Of course that’s still better than many countries who squander their resource windfall.
History explains a lot. If you use the year that industrialization started in earnest by some uniform benchmark, that is going to explain a very large share of the variability, certain from U.K. to Europe to East Asia.
If you want an answer to American exceptionalism, one easy answer may be that we paid a much lower price in property damage and casualties in World War II.
Another key factor for American exceptionalism may be the longer lasting impacts of the fit immigrant hypothesis. Able people migrate. Less able people stay home. We are a nation of relatively recent immigrants. None of our peers are in the same boat.
But that factor is already captured in growth rates.
So you’re just reframing the question: why didn’t European and Japanese capital stock eventually converge with the US level of capital stock ? European and Japanese rates of capital accumulation in 1945-70 were much higher than the US rates precisely because they were converging. Why did convergence stop where it stopped ?
That’s functionally the same question as, why does the USA have such a high GDP/capita relative to other rich countries ?
America’s past productive advantage had to do with its culture – we had an amazing “can do” optimistic attitude towards life. Except for the rejection of black people by white people, we could work together to accomplish something. Our homogeneous Christian culture exuded hope. It allowed us to work together even though we were of different European tribes. A high percentage of every strata of culture could be productive.
Today we Americans wake up more productive then other countries because of our past, not because of what we are doing today.
America’s optimistic advantage is currently waning because of the divisive politics of its power seeking wealthy Jewish citizens. Sadly, today we have been pushed into seeing each other in an ethnic sense, not as homogeneous Christians.
God, what a post! What I wouldn’t have given for this kind of analysis when I was studying Economic History in the late 60s.
While I need to consider more in depth the various factors discussed, off the top of my head, I would probably assign greater weight to Anatoly’s loosely defined “Hedonics/Fiddling” category in explaining American Exceptionalism.
Comparing rates of mothers participating in the work force would likely reveal that Americans disproportionately monetize child care, meal prep, simple healthcare, entertainment and lots of other things that don’t go into GDP in more traditional societies.
Another comparison along these lines would be the level of per capita advertising spending; conspicuous consumption is a more important signal of status in a large culturally diverse anomic economy compared to relative monocultures. Or tax expenditures encouraging home ownership: consider how the greater importance home ownership in the US (relative to even other Anglo-sphere nations) inflates GDP as well as acting as a driver of female workforce participation.
Good grief, post hoc argument from ideology. Look, there are way too many unknowns to make what is basically a biological argument.
The claim is that a brain processes, IQ/processing speed, causes behavioral differences in….what? Making money or any other economic indicator.
The “best and brightest” professional scientists can’t make definitive statements on any ONE issue this post covers. This is truly gobbly-gook.
Gee, is there a single peer-reviewed citation to anything in this windbaggage? Let’s exclude anything in economics – since nothing in economics, along with the humanities, philosophy and religion, is evidence-based.
Some analysis of Israel’s PISA results from
http://cms.education.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/B9434C77-C102-4D41-BD9B-B8074AFF19BE/192610/PISA_2012_Report_ed1.pdf (hebrew)
In all 3 scores, Hebrew-speaking students are on par with the first world – same as Norway in math, same as Holland in reading, same as Italy in science. Arab-speaking students have the same scores as Jordan and Tunis. So the mean score of Israel doesn’t make much sense as Arabs are 23% of the PISA sample. I guess the same gap exists in other countries.
Also Israel’s GDP is somewhere between 32k and 36k, so Israel need to be moved on the graph close to France …
Great article; just a note that “prodigal” most likely should be “prodigious.”
The culture of “saving face” in Eastern Asia acts as the equivalent of central planning. It prevents feedback by subordinates to superiors in the chain of command. Therefore, production or service problems cannot be corrected as quickly as in a more “egalitarian” culture. I can attest to this from personal experience. Difficult to quantify no doubt but it exists. The Japanese were smart enough to import western management methods (NYT, Dec. 21, 1993):
“W. Edwards Deming, an expert on business management who advised Japan on how to rebuild its shattered industries after World War II and urged American corporations to treat their workers as associates rather than adversaries, died early yesterday at his home in Washington. He was 93.”
Great article, two quick comments:
Regarding US healthcare results (bang for the buck), it has long been known (but never mentioned out loud) that the US jumps way up the chart if you exclude NAMs from the results. Is this IQ or culture or something else? I don’t know, but it’s not nothing.
Keep up the good work.
The Olympus mega-scandal in Japan was a small window into the extreme corruption of Japan’s secrecy-obsessed corporatocracy.
One can well make the argument that the most successful criminal behavior will be a reward that the most intelligent reap to the detriment of everyone else. There can be enormous accumulation of wealth which is unequally distributed in the extreme, and accumulated by activities which are only in the interests of a few, which analysis by reduction to total “raw” wealth obscures.
Comparing rates of mothers participating in the work force would likely reveal that Americans disproportionately monetize child care, meal prep, simple healthcare, entertainment and lots of other things that don’t go into GDP in more traditional societies.
Excellent point – single working mothers do zero long-term good for society – period!
It is good for government – it turns over money bringing in more tax dollars – but it is ZERO good for the long-term interests of their children and the future of the culture. These children become unproductive – end of story.
Twinkie: If your LED TV or Blu-ray breaks in the U.S., you pretty much throw it away and buy another one (unless it broke shortly after purchase), but in East Asia, the manufacturer will often send out a repair man to fix it free or charge a very nominal cost. It’s just culturally impossible to have nonexistent service (in order to have cutthroat prices) and survive as a business in these countries. Clearly they prefer a price-inefficient, but qualitatively-better service. That may lower their PPP GDP per capita and such, but probably makes life easier and less aggravating.
Land areas and incomes are low, so less municipal waste? If it’s difficult and expensive for customers to junk stuff, they’ll want higher repair rates.
I hear about Japanese service that it is good, but is very, very (irritatingly) inflexible. It’s all very proper, at the same time they can’t handle deviations from procedure very well. Certain ways of services might make more sense in a tighter society (if the customer and the server are resolutely proper, formal and rigid in their dealings, the customer might get a better outcome… or they may not).
I’m not sure if the Japs (or other East Asians) find life very easy or less aggravating on the whole. They’re not exactly very high up on those happiness scales. Although maybe they need quality high customer services to take away the irritation or they’d be really moody.
Tourism is the ideal resource for countries whose population would otherwise behave worse than the world average. It encourages the population to conduct themselves in ways which do not frighten away visitors. Bermuda and the Bahamas are two examples. That cynical thought aside, some African majority countries are very well behaved. Ghana is said to have a very mild population. Pleasant surroundings produce pleasant people… as in the Rat Park experiment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
According to economists that is meaningless because the fools have no way to measure it. That is why the constant calls by economists for immigration to “save” Japan. To an economist a society full of people who hate each other and who are constantly looking to get over on one another is good as long as the GDP goes up each year.
This is why economics is a worthless pseudo-science.
Value-added comments only please, Elmer.
“The claim is that a brain processes, IQ/processing speed, causes behavioral differences in….what? Making money or any other economic indicator.”
This is too complicated for you?
American innovation benefited from immigrants. Other countries have not had immigration of this order. However, now even with this boost it is flagging in various. Start up rate is falling, If America didn’t attract immigrate I would say rate would be far lower! And now who in future wants to come to nation of mostly poor old and young people?
There is a reason why economy needs “financial engineering”! It has become an aged economy very quickly!
http://www.sprottmoney.com/news/why-u-s-economic-statistics-get-more-and-more-absurd-jeff-nielson-sprott-money-news?mw_aref=7b5b8659dfa071b4c7d0a95a56259dec
Why U.S. Economic ‘Statistics’ Get More and More Absurd
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-10/the-u-s-middle-class-poorer-than-you-think
The Middle Class Is Worse Off Than You Think
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-09/why-your-wages-could-be-depressed-for-a-lot-longer-than-you-think
Why Your Wages Could Be Depressed for a Lot Longer Than You Think
Reality is exact opposite to what you wrote.
Until 1920, america was not known as innovation hub.
Notable exceptions include Edison.
After stop to immigration, from 1920s-1960s American innovation soared. Man on moon. Arpanet, semiconductors. 1969.
Asian immigration was deadly. Espionage, balkanization, corruption.
What is curious is your complete disregard of the exorbitant privilege of printing the world’s reserve currency that America has enjoyed since WWII. Neither you nor any of the commenters, with the exception of Panda, recognizes this as a valid explanation for why Americans are much richer than they “should” be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
The term exorbitant privilege refers to the alleged benefit the United States has due to its own currency (i.e., the US dollar) being the international reserve currency.
the Bretton Woods system put in place in 1944…… resulted in an “asymmetric financial system” where foreigners “see themselves supporting American living standards and subsidizing American multinationals”. As American economist Barry Eichengreen summarized:”It costs only a few cents for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce a $100 bill, but other countries had to pony up $100 of actual goods in order to obtain one”.
Take away this privilege and the US GDP will shrink dramatically. The biggest move in this direction so far, the biggest threat to dollar hegemony, is the establishment by China this year of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/03/asian-infrastructure-investment-bank-150329074949552.html
China’s foreign minister, along with his Russian and Indian counterparts, was emphasizing a vision that many in the West have long feared – a vision of a new world order….The relevant comment was short, and buried within 30 other paragraphs of much more conciliatory language; nonetheless it was punchy: “Russia, India and China are determined to build a more just, fair and stable international political and economic order.”
we should now analyse the recent mayhem surrounding the launch of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). And mayhem it has been, at least in political terms. From the moment that Britain, on March 12, decided that it wanted to be part of the China-led AIIB, a raft of Washington’s traditional allies have followed suit, turning eastwards with unseemly haste.
France, Italy and Germany jumped aboard the betrayal bandwagon almost immediately after the UK, then Luxembourg, New Zealand and South Korea. Now that Australia’s cabinet has agreed, despite the prime minister’s protestations, to join up too, the only significant ally sticking by Washington is Japan, and even it is wavering.
So what’s behind this mass-defection from the Washington consensus, and what will the consequences be for the international financial order? The answer to the first part is straightforward – money. Asia needs $800 billion a year in investment to develop its infrastructure, and numerous countries are keen to help them get it.
But, as everyone from the European Commission’s vice president to the US treasury secretary have admitted, Washington has been standing in the way of business for years.
US credibility and leadership in the multilateral system, said Jack Lew, has been lacking, and that’s allowed Beijing to seize the initiative and offer a viable solution.
Many financial analysts are speculating that the new bank may well prove to be genuinely transformative, its adoption an irreversible step towards the multi-polar world envisioned in Beijing. Because the fact is this bank is not just a standalone initiative, an independent body among many others, it’s a core component of a much broader template, a long-term plan that China began putting in place some time ago. Already, some of the more than $3 trillion Beijing holds in foreign reserves has been deployed in international markets; its economic reach now spreads beyond Asia to the Middle East, Africa and as far away as Latin America.
The existing global financial architecture, devised 50 years ago when no alternatives existed and all were happy to concede leadership (and benefits) to Washington, is no longer fit for purpose.
Not only are its institutions – the World Bank, the IMF, the ADB et al – thoroughly dominated by the US (helped, in the case of the Asian Development Bank, by Japan), they impose a coercive and ideologically driven agenda on developing countries that can do more harm than good. Not to mention the fact they simply don’t have the capacity to handle emerging Asia’s development needs. What Washington has chosen to ignore, in fear of losing political power, is that a change to global financial structures is a very necessary evolution.
Asian countries have a hierarchical social structure.
A young Asian who has a better idea than his mentor will probably keep mum about it out of respect.
A high status Japanese man will guess at important information rather than admit that he doesn’t know.
These traditions are apt to have a strong negative effect on GDP/capita, even though the people are very smart and hard-working.
East Asians (and I am talking mostly about the Japanese and the South Koreans here) are unhappy because they live in highly dense environments with a lot of academic and professional competition (and even shopping can be competitive). So life is very stressful for them. Being crowded usually is. They also have depressing weather (much like Nordics) with lots of disasters like typhoons from the Pacific, snow storms from the Manchurian plains, floods, earthquakes, etc.
However, they have far more intact family structures and support, much lower crime rates, and, yes, customer service that is quite good. And as with, again, Scandinavians, their governments are ubiquitous in a good way. You can go to the local district/neighborhood offices of the central or municipal government and can get actual service by actual human beings with actual intelligence. They might even smile and bow at you as they politely (if “inflexibly” as you say) address your concerns. Compare that to the experience an average American has at the DMV let alone the IRS (tax time, y’all!).
As Derbyshire says sometimes, the DMV lady is real in America. And the petty Beamter in Central Europe isn’t exactly customer service-oriented either.
Jayman, were we talking about central planning, which surely had an impact, or other institutions? Decisions to shoot the intelligentsia, of implementing collectivisation and so on were results of the lost war. This seems to me so obvious that I don’t know how you can argue otherwise: countries with communist legacy still lag behind what you could expect from their average IQ, for example; usually, they (we) gained a lot in terms of GDP per capita; it seems obvious that the legacy of communism plays some role here, as it was equivalent of 50-years lasting natural disaster. I am not saying eventually we will reach levels of Sweden or Germany; merely that right now, we have still not reached our full capacity and the reasons of that is 50 years of communism.
Before WWII, Poland was comparable or more wealthy than Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece. Now it is poorer. How you can possibly say that you can account for this by HBD alone and that 50 years of wasting resources, promoting wrong people to the wrong places and creating cliques could have no lasting effect? HBD Chick uses membership in civic associations as one measure of social trust; before WWII it seems that such membership in Poland was higher than now; and that membership in civic association is on the rise in Poland.
As the Anatolyi answered already, it does not mean that Poland (or Russia) will eventually reach levels of Germany; merely, does currently Poland and other Central and Easter European countries lag behind what is their true potential.
Twinkie: East Asians (and I am talking mostly about the Japanese and the South Koreans here) are unhappy because they live in highly dense environments with a lot of academic and professional competition (and even shopping can be competitive).
Sounds pretty much like it makes sense to me – East Asians stress themselves out with all this intragroup competition and intragroup hostility that doesn’t necessarily achieve anything more than a positional good, so can’t cope with having another layer of stress from services, so pay out for ultimately inefficient (but comforting) services.
Urban population density is an interesting one as well because it tends to raise the GDP per capita within country, so that might be an measure it is worth adjusting GDP per cap or personal wealth against, see if the East Asians are poorer or less than people in equivalently dense areas in the West (I’d expect they would at middling GDP per cap and highly dense living).
However, they have far more intact family structures and support, much lower crime rates, and, yes, customer service that is quite good. And as with, again, Scandinavians, their governments are ubiquitous in a good way.
Murder rates are pretty low in Japan, still pretty high in South Korea, for a crime indicator (https://www.quandl.com/c/society/oecd-murder-rates – OECD’s data, which I would give the benefit of the doubt over Wikipedia, a little higher in SK than most of the West, Japan tied with the UK for the lowest homicide rate of any reasonably large country).
Re: family structures, yeah, you’ve got that figure where the Japanese have 2% of births outside marriage, closer to the 8% of Italians that do than the 50% of Nordics (Sweden / Denmark, who seem to respond very happy despite the weather).
At the same time, Japanese marriage rates are pretty middling compared to most Western countries, and divorce rates are also pretty similar to Catholic Southern Europe. Even if their marriage and divorce is not very different, they’re still committed to that idea that you marry before you have kids (not after, as the Nords often do).
I don’t know much about the quality of how much support people get from brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and the like. I like Japan a lot, but I tend to think of the people as atomised and lonely living in urban areas without much community, worried about burdening others with their problems, turning to odd obsessions, so I wonder if that’s wrong and actually they’re vigorously social and well supported with their families and friends.
It’d be interesting to see what international perceptions of efficiency of government, and citizen satisfaction, are in Japan, whether they’re high or low compared to other countries. Can’t find any international comparisons.
I don’t think JayMan knows what Communism is.
Exactly. Finland’s overall situation (economy included) in early 1900’s was much more comparable to the Baltic countries than to Sweden or Denmark, never mind the US or UK, having just separated from Russia with an earlier history as contested periperal territory. Only later events allowed Finland to take off in a way its neighbours to the south could not, or perhaps more accurately stifled the southern neighbours in a way Finland was not.
In fact if you look at Karlin’s first graph, you can draw two parallel clines; traditional Western and Southern Europe falls along one from Malta to Netherlands, and all of Eastern Europe is along one extending from Serbia or Ukraine to Finland. Groups along the latter cline have larger gaps between each other, and plausible explanations for that can easily be found in recent history.
He knows. I’ve already discussed with him (and with HBD Chick) some three years ago about this subject, and I was (stupid me!) sure he accepted some arguments of mine.
http://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/04/13/anonimo/comment-page-1/#comment-25268 and the following
Beamter – think Stempel, Stempel, Stempel (“rubber stamp”).
Visualize a sweaty, officious little man twirling his rubber stamp carousel absent-mindedly while awaiting the next victim, er, citizen. Then add a pinch of imperious based on local flavoring, and a dash of punctiliosity to season to taste.
For the same IQ or education, do black American have higher income than white or asian?
If so, then personality explains the difference.
When I interviewed house-cleaning service, African Americcan contractors demand much higher pay than hispanic contractors for the same kind of service.
Income is result of supply/demand. When you demand more for the same product, you might get it. Income/wealth is product of many factors including IQ, personality, self-worthness, market ect. Intelligence can not explain every thing.
Why relying on patent output as a marker for productivity is a bad idea
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/04/14/the-u-s-patent-and-trademark-office-doesnt-know-if-patent-examiners-are-doing-their-jobs-watchdog-says
The economic rent of land and natural resources is not counted by value added.because it’s captured by financialization. The economic rent goes to real estate and financial returns. Farming, mining, and energy extraction enterprises are heavily financed, and financial profits are a huge percentage of US domestic profits, something like 30%.
It’s not so much a marker of productivity as much as a measure of the desire of a given population to come up with new things. As long as the said people are reasonably intelligent, people who seek to invent new things tend to do so sooner or later.
And I also brought up patents per capita to illustrate the inadequacy of looking at a single time frame.
That page doesn’t give the years. Here is what the actual OECD website says: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/
It ranks Japan at the top and ranks South Korea higher (6th) than most rich European countries in terms of safety (murder + assault rates).
Looking at the homicide rate under “Indicators,” Japan does excellently and South Korea fares pretty well and keeps company with much wealthier (smaller) European countries.
Murder rates in South Korea are not “pretty high” by any stretch of imagination. It is by most measures one of the safest countries in the world in terms of crime rates. It has lower murder rate than do countries such as Iceland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Canada.
@ Twinkie
If you look at the homicide stats alone
“According to the latest OECD data, Korea’s homicide rate is 1.1… In Korea, the homicide rate is the nearly the same for men and for women, at respectively 1.3 and 0.9.”
Homicide rates are a little higher than Australia (0.6), Austria (0.5), Czech Republic (0.8), Denmark (0.8), France (0.8), Germany (0.5), Ireland (0.8), Italy (0.7),Netherlands (0.9), Poland (1.0), Portugal (0.9), Slovenia (0.9), Spain (0.7), Sweden (1.0), Switzerland (0.5). These are all rates per 100,000.
So not exactly pretty high, you’re right. Mainly a little higher than the Western and Central European average, based on larger countries mainly. Homicide gets higher east of east Poland, where Central Europe ends, with a few small country exceptions. But it’s hardly a great deal of difference.
I don’t think homicide rates tend to fall with wealth among OECD countries, more that there’s no relationship. The safety index doesn’t seem to have much relationship with GDPpC or average wage either.
Korea might do a little better if it had the same age structure as other countries though, as homicide rates fall with age.
Korea’s position as 6th on that table seems is due to its low rates of physical assault, comparable to low assasult rate countries like Britain, Ireland and Poland and higher than higher assault rate Western Europeans like Sweden and Italy. I wouldn’t have expected Swedes and Italians to be more bar room brawlers of Europe compared to the 3 I mentioned, but it seems there are. Looks like Koreans today aren’t ones to get in a street fight (and the endemic beatings and slaps to the head inflicted on lessers by highers in Korean movies is a false impression, as is how some Korean talk themselves up as rednecks with fiery personalities).
Not saying Korea is “high crime” or anything – it’s not. “Pretty high” was, I guess, a loose lipped comment based on my impression of Korea’s rate compared to the large Western European states.
This is just interesting context for those discussions about how East Asian societies are, compared to Western and Central European ones, oh so safe and oh so low crime, so let’s forgive them anything else.
Thanks! I haven’t read about Habsburg effect before, and it is nice argument against putting every difference between the countries down to the genetic differences only.
Note I do not claim institutional differences won’t create, in the long term, genetic differences or that genetic differences do not matter. I merely claim that institution and history matter too.
In the comment right after I had an example of an institutional impact applied specifically to communism.
Financialization can be done anywhere. Hong Kong has no land or natural resources, and yet its economy is heavily reliant on finance.
Similarly, you can have a bounty of agricultural land and natural resources, and little in the way of a financial sector.
But this is a recent phenomenon. It has nothing to do with the U.S. acquisition of land and natural resources. The U.S. financial sector in the fifties was marginal compared to today, and yet the U.S. at that time had been a capitalist society for generations with most of the same land and natural resources that it has now.
I don’t think you understood my comment.
Value added is output price minus production cost. It doesn’t give a complete picture of the economic value of farming, mining, energy extraction (or any other form of economic activity) in a financialized economy because rent and interest are part of the production cost while deriving their value from the agricultural or mining yield
A farmer or miner who leases land from a landowner or borrows money from a bank to buy the land to operate his farm or mine pays rent or interest as a part of his production cost. How much rent or interest the landlord or banker charge is based on the value of the farm or mine, which is based on the agricultural or mining yield. This eats into the value added calculation of the farming or mining.and obscures the complete economic value of farming and mining.
I understood your comment, but apparently you either did not understand mine or have forgotten the context of your original remark.
Tom Welsh commented that the U.S. had a virgin territory to exploit after the natives had been dispossessed, but Pseudoerasmus replied that this was too simplistic because U.S. “forestry, fishery and agricultural resources” are insufficient to explain U.S. productivity.
Your elaboration of an accounting identity doesn’t help your case. U.S. financialization is a recent phenomenon that is not primarily driven by the underlying value of U.S. land and natural resources, but by the productive uses to which they are both put.
The visual-spatial superiority of Asian seems more a myth. In the tests of “purest” visual-spatial ability as the mental rotation test and the line angle judgement test, Northern Europeans have higher scores. See : http://goo.gl/CBxLyF . Note that the study sample is huge, and that the result is consistent with the Project Talent, where asians, despite having better score in math tests, had lower scores on visual spatial ability tests.
@ Rudolfo M.
interpreting the graph on page 995 of the page you linked to is a kind of visual exercise itself. It is true that Japan and China do not score better than European countries, but they also do not score worse, they score as good as France, Germany and UK. But actually Finland and scandinavian countries score a little bit better.
The US financial sector is about 8% of value added and most other rich countries range from 4% to 6%. These differences aren’t big enough to account for the large lead by the United States in GDP per hour worked against most other rich countries. Not to mention the fact that Australia, the UK, and Ireland also have large financial sectors.
I mistyped “productive” instead of innovative. Should have posted a correction immediately.
There is a sharp difference between pretending to be innovative, perhaps out of vanity (just as there are many crooks posing as special operations fighters online), vs a genuine desire to be innovative.
Thus there are two distinct populations. Pretenders vs innovators. And it is the job of a competent patent examiner to segregate them.
The WP link was raising the question of examiner fraud and competence.
Clearly, the patents per capita etc is not a credible marker for innovations (and innovators) in a fine grain analysis.
I suspect similar fraud in European patent offices.
I suggest you read economist Michael Pettis’ arguments on why the supposed “exorbitant privilege” is actually an “exorbitant burden”:
http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/10/are-we-starting-to-see-why-its-really-the-exorbitant-burden/
Pettis also thinks the new AIIB won’t amount to much, at least for a while:
http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/04/will-the-aiib-one-day-matter/
The large lead may also be due to dollar as a global reserve. The way GDP is calculated isn’t as simple as its definition implies.
There is also large scale legalized accounting fraud. read Feenstra and raghuram rajan’s work.
On y-axis, male life expectancy is superior to GDP when measuring success and quality of life.
Jews, swiss, japanese are on top. Women cope much better in stress, by crying, being more health aware, and rationalizing etc. In russia women coped much better than men after soviet implosion.
Its not life, liberty and pursuit of GDP.
Burden to whom? American tax payers. Privelages whom? The bankers and the GDP calculators.
it distorts reality. GDP says america is much wealthier. But reality is far worse. That is the magic of “innovative” accounting and reserve currency.
So arm chair analyst like anatoly kaarlin plots GDP of US, china, Japan, then declares china, japan underperforming, and gullible reader eagerly eats it.
But those of us who have lived in both worlds know the ground reality.
Throw some arguments my way about GDP calculation.
Absolutely not.
There are two kinds of “reserve currency” people. One kind stresses the fact that the United States can borrow in its own currency — which is not unique at all, so I don’t know why they make that argument.
The other, somewhat more subtle kind, points to the supposed benefits the United States derives from global transactions being done largely in US dollars. On that I agree with this http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/seignor.html which states the case succinctly enough so I don’t see any need to elaborate.
By the way, the ability of the United States to persistently run current account deficits with the rest of the world — which is also not unique, but never mind — actually lowers US GDP. American consumption is higher than its GDP.
What are you referring to specifically and which works are you talking about ?
You didn’t understand my comment, which was that the value of land and natural resources is not measured by the value added of things like farming, fishing, mining, etc. The economic rent is generally not captured by value added activities.
China’s 8-10 -year-old-children IQ Map by provinces：(Average: 103.4)
Chinese Jouranl of Endemiology- Owned by China ‘s ministry of health
http://www.targetmap.com/viewer.aspx?reportId=40493
sources: http://www.doc88.com/p-5803924483878.html
Abstract: Objective To study children＇s intelligence after universal salt iodization （USI） had been implemented for 10 years in China. Methods: The children of 8 to 10 years were sampled by population proportion sampling method. The samples were divided into groups according to the province, age, sex, urine iodine. Intelligence quotient （IQ） values were measured by the combined Raven＇s Test in China （CRT-C2）. Results The mean IQ of children was 103.4
Top10 :
1.The Xinjiang production and Construction Corps(All Han-Chinese) 119.5
2.Zhejiang Province 115.8
3.Shanghai 115.3
4.Beijing 114.1
5.Jiangsu Province 109.0
6.Shanxi Province 108.0
7.Shangdong Province 107.9
8.Liaoning Province 107.5
9.Fujian Province 107.1
10.Jilin Province 107.0
It doesn’t matter. You spoke of the financialization of the United States, and the figure you mentioned (financial companies making up approximately 30 percent of domestic profits) is meaningless if you don’t consider how productivity has enhanced business activity.
In brief, your notion that the U.S. economy is wealthy today because it’s mostly or primarily a rentier economy based on land and natural resources is wrong. It doesn’t really matter what the exact figure is that you come up with. Any reasonable figure for that activity will be trivial.
I suppose it’s possible to argue that the huge expansion of the financial sector in the United States over the last several decades is a new kind of rentier capitalism, distinct from both land holdings and natural resources, but that’s not what you were arguing.
This blog may not be the best arena for elaborate discussions, but for starters, here are some links:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/gross-domestic-product-charts
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691156794
Feenstra http://www.nber.org/papers/w17729
Reserve currency benefits only the well connected financial firms, not the nation. Karalin post was about “national wealth” and IQ.
Wish you the best.
I meant dollar reserve currency. But yen as a reserve currency helps the Japanese, because their economy is for the benefit of japanese nation.
#1 are most probably the children of the space and nuclear scientists and engineers. Since this is a selected pop the distribution is a exponential curve, and a quarter of them have IQ >130
Interesting the Tibet distribution is not a normal curve but a power curve.
(1) Reserve currency status barely adds anything to GDP.
(2) You were saying something about massive fraud. What were you talking about ? Neither Diane Coyle’s book nor Feenstra et al.’s paper contribute to your argument. Can you name what exactly does ? I know both. In the case of the ICP’s revisions to the PPP, these don’t affect the measurements of the rich countries’ GDP. They affect primarily poorer countries’ GDP in relation to the GDP of the rich countries.
(3) Really, Shadowstats.
That’s… an unusual interpretation with a lot of presuppositions. I’d argue simply that high density living increases stress. As for the rest, well, some high density cultures never develop a superb customer service-orientation. Some do. East Asians, by and large, did.
Possibly, within a given country, yes. But as the following list shows, international variance is great: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#By_political_boundaries
By the way, while income may correlate poorly to crime, I think urban density may have a modest correlation. I’d have to take a look.
And don’t forget that unmarried East Asians often live with their parents until they marry. To repeat, their traditional family structure is still intact compared to that of the West. However, the divorce rates in East Asia have skyrocketed in the recent decades. So they are by no means immune to the rot the West has experienced.
Urbanization leads to atomization everywhere. Urbanization tends to loosen traditional social bonds of a village.
However, your perception of East Asia (“odd obsessions”) appears to be based on sensationalist press reporting in the West than is based on the real thing. I’ve lived and worked in East Asia extensively. Their extended family/friendship* cohesion is MUCH strong than that in the West. They also have A LOT of civil society associations (university class associations, military conscription cohort groups, workplace extracurricular groups, etc.) that are much more robust than the vestiges of such things in the West. In other words, East Asians still bowl together.
*I read an interesting thesis written by a Korean-American university graduate that asserted that friendship in Korea is narrower and more exclusive, but of much greater intensity than that in the U.S. In other words, Koreans have fewer friends than Americans, but their friends are much more mutually-supportive and family-like. I think he is more right than wrong, and Westerners do tend to conflate frequent acquaintances as “friends” who are not, indeed, family-like.
Let’s look at the whole thing.
Homicide rates per 100,000 according to OECD:
UK 0.3
*Japan. 03
Slovenia 0.4
Switzerland 0.5
Germany 0.5
Austria 0.5
Spain 0.7
Italy 0.7
Ireland 0.8
Czech Republic 0.8
France 0.8
Denmark 0.8
Ireland 0.8
Australia 0.8
Netherlands 0.9
Portugal 0.9
Sweden 1.0
Poland 1.0
*Korea 1.1
Slovak Republic 1.2
Belgium 1.2
Iceland 1.3
Greece 1.4
Hungary 1.5
Canada 1.7
New Zealand 1.9
Luxembourg 2.1
Israel 2.2
Norway 2.3
Turkey 3.27
Estonia 4.7
U.S. 5.2
Chile 5.2
Russia 12.8
Brazil 25.5
Now considering the year-to-year variations and methodology variations (UNODC has a somewhat different set of data whereby, as of 2011-2012, the UK had 1.0 per 100,000, Japan had 0.3, Singapore 0.2, Luxembourg 0.8, Korea, New Zealand, Austria, and Netherlands all at 0.9), I’d say that with the exceptions of the bottom few in the OECD numbers, all have similar and very low rates of homicide.
At these low rates (between 0-2.0 per 100,000), we are talking about mostly murders of passion and maybe occasional serial killers rather than random criminal predation.
“Bar room brawls” aren’t the entirety of felonious assault convictions (in fact, they may be a small minority of such convictions). Usually such convictions are targeted attacks (often with weapons or with sexual intent) based on serious criminal predation. Ireland and Korea may indeed have more bar room brawls than Italians. Who knows? But they certainly have low rates of criminal assault and battery, sexual attacks, violent muggings, etc.
As for the corporal punishment in Korea by teachers and parents on children (and by superior officers against subordinates in the military), that is not a myth and is very endemic. There is a lot of internal debate about that topic in Korea today.
Regarding Koreans as “rednecks with fiery personalities,” I think that has more to do with the binge drinking and “grit” more than frequency of murder and criminal assaults (otherwise American blacks would be kings of the “rednecks with fiery personalities” title as would South Africans and Brazilians). Binge drinking is EXTREMELY pervasive in Korea, for sure, and as for their grit, well, I think they start them young and go from this: https://youtu.be/bnPT_WYQaPs
To this: https://youtu.be/AYzQIaayvOI
I’ve been dumped in icy water and I can tell you that it’s not fun. The nice thing about hypothermia though is that soon enough it feels all warm and numb.
First of all, I don’t know what this “let’s forgive them anything else” bit is all about. Maybe you can elaborate.
As for the low crime reputation of East Asian countries, I think that has to do with some additional factors, besides their low murder + assault rates. First, most Western experience with East Asia is in the urban setting. When most Westerners (especially North Americans) compare the level of criminal predation in their cities with that in East Asia, they are very favorably impressed. East Asian cities are indeed generally very safe, which is not always the case with urban ghettos in the West.
Second, arrest and conviction rates. In many parts of the West (especially urban areas), criminal perpetrators are frequently not apprehended and the conviction rates are typically low. In East Asia, arrest and conviction rates are extremely high (e.g. Japan has conviction rate that hovers in the high 90’s in percentage). It tends to reduce the sense of safety when criminals are on the loose.
Third, and this is tied to the second point, in East Asian cities there is very little observable street crime and much greater “law and order.” That is often not the case in the West and certainly not in North America.
Fourth, Western view of East Asians as having exceptionally low crime rates as immigrants in their own societies affect their thinking on the issue as well. For example, Asians account for about 5% of the U.S. population but only account for 1% or fewer of the arrestees for violent crimes.
I don’t know who you’re arguing with. I never claimed that the “U.S. economy is wealthy today because it’s mostly or primarily a rentier economy based on land and natural resources”.
I’m not sure what your point is. Are you saying that the value added of things like farming, fishing, mining measures the value of land and natural resources? Or that the economic rent is trivial? Both?
You read this part, right?
I wouldn’t say “clearly.” In social science a lot of things can’t be measured directly, so you have to rely on proxies. The utility of proxies varies, but in life you go with “the least worst available.” I have no doubt there are fraudulent patent application attempts (just as there are academic frauds in publications), but in absence of other quantifiable proxies, patents per capita and peer-reviewed publications are useful proxies for technical/scientific innovation and advances. I think they are certainly more useful than counting the Nobel Prizes for Physics or Fields Medals.
Even accounting for fraud, the changing numbers over the decades provide some useful comparative information.
It appears that you have neither read nor paid any attention to how GDP calculations work.
You simply assert that feenstra’s and coyle’s work does not add anything to my point.
You further mock at shadowstats. And what exactly is your credibility? Is it not massive legalized accounting fraud, that divergence in john williams’ chart between govt gdp growth data and reality is so wide?
My original point was that GDP is a very bad measure of national wealth. Which is amply clear if you read the entire comments thread, and read coyle’s book which is simple to understand even for non-specialists.
Reserve currency allows currency arbritage to go unchecked. And this allows cheap goods flowing in to artificially induce disinflation. If dollar wasn’t the dominant reserve, inflation adjusted GDP would be much lower.
But egoism makes it hard to admit when you are wrong, and hence the continued posturing, instead of admitting your defeat and moving on graciously.
You commented on a discussion that was already underway between Pseudoerasmus and Tom Welsh, and you did so in such a way that suggested you agreed with Mister Welsh about the importance of the value of virgin land and natural resources to the U.S. GDP.
Land and natural resources are only valuable to a modern economy to the degree they’re used productively, and I doubt either sector contributes heavily to financial profits in the U.S. The real estate sector, for example, is but a small part of the total U.S. stock market, and the ag sector is almost nonexistent. There are other ways to measure financialization, of course, but that’s just an illustrative example.
Both.
The financialization of farming, fishing and mining is a poor way of judging the value of those enterprises, since any value added to those sectors is only enhanced by increases in their productivity or U.S. productivity.
Economic rent on unproductive or stagnant enterprises is also trivial. To the degree there is growth in economic rents because of scarcity, they reflect increases in U.S. productivity.
According to your logic, quantity, and increasing quantity of patents, is a useful proxy.
If this logic is applied to improving high school graduation rates (more patents), than lowering the standards (bad patent examiners), would increase the quantity of graduates (patents), and this would serve as a useful proxy of school success!
Again, let’s come back to earth. Quantity of patents, without some measure of quality, cannot be a useful proxy for innovation. Nor academic publications.
A feynmann quote on social sciences: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-18/farce-economics-richard-feynman-social-sciences
Click on his website and you’ll get a good sense of his expertise and, hence, his credibility on this topic.
@ Twinkie. I’m just going to comment on the stuff I think would move along our discussion a little and add value to what you say (it’d drag us increasingly off topic if I reply to everything where I don’t have a lot more to say than I have).
Re: community and family – I don’t know how warm and supportive family relationships are between East Asians. I don’t think feel like East Asians turn to their brothers or sister or mother or father especially easily, or have that close contact with them through their life (not exactly the stereotypical Italian mamma’s boys). That’s not a measure though, so there you go.
The OECD Better Life give a middling rank to Japan and a low rank to Korea on their community measures – http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/community/ – which are a composite of questions relating to helping a stranger, volunteering, and whether a person states that they have a social contact that they can rely on to help them personally (so presumably the respondents for Japan and Korea said they didn’t have much of those).
That may not reflect community in East Asian societies, which may have a lot of community despite having low levels of those things.
On whether Asians bowl alone, the blogger HBD Chick (who is a little obsessive on this stuff, perhaps too obsessive) pulled together a list of participation rates in civic groups from the World Values Survey, when the sample was asked about it -https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/civic-societies/. Including being a member of groups to play sports etc.
Japan and Korea don’t really stand apart. They look lower the Western Europe and particularly the Anglo countries, not lower than Eastern Europe. (I tend to think the Eastern European pattern may be due to Communist governments somehow leading people to be resistant to joining a lot of little groups.) I’d have to take that more seriously than your anecdotal, for me, since your anecdotal might be reflective of the people you spent your time around with Asia. Putnam may have found Americans were tending more to bowl alone, looks like they still bowl together way more than other countries do.
Re: whether assault rate differences much relate to serious crime, they could do.
On the other hand this assault rate is based on an International Gallup poll (presumably to get around differences in criminal law, report rate, etc.) where they basically just asked “”Within the past 12 months: have you been assaulted or mugged?” and it considers people declaring having been assaulted or mugged as a percentage of the population.
I tend to assume the vast majority of people who’ve been assaulted haven’t actually been subject to violent crime, so that’s why I was thinking generalised fighting in society would drive the differences in %. Although the two should correlate somewhat and if absolute physical safety rather crime is the benchmark, I can see this assault rate.
Re: Conviction rates, my stereotype would be that differences in conviction rates would be definitely real, for various reasons I could think of.
Taking Japan, there’s a low incarceration rate for crime I think per conviction (compare to the US’s dysfunctional culture driven routine imprisonment), in terms of duration. So absolute convictions might get higher where stakes are lower.
At the same time, my stereotype would be that, society wide collusion with the police should also be higher in Japan – supposedly they have a less “adversarial” system with not much real criminal defense that’s balanced with or fighting against prosecutors, witnesses support a law and order ideology and are happy to come forward, judges don’t challenge the cops much. That could lead to a lot of low friction in low enforcement, and so a higher conviction rate. It’s comparatively nice to be a cop in the East. Whether Western societies confronting their norms would actually be happy that justice had been done.
Arrest rate I’m not so sure about.
Re: crime rates as migrants, yes, that’s real and causes some overgeneralisation to what societies full of East Asians would be like. East Asians can do relatively well in Western societies (despite whatever culture-gene-economic incentive weirdness may lead to differences in their own societies) and I don’t imagine they really have much confidence about how they fancy themselves as being able to physically overpower or intimidate or socially trick Western people, on the whole. So those factors come together, with others.
The mean IQ of 103.4 is for the total sample. What I mentioned is from the second ref source the intelligence faction for the top region the mean of which is 119.5. You read that right?
Shadowstats is a crank site. Anybody who uses it is a crank.
http://econbrowser.com/archives/2008/09/shadowstats_deb
http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/03/31/deconstructing-shadowstats-why-is-it-so-loved-by-its-followers-but-scorned-by-economists/
http://azizonomics.com/2013/06/01/the-trouble-with-shadowstats/
And this arrant nonsense is what you’re claiming is supported by Feenstra and Coyne ? Chapter and verse, please.
By the way, Feenstra’s paper you cited is about PPP calculations and specifically PPP calculations for China. I guess you don’t even realise US prices are the base for PPPs ! That is, all other countries’ price levels are indexed to the US price level. So why would changes in PPP methods address the calculation of US GDP ???
Those semantics do not matter, since the issue at hand is why the US GDP per capita, as currently estimated, is so high relative to other rich countries. That is how Karlin framed the question.
Dear duxie ! You wrote:
.
“selected pop the distribution is a exponential curve”.
.
Apparently you meant to emphasize the properties of “the standard Bell Curve”,
or Gaussian curve W(x) = constexp[-(x^2) / (2sigma^2)].
I would like to remind you
that not all functions containing the symbol “exp” are to be called “exponential curves”.
IMHO, a convincing example is a function F(x) = exp[-3ln(x^2)],
which is just F(x) = 1 / (x^6) , definitely not an exponential one.
An exponential curve is G(x) = aexp[b*x], with positive or negative constants “a” and “b”.
.
I want to use this occasion to express my protest against people
using the adjective “exponential” in the meaning ‘enormously large’.
Actually “exponential” means ‘in geometrical progression’ with respect to some sequence,
not an attribute of a single value.
.
Your F.r.
Read the study again. It points out several limitations of the survey. I quoted the relevant section below. I suspect these “limitations” are the reasons why the authors avoided cross-country comparisons and focused on gender differences.
“Several limitations to the BBC data are worth noting. First,
the BBC participants did not comprise a random sample.
Because the BBC survey was implemented via the Internet, it
tended to attract participants who were young, educated, and
computer savvy (see Reimers, 2007). At the same time, the
national samples assessed by the BBC survey were often
larger and more diverse, in terms of participants’ age and
geographic locale, than the samples assessed in many recent
cross-cultural studies of sex differences and, unlike much
recent cross-cultural research on sex differences, the BBC
sample included many non-college-student participants.
The BBC survey was implemented in English, which
may have affected the responses of participants from non-
English-speaking counties. Although instructions for the
mental rotation and line angle judgment tasks were in English,
the tests themselves were ‘‘nonverbal,’’ and thus it could
be argued that performance on these tests was less affected by
English fluency than other measures in the BBC survey.
Finally, the mental rotation test used in the BBC survey was
shorter than standard paper-and-pencil mental rotation tests,
and participants’ performance on the mental rotation and line
angle judgment tasks in the BBC survey may have been
subject to more sources of error variance than performance
under more standardized laboratory settings. Indeed, mental
rotation and line angle judgment tasks administered in controlled
settings often show larger mean sex differences than
those reported here (Collaer et al., 2007; Peters et al., 2007).
Thus, the current results, if anything, may underestimate the
true strength of associations.”
I explained to you why its so high. Bloated services sector.
But you cite crackpot economists to smear credible people as crackpots. How can anyone take you seriously?
Williams has given congressional testimonies. That does not guarantee one is not a crackpot. But it will caution and alert the readers to your deceptions.
Yes I cited Feenstra as an example of how china’s GDP PPP has been underestimated.
Keep deceiving the gullible readers here. Good luck.
You assert that quantity of patents, or increasing quantity of patents over time, is a useful proxy for innovation.
According to this logic, increasing the graduation rates (more patents) of high school students by lowing the standards (bad patent examiners), means increasing school success!
Let’s come back to earth. Quantity of patents is not a credible proxy without measuring quality. Nor are academic publications.
Few more points:
1) crackpot economists: 2y before fin. crisis, Milton friedman lavishly praises greenspan and marvels at US GDP “strength”, on charlie rose show.
2) example of bloat: japan’s services sector is lean. few Japanese own stocks. Much of their savings is cash. But US stock MKT is massively bloated.
3) japanese manufacturing is more productive, more advanced than US.
4) US is largest debtor. Japan is largest creditor. But according to Karlin its all east Asian mediocrity.
5) last 15 years, US pop grows 0.8-1% per year, but average income, inflation adjusted, is stagnant, even declining for bottom 50% labor. That itself is a huge red flag that US govt GDP data is fraud and crackpot economists are wrong.
Before you go back to your keyboard use commonsense. Its not that hard.
The quantity of patents, together with increasing quantity of patents over time, is indeed a useful proxy for innovation, for otherwise the world’s patent organisations and their patent offices should all be shut down already, because what’s the point of having them? You should put forward your counter-argument directly to patents lawyers of WIPO first of all.
Your analogy of “lowering the graduation rates” doesn’t fit here, because WIPO has a certain unified acceptance standard on patents applications worldwide. Otherwise, there would be no point having these WIPO offices either, because, as you said, any country can just lower its acception standard to artificially beef up its quantity.
That said, it doesn’t mean quality is not an issue . Quality can be used as a sort of adjustment to the first moment quantity figures.
The ideal is the combination of both. But if forced to choose only one as the proxy, intuitively quantity appears less troublesome.
For all those who mention # of Nobel Science as a sort of “gospel evidence” of innovation or avg IQ level, pauleez, stop making Panda laugh. ROFL
There’re many driving factors for Nobel Science awards apart from IQ, GDP per cap (i.e. how much R&D funds available to individuals, and how high is the “gaint’s shoulder” on which he stands, etc ), closeness to global education centres(i.e how good and how tight are one’s personal networks in academic fields directly lead to which topic is hot and what’s the chance of nomination, etc), time lag, nomination committee members’ personal preferences, etc., just to name a few. Taiwan has some Nobel Sci whereas China(PRC) zero, Chinese in Taiwan have higher IQ than Chinese in China? West Germany had some Nobel Sci whereas East Germany zero, Germans lived in West Berlin had higher IQ than the ones lived in the East side? … ROFL! Is that HBD-level “logic”?
Furthermore, any individual prizes ( such as some computer prizes, maths competitions, some awards, etc), even without pre-nomination, is not an objective evidence of innovation or avg IQ of population they represent either. C’mon, this is just common sense.
Only a widespead objective-score-based test (such as SAT, some nation-wise exams, etc) with a concret, clear and singular answer, or a standard sampling (TIMASS, PISA,etc) using a unified methodology, means something on the populations they represent. The rest are abc-level crap!
Well I do agree that land and natural resources are important. That’s not the same thing as saying that the “U.S. economy is wealthy today because it’s mostly or primarily a rentier economy based on land and natural resources”.
Most of the gains in productivity are captured by the economic rent of things like land and natural resources. An idle plot in an urban area that has no productive activity on it at all will be much more valuable than a capital good that could be used on the land for productive activity. Modern neoclassical economics obscures this by treating land and everything else as “capital” and ignoring economic rent. Looking at value added, for example, is symptomatic of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution
“Note that the exponential distribution is not the same as the class of exponential families of distributions, which is a large class of probability distributions that includes the exponential distribution as one of its members, but also includes the normal distribution, binomial distribution, gamma distribution, Poisson, and many others.”
Except in this case the exponent is positive, hence did not use the term “negative exponential distribution”
I find it astounding that you don’t consider the effect of the American’s ability to write the rules of global trade.
But you yourself are citing economists (Feenstra and Coyne) !
And you still don’t cite the page numbers. Obvious why — you can’t.
(1) There is no necessary connection between reserve currency status and “unchecked” currency arbitrage.
(2) If currency arbitrage is “unchecked”, so what ? For floating currencies (like the US$), currency arbitrage is a non-problem.
(3) Besides, currency arbitrage might lead to cheaper imports only by causing US$ appreciation. But there is no reason currency arbitrage should cause either appreciation or depreciation (at least without more information than you’ve given).
(4) There’s nothing “artificial” about cheap goods “induc[ing] disinflation”.
But prima facie the effect of the US “ability to write the rules of global trade” results in the USA being able to run persistent current account deficits equal to a few percent of GDP.
Who will shut them down? Have tax payers shut down beltway corruption yet? Why make such silly assertions?
Did you even read the wash post column?
Warm? Not in the Western sense with effusive kissing, hugging, and constant “I love you’s,” no. Supportive? Absolutely. It’s expected (especially in South Korea) that parents work to death to provide funds for their children’s education including college fees. Parents also house and feed their unmarried children until they tie the knots. And when the kids do marry, the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts and such, if they are financially able, provide (usually) a modest apartment or house, furnishings, etc. down to televisions and pillows. And everyone, I mean, everyone, cousins to the 8th degree, friends, school chums, work colleagues, bowling buddies or what have you bring envelops with money to the wedding.
This is not as common in Japan, but in Chinese and Korean cultures, lunar new years are celebrated with HUGE family/clan gatherings where all the little children kowtow to their elders individually and collect envelops filled with money.
And the cycle goes on and on. East Asians often have a complex web of family and friend relationships with a strong sense of mutual obligations and support (and it’s not just family – one of the most important lifelong social relationships in East Asia is the class cohort of one’s university).
Don’t take my word for it. Just ask anyone who’s lived and worked a long time in East Asia and have developed relationships with the natives (outside the typical expat bubble).
Indeed. That’s because East Asians do not consider helping or volunteering for a stranger a part of their communal activity. East Asians are late arrivals to the concept of res publica, so their notion of community is their extended family/clan and what sociologists call primary groups (family/clan, school chums, neighborhood friends, fellow church members, etc.). Again, East Asians have fewer “friends” but more intense sense of mutual obligation and support.
Interestingly, according to the OECD, the Korean and Japanese senses of “civic engagement” differ. Korea ranks no. 3 while Japan scores rather poorly. I don’t know what to make of that.
That may be. However, I am not convinced by the HBD Chick’s numbers (I know they are from the World Values Survey), because church membership and labor union activities, for example, are extremely organized and militant in South Korea, but show up as very low on the survey. South Korea has the second highest number of Christian missionaries in the world, after the United States! (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/international/asia/01missionaries.html). That from a country with only 50 million people. If you are stationed in Seoul, you cannot go a mile (or a kilometer) without running into a church (or being bothered frequently by someone urging you to join his church). And East Asian Christians aren’t just “nominal” members of their church, as is frequently the case in Western Europe where adherents claim membership but do not participate actively in the mass/services/activities.
Muggings and bar brawls are very different. In most cultures bar brawls aren’t considered “assault” even if they are technically. They tend to be broken up by bouncers and tossed out, and not exactly prosecuted vigorously. Muggings are a different story though.
Yes, shorter durations. That’s also the case in Europe, especially Scandinavia.
Prisons in Japan and South Korea are not brutal gang turfs like prisons in parts of the West. They are Spartan and tough, but also orderly. And they are seemingly very successful at reforming the convicts because recidivism rates there are very low (as is the case in Scandinavia).
There are two reasons for the high conviction rates. First, police is not seen as outside occupiers. Japan and South Korea have real “community policing” – their beat cops, unarmed, are stationed in small “boxes” or offices embedded in neighborhoods and patrol constantly, mingling with the neighbors and business owners. They are like small town cops in the West. They know everyone and everything going on in their areas of responsibility. When crimes happen, they know who the “usual suspects” are. And, yes, they get very good cooperation from the citizenry. Now, while one might consider that “comparatively nice” from a Western perspective, Asian cops are also paid pretty badly by American standards and their benefits are similarly meager. And generally they have pretty unexciting careers, taking in and storing lost money found and brought in by kids and such (http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04/10/japan.lost.cash/index.html and http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/22/world/la-fg-japan-returned-money-20110923).
The second reason for the near perfect conviction rate is… confession. East Asian cops will apply what Israelis call, er, “moderate physical pressure” to elicit confessions. Or, even without such physical pressure, they will hold the suspects until confessions are made. Of course, this kind of tactic can create horrible abuses of justice where there is no democratic accountability (e.g. PRC), but somehow in Japan and Korea, the cops seem to manage to slap the right suspects as recantation (“I only confessed, because the cop slapped me!”) is almost nonexistent.
Still, as an American, I don’t quite care for that kind of justice system at all, but the Japanese and the Koreans seem to manage well with it.
That’s an odd supposition. I don’t think East Asian immigrants in the U.S. refrain from violent crimes because they feel they are too small or physically too weak (that’s what guns are for). Southeast Asians (especially Cambodians and Laotians) are even smaller than East Asians and they have substantially higher rates of violent crime than East Asians. And the Hmong are notorious for their violent crimes.
I think a vast majority of East Asians has no intention to commit any violent crimes, because they have high conformity to social and legal norms and lack transgressive attitude toward their non-Asian neighbors (especially whites). You seem to go out of your way to ascribe speculatively as negative a possibility/motive to East Asians as possible.
Look, I am an American of East Asian background. And I happen to believe in a very drastic reduction in immigration (including from Asia), because any (even highly educated, low criminality Asian) mass immigration lowers social cohesion and is unhealthy for the country (I subscribe to Derbyshire’s dictum that “diversity” is like salt in a soup; a little adds some taste, but too much ruins the soup). But facts about extremely low East Asian criminality in the U.S. are what they are. You don’t have to invent convoluted psychological rationale (“they don’t commit crimes, because they think they are too weak”) to deny them credit where it is due.
Do you even know what is WIPO?
WIPO is an UN organisation, a co-publisher of Global Innovation Index, largely financed by application fees.
WIPO uses a uniformed standard across all its patent offices worldwide, aiming to ecourage innovation and protect exsting IP.
If every of WIPO member states are able to lower their own standard themselves in order to soup up their patent quantity as you assert, of course WIPO offices would be shut down, either by the UN due to serving no purpose – making no sense at all, or by itself due to running out of its member state customers, hence finance source. Why would someone goes to a WIPO patent office paying a fee for his application in Spain while there could be 1,00o similar sub standard patents souped up by others in Nigeria overnight making his original application worthless? Silly? ROFL. Who’s silly?
Hence since all major countries are WIPO member states (Taiwan is not a member though, but count into the US patent office usually), WIPO patent quantity (and underlying growth trendline analysis) is a good enough proxy for gauging innovation capabilities across the world , even though it should ideally be combined with and adjusted by quality analysis as well.
And you claim that with a straight face?
ROFL!
The US “ability to write the rules of global trade” thanks to
in the mid term, the British Industrial Revolution!
in the long term, the cyclical economic ups & downs of the East and the West!
It has jack to do with “USA being able to run persistent current account deficits equal to a few percent of GDP”.
If the USA has written the global rules of trade, then the effect shows up where ? In the US current account balance. It’s been in deficit by a couple of percent of GDP since about 1980.
That ole ‘derivatives’ magic..
Effect? lol. How about (almost) whenever 2 third parties conduct trades between each other in the last half a century, the US has taken a free cut on commissions even while it’s sleeping, just because the merchandises/commodities have most likely been priced in privileged USD?
It’s not about trade balance or whatever deficit. Why the US worries about the % of trade balance on GDP if it has the $ printing machine? It can easily control both the nominator and the demoninator via many means.
The US can, as it has been doing ferociously (and sometimely anonymously as well, as the FED is a private organisation/club, my!) for quite some decades now.
Panda wonders (even taking the top 1% into account) why the heck the USA didn’t have GDP per cap of USD 1 million already? The US can theoritically print whatever amount of $ as it wishes regardless of ceilings, and the rest of the world, noticeabelly the East Asian countries being the largest buyers of IOUs, will pick up the tab of the so called “American Exceptionalism & Productivity”, by absorbing the “irrational exuberance” inflationary impact… C’mon , it’s pretty much an open secret for quite some time now.
USD 8.5 trillion was unaccounted for in Pantagon alone in 2013! Take that. Do you really think at this time they care about tiny things such as the few percentage points here or there?? It is by and large an off-balance sheet accounting game that given instructions most entry- level CFAs in Mumbai can easily handle.
US dollars is modern `gold’. Gold is a form of natural resourse like oil. Countries with large amount of natureal resourse can be easily rich.
USA have plenty of natural resource like cheap land (agricultural outpout, business starting cost), woods, mineral, modern ‘gold’- Dollars.
I keep forgetting this place is full of cranks.
It does not happen.
UN itself is thoroughly corrupt. Of course the patent process is not completely discredicted. If Nigeria was clocking 10,000 patents, it would be.
But it is sufficiently discredited so that quantity alone is meaningless. You are dishonest and refuse to admit your analytical blunder.
The reserve currency status of the US$ makes it easier for the USA to borrow on international markets. Non-Americans are willing to sell goods and services in exchange for printed dollars, and/or lend the money to buy them with. This means the USA can spend more than its own production (i.e., persistent current account deficits). And it also means the USA exports less than if the US$ had not been a reserve currency. And it also means the USA has higher debt than if the US$ had not been a reserve currency.
I don’t see the huge benefits.
Also, all developed countries can borrow in their own currencies, so I don’t think “exorbitant privilege” even exists any more.
People who can’t figure out that 911 was an inside job have little to say to me about IQ.
Relating IQ to National Wealth seems a bit silly when you remember that people and ideas move about.
Examples:
Einstein went to Switzerland where he did some of his best work.
Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.
Edward Teller father of the H-Bomb.
Various Nazi Scientists under Operation Paperclip, brought us our space program and its satellites.
Much of our current information based economy goes back to Bell Labs who invented the transistor, the Unix Operating system. C Language etc. Most things are designed on computers these days.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, A nation is about as wealthy as it decides to be.
We’re talking about why the U.S. is slightly wealthier on a per capita basis than most other developed countries. You seemed to be supporting the idea that the U.S. just has more land and natural resources than other developed countries, and that if we accounted for the economic rents collected for that bounty, then it would become obvious why we’re wealthier than other developed countries.
But economic rents have a specific definition of scarcity that, in principle, strongly suggests that having a lot of land and natural resources should make it harder to drive up the prices on those goods beyond market value.
In other words, we should expect that smaller countries with fewer natural resources and less land have higher economic rents for those goods.
The only way this is true is if the surrounding urban area already supports productive industries and businesses. An idle plot in San Jose won’t support many productive activities, but an idle plot in Detroit sure will. So will an idle plot in Utah or Texas.
JayMan do you have some data on this? Why you think it is not true?
As my kids went through HS and off to college i’ve been around kids of this age yet again a fair bit. Most kids take the SAT–our data point for roughly similar IQs–at 16 and change, maybe retake at 17. My observation is that the “girls” at this age are really “young women”. But the boys–and i’ve dealt with a lot of them as scoutmaster for my son’s troop–are still “boys”.
Many of the boys still actually grow physically past this point. My son–who has a fall birthday and so took the SAT right around 17–nonetheless kept creeping up about 3/4 of inch over the next year and change. Wasn’t completely at his adult height till probably a few months shy of 19. I run into some of my scouts–they often contact me for recommendations and such–after they’ve gone off to college, i note that they are different. That they’ve finally matured into “young men”. But my daughter’s friends–i took a bunch of her track\XC friends to Florida for spring break as seniors–seem … pretty much the same. I’m sure they are maturing, getting wiser about the world in college. But physically and behaviorally i don’t see a lot of difference from how they were in HS. They were young women then and are young women now.
I’d just be surprised if this difference in physical maturity at 16-17–the SAT timeframe–does not also translate into a difference in mental maturity as well, with men still growing and adding capability to their brains between 17 and 20. And much more so than young women.
~~~
It should be possible to get a handle on this sort of thing by doing some longitudinal studies. For example comparing folks between SAT and GRE.
But it should also be possible to account for attenuation of left-fringe males, by ignoring the mean of a sample and comparing the male\female modes or curve peaks. If the effect is just attenuation the male curve would be skewed–the mean moved, but the peak in the same relative position. If males generally add brain matter and get smarter, then the curve peak moves right relative to females.
remember the movie “Chinatown?” That movie could probably not be made today cuz of Pee Cee.
The “inscrutability” of events was expressed in the line, “Its Chinatown.”
here’s something from today’s NYT: and my comment. The story is about the fad of Tibetan Mastiffs who once sold for up to $250k and now are just , uh, dogmeat, worth about five bucks a pop.
Subject: Fw: NYTimes.com: Once-Prized Tibetan Mastiffs Are Discarded as Fad Ends in China ( slaughter house for dog-meat…who eats dogs anyway?)
I have an acquaintance, a banker, who is Catholic and therefore I assume believes that God has a Plan that must be Good. Reminds me of the old line, “How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb.” I have always assumed that this was a joke laid at the door of the Catholic Church , yet I wiki ed it and discovered that it was the subtitle of the movie, Doctor Strangelove, by Kubrick who I assume was a jew, and starred another jew, Peter Sellers. So, I would bet that the line WAS laid at the door of the Catholic Church by jewish subverters. Blame The Church for Oppenheimer’s bomb, plus other jews and their accomplices, naive Whites who wanted to help the Jews kill Germans and Russians, both of whom threw out the Jews.
Today, The Bomb is mostly a Jewish threat if you think about it, what with the Jews clamoring to bomb the Middle East and Russia back into the No age. And of course, our Exceptionalist Puritan Hebraizers shouting the loudest while the neocons grin, laughing all the way to Jerusalem.
So China. My above Catholic friend, a banker and no slouch intellectually, deals with the Chinese and agrees with my diagnosis and countless others (whites ) around Silicon Valley that there is something wrong, shall we say, with the Chinese. Greed and one-dimensionality which leads to general dishonesty and bullying behavrior even on the street. If you are a pedestrian, and see a chink creeping her 6000 pound SUV menacingly close to you as you walk the cross-walk, watch it!
The chinks come in with their China money made usually on the backs of other Chinese semi-slaves, and god knows what else and buy houses here for investment which is a pretty good investment …Silicon Valley and all. The chinks are everywhere and Every White person I talk to about it, dislikes or hates them. They are universally regarded by whites as a threat. Forget the Darkies around here, of which there are almost none, and the Mexicans pretty much behave themselves and accept a subaltern status and are largely friendly…its the new Yellow Peril. And there are over a billion of them…an inexhaustible supply of chinks.
My Catholic friend thinks it is Cultural and that it will take a couple generations to assimilate them to White civility. Well, as I usually say these days, you want to know what kind of a person, X is? Consider where they came from. Whether it is racial origins, or other social origins for, say, Whites, I suggest that future behavior can be predicted by past “breeding.” We today can spot a psychopath by the time he is about 8 years old…genes try, sometimes, but they can’t lie.
Got a Chinatown in your area? Have they Changed into nice White people? How many generations is it now since @ 1875? Or the Darkies, have they Changed? Except for more hatred of us?
The old American and European term, “Good Breeding” has been a very loose term, suggesting not only genes, but instruction in the arts of proper social behavior, so that Mom and Dad, for example are not embarrassed by their children. “Please, thank you, how are you” and so on.
The chinks are addicted to gambling (narcissistic Belief in one’s Specialness), luck and magic in for example, even the house you buy… it must comply with magic-based strictures on placement on the street with regard to various angles, numbers, or whatever. Don’t want evil coming in the front door, so you build a wall just inside the door to prevent evil spirits entering. Seems evil spirits don’t like to go around corners….they travel in a straight line. (there is some poetic sense to this, like in linear thinking, Hebraized thinking per the Old Testament. More Hellenistic thinking allows for deviations and consideration of sidebars)
I have seen chinks picking their noses in public. I have the common experience at my gym, of chink behavior….they don’t know how to say “excuse me”. They will dart around you to save time, they don’t say hello. They are very rude in general. Queue? forget it. They will jump ahead in a line at the grocery store.
This I am told by two friend who live in Foster City , near San Mateo, CA. Which is infested with chinks. These guys hate them, and have dealt with them physically when violated in the grocery.
Chinks will never change. They are a total Menace. The New Yellow Peril. The only thing worse than a stupid psychopath is a smart psychopath.
. East is East and West is West and Never the Twain Shall Meet, except in the halls of Money, and if you think the Jews are Other, you have not met their match.
China is China, always has been an Oriental Despotism, per Marx, and always will be. These chinks devour their own people, and we Whites are just so much cattle, like the Jewish goyim…Goyim ‘r’ us.
By the way, the whole world is Oriental, outside of Europe and the anglophone countries. Well, maybe Africa is not Oriental…just an evolutionary dead end with nothing to show for tens of thousands of years of evolution of homo sapien sapiens. Global South and all. No snow and ice to stimulate genetic selection.
There is no Democracy (with whatever that means) outside of European genetics-based countries. India some will say…not really but they did get a good dose of White genes about 3 thousand years ago with the Aryan invasions…hence the Indo-European language connection with us.
Joe Webb.
@ Twinkie: Warm? Not in the Western sense with effusive kissing, hugging, and constant “I love you’s,” no. Supportive? Absolutely. It’s expected (especially in South Korea) that parents work to death to provide funds for their children’s education including college fees.
It’s not really so much about “I love yous”, more about being able to get advice or a reality check or mentoring from your parents and family when you need it, a lot more than the (probably over) stereotypical “You gotta work harder”, “Don’t disappoint me” and lobbing money at the kid. Being able to talk about your problems rather than stressing out about if you admit to having problems, you’re not filial or a bad son or whatever. It’s about maturity and helping the child learn to be simpatico with others, not about being warm and fuzzy.
Also, I guess I wasn’t really aware that the costs of raising a child, in terms of the average spending per child, were particularly high in East Asia. Are there actually any international stats on this one? I can’t actually find any. In terms of working long hours, Korea does, Japan is fairly high but a lot less exceptional these days. Actually seeing that broken down by parents would be interesting. Although it would be hard to see that take into account how much effort the parent makes for the child outside working hours, and in a sense its kind of immaterial compared to the spend.
In general East Asians don’t spend as much of their public spending on childcare or early education, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that motivates parents a little more to work for provision for their kids, and it takes some time to adjust culturally to different regimes.
In the context of traditional family values (which I think is why we got on to this), I do tend to think not really of primarily financial support but more a human, emotional and moral development guidance based relationship, developing practical and social and emotional skills along side one another in traditional family contexts. Emotional relationship plus the transmission of values and social abilities that lead to kids having marriages and kids and not cratering fertility and relationship rates (regardless of marriage).
Another index of family values would be intact families – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2254450/Demise-nuclear-family-British-children-likely-live-parents-major-Western-nation.html That’s pretty good in Japan, almost as good as in Finland and the traditionalist Southern European countries, so when they do have their divorces, they probably are between parents who don’t have kids yet.
Again, East Asians have fewer “friends” but more intense sense of mutual obligation and support.
I think the “sense” is more intense… whether social support and obligation happens more in practice is another question. There is some work on East Asian sociology by a Korean academic Heejung Kim (so I assume she knows Korea) which mentions that social support seeking in East Asian societies may be rarer because the high explicit pro-social ideology leads to harsh judgement of perceived free riders and everyone is more worried about appearing prosocial so are discouraged from seeking support and looking like a “mooch” (so to speak).
Interestingly, according to the OECD, the Korean and Japanese senses of “civic engagement” differ. Korea ranks no. 3 while Japan scores rather poorly. I don’t know what to make of that.
The value is a composite of trust in the state and voter turnout, so I’m guessing South Korea has a lot of both, compared to more… politically cynical and apathetic nations. Apparently this is a big function of wealth in SK – better off citizens really turn out to make sure everything is stays on course (people like the disaffected “Ilbe” idiots don’t?). And I expect they are probably ideologically relatively democratic – nothing like a few mad Nationalist Socialists (basically) across the border to concentrate the mind on democracy. Doesn’t necessarily have too much to do with engagement with one another within communities.
@Twinkie:
South Korea has the second highest number of Christian missionaries in the world, after the United States! (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/international/asia/01missionaries.html).
Probably being a recently missionised country has to a lot to do with it – many Koreans were converted by missionaries within living memory, and they take them as role models (and to some extent and so on).
East Asian Christians aren’t just “nominal” members of their church, as is frequently the case in Western Europe where adherents claim membership but do not participate actively in the mass/services/activities.
HBD Chick only counted self declared “active members” in her comparisons, so it’s possible the perception of the standard of what being an active member means differs between country and influences the outcome.
Seems like a puzzler though – there’s a low importance on religion in Korea not just on WVS but also on the Pew Surveys (2002) data (http://www.pewforum.org). http://www.pewglobal.org/2008/09/17/chapter-2-religiosity/
And they are seemingly very successful at reforming the convicts because recidivism rates there are very low (as is the case in Scandinavia).
Recidivism is probably naturally fairly high as lots of prisoners just age out of crime (as per a Clockwork Orange, if you want a literary example). There’s some interesting stuff on this in criminology literature – an overly harsh system actually can makes the outcome worse, as it leaves people with lots of experience being around criminals and few skills.
That’s an odd supposition. I don’t think East Asian immigrants in the U.S. refrain from violent crimes because they feel they are too small or physically too weak (that’s what guns are for). Southeast Asians (especially Cambodians and Laotians) are even smaller than East Asians and they have substantially higher rates of violent crime than East Asians. And the Hmong are notorious for their violent crimes.
Hey, there’s a physical element in my post, but I also acknowledged that as generally educationally successful, East Asians (of the Han, Korean and Japanese stripe) generally don’t have as much cause to resort to crime, and more to lose if they go to prison, nor do they tend to form gangs that work outside the system at such a high rate, unlike other dropouts from the system. That’s is where East and Southeast Asians tend to differ, even though Vietnamese and the like are a little shorter and slighter. I’m sure physicality does matter a bit, as how often do people even use guns in normal countries? Being able to organize in numbers is probably the more important offset to relatively more diminutive physical size.
I somewhat doubt the idea that “(East Asians) have high conformity to social and legal norms and lack transgressive attitude toward their non-Asian neighbors” (the latter of these doesn’t really even seem to matter very much since the majority of crime is intra-ethnic, even for high crime rate groups) rather than that the incentives to violence and crime for them seem quite different. There are incentives and disincentives and situations leading to violence and crime that apply to different groups differently. You don’t have to take it 100% as true, I just think these kind of incentives and disincentives and ethnic self organisation by young men and violent experiences loom higher than moral principles or conformity or work ethics and so on here.
How did we get here from GDP anyway?
The Germans used to eat dog recently and apparently some Swiss still do, along with cats:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04E4D9133EE033A25750C2A9609C946697D6CF
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C0CE7DC1531EE3ABC4A52DFB066838E639EDE
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/30205410
Anatoly Karlin,
You engage in the practice of chronically chipping away at that which you do not wish to be true and chronically adding to that which you do wish to be true. Your intellectual estimates for whites have been added to with very optimistic assumptions, and your intellectual estimates for East Asians have been chipped away with pessimistic ones.
While some of your points are valid and fully creditable, many other points indicate an extreme lack of mathematical sophistication and general intelligence—at least relative to what I’m used to.
Whether or not we wish it to be true, the reality genuinely seems like an East Asian intellectual capability of a full standard deviation above that of whites (e.g. the IQ of Chinese or Asian Americans who are not yet on the same intellectual/cultural/social/etc. standard of living as Americans and western Europeans center around 115). That is what reality currently seems to be converging to. It is an intricate topic to discuss and as such I will not get into it here unless really prompted by the readers of this blog.
East Asian mediocrity doesn’t just show up in economic performance, although that’s where its most readily quantifiable.
Every kind of intellectual and creative activity shows Asians lagging relative to whites and Jews at the extreme upper end. People have been noticing this for a very long time and puzzling and scratching their heads over it, but its been possible to argue that Asians have been suffering from some kind of institutional, political, or developmental handicap that is holding them back, or even some kind of personality deficit.
One you look closely at these arguments, they don’t hold up well. But people still use them as fall back arguments.
However, these arguments are becoming increasingly impossible to maintain as time passes. If Asians don’t do something in the next 30 years the verdict will be in and impossible to ignore.
IQ just doesn’t seem to correlate well with the extreme upper levels of achievement for Europeans either. European countries with similar IQ’s and similar institutions and levels of development nevertheless show extremely wide disparities in achievement at the upper ends.
Maybe its time to admit that IQ tests are useful but limited tools? After all, the idea that the ability to solve puzzles involving shapes in an abstract setting that doesn’t obviously relate to the real world would translate into an ability to have deep insight across disciplines into problems involving real world entities was always an article of faith to be tested against real world performance. Well, the results are in, and they are mixed. Some predictive ability, but no more.
We certainly shouldn’t discard IQ. But the Asian experience, as well as the wide disparity in achievement of similar European populations, should perhaps teach us to approach it with more caution.
However, such humility goes against the grain of the modern scientistic quantifying movement. One sees this with nutrition as well. Not much is reliably known about nutrition, but wide ranging claims are made with absolute confidence nevertheless. It seems that anything that can be quantified commands immediate acceptance.
However, a case could probably be made even within the framework of IQ.
Asians have at best a 5 point advantage over whites in IQ, a third of a standard deviation. Japan, the most successful Asian country by far, having achieved developmental parity with the West at a very early date in the late 19th century, has an average IQ of 106. In the end that isn’t much, and might well be accounted for in terms of environmental factors. Ron Unz’s excellent series of articles showing how IQ for various ethnic groups can rise by as much as 10 points when certain environmental conditions change, chiefly the shift from a rural to an urban setting, should give everyone pause.
Cities, and even towns, in Asia are nothing like what they are in the West. Asian cities provide a much denser and more stimulating environment. If you compare perhaps the densest and most stimulating Asian city, Tokyo, with its closest Western counterpart, New York City, its impossible not to be struck by just how much more of a stimulating environment Tokyo provides.
And while most Asian cities are more or less like Tokyo, few Western cities are like New York.
Again, the link between high achievement and IQ is full of mysteries and puzzles. In the 10 year period of 1927-1937 American Jews had an IQ of 101, quite similar to whites. Yet even then Jews were outperforming whites.
Much more research has to be done. We know little as yet. Too many puzzles and mysteries.
If the Asians don’t show any ability to pick up the torch of progress whites have let drop, which I sadly suspect they cannot, we are doomed. Because whites have lost all drive to accomplish.
Is this your vision of the kind of support that East Asian parents provide? If it is, it appears to be based on highly superficial understanding based on sensationalist mass media coverage, rather than actual, on the ground, understanding of what East Asian parents are like in real life.
In reality, (from this American’s perspective) emotional support provided to East Asians from his friends and family is suffocatingly frequent and pervasive. If anything, East Asian societies retain the traditionally paternalistic social mores of elders (parents, uncles, aunts, teachers, etc.) providing unsolicited advice, concern, and such in the mold of the “It takes a village” manner, unlike, say, in the United States where it is common for children to reach 18 and leave home in the stereotypical quest for individual autonomy.
The problem here is definitional. By “social” support, does Kim mean from the public sector or from family & friends? Seeking support from the public sector is indeed seen to be disgraceful (as was the case in the United States decades ago). But much of primary relationships in East Asia revolves around mutual support giving. Indeed, China, Japan, and Korea all have complex unwritten social rules about reciprocal support (and gift) giving, in ways that are completely absent in the post-modern West (Southern/Catholic European countries still have such rules, as anyone who’s been to a Spanish or Italian wedding can attest).
This is a young man’s game, obviously, which I am not. Nevertheless I am impressed by Karlin’s comprehensive, open minded, approach to the data (especially liked the way he highlighted differences in countries’ labor participation rates and hours worked per year in making comparisons of GDP per capita — you don’t see that very often) and was frankly astonished by the variety of disagreements it triggered. Jayman’s dissents, though overly dogmatic, are particularly interesting to me, and I will be curious to see how right his genetic determinism turns out to be. I guess I’m a genetic determinist in old age. We are what we are and we ain’t what we ain’t.
But how will we separate the sheep from the goats?
Possibly. But that’s a proximate cause. Why was Korea so receptive to Christian missionaries in the first place?
Indeed South Korea is somewhat unique in that it combines a dramatic rise in income and economic development and rise in religious, specifically Christian, fervor.
Vietnamese are “a little shorter”? Let me provide the relevant numbers:
Average male height in the U.S (age 20-29).: 177.6 cm (5 ft 10 in)
Average male height among white Americans (20-29): 178.9 (5 ft 10.5 in)
Average male height in S. Korea (20-29): 173.5 cm (5 ft 8.5 in)
Average male height in Vietnam (25-29): 162.9 cm (5 ft 4 in)
As you can see the Vietnamese are substantially shorter than South Koreans (4.5 inch difference!), yet the former have much greater (violent) crime rates than the latter in the United States (and in Asia too, for that matter).
This is what you wrote earlier:
Your assertion that East Asians recoil from crime because they lack confidence due to diminutive “physicality” is utter nonsense. Low crime rate is likely a combination of internal genetic and cultural factors regardless of the size of their non-ethnic kin neighbors. Pakistanis are smaller than the English, but it doesn’t stop them from committing relatively higher rates of crime (especially sex crimes) in England.
This seems to contradict your earlier assertion that interracial size difference is a factor in violent crime rates.
Furthermore, while it’s true that most crimes are intra-racial, you ignore that the interracial crimes rates differ enormously by race in the United States. Blacks have incredibly high rates of interracial crime (tens of thousands of non-black women are raped by blacks each year; the reverse is almost nil). Something like 80% of assaults in San Francisco are black-on-Asian as another example.
To further invalidate your assertion of “physicality” component of interracial (and inter-ethnic) crime, note that South Koreas are much larger than Vietnamese (to a much greater degree than the size different between American whites and Koreans), but the South Koreans in Vietnam do not go about committing violent crimes against their smaller hosts. South Korean crime rate in Vietnam is probably about what their crime rate is in the United States. As such, they are not responding to situational incentives and disincentives as you claim, but are expressing their genetic-cultural propensity for lower criminal orientation. (Similarly, think of the Swedes in Italy or Greece – do they go about assaulting Italians or Greeks because they are bigger than their hosts? No, they are, for largely reasons of genetics and culture, a low crime people and behave accordingly no matter whether they happen upon smaller or bigger others).
Er, it all started with your statement that South Korea has a “pretty high” murder rate when in fact it has one of the lowest rates in the world. You strike me as a generally intelligent and reasonable person, but occasionally certain non-scientifically-derived agenda seems to peek through in your assertions (e.g. Asians don’t commit crimes because they are weak, we forgive them everything because they supposedly have low crimes, etc.).
Because that argument appears very likely, that’s why.
For example, another commenter elaborated on why measuring interracial genius quotient based on something like the Nobel Prize is highly problematic because the small number is easily given to distortions like celebrity and familiarity (even in the science prizes).
But even setting that aside, one might note that during 1997-2014 (18 years), there have been 10 ethnically East Asian Nobel laureates in physics. In contrast, during 1901-1996 (96 years), meaning the entire history of the prize prior to 1997, there were only 6 ethnically East Asian Nobel physics winners.
Either the East Asians just became much more genius-y in the past 18 years or they were indeed held back by “some kind of institutional, political, or developmental handicap” from which they seem to be emerging.
@ Twinkie
people always say that North East Asians are taller than South East Asians, which is true. But height is probably not the determining factor for fighting ability / ability to intimidate somebody.
Being physical strong means in the first place to have big bones. This article gives an impression of what this is about: http://www.badlefthook.com/2011/3/15/2051585/boxing-science-how-manny-pacquiaos-body-has-tricked-analysts-and
My personal impression is that south east asians are shorter than North East Asians, but still North East Asians are more gracile. Thus it might be still true that the low crime rates of East Asians in western countries are IN PART due to their more gracile anatomical build-up.
@ Twinkie: Possibly. But that’s a proximate cause. Why was Korea so receptive to Christian missionaries in the first place?
Indeed South Korea is somewhat unique in that it combines a dramatic rise in income and economic development and rise in religious, specifically Christian, fervor.
Hard for me to know why missionaries are successful. Why did the Philippines convert to Catholicism when it did, etc?
There are not many other groups that became much more Christianised at the same time as rising in economic status. Backward Castes in India for other comparisons?
Although I would question this is this unique.
There is a lot of this in China, and the post-Communist states in East Europe have a religious resurgence at the same time as economic development, IRC (Poland?).
And prosperity gospel Christianity goes hand in hand with economic development (such as it is) in Africa.
I assume the development of religion is because pre-20th century Korea had a very low base of religion, and it was effectively an unmet need. The other part of it is probably that the pro-Western influence is a lot stronger than any other American client.
I don’t think it really shows too much relevant to the questions in this comment thread except that missionaries from South Korea are probably an (interesting) unique phenomenon and may not really provide that much of a useful index for of a civil society (or even religious enthusiasm itself).
The problem here is definitional. By “social” support, does Kim mean from the public sector or from family & friends? Seeking support from the public sector is indeed seen to be disgraceful (as was the case in the United States decades ago). But much of primary relationships in East Asia revolves around mutual support giving.
Family and friends, and this is apparently what her data says.
(It’s in connection with a her investigation into a variation of oxytocin related genetics that implies that social information is effectively at a lower volume in the average East Asian brain, and this influences their social norms.)
“Unsolicited advice” might be different – if you have a culture where actual support seeking doesn’t happen (because of a bizarre state of affairs where seeking social support is seen as anti-social), perhaps you end up getting “lectured” by your elders because they can’t as much depend on you to go to them when you actually have a problem and need support, so there’s a lot of pre-emptive advice giving. Whether this works out as more or less support, ultimately.
This seems to contradict your earlier assertion that interracial size difference is a factor in violent crime rates.
That’s probably correct, actually. The fact that most predation is intra-group would indicate that intra-group size and physical ability differences wouldn’t matter much. Different ethnic groups teaming up together, learning to be streetwise and having not much money and having more culture of honour and violent experiences probably matter more (factors coming together rather than any one).
(You’ve gone over it a few more times than you needed to though TBH, I’d have got your point with one paragraph).
I’m really skeptical that East Asians are particularly naturally serious about the law or morally upright in any way (for one it’s hard to see how that fits with having no concept of the res publica) or have warm feelings towards other ethnic groups though (if any Asians are warm towards non-Asians, it’s the higher crime Southeast Asians?). I’m still pretty sure it’s other stuff – and I don’t think there are any “scientific” models of crime that can test that and would contradict that.
Blacks have incredibly high rates of interracial crime (tens of thousands of non-black women are raped by blacks each year; the reverse is almost nil).
Compared to the overall Black crime rate, it seems pretty small – http://takimag.com/article/guns_and_race_steve_sailer/print#axzz3Xs6Yz24W
Check out Fig 19 – for the large number of Whites who surround them and the general level of Black criminality, seems there’s not that much predation on Whites specifically as a driver of the Blacks’ overall rate.
The level of Black on White stranger homicides is quite high, of course, as you’d expect if the motives where robbery, generally (Black stick up men). It just doesn’t drive the overall rate very much, because those incidents are relatively rare even within the USA (which is high homicide by Western European and East Asian standards).
Er, it all started with your statement that South Korea has a “pretty high” murder rate when in fact it has one of the lowest rates in the world.
That’s true to the extent you’d say virtually all Western European countries have the lowest rates in the world.
I am afraid not:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/world/2348902-china-iq-map-provinces-8-10-a.html
The second post of that page is the only (and pretty much a large scale sampling as well) pan-China official avg IQ results per provinces (conducted in 2006 on children of 8 to 10 years ) that I could come across in the web.
Panda has to admit that those results fit very well with the historical stereotypes amongst the Chinese. It seems to suggest the following:
Han Chinese avg IQ is obviously much higher than 103.4
Only several predominantly Han Chinese provinces in China seem to have avg centred around 115
Some clusters of predominantly Han Chinese provinces in China centre around 109, whereas some others around 100
Even with far lower GDP per cap, some clusters of Han Chinese provinces in China have avg IQ clearly higher, up to half a SD , than both Japan and South Korea – which also fits well with Chinese historical stereotypes
Just another piece of evidence that there are several types of “Han Chinese”?
Nonetheless it is a very intricate topic indeed.
Oh, forgot to mention that in that pan-China IQ result (I dunno how reliable it is though), it is interesting to note that Jilin Province next to North Korea, which is by and large an ethnic Korean autonomous region, had tested avg IQ of 107 – pretty much in line with South Korea’s 106.
the map you linked to was already discussed above in the thread.
“2. Han Chinese avg IQ is obviously much higher than 103.4” I would say the data the map is based on does not suppprt this. The non-han share of the population of the PRC is not that big to have such a big impact on the overall average.
Besides I would say the data is not very convincing. For example it gives an 4 point IQ difference between Shanxi and Shaanxi. Although there is this Hui population in Xi’An but wikipedia says only 0.5% of the population in Shaanxi is non Han, this is much so small share to explain the 4 points difference. So it might be still true that Han average IQ is higher than 103 but for this I would not rely on this study.
Your impression is incorrect. First of all, Manny Pacquiao is a rather unique individual (most Filipinos do not have heavyweight wrist diameter).
Second, Filipinos are of a different founding genetic stock than the Vietnamese and have a high degree of later hybridization (especially from Spain).
Third, note that I compared Koreans (low crime) with Vietnamese (high crime). The Vietnamese are a highly gracile people, at least as gracile as Koreans and possibly more gracile (due mostly to genetics and diet, I’d think, the average protein intake is substantially lower in Vietnam than in South Korea).
In terms of “physicalilty,” Koreans are far more physically dominant than Vietnamese, if one were to use the proxy of Olympic medals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics_medal_table
South Koreans are an athletic powerhouse, ranked number five at the last Summer Olympics with 13 gold models, 8 silver medals, and 7 bronze medals, despite their modest population size. The only other countries ranked higher were the U.S., China, the UK, and Russia (all have larger populations than South Korea; all but the UK have substantially greater populations). They also derived most of their medals from “combat” sports, e.g. Judo, Tae Kwon Do, archery, fencing, shooting, boxing, and wrestling.
South Koreans also do well in the Winter Olympics. At Sochi, they ranked number 13: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Winter_Olympics_medal_table)
Vietnamese did not medal at either event, despite having 80% greater population than South Korea.
And, yet, despite their diminutive size and lower “physicality,” the Vietnamese commit higher rates of crime than Koreans in the U.S. and are also known for their occasionally spectacularly violent crimes (often involving street gangs). And it’s not because the Vietnamese organize better either (Koreans excel at team sports like soccer and their only rivals in Asia are the Japanese). Their native crime levels also reflect this. According to the UNODC, the murder rate per 100,000 as of 2011-2012 in South Korea is 0.9 while that in Vietnam is 3.3.
Crime is not a function of size or “physicality.” It’s a function of genetic and cultural propensity for low impulse control and low conformity to social norms.
True. But what is unusual is that South Korea is beginning to approach Western European level of economic development and standard of living, and have experienced growth in Christian fervor. Indeed, Seoul is reputedly the city with the highest concentration of Ph.D.’s per capita.
Parts of sub-Saharan Africa are making economic gains, but their level of human development (e.g. education level) is extremely low and the economic gains are largely extractive in origin (largely powered by the growth in demand in… China!).
I cannot see how you can say that missionaries per capita might not serve as a useful proxy for religious enthusiasm. On the contrary, it is an excellent measure of the same compared to very unreliable numbers of claimed membership (“active” or otherwise) based on self-identification. It takes no effort to claim (falsely) that one is religiously active. It requires actual commitment and hard work to be a missionary.
What led you to this assumption?
But that’s also a proximate cause that begs a further question: why is it more “pro-Western”?
This is a rather belabored and unsubstantiated speculation on your part, not unlike your assertion of “physicality” as a major component of crime. You seem determined to derive as negative a speculation as possible to explain East Asian social construct.
Have you considered a rather simpler explanation that there is not much support seeking, because such support is, to borrow your term, “pre-emptively” provided?
East Asians are late arrivals to res publica, but have a long history of refraining from interpersonally trangressive behaviors as well as a strong Confucian emphasis on personal virtue. See: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04/10/japan.lost.cash/
I don’t know how to quantify “warm,” so I will set that aside for the moment. But I will use other proxies for “interracial friendliness” or at least the lack of hostility toward non-Asians (especially toward whites; excludes blacks obviously). First, per Pew Research (2012), 87% of Asians say that they get along “very well” or “pretty well” with whites.
Second, Asians, by an overwhelming margin, are the most likely to live in neighborhoods with non-Asians. As the Pew Research shows:
Indeed, this is confirmed even from a casual survey of the Racial Dot Map: http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map
Asians tend to live intermixed with non-Asians (especially whites) to a much greater extent than blacks and Hispanics.
Third, intermarriage rates for some East Asian groups are extremely high. For example, 34.6% of ethnic Korean males and 57.7% of ethnic Korean females raised in the U.S. (born here or arrived here at age 13 or below) marry white spouses. “Warm” enough?
Again, yes, in terms of the overall crime rates, intra-racial crime accounts for the bulk of crimes. But when you look at only interracial crimes, the stats are extremely skewed. Blacks account for a huge number of interracial crimes, whites considerably less, and Asians almost nonexistent, despite the fact that Asians tend to live next to non-Asians to a much greater degree.
Absolutely. Northwestern European countries and a few East Asian countries (including Singapore, which is technically Southeast Asian, but has an East Asian majority population, that has 0.2 per 100,000 murder rate, pretty much the lowest in the world save a few European principalities) have the lowest violent crime rates in the world. The only other countries that even come close are probably a few Islamic countries with a high degree of policing, political repression, and extremely brutal punitive system.
As you probably know, being of “Han Chinese” is a claimed (partly cultural) ethnicity and is not a precisely defined biological marker. Many Manchus, for example, claimed Han ethnicity for political and social reasons until quite recently. Due to immense levels of ethnic and cultural assimilation throughout China, there are indeed “Han people” with very different genetic markers.
So, it’s nearly impossible to identify a strictly “Han-only” IQ average. But the national Chinese average of 103.4 seems reasonable and plausible, and appears consistent with its reverse-engineered PISA national figures (China only provides select cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau, but some folks have deduced the national figure).
Nope. Southern Mediterranean civilizations long had stereotypes of the northern (Germanic) “barbarians.” But today it’s clear that Northern Europeans have slightly higher IQ averages than those peoples along the Mediterranean. So a similar dynamic is entirely possible and even likely with the Chinese vis-à-vis the Koreans and the Japanese.
No. Just the results of historical pop movements (from ancient capital of Xian to Laoyang to Nanjing to Beijing) and clustering of more intelligent people to important political and economic centers. A process which can be seen from the OECD PISA CPS data for Singapore (I know its not China) converted to IQ scores by Jensen, the children of the selected mostly Hockien speaking immigrant from Fujian and Taiwan are smarter than the average local
children thus boosting the national IQ further,
IQ2ndGenImm-IQ1stGenImm|Region|IQNative|IQ2ndGenImm|IQ1stGenImm
3.90625|Singapore|107.03125|110.78125|106.875
whereas for Hongkong which draws the Cantonese immigrants from surround Guangdong province which have lower av IQ than that for Fujian and Taiwan, and that will lower the regional IQ slightly over time,
3.90625|HongKong|103.59375|103.28125|99.375
Hongkong has higher IQ than the surrounding Guangdong because of the flood of refugees from the north in the past.
My bad, I should have used the Han Chinese term more precisely. It should be “some clusters of Han Chinese avg IQ is obviously much higher than 103.4”.
Your counter example of Shanxi and Shaanxi doesn’t cut it, since wiki’s data must be wrong. Any Chinese who has a bit field knowledge about Shannxi knows that far more than 0.5% of its population is non Han.
Your analogy to South Vs North Europe appears wrong, because you have overlooked the critial differences on climate of the two sides of the Eurasia. Hence your conclusion can not be reached:
On climate differences:
Both the South Mediterranean and Northern Europe have a climate very suitable for living, albeit the South a bit nicer during the winter even though it is still tolerable in the North – actually some could argue that winters in Netherlands, England, Belgium, Germany and Northern France etc are generally mild in most cases.
It is not the case however in the North and South China, where the winter is much bitter in the North (right below Siberia, the life-threatening long history of Northen Nomad invasions aside). So, it is logical to argue that for better lebensraum the higher IQ Chinese, the Han or whatever, within the span of the last 2,000 years, have gradually conquered and migrated into en masse, and established themselves in the much nicer South China near Yangzi river, both in the interior and along the coast. Both the current China’s IQ data and stereotypes seem to have confirmed this conclusion.
If you must argue using West Europe Vs East Asia example, the conclusion seems to suggest otherwise than yours:
For the natural need of lebensraum, relatively higher IQ people, with time, would have conquered the largest, climately better, and the most fertile land mass. Agreed?
The higheset IQ group/s of Europe have better chances (there’re enough chances in history) and must have occupied the best (i.e. the most fertile land , climate, etc) and the largest parts of West Europe in theory. In practice, the Germanics have got the best parts of mainland Western Europe. Spain is an exception here. Even though it has a nice weather (a bit too warm in summers), it had constant life-threaning danger from the Moors. In other words, if the English, Irish, Norwegians or Icelanders had clear IQ edge, they would have already occupied the mainland Western Europe (France, Germany, Poland, etc) long ago.
Ditto in the East Asia: a simple look of where China is, that piece of huge and climtely (relatively) pleasant landmass of South China (in comparison to climately hash non-fertile land of Korean Peninsula and earthquake-prone small cold and isolated islands of Japan) , one should have known that the people, or more precisely some groups of people, in South China coast should have higher IQ than Korea and Japan – it’s so intuitively logical. Otherwise, you would have seen a completely opposite map today. Not surprisingly, 3, 000 years of experiences of complete dominance of the Chinese in East Asia on culture, technology, art, and politics seems to have confirmed this, along with historical Chinese(and East Asia) sterotypes and modern day partial data of TIMAS, PISA, IQ, etc. Therefore it comes no surprise to Panda at all that some “Han Chinese” clusters of SE China coast do have avg IQ higher (and up to about half a SD in some clusters! ) than the Japanese and Koreans.
Your explaination makes sense and is definitely one of the reasons, but I am not sure it is the main or only reason.
Have you ever been to Scandinavia?
Except that the “Han Chinese” did not come from the north, but from the West, along the Yellow River valley. Since their establishment, they were continually invaded by the actual northern and northeastern peoples who assimilated into the Han culture as their overlords. This is a rather similar dynamic to the way Northern Europeans conquered and assimilated into the established cultures along the Mediterranean.
It’s not an issue of lebensraum but the natural selection for IQ in colder climates per the r/K selection theory (or the modernized “life history” theory). You might try reading some Rushton.
You seem to be comparing the rather select population of the Chinese in Shanghai and Hong Kong with all the Japanese and the Koreans. Why don’t you try comparing the average in Shanghai with the average in Tokyo or Seoul? You will find that “half a SD” difference disappear and then go negative for the Chinese.
The Japanese and the Koreans have slightly higher average IQ than China. Sorry. Maybe things will change in the future and the Chinese will benefit disproportionately from the Flynn effect.
This has proven to be one of the most fascinating threads and articles on this (excellent) website.
I must second Eldan Yam above. His argument that wealth is not the be all and end all of civilisation is apposite. Japan has a high standard of living, superior health outcomes to most countries, low crime and disorder, advanced technological capacity and an aesthetically wonderful culture. Also, its Gini is much better than America’s or Europe’s. If you believe happiness is relative, which I do, then most Japanese have a less stressful and pleasant experience.
On anonymous assertions that people keep moving the goalposts on HBD, regarding metrics to ascertain ‘superiority’, let me just say that HBD should be about studying diversity and why it happens. It should not be racism or eugenics. We all know that African people are the best athletes, asians the best engineers and programmers, whites the best businesspeople, jews the best lawyers etc. HBD is about seeing why these traits are selected for in societies. Not comparing them against each other and punching people in the head for what people are not. It makes no sense to say a tiger is inferior to a polar bear or vice versa. Although this particular analogy is not perfect either.
Regarding Karlin’s regression on IQ and wealth, there is clearly a correlation. The sample is decent but I think that when we are considering something as complicated as whole countries and civilisations with their minorites, institutions, capital, culture, historical incident etc there are a lot of non-systematic factors that may explain a decent chunk of a country’s outcome at any point in time. Some day, perhaps in the long run, we can control for all these ‘Murphys Law’ type variables and make an assessment of what works and what doesn’t, but unfortunately both the great thing and worst thing about the social sciences is that the variables are tangled with each other and their correlations can reverse or change in magnitude. Trying to formalise this mathematically would probably be even harder than physical phenomenon – hence why its never been attempted, even by our greatest economists or scientists.
I have. So?
By “North” Europeans, I meant the north-western part of mainland Europe.
(The whole argument has nothing to do with Scandinavia, where the winter is not as harsh as Northen China(Manchuria)/Siberia anyway.)
One could argue no one originally came from the North, but the West. Your claim is highly questionable: if it had been the case that mystical “nothern”people conquered the Han Chinese and were assimilated into the latter, today’s China would have been called “Turkistan” or “Mogoland” or ” Sibe-land”, and today’s East-Asian culture, architecture, main philosophy, art forms, etc across China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam would have been riding horses, living in yurts, worshiping stars , playing Bağlama correspondingly, with no written language so sophisticated as Chinese Characters wahtsowever… actually I think your claim is way off.
My argument was ALL about lebensraum in the full span of human history. It is nothing to do whatsoever with colder climates per the r/K in this scenario!
Han Chinese originated in the colder climates. But that doesn’t have to keep them there.
Likewise, the high IQ people originated in the north (in the Ice Age), yet that doesn’t guarantee that these high IQ people stupid enough to keep staying in the ice holes they originated thereafter.
On the contrary, high IQ people, for better and more prosperous lebensraum , have migrated logically, to where? to where they could find the largest fertile land with the best 4-season weather (hence the best chance of survival), they had to do that in the course of history, kill if neccesary… that’s just human survival instinct I was arguing about.
No. As the chart above shows, I was talking the entire Zhejing Provionce the most part of Jiangsu Province (about half a SD), with combined population close to that of Japan and several times more than Korea. This is WU branch of the Han Chinese, speaking WU dialect.
It has nothing to do with Beijing or Shanghai, both have avg lo only in the ballpark of 108 or so.
Japan and Korea’s avg IQ is slightly higher than China’s (weighted avg of 103.4) currently – correct.
But to claim that the Japanese and the Koreans have slighly higher IQ than the (Han) Chinese (I pressume that is what you meant), however, is in dire contradiction with all the generally-recognised evidences of almost entire written history of mankind in East Asia(except the last 100 years or so) for the last 3,000 years . Do you think you can re-write the entire history?
You people are idiots. Why spend your time dithering about things you can’t really control, when it is pretty obvious that cultural factors including economic and education policies have a far greater effect on the wealth of a nation than does IQ.
Anyway, IQ in a population, like other characteristics, generally forms a bell curve.
China and India with their higher populations should, on average, have a higher absolute number of people with higher IQs aka geniuses level IQs. But even if they did, many of these people might be lured to America to work for more money or access to research facilities their own countries don’t provide. In short, cultural factors dominate.
Do you people need to feel superior in some way? Is that really what this is about?
Twinkie: I cannot see how you can say that missionaries per capita might not serve as a useful proxy for religious enthusiasm.
Er… Because there’s no evidence for how much a country (or religious group) sends out missions has much to do with how religiously fervent they are? It’s trivial to imagine deeply religious people who aren’t out to convert the world, and that how common missionaries are would vary due to a bunch of social and historical factors –
See – http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/08/economist-explains-6 for some.
This is a rather belabored and unsubstantiated speculation on your part. You seem determined to derive as negative a speculation as possible to explain East Asian social construct.
I don’t think the idea that people may provide unsolicited advice when they are concerned others won’t seek it is exactly belaboured.
As for unsubstantiated, of course to a degree. That’s sort of the nature of conjecture.
And frankly you’re the one who already talked about unsolicited advice in negative terms (suffocating).
Have you considered a rather simpler explanation that there is not much support seeking, because such support is, to borrow your term, “pre-emptively” provided?
Shrug. Heejung Kim has her own hypothesis about why support seeking is low, that it is apparently due to concerns about perception and stressing out peer networks. I’m willing to trust the Korean lady social scientist over adding my own unsubstantiated speculation here, maybe you’re not.
Her commentary is “(The) difference can be explained by the fact that Asians/Asian Americans experience greater interpersonal concerns stemming from disclosing their problems. Asians/Asian Americans were more concerned than European Americans that seeking support would cause them to lose face, disrupt group harmony, and receive criticism from others, and these relationship concerns appear to have discouraged them from drawing social support from close others.”
If her participants on the surveys and her study populations had answered “I don’t ever need to seek support after stress because big brother / dad, already gave me the answer and I never need support after the event because I’ve already been given it” and not “I’m worried about stressing others out and being criticised and shamed for asking for help” I hope she would have the brains to have realized it, and explored it beyond some glib comment. I don’t think their way of doing things is necessarily a problem, btw, just diverges from the simplistic idea of East Asian forming these actually much more mutually socially supportive cultures that just does not make sense.
Asians, by an overwhelming margin, are the most likely to live in neighborhoods with non-Asians.
I don’t know if that’s a great metric, as it’s strongly influenced by relative population size – e.g. Raz Khan has described how Asian interracial marriage decreased as the percentage of their population went up – not because of decreasing warmth, but because an unrealised degree of preference became more practical to realise). Plus those areas are where the good jobs are etc.
Would you have used this metric back when Chinatown and Koreatown were where most new arrivals lived?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine that East Asians end up with some level of familiarity with White Americans due to career paths and the general relatively low numbers of East Asians and this leads to more warmth than would otherwise be the case. It’s hard to index how much populations like one another – I would distinctly say that the level of activist, “we’re underrepresented in X, I hope the White Man chokes on his own lactase” brouhaha from smart East Asians hardly seems low compared to Blacks with similar abilities, and the lower number of fields East Asians are actually underrepresented in due to ability. But that’s not exactly a cold metric, it’s very subjective.
Northwestern European countries and a few East Asian countries (including Singapore, which is technically Southeast Asian
That seems reasonable, although with you’re precise (hyperbolic?) comment “one of the lowest” you’d expect them to at least be in the top 5 and I’m not sure why you’re mentioning Northwestern European countries here exactly when the Southern European and Central European countries are comparable, and its really the East (North and South) that’s different.
Twinkie: Japanese children, from a young age, are taught to turn in any lost items, including cash, to police stations. The cultural practice of returning lost items and never keeping what belongs to a stranger has meant police departments like Tokyo’s Metropolitan have an entire warehouse filled with lost shoes, umbrellas and wallets.
I don’t know how much stuff like this actually tells us about compliance with norms or what have you, but this was interesting to make me Google up the “lost wallet” tests, where a social science experiment (by the Reader’s Digest, mind) “lost” a number of wallets in various locations around the world, then saw how many were returned:
http://www.xys.org/forum/db/4/155/242.html
Their single Japanese and two Koreans samples found a high level of their ten dumped wallets returned, but not really beyond the norm for the US, Northwest Europe and Spain, while their single Chinese in Hong Kong sample returned a relatively low number (but then so did the Swiss). Taiwan was mid table, like Germany, Brazil and Thailand.
I wonder if anything like that would tell us anything if a larger sample was used.
That is possibly how Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norsemen and Normans (descended from Vikings in frigid Scandinavia) came to conquer, rule and be assimilated into what became England, which had the best land of the British Isles, while consigning the defeated natives to Ireland, Wales and Scotland, all of which had marginal agricultural land.
The Han Chinese are not from Manchuria or Siberia. They are from the Yellow River valley, as archaeology and history demonstrate (and their language, a part of the Sino-Tibetan group, is not Altaic-Tungusic either). The people who originated in Manchuria and Siberian are the ancestors of Mongols, Manchus, Koreans, and probably the Japanese, collectively known as the Dongyi or Donghu in ancient Chinese annals.
Southern China remained “native” for a very long time because a) there were major physical barriers to the south from the northern plains, b) there was already a substantially organized and densely-settled population established there, and c) the subtropical climate and disease patterns were not amenable to cold-adapted peoples.
There is no “lebensraum” theory. However, r/K selection or life history theory is a rigorous product of peer-review.
No. They may migrate for easier pastures, to be sure. But that doesn’t stop more from coming from the north to the south, as historically happened. Much of pre-modern Chinese history is one of the continual struggles of the settled Han Chinese to absorb incursions, raids, and invasions of northern and eastern “barbarians.”
If you wanted to do apples-to-apples comparisons, it’s helpful to think in terms of percentages rather than absolute numbers. The average IQs of Japan and Korea are higher than that of China. If you selected the top 10% of each country, I’m pretty certain the (small, but measurable) gap will continue to maintain… for now.
However I make no claims about the future. As the Chinese continue to develop economically, they may benefit disproportionately from the Flynn effect, especially as the population urbanizes more. Or they may not. Future tends to be stochastic.
You seem to equate early advantages in civilization building based on access to river valleys as 100% predictor of modern economic advancement or IQ. That’s just not the case.
Until about two hundred years ago, Scandinavia was an economic and social backwater of Western Europe. It was a poor, sparsely-populated region with low education level (and even serfdom until the late 18th Century). Throughout most of its medieval history, its biggest exports were daring, violent merchants and warriors, the Vikings.
Look at it now. It’s one of the more advanced regions in Europe and is one of the most advanced societies in the whole world.
If early civilizational dominance were such a powerful indicator of enduring human quality, North India and Mesopotamia would be powerhouses with high IQ peoples.
So in your opinion, surveys of self-described religious affiliation is a more accurate predictor of religious intensity of a given population than per capita numbers of people who forsake “normal” lives and pursue religious aims?
You haven’t done any social science research, have you? (I was a historian early in my career.)
Yes, “unsolicited” and “suffocating” from a stereotypically American perspective. I happen to be the kind of a person who likes to sit alone on an Appalachian mountain top with a rifle and a rucksack for hours and kill an occasional animal if chance presents itself, but otherwise contemplate upon nature alone. I’ve internalized the “rugged individualism” of the early American mythos, and now find the traditional “It take a village” culture writ large of, say, Koreans, suffocating. To paraphrase Grover Norquist, I belong to the “Leave Me Alone” coalition (but, don’t get me wrong, over the years, I’ve come to appreciate deeply the strong community of a rural American life – what Rod Dreher calls the “hidden grandeurs of the small town life”).
I do not know of her work. I will try to take a look. But do you have anyone with a similar thesis besides this lone Korean-American academic?
Is her study about Asians or Asian-Americans? Makes a difference, you know.
There is something to that, to be sure, especially in intra- ethnic terms.
But the problem of that logic is the issue of scale and proportionality inter- ethnically, which is the point in contention here. If you picked an area with, say, roughly 60% whites, 15% Asians (mostly Korean), and 15% Hispanics (mostly Mexicans and Salvadorans), I can tell you even without looking that the residential segregation and intermarriage patterns of the two respective minority populations would be very different, despite having identical population sizes. And indeed I know an area like this in my region, and the Asians have substantially higher residential intermixture and intermarriage rates with whites than Hispanics do.
Judging from this, one can surmise that the Asian affinity toward the majority whites is higher than that from the Hispanics toward the latter. And this is confirmed by surveys as well (surveys alone are not as useful as people can lie or exaggerate; but people do not do so to the same degree with marriages and housing decisions, which speak louder than mere words).
Precision is hyperbolic to you?
While positions (no. 1, no. 2, etc.) are interesting, clustering is far more interesting to me. Positions aren’t as useful if, say, 6 of 10 are tightly clustered together while the remaining 4 are far off.
Japan and Korea are clustered very tightly with other extremely low murder (and murder + assault) rate countries. If you looked at the rates globally, anything that is under, say, 1.5 or so under per 100,000 is considered very low, considering the regional averages per UNODC are 16.3 for the Americas, 12.5 for Africa, 3.0 for Europe and 2.9 for Asia. Look here and click on rate to see the list by lowest countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
I can be a good proxy for difficult-to-quantify concepts like honesty and conscientiousness. If done well, that is.
I can absolutely believe that. High IQ, low social conscientiousness city, Hong Kong. Everyone hustles. Singapore, on the other hand, is a high IQ and high social conscientiousness city. I can speak intimately from personal experience.
I think so. But we’d need more than simply a larger sampling. We’d have to control for a lot of the usual variables (such as income, education level, population density, etc.).
According to the study there are about half a dozen Chinese provinces with IQs in the low or mid 90s. Can you list them? Or list the entire bottom 10.
Agreed! Thanks for help making my point! LoL. I didn’t say anything about “sunny weather”. The tropical zones all have “sunny weather”, yet we all know they are detrimental for developing high civilisations. What I argued was “for better and more prosperous lebensraum” and “4-season” climate (even though they have obvious overlaps with “sunny weather”, yet they are quite different concepts) , both of which implying “the length of the growing season and soil quality” you refer to in more detail and possiblely more such as easy access to major water source, etc.
Your mistake here is to assert that the Han Chinese are from the Yellow River – which is supported by archaeology and history.
That’s just wrong from holistic point of view.
Your unspoken (wrong) assumptions above are:
The Han Chinese originated in the Yellow River Valley.
The following scenario is entirely logical which you ignored (possiblely deliberately? lol):
a group of people endured extremely cold weather in the far north 10,ooos and 100,000s years ago, before migrated and into today’s Yellow River Valley about 10,000 years ago ( is that because Yellow River Valley was/is certainly a better lebensraum soilwise, growing season-wise and tempreture-wise) than Siberia and Korean Peninsula or isolated earthquake-prone islets of Japan? lol ). Since Yellow River Valley was a such an attractive lebensraum that many groups of tribes were competing for that. This group of people won in the end by conquering and assimilating others there, and developed a civilisation in Yellow River Valley thereafter, proved by the archaeology, their language, and history in the last 5,000 years. Actually this is what I pressume a much more reasonablely logical origin of the Han Chinese which you ignored.
And if you reckon above, then ask why today’s China didn’t speak Korean (or Japanese or Siberian)? Remeber that the Yellow River valley lebensraum was open for all?
Largely agreed, notablely except (b). There is no evidence of ” already a substantially organized and densely-settled population established there” before the Han Chinese. Plus, that assertion is ilogical as well, since “densely-settled” and “low IQ aboriginals” could be argued as mutually exclusive in that period before the Han Chinese arrived.
It is imporant to emphasise here that the Han arrived in South China 2,000 and even thousands of years ago, in different waves and with gradual adaptions of course. It is not as if it were a recent (e.g. 500 or 1,000 years) phenominon that people would normally and tacitly assume.
r/K selection is fine – I haven’t challenge it at all throughout. ( r/k? actually current East Asian birth ratios also suggest my point, because Taiwan and China are lower than South Korea and Japan)
Dunno what “life history theory” you refer to though, but if there isn’t lebensraum theory , there is now, because Panda says so due to common sense, peer reviewed or not. ROFL –
now seriously, if there’s isn’t a theory already regarding to Panda’s lebensraum , then it tells much about the quality of the current mainstream “peers”, hence who in his right mind cares about their”review” in the first place?
Actually the very final purpose of life history theory is for the best chance of survival, with r/k selection theory and lebensraum theory being just 2 of many major ways to achieve so –
eminently sensible, don’t you think so?
You’ve secretly switched the key concept here my friend. ROFL. They may migrate for better pastures, not easierpastures. There’s a fundamental difference between the two, because better, by default, is much harder to achieve due to its attractiveness to all and sundry, whereas easier by its definition is almost the opposite, meaning much worse in this sense.
Your “top 10%” claim is becoming quite bizarre… ROFL. China’s top 10% are non-compariable with the top 10% of the Koreans or Japanese, with China’s being both higher and with much more numbers. It’s just a simple bell distribution.
Even India, or Indonesia, or even Nigeria, could have its right fat tail or top 10% IQers both more and potentially higher than that of Korea(population 50mio?), and even that of Japan(population 200mio?) , simplely if the population bases of the former are, and/or become, much larger.
Oke, Obi Kim! LOL. Are you sort of Korean Jedi or something?
No, “seem” is delusional. Panda has never claimed so.
What Panda did argue was that if a civilisation has led the region throughout pretty much the entire written history of mankind across thousands of years, then it is logical to suggest they have an edge IQ-wise in relation to their immediate neibourhood.
You could make your point better here, if you showcased that the current mainland Europe (e.g. the western, northern and central parts) widely spoke Swedish or Norwegain (or their derivatives), worshipped viking gods and philosophies, had ancient traditional viking archtecture style alloever, ate viking cusines, played viking music, read viking literature classics, had viking social norms and values, etc., culturely and technologically viking so to speak.
Another strawman? LOL.
Panda didn’t claim “early“, yet Panda did claim “almost throughout“.
Yes, Jedi Pseudoerasmus, it does not happen! rofl.
Yes, very much so, I would argue. The “Panda Lebensraum” theory seems quite universal? 🙂
Actually there’s a strikng similarity between the 2 far sides of the Eurasia continent:
Western European mainland vs England (as you just detailed) is quite similar to China vs Japan in racial make-ups.
Without historical migrations and assimilations of the Anglo-Saxens, the Norse and Normans, the British Isles would have been a very different place, with most likely no Industrial Revolution whatsoever.
Similarly, without the historical migrations and assimilations of the Han Chinese and the Koreans ( the single two largest DNA contributors to the modern day “Japanese”, instead of the Ainu or others) to the lsles of Japan, Japan would have been just another “Philippines” today.
The closest analogy Panda could see is about this:
China = Europe (Germany+France+Italy+Spain+Poland + Scandinavia+Greece + Ukraine …). A major difference between the two is that China is by and large Han Chinese (O3) due to thousands years of conquering, absorbing, killing and assimilation as a unity, whereas Europe, or the EU, is not by and large Germanics.
Korea = Denmark – the link between the Germanics and the Nordics. Korea, even though being a vassel of China in almost entire written history, has been an independent kingdom most of the time (sometimes being a part of Imperial China).
Japan = sort of UK in racial make-ups as per explained above – The similarity btw the two ends where England started Industrial Revolution – a stunning civilisation-class rare feat, whereas Japan has never achieved anything similar in its history unfortunately, and was the first of the East Asia (including China/Korea/Japan) to surrender to American (Anglo-Saxens indeed) merchant fleets about 150 years ago. Japan, the weakest in East Asia at a time, ironically was the first of the East Asia to become industrialised due to this orginally tragic event, and led the rest of East Asia both in technology and GDP per cap till now, hence lauded today as “the smartest of the East Asia” overall the world (except in East Asia) … History, together with Panda, are both having a laugh.)
If you could please refrain from sounding like a Chinese teenager typing from mom’s basement, I’d appreciate it as it is quite silly, and detracts from a serious discussion.
If I could possibly take you away for a moment from a juvenile delusion of grandeur, I’d like to pose one question about this “lebensraum” theory (and it is quite generous to call it a theory), as it relates to Chinese history.
Given the continual success of invasions and dominations of Han Chinese lands and people by northern and eastern “barbarians” such as the Tanguts, the Tuoba, the Xianbei, the Jurchens, the Mongols, and the Manchus throughout pre-modern Chinese history, does it mean that when the Han Chinese had to kowtow to their steppe overlords, they were lower IQ people bowing to their higher IQ superiors?
There were Norsemen (Scandinavian) conquests and settlements in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, and via the Normans of France, Sicily. But when the invaders who become overlords are very few in number, they tend to assimilate into their conquered subjects’ language and culture, and their genes contribute only a small amount to the overall pool. See: http://www.unz.com/gnxp/cuius-regio-eius-religio-in-anglo-saxon-england/
As long as a country is a cultural leader it makes every sense to say they are probably of higher IQ. But since the 19th century Japan has surpassed China in every single civilizational indicator, and in fact probably earlier. I think by this very same argument we can safely say Japan has had a higher IQ since about the 16th century, that Korea has had a higher IQ since the early 20th perhaps, and that North Western Europe has had a higher IQ since maybe the late 18th century. India, since its had vast cultural influence on China without receiving any – any – reverse cultural inflow has probably had a higher IQ since the 6th century, I believe, when that monk, I forget his name, crossed the Himalaya and brought over Buddhism, and when most of Indochina and Indonesia was Indianized despite being geographically in China’s sphere. Uh-oh. Then of course the ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have had a higher IQ than China – going by civilizational leadership, of course – but they’re gone, so who cares. Probably the Renaissance Italians as well.
Then what are we to make of the fact that the Chinese spent most of the last thousand years conquered and ruled by various foreigners despite being, as described by themselves, the world’s foremost strategists, inheritors of the most subtle of ancient strategic texts that no other culture can apply with equal cunning? One simply does not know why the world’s foremost strategists, as described by themselves, and possessor’s of the worlds most subtle strategic text that no one can apply with as much cunning as they, spent the last thousand years being exploited and lorded over by motley bands of rude barbarians? It would almost seem as if they are NOT so smar…wait, nope, that cannot be thought. La la la la my hands are over my ears.
Anyways, all kidding aside the Chinese are a relic from the ancient world. They have about as much to contribute to the future of mankind as the ancient Sumerians. Its just that geographic isolation kept the Chinese preserved in amber. The Chinese have all the virtues of a once great people who have exhausted their talent. Thrift, frugality, industriousness, and a reasonable level of intelligence – after all, they’re not Africans – if a pronounced lack of genius. And an understandable nostalgia for when they last had civilizational relevance (civilizational, not economic), and, unfortunately, a childish jealousy of the many people’s who have greater civilizational relevance.
The Chinese attitude, if apt to provoke a smile, and perhaps a little bewilderment, on the part of non-Chinese, is perfectly understandable, and is the fate one sees developing among whites who are facing the exact same civilizational senescence.
Us whites are a few steps behind the Chinese on the path to irrelevance.
The future does not belong to whites, and certainly not to a race whose last real explosion of genius happened over 2,500 years ago, but to some new human combination not yet foreseen.
This should be obvious from any reading of history, but nobody wants to see the large picture. A people, once in decline, does not rise again. At best it achieves a kind of relative wealth and stability, like China might, and like Europe has.
No, they’re really, really bad arguments. In fact they’re little more than excuses and special pleading. I’ve explained this on other threads and the usual response is a deafening silence. But its easy to realize if you just apply some thought to history. Hint; when Einstein was working out his theories he didn’t need fancy infra, nor when all those European math geniuses were doing their thing. And wars, disease, political instability, bad roads, no roads, were endemic to Europe. In fact China was way more developed than the West till quite late. Maybe, one can argue, that at this late date, some kinds of contributions need great infrastructure, but China encountered the West in the 16th century, had an accelerated encounter in the 19th when it tried VERY hard to do what the West did.
This should be decisive; one would expect the Chinese to have produced better thinkers than Europe in just ONE field – ONE. Not even two. Not even three. Some field that doesn’t take infra. Like, say, math. Yet all the math geniuses, the ones who really developed, weren’t Chinese, and Terence Tao isn’t close to the old math giants. Or political science. China had wars and political instability? Oh, right, Europe didn’t. Got it.
This is silly. People who don’t want to get it won’t. I can’t repeat myself a million times it won’t make any difference.
lol. Of course not, partially because you gave away some parts of my answers in your not-entirely-true-question yourself:
they were not successful neigher – at least not at all in retrospective, as what’s the point of been assimilated yourself by attacking someone, a bit like is that a “success” breaking into a bank touching gold bars with both hands but ending up being caught with life-in-jail?
only the Mogols and the Manchus “succeded” for however short period of time (so succesful that they end up lossing themselves all together though), the rest no. Much more importantly, on both occassions it had not too much to do with IQ whatsoever. On the contrary, it’s much more precise to say that millitarily, culturally and technologically (both in quantity and in quality) vastly superior South Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty – argueablely both marking the pinnacle of human civilisation at its time – somehow * (i.e. the reason for that is another topic) committed suicides themselves before teh Mogols and the Manchus came, pretty much the similar way how California giving up to Mexico nowadays. You tell Panda that it was due to “high IQ”. Right, California, bow to higher IQ Mexico! These events are called inccidents, which do happen from time to time in anyone’s history, but they can not be sustained long though.
And ironicly both inccidents had made China a giant step backward in relation to the rest of the world. The latest Manchus’ Qing Dynasty directly cost China missing the train of Industrailisation, lossing Korea and Taiwan to then-just-industrialised Japan, alongwith the most recent “100 years humiliations” at the hands of the Eorupean powers and mad Bolsheviks revolution till today, when a Han Chinese such as Panda writes English in an English forum defending “East Asian Mediocrity” – how friggin ironic is this? Shall Panda thank the Manchus for their “higer” IQ? Historically, all Han-Chinese-dominated Chinese dynasties, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Ming were amongst the world’s (i.e. as far as people could reach at a time) most advanced technologically and culturally, if not just the downright #1, in the last 2,000 years without exception, oke, except “higher” IQ Manchus and Mogols-led China, my goodness! LOL
and “kowtow to” them? Are you aware that “kowtow” was originally a Han Chinese word, describing people bowing according to Confucius courtesies trying to make guan xi. Mind you “higher IQ steppe overlorads”were kowtowing, not being kowtowed by the Han, by classic textbook definition.
… Panda can go on.
Precisely! Thank you for bringing it up. As your example showed that not every invaders have higher IQ than the locals. This example didn’t show that the Nordics ( the Norse) had superior IQ than the locals in the Western Europe , as in fact they bonded to meet many Germanics local tribes there, too. It showed that their IQ edge over the locals was at least not clear- cut , or on the contrary inferior in many cases, for their being assimilated themselves in the end. What’s the point invading someone but ending up being eliminated by the latter out of existance? To prove the the former having guts to invade but no brains? Sorry, but Panda just can’t comprehend this logic.
Your mistakes in above statement are :
you’ve mixed up “a point in time” and “longer time frames”. IQ won’t jump and fall like a tennis ball so often and so fast. IQ is relatively consistent over time. Hence to evaluate IQ through events, you need to look at “longer time frame” events themselves instead of “a point in time” single event – so-called a “cheap & dirty snapshot”. A counter example: Libya was the richest country per cap and culturally quite liberal ( In Arab’s standard) in Africa during Gaddafi time, months later ME Springs came, and it became both an economic and a cultural backwater. Trust Panda, if tomorrow Libya got a stable govt and full endorsement of all 5 members of the UNSC, it will be up again. Ditto Egypt. So, IQ of the Libyans and the Egyptians went from 85 to 70 to 85 over the course of several years according to you? LOL.
you’ve idealised and over-simplised “the reason why one becomes advanced or backwards”. They are many reasons, with some due to IQ, and the others due to whatever, ok? One needs to carefully analise which is which. No easy shortcut there. A quick counter : North Korea is a cultural backwater (despite the objection from the Dear Leader himself 🙂 ), agreed? South Korea is a culturally advanced according to you, oke? Now the Koreans are both the highest IQ and the lowest IQ then? depending on what? tomorrow’s weather? Ditto China or Japan or whichever, such examples are endless.
That’s just grossly over the top.
I think the Chinese average IQ will probably rise a bit as favorable environmental factors rise (urbanization up, malnutrition down). Their civilizational contribution, as such, will continue to increase.
So what’s your explanation for this? That East Asians just became really genius-y in the last twenty years or so?
It’s now clear to me that I am arguing with a juvenile (and nascent) Sino-supremacist who doesn’t understand much science or history.
Yes, indeed, and that’s why I used it. You obviously don’t understand irony. I thought the image of the historical Han Chinese robed elites prostrating themselves under smelly barbarian overlords and giving up their wives and daughters as tribute would set you off. I was not disappointed.
No? So what happened to the “Lebensraum” argument then? I thought high IQ people invaded and displaced low IQ people in desirable lands?
Desire for, conquest and settlement of, “living space” have little to do with IQ differentials. You might wish to read scientists such as Kanazawa, Lynn, and Rushton regarding the topic. I have neither the time nor patience to give you that education. Then come back and we’ll argue some more. Until then, good luck to you.
Have you realised that blue-faced ad-hominen attack without some true essense,or humour at least,is a good sign of having lost an argument? 🙂
I don’t get your irony unfortuantely. Mind you that “tributary” system is yet another Chinese-origin expression. Panda sees that Chinese cultural influences run deep in your heart, don’t they? 🙂
LoL. Does it matter that Panda was PhD valedictorian, oke, 2 PhDs, of one of the best schools in the world 2 decades ago, or only a poor farmer digging my own wells selling rice balls in a West China bamboo village?
I have to say that you’ve got your logic a bit messed up there unfortunately, don’t you pal? On top of that, you seem to have a consistent strong urge of putting up strawmen whenever you’re forced into the corner, don’t you? —
Where did Panda argued for ” Desire for, conquest and settlement of, “living space” have sth to do with IQ differentials. “?
Actually every group, regardless of IQ, desire for conquest and settlement of “living space” – that’s just basic human instinct. Yet only the higher IQ groups succeed in doing so from the angle of full course of the recorded history – and that’s what Panda argued for all along. Pretty simple stuff, isn’t it?
Above 2 are completely different arguments, don’t you realise?
Your Norseman example , as I showed earlier, only proved the following and nothing more:
they likely had high IQ in relation to the locals during their conquest, judging by the fact they won at some stages.
yet their IQ edge over some of the local groups is not clear-cut, or even lower than some local groups judging by the fact they eventually got themselves eliminated / assimilated by the locals in the long run. That’s just hilarious, isn’t it?
No one knows how high are the IQ of the Norseman including themselves (or how high is the IQ of any group for that matter) at a time without comparison.
We know that they tried to conquer, they succeed at some early stage, yet they finally failed.
Then, and only then, we started to know sth about IQ of the Norseman in relation to the locals they tried to conquer, is that right?
Therefore, it doesn’t contradict at all with Panda’s Lebensraum theory which still stands.
Let me sum up what I wrote on Panda’s Lebensraum:
Bearing Panda’s Lebensraum in mind, a quick glance at today’s world map could even give a new extraterrestrial arrival from Jupiter some pretty decent hints on human IQ distributions, after warning them ignoring temporarily Africa, S America, and any possible territorial expansions post WW2 since we could go nuclear now.
These are just some very easy stuff – no quantum leaps of thoughts are required.
Panda is 99% sure that there must be half a dozen similar theories already in the academia in this field. If not, Panda would be very perssimistic about intellectual future of the human race.
Scientists such as Jensen, Lynn, Rushton or Murray/Herrstein, Gottfredson,Harpenning, etc alike have at least two black holes commonly shared in their theories as far, and as soon, as Panda could see, the holes are so big that could potentially make their theories into a house of cards. Panda shall wait to see who in the HBD world has the intellectual and the courage to point them out?
BTW, is it that hard to admit “oke, I concede the argument”? ROFL.
Dear Panda:
I did not have the enthusiasm to read all this discussion. Can you kindly announce, what are
“two black holes commonly shared in their theories as far, and as soon, as Panda could see, the holes are so big that could potentially make their theories into a house of cards.”
Respectfully, F.r.
Dear Florida Resident,
Thank you for your polite words, but Panda has to announce that whenever reading serious books, Panda almost always sees 2 big black holes together with a bunch of stars getting me dizzy… really! 🙂
Very tremblingly yours,
[email protected]
While the term “kowtow” is of Chinese origin, the English word “tribute” is of Latin origin, i.e. tributum, meaning contribution or tax. The Chinese neither invented nor monopolized the concept of buying peace with gold (or silk or women, etc.). But they were awfully good paying out Danegeld.
As for the rest of your “legend in your own mind” stuff, good luck to you arguing with Rushton et al. in your mind. As the saying goes, “Don’t try to teach a pig how to sing. You will annoy the pig, and it still won’t sing.”
Chinese sense of “tributary”(system) , however, went far beyond what Latin, or other major languages, could possiblely capture. There is no phrase, for instance, in European and other non-Chinese (possiblely excluding Korean and Japanese languages as you guys use Han Chinese characters instead) languages , as far as Panda is aware, that could describe the full scope of “王道” philosophy imbedded in the Chinese “tributary” (system). It is simplely because they just haven’t developed the thought hence no the equivalent in their vocabularies – one of the major reasons why the chance of any Chinese classics winning the West-focused Nobel Literature was, is, and will be practically zero as one could never get even a half-decent translation, the politically motivated aside.
Actually the late Rushton’s major work is the least problematic of them all IMO. Panda won’t debate him.
Still couldn’t believe that Panda was that rude… 🙂 but I hope that you do realise that your question could potentially put Panda in grave danger by being possiblely targeted as a prime suspect of Enemy of the State of HBD, before getting Watsoned by both camps, don’t you? LoL
oops…again
@Florida resident
Still couldn’t believe that Panda was that rude… 🙂 but I hope that you do realise , as you’re comfortablely sitting on the Florida beach, that your question could potentially put Panda in grave danger by being possiblely targeted as a prime suspect of Enemy of the State of HBD, before getting Watsoned by both camps, don’t you? LoL
Dear Panda:
To be “getting Watsoned“,
you should better produce first the regular work at James Watson’s level.
Your F.r.
I seriously doubt Sephardic Jews (or non-Yemenite Mizrahi Jews) have a low IQ considering they outperform white Christians in every western society they settle in, and it’s been that way for centuries. Furthermore, as someone has pointed out they have a very high number of Nobel Prize winners, way out of proportion for their numbers.
Regarding East Asian mediocrity, could it be because they are just simply boring people? Most seem to lack any intellectual curiosity. Most are never interested in politics, history, science or literature. They tend to read books only for the purpose of passing exams at school or university. They just don’t seem passionate about many serious things and that could contribute to their lack of success in intellectual fields and also commerce. It would be interesting to see how well the large western-born Asian diaspora does in winning Nobel Prizes and other things, though.
Hey, how does it feel to be a complete racist evil scumbag?
It’s John Watson whom Panda referred to, not James dear.
Actually it’s not fair, Panda got Watsoned simplely due to the rule that no legs are allowed. LoL.
Please elaborate. Because the infrastructure of modern,20th c. America, was pretty well in place by the early years of the 20th century. There were so many patents in the early 1800s that someone actually suggested, in 1844, that the patent office be closed because everything that could be invented had been invented. Yankee ingenuity, etc. Americans were constantly inventing–I’m kind of in awe of the 19th c. and early 20th century. Many inventions were improvements and modifications of already invented things like trains. The first automobile was actually put together in a civil war camp, and the first auto accident was in 1869. Then there was the airplane in 1903. Of course Nicola Tesla (greater than Edison) was an immigrant, but he came in the 1880s. Alexander Graham Bell was from Scotland (famed for its inventors) but he invented the phone in the U.S.
America was already known for its practical inventions and high standard of living. It would not have attracted so many immigrants, especially in the urban areas, if it had not been.
OK, 一不做, 二不休, 俺豁出去了！ROFL. Since Panda is getting bored, let’s start with the holes, shall we?
Hole 1:
IQ ranking is calculated by the sum of two parts namely verbal IQ and spatial IQ, right?
Are there any theoretical and/or empirical evidences that
1 verbal IQ unit/point = 1 spatial IQ unit/point ?
This, at least, will affect hugely on groups with similar IQs.
NO? Zilch? Zero?
How about let’s assume that they are equivalent IQ points?
—-Panda says: assumptions are the mother of all screw ups, mostly. How this time is special? ROFL
Excuse Panda’s poor reading volumn in the field , Lynn, etc can argue until their faces turn green (despite the fact that their IQ studes might be rigorously done), but if there isn’t any strong evidence here (pls reminds me that I might have overlooked many of their works that have touched the point), first thing first – the current global IQ ranking list can to garbage bin now, ok?
The only thing that could be temporally done instead is perhaps to have 2 separate IQ rankings, one on verbal scores, with the other on spatial scores – they have nothing to do with each other, for now.
(There’re indeed more small holes along this hole that Panda shall ignore for the time being.)
Hole 2: Jensen, Lynn, Murray, Gottfredson, Harpenning, etc contradict Rushton.
Rushton is presumablely one of the pillars of HBD with his Negorord-Caucasoid-Mongoloid 3-way distribution evidenced by respective average brain sizes, reproduction level, Personality, Maturation and Social Organisation, etc., right?
Likely so, at least Rushton’s structure and logic appear to Panda elegantly simple with quite a lot evidences and predicting power.
Then how come Ashkenazi Jewish people, widely recognised as an European sub group (Caucasoid) , or at least Eurasian (Caucasoid-Mongoloid mix) at the start but Caucasoid by and large nowadays, have the highest “IQ” (i.e. temporarily forget about Hole 1 here), claimed by Jensen, Lynn, Murray, Gottfredson, Harpenning, etc?
Don’t get Panda wrong, obviously Ashkenazi Jewish people are smart people, but in addition to the downright contradiction to Rushton´s 3-way distribution logic, the way that Jensen, Lynn, Murray, Gottfredson, Harpenning etc claim so (e.g. with some % of this and that prizes won by Ashkenazi Jewish people, etc., as Panda refuted in post 168) are just borderline-stupid, if not PCly-way too smart.
Now, If Rushton is wrong and Lynn-Murray-Harpenning are correct, then we can just dump the corresponding hormone level, motor-dental development speed, life span, mental health, brain size, “IQ”, etc., all together, right? It is simplely because they are pretty much meaningless as the Ashkenazi Jewish people on average may not have the largest brain size, or may not have the least mental health issues, just for the starter, right?
(the same as Hole 1, Hole 2 has many small holes along its line, too, that Panda shall forego for the time being)
See? 2 big black holes in HBD IQ.
What? HK 108, S Koran 106, Ashkenazi Jews: 115? Europeans 100, … yeah right, ROFL
This is not to say that entire or general direction of the research is useless or even remotely to that, but certainly there appear to be some present and potent issues for HBD world to reconcile before issuing a decent global IQ ranking list, right?
The bad news, nonetheless, is:
there are at least 2 black holes as Panda sees thus far, which means that holes , big and small, small and big, are about all over the places. These 2 birdies are merely a starter.
[email protected] seems more appropriate now, huh? ROFL
Dear Panda:
The reason of my reaction was this.
I have a colleague who complains that he suffers from “grapho-phobia”, i.e. he can’t make himself to describe his results in the form of a manuscript for publication.
He says: “Just like *** “, with *** being the name of particular outstanding Prize Winner in our field.
Meanwhile the results in question, being technically correct, are quite below the Prize level.
Sincerely best, F.r.