FW: Bell-curve racism for nations

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well,

Apparently, you progressive economists got it all wrong. It is
the IQ stupid.

Sabri

-----Original Message-----
From: wsn-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 6:25 AM
To: wsn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; psn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
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Subject: Bell-curve racism for nations


(I received this from John Landon, a Marxism list
subscriber who ran into it on the evo-psych mailing
list, an influential forum with thousands of
subscribers. Phillipe Rushton is a well-known racist
who has appeared on platforms with the ultra
right-wing National Party in Great Britain. What's
next? Academic articles and books arguing for eugenics?)

The Intelligence Of Nations

A review
By Philippe Rushton

IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Richard Lynn and Tatu
Vanhanen, Westport, CT: Praeger (2002), 256 pp., U.S.
$64.95 (Hdbk.) ISBN 0-275-97510-X (Available
from amazon.com)

IQ and the Wealth of Nations. is a brilliantly-conceived,
superbly-written, path-breaking book that does for the
global study of economic prosperity what The Bell Curve
did for the USA. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen examine
IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 countries. They
document that national differences in wealth are explained
most importantly by the intelligence levels of the populations.
They calculate that mean national IQ correlates powerfully
--more than 0.7--with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
National IQs predict both long-term and short term economic
growth rates. Second in importance is whether the countries
have market or socialist economies. Only third is the
widely-credited factor of natural resources, like oil.

One arresting fact emerges: the average national IQ of the
world is only 90. Fewer than one in five countries have IQs
equal or near the British average of 100. Almost half have
IQs of 90 or less. This poses a serious problem if the book's
conclusion that IQ = 90 forms the threshold for a
technological economy is correct.

Lynn and Vanhanen review the theories advanced over the last
250 years to explain why some countries are rich while others
are poor. These include: climate theories (temperate zones are
said to be best); geographic theories (an East-West Axis is
said to be best); modernization theories (urbanization and
division of labor are said to be good); dependency
theories (exploitation and peripheralization of poor nations
are said to be bad); neoliberal theories (market economies are
said to be good); psychological theories (cultural values
like thriftiness, the Protestant Ethic, and motivation for
achievement are said to be good). Some of these
factors no doubt play a role. But it turns out that IQ that
does the heavy lifting.

Next, Lynn and Vanhanen review the scientific literature and
find that IQ is an important determinant of educational
attainment, earnings, economic success, etc. In the United
States and Britain, the correlation between IQ and earnings
for individuals is approximately 0.35. (That is, cleverness is
a fairly loose guarantee of economic success for an individual,
but is significant across an entire population. If you bet on
it at a gaming table you wouldn't win on every throw, but you
would make a lot of money over an evening.) Of course, it makes
sense that intelligence determines earnings. More intelligent
people learn more quickly, solve problems more effectively,
can be trained to acquire more complex skills, and work more
productively and efficiently.

Nations whose people have high IQ levels also have high
educational attainment and large numbers of individuals
who make significant contributions to national life.
On the flipside, nations with low levels of intelligence
have low levels of educational attainment and few individuals
who make significant contributions. Low intelligence leads
to unfavorable social outcomes like crime, unemployment,
welfare dependency, and single motherhood.

Lynn and Vanhanen prove that the widespread though rarely
stated assumption of economists and political scientists
--that all peoples and nations have the same average IQ--
is wildly wrong. Their evidence documents substantial
national differences in average intelligence. The highest
average IQs are found among the Oriental countries of
North East Asia (average IQ = 104), followed by the European
nations (average IQ = 98), and the mainly White
populations of North America and Australasia (average IQ = 98).
Further behind are the countries of South and Southwest Asia,
from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia
(average IQ = 87), as are the countries of South East Asia
and the Pacific Islands (average IQ = 86), and Latin America
and the Caribbean (IQ = 85). Lowest are the countries of
Africa (average IQ = 70).

Lynn and Vanhanen find that some countries do have higher
or lower per capita incomes than their national IQ averages
would predict. This is where having a market or socialist
economy or sitting atop a sea of crude oil comes in.

Some of the countries with a higher per capita income than
would be predicted from their average IQs are Australia,
Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland,
Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, and the U.S.
Except for Qatar, South Africa, and Barbados, all
of these are technologically highly developed market economies.
Qatar's exceptionally high per capita income comes from oil
exporting, which is actually managed and controlled by
corporations and people from European and North American
countries.
South Africa's much higher than expected per capita income
derives from the high performance of the industries
established and managed by the country's European minority.
Similarly, Barbados's above average wealth comes from its
well-established tourist industry and financial services,
which are owned, controlled and managed by American and
European countries.

Some of the countries with lower per capita income
than would be predicted from their average IQ: Bulgaria, China,
Hungary, Iraq, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, Romania,
Russia, Thailand, and Uruguay. Most of these are present or
former socialist countries. Iraq has suffered from losing
the Gulf War and a decade of UN trade sanctions. The large
amount of ethnic conflict in the Philippines decreased growth.

Lynn and Vanhanen provide a detailed examination how well
IQ theory stacks up against its competitors. For example,
two significant exceptions to the view that a tropical
climate is detrimental to wealth are Singapore and
Hong Kong, which lie in the tropical zone but are rich.
Conversely, Lesotho and Swaziland are temperate, lying
slightly south of the Tropic of Capricorn, but poor. These
differences, however, can be explained in terms
of intelligence theory. The people of Singapore and Hong
Kong belong to the ethnic group with the highest average
IQs; the people of Lesotho and Swaziland belong to the ethnic
group with the lowest.

Modernization theories, according to which all economies
would evolve from subsistence agriculture through to various
stages of urbanization and industrialization, have worked for
Western Europe and the Pacific Rim but have failed for the four
remaining groups of nations (South Asia, the Pacific Islands,
Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa). IQ and the Wealth
of Nations proposes that modernization theories describe Western
Europe and the Pacific Rim because these countries have
appreciably
the same or somewhat higher IQs than in the United States. But
they did not work for the other four groups of countries because
average IQs are below the technological threshold.

But why did the peoples of East Asia, with their high IQs,
lag behind the European peoples until the second half of the 20th
Century? Well, China's science and technology were generally more
advanced than Europe's for around two thousand years, from about
500 B.C. up to around 1500 A.D. But in the 15th century, Chinese
inventiveness came to an end and from that time on virtually all
the important advances were made by Europeans, first in Europe
and
later in the U.S. The explanation may be that Europeans developed
the market economy, while China stagnated through authoritarian
bureaucracy and central planning.

The failure of Japan to develop economically until the late
19th  century is largely attributed to a regulated economy
and isolation  from the rest of the world. By 1867-68 a
revolution
occurred and  the new rulers embarked on a program to modernize
Japan by adopting  Western education and technology, and by
freeing up the economy by transforming state monopolies into
private corporations. Much of the  Japanese economic success
in the 20th century was built by adopting  inventions made in
the West, improving them, and selling them more competitively
in world markets. Japan thereby built up its motorcycle,
automobile,
shipbuilding, and electronics industries.  Although it is
sometimes
asserted that the Japanese have not made any significant
scientific
and technological innovations of their own,  this underestimates
their technological achievements: the fiber-tipped pen (1960),
bullet trains traveling at 210 km per hour, much faster
than any Western trains (1964), laser radar (1966), quartz
watches (1967), VHS video home systems (1976), flat screen
televisions using liquid  crystal display (1979), video discs
(1980),
CD-ROM (read only memory) disks (1985), digital audio tape
(1987),
and digital networks for  sending signals along coaxial cables
and
optical fibers (1988).

African countries are at the opposite pole from China and
Japan in national IQ. This may explain why they are such
a major anomaly for modernization theory. The low rate of
economic growth of African countries following their
independence from colonial rule in the 1960s is one of the
major problems in developmental economics. During the years
1976-98, the average rate of economic growth per capita GNP
of the 41 countries of sub-Saharan Africa for which data are
available is much lower than in the rest of the world. Many
of the African countries actually suffered negative per capita
growth rate. Economists have quantified all possible factors,
such as climate, ethnic diversity, geography, mismanagement,
unemployment and the like, and compared the situation to
elsewhere
in the world, especially Asia. They concluded that these factors
do not provide a complete explanation and that there is some
"missing element." Some have suggested the low level of "social
capital,"  i.e., the widespread corruption and lack of trust in
commercial  relationships, poor roads and railways, unreliable
telephones  and electricity supplies, and the prevalence of
tropical diseases such as malaria.

IQ and the Wealth of Nations identifies IQ as the missing
link. Some of these "social capital" are actually manifestations
of a low level of intelligence in the populations. Poor
telephone services and electricity supplies, low agricultural
yields, and the poor advice given by government advisory boards
reflect low average IQ. With a mean IQ of 70, the populations
of Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic
growth achieved elsewhere in the world.

Finally, Lynn and Vanhanen peer into the future. They predict
future growth is most likely in countries with high national
IQ scores but currently bad economic systems. The countries of
the former Communist Bloc--Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania,
and the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam--are good bets.

What else can be done? Lynn and Vanhanen also list some of
the factors, some environmental and some genetic, that might
raise IQ scores and somewhat alleviate the disparities in
national average IQ. These include: better nutrition, education
and health; and ending the dysgenic fertility trends where the
lowest IQ people produce the most children. (Obviously,
immigration policy has a role to play too.)

The take-home message of IQ and the Wealth of Nations: national
differences in IQ are here to stay and so is the gap between
the rich and the poor countries. Political promises that the gap
is temporary, and will be remedied by aid from rich countries
to poor countries, or even by poor countries adopting appropriate
institutions, will not be fulfilled. Such promises assume that
all
human populations have equal mental abilities to adopt modern
technologies and to achieve equal levels of economic
development. They do not. The authors sound a clarion call for
the recognition of national and race differences in intelligence.

Adapted from:

The Bigger Bell Curve: Intelligence, National Achievement,
and The Global Economy, 22 October 2001, (PDF version) in
Elsevier Science journal Personality and Individual Differences)

Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University
of Western Ontario and the author of Race, Evolution, and
Behavior:
A Life History Perspective


Louis Proyect
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