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 | | IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen ISBN-10: 9780275975104 ISBN-10: 0-275-97510-X ISBN-13: 9780275975104 ISBN-13: 978-0-275-97510-4 Hardcover 2002-02-28 Praeger Publishers Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Lynn and Vanhanen test the hypothesis on the causal relationship between the average national intelligence (IQ) and the gap between rich and poor countries by empirical evidence. Based on an extensive survey of national IQ tests, the results of their work challenge the previous theories of economic development and provide a new basis to evaluate the prospects of economic development throughout the world. They begin by reviewing and evaluating some major previous theories. The concept of intelligence is then described and intelligence quotient (IQ) introduced. Next they show that intelligence is a significant determinant of earnings within nations, and they connect intelligence with various economic and social phenomena. The sociology of intelligence at the level of sub-populations in nations is examined, and the independent (national IQ) and dependent (various measures of per capita income and economic growth rates) variables are defined and described. They then provide empirical analyses starting from the 81 countries for which direct evidence of national IQs is available; the analysis is then extended to the world group of 185 countries. The hypothesis is tested by the methods of correlation and regression analyses. The results of statistical analyses support the hypothesis strongly. The results of the analyses and various means to reduce the gap between rich and poor countries are discussed. A provocative analysis that all scholars, students, and researchers involved with economic development need to confront. | ||
Reviews | ||
Genetic Engineering Will Equalize World's IQ At 200 And Beyond As a bioengineering student, I have become convinced that this new and exciting science will soon begin to identify groups of genes that increase intelligence, and that people will iteratively and voluntarily redesign the DNA of their progeny accordingly. The curve will be exponential, meaning the smarter we become, the smarter we'll want to be, and the more capable we'll be of implementing it. Very quickly, within several generations, the world's IQ will equalize toward the high end of the existing range, somewhere around 200. At that point, with billions of people with IQ's of 200, things will really start to get interesting, and fun. The real question is, how intelligent can life become? Is there a physical limit? In addition, race as we know it today will become obsolete, since we'll be blending DNA from all races, and perhaps species, together on a regular basis. After that, we'll be creating new genes that have never existed, and from there life will transform into anything we can imagine. Since nobody likes traveling alone, we'll probably move along this transformation curve together. So instead of worrying too much about the differences in IQ, we should all be working to speed up our inevitable future, it's going to be great! | ||
A dagger in the heart of equalitarians This book has, not surprisingly, aroused a great deal of controversy. The thesis is fairly simple: I.Q. highly correlates with the wealth (measured either as GNP per capita, or GDP per capita) of a nation. The authors use I.Q. as their independent variable to predict wealth with regression analysis. Most of the scholarly apparatus is confined to the appendices, which makes for a smooth read. Why the fuss? No surprise, the authors find that whites and asians have higher I.Q. scores than do dark-skinned individuals. In fact, they claim that the average I.Q. in sub-saharan Africa is 70! Is it any wonder to anyone then that Africa is so poor, desolate and disease ridden? It must be said that the authors leave themselves open to methodological criticism. For example, heritability within a population cannot be used to deduce the heritiability between populations in different environments. (Although, research by Rushton and others has conclusively shown that heritability in intelligence tends to work similarly between and within groups.) This aside, the thesis is extremely attractive, and the analysis shows the statistical power of using I.Q. as a predictor of national wealth. I fear that the book may be a bit simplistic- nuance doesn't seem to be a strength of either author. Whatever the verdict on this book, those who wish to read about global stratification would be remiss to ignore it just because it doesn' t mesh with their ideology of global meliorism. Perhaps the weakest part of the book is the discussion on the intelligence of heads of state. Here the authors claim that stupid countries have been hindered by stupid leaders. An example: Lenin was not very bright and he launched Russia down the idiotic road of communism! This anecdotal story telling doesn't impress. Are we really to think that Lenin was any dimmer than Truman? The authors should have left this part of the book out. It is clear that ideology, rather than intelligence, was the driving force behind the insalubrious path that many communist countries took. All things considered: read, enjoy, but make sure to down this with a few grains of salt. | ||
Interesting but probably rendered obsolete by the Flynn effect This is an unfair review since this book was published back in 2002, but the key ideas of this book may have been rendered obsolete by James Flynn's new paradigm on IQ, which he describes in "What is Intelligence" (2007). The Flynn effect basically observes that raw IQ scores have risen dramatically world-wide over the past 50 years- not on all test questions- but on the abstract ones- the ones that suposedly best reflect innate intelligence. IQ does reflect heredity, but it also reflect several other factors so it's essentially an achievement test then. (Recent work on epigenetics- gene switches- also cast further doubts on the conclusions of "Wealth".) If Flynn is proven right, then in the future, your IQ will be like your current salary as opposed to the convention that IQ represent some kind of maximum cap. | ||
The rebuttal for a terrible book... In this book, Lynn and Vanhanen argue that the great variation in the per capita wealth of nations is caused by the differences of the mental capacity between poor and rich countries. Western countries are rich because white people are smart. African nations are poor because black people are not as smart. According to the authors this gap between the mental capacity of whites and blacks may persist into the indefinite future or may never be closed so citizens of rich countries must accept the responsibility to support citizens of poorer nations. Unfortunately for the authors and many fans of their argument the case is not all that convincing and there are much better explanations and devastating counterarguments that destroy their case. Some of you may see this argument as a variation of the `White Man's Burden' argument that many of us grew up with. We were told that those Chinese, Indians and Blacks had no capacity to look after themselves and that it was up to the old Union Jack or Stars and Stripes to show them what they must do to have better lives. While these unfortunates were certainly expected to work hard and do their bit we whites would do the thinking and managing so that everything can turn out all right and the world could become a better place. Recent history has caused the supporters to rethink part of that argument. It now seems that Asians have been rehabilitated and are not nearly as hopeless as many white scholars and `humanitarians' in the past said that they were. It seems that it wasn't mental capacity but something else that was the cause of their previous condition. But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves; we'll get back to that argument a bit later after we go over some deficiencies in the book. Some of you may remember another book that made an attempt to answer the question of why the rate of development was so different on the different contents. That book was Jarred Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning, Guns, Germs & Steel. Given the fact that at the beginning of his book Mr. Diamond argued that, "New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans," and gave coherent arguments to explain why different continents developed at different rates it is no surprise that Lynn and Vanhanen attacked Jared Diamond's thesis that geography has been the primary cause of this discrepancy and they make the attack early. While I have my own problems with Mr. Diamond and remain unconvinced by his thesis, Lynn and Vanhanen's arguments are very weak and somewhat puzzling. Although their book is full of figures and references that makes it seem scholarly and they make a comprehensive attack on Mr Diamond's book they seem not to have read it. For example, right at the beginning of their book Lynn and Vanhanen argue that Africans didn't put enough effort to domesticate buffalo, wildebeests and zebras. The implication is that if they had done so their level of development may have been much higher. But the argument is foolish and had they read Mr. Diamond's book or had some general knowledge of the subject the authors would have found a good explanation about why the domestication never happened. Let us begin with the zebra. Many attempts have actually been made to train zebras for riding because they are resistant to African diseases that kill horses. Those attempts have failed because, as Mr Diamond points out, zebras have an unpredictable nature, panic under stress, cannot be caught easily by rope and do not seem to want to want to let go when they bite. Whites, Indians and Chinese have lived in Africa for a long period of time and they have not been able to domesticate the zebra any better than the native Africans. Let us move to the African buffalo. Unlike the Asian water buffalo, which is a gentle animal that is easy to domesticate, the African buffalo is an extremely dangerous animal. (The two animals are not closely related.) Many consider the African buffalo to be the most dangerous mammal on the continent and it has been known to kill people, lions, hyenas and most other mammals that it comes across. Even hunters are weary of the animal because wounded buffalo have been known to ambush and attack their pursuers. As Mr Diamond points out, many people have attempted to train small calves but had to kill them when they get too large and too dangerous. Like the zebra, the wildebeest is very unpredictable and reacts badly to stress. All efforts to domesticate it have failed and that includes efforts by the European settlers who have been on the continent for more than three centuries. The bottom line is that if these animals could have been domesticated they would have been domesticated. In another example of very sloppy scholarship the authors also argue that Africans should have domesticated guinea fowl, rice, millet sorghum, and yams. Of course, had they read Jared Diamond's book or knew something about the continent they would have known that these species were actually domesticated by Africans long before Europeans settled on the continent. And given the fact that no new species have been domesticated since whites started to live on the African continent I think that it can safely be argued that the Africans did a good job of domesticating all of the animals that could have been domesticated. While I may seem to be hung up on Lynn and Vanhanen's unsuccessful attack on Mr. Diamond it is important to consider that if the authors fail to discredit Mr. Diamond's thesis their conclusions may not even be as good as Mr. Diamond's and his is also very unconvincing. The authors go after Mr. Diamond for making the subjective argument about intelligence and claim their approach to be much more scientific and objective. While that may be true I am not certain that their tests are a better assessment of intelligence than decades of real interaction and observation by Mr. Diamond. A lot can be written about how test taking skills can improve results even if intelligence is not affected. I remain unconvinced that proper adjustments can and have been made to eliminate these types of errors. But there is no need to go there because the author's failure is easy to establish even if they were correct about a lot of what they write about. While the authors include a lot of data and quote extensively from others that support their thesis their argument is not convincing. They make a claim that around 80% of a persons IQ is dependent on genes. While that may be defensible the jump to an assertion that 80% of the nation's mean IQ is due to genetic influence may not be so easily defended. After all, the variation between cultures may be traced to environmental circumstances even if within the culture most of the IQ could be traced to some genetic factors. Norwegians may not be better cross country skiers than Jamaicans because of some genetic advantage but because they live in a country where there is a lot of snow and a culture that supports skiing. One of the reviews that I looked at made a point that I agree with. The authors treat `heredity' and `the environment' as totally independent variables but anyone who has read Mr Diamond's book or has some common sense is likely to understand that they are intertwined. More than a million years ago one of our ancestors was a creature with a very small brain because of very strong jaw muscles that were used to chew the abundant food that was easily found in the local environment. While there was a mutation where some individuals in the population had much larger brains because of much weaker jaw muscles intelligence was not a large advantage because greater intelligence did not count for much at a time when food was abundant. But when climate changes made the area drier and the abundant fruits disappeared the mutated population grew and displaced the less intelligent group that could not adjust to the changing conditions. Similarly, if you were a farmer in a low tech pre-industrial world where there wasn't much of a surplus and daily life was a struggle, endurance and a strong back were likely to be of much more use than intelligence. It is only when there is a certain level of abundance and the complexity that comes with it when a premium is placed on intelligence. If Socrates was a subsistence farmer he would not have had the time or stimulus to develop such a sharp mind. One can also make the argument that the complexity of urban life increases intelligence and that Westerners owe much of their high IQ to their higher level of urbanization but once again, we don't have to go there to discredit the conclusions of the authors. While the book has some arguments and data that are of interest I do not believe that the authors are convincing. They, and many others who work in this field, fit Nassim Taleb's definition of empty suits. They are very intelligent individuals who try to explain complex systems that defy simple explanations and cannot be analyzed with the tools that are being used. (For a much more comprehensive explanation of this point you may wish to look at Nassim Taleb's great book, The Black Swan.) My own guess is that some nations are a lot wealthier than others because of economic liberty and property rights. One can look to China and Vietnam and find that the same people who were poor not that long ago now have a standard of living that is significantly higher. I do not believe that Lynn and Vanhanen can make the argument that the Chinese or Vietnamese got a lot smarter in a very short period of time or that an increase in IQ is the cause of that increase in wealth. (Well, they do but the argument isn't convincing.) On the other hand many writers have made the argument that when Asian nations turned their back on socialism and moved towards freer, market oriented economies they got richer. Africans and Latin American's didn't and remained much poorer. The explanation is a lot better and much more convincing than the one that Lynn and Vanhanen provide in their very expensive book. Don't waste your time or money on this book when there are so many good books and good authors that are much more deserving. | ||
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics Well.. What is IQ? Even relatively speaking, it should only classify people between Haves and Have Nots. Its low IQ to think that national IQ average can predict wealth of nations. | ||