IQ and the Wealth of Nations [Hardcover]

Richard Lynn (Author), Tatu Vanhanen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 027597510X | ISBN-13: 978-0275975104 | Publication Date: February 28, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Lynn and Vanhanen have made a major contribution to highlighting the importance of intellegence as one factor in accounting for disparities between rich and poor countries.”–Development Policy Review

“Lynn and Vanhanen have launched a powerful challenge to economic historians and development economists ...”–Heredity

“[A] brilliant integration of economics and psychology that illuminates the nexus between mental ability on the one hand, and national wealth, industrial productivity, and well being, on the other. This is a book that social scientists, policy experts, and global investment analysts cannot afford to ignore....Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's thesis is stunningly engineered to allow for no error of inference and no possible outcome than the correct one, strangely overlooked until now...IQ and the Wealth of Nations does for the study of human diversity and achievement among nations what The Bell Curve did for IQ and achievement in the USA.”–J. Phillippe Rushton Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Professor of Psychology, University of Western Ontario

About the Author

RICHARD LYNN is Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland.

TATU VANHANEN is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Tampere and Docent Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Praeger Publishers (February 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 027597510X
• ISBN-13: 978-0275975104
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,181,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

158 of 182 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars World-Historical Importance?, April 21, 2002

By 

Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Hardcover)

The book's content is irresistible - at its heart is a table of the average IQ scores of 81 different countries, drawn from studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The national average IQs range from 107 for Hong Kong to 59 for Equatorial Guinea.

Lynn and Vanhanen benchmarked their IQ results so that Britain is 100. America scores 98 on this scale, and the world average is 90. IQ's are assumed to form a normal probability distribution ("bell curve") with the standard deviation set at 15. Here are a few examples:

Nation Avg. IQ
Eq. Guinea 59
Nigeria 67
Barbados 78
Guatemala 79
India 81
Iraq 87
Mexico 87
Argentina 96
US 98
China 100
UK 100
Italy 102
Japan 105
Hong Kong 107

Admit it, you want to know what the rest of the table says! Beyond satisfying sheer curiosity, though, the strong correlation between IQ and the wealth of nations is of world-historical importance. From now on, no public intellectual can seriously claim to be attempting to understand how the world works unless he takes IQ into account.

How much can we trust these IQ results?

As soon as I received the book, I turned to Appendix 1, where Lynn and Vanhanen describe all 168 national IQ studies they've found - an average of just over two per country.

Are the results internally consistent? In other words, when there are multiple studies for a single country, do they tend to give roughly the same answer?

I expected a sizable amount of internal divergence. I spent 18 years in the marketing research industry, so I know how expensive it is to come up with a nationally representative sample. Further, Lynn and Vanhanen use results from quite different IQ tests. They rely most on the non-verbal Raven's Progressive Matrices, which were designed to be used across cultures, even by illiterates. Yet, they also have a lot of results from the Wechsler exams, which are more culture dependent - the Wechsler include a vocabulary subtest, for example. And they report results from other IQ tests, including a few from the oddball Goodenough-Harris Draw-A-Man test. Also, sample sizes vary dramatically, from a few dozen in some obscure countries to 64,000 for one American study. Finally, some studies were of children, others of adults.

This doesn't sound promising. Nevertheless, the results show a high degree of internal consistency. Here are the first eight countries for which they have multiple scores:

Argentina: 93 and 98
Australia: 97, 98, and 99
Austria: 101, 103
Belgium: 99, 103, 98
Brazil: 88, 84, 90, and 85
Bulgaria: 94, 91
China: 100, 92.5, 103.4
Democratic Republic of Congo: 73, 72

That's not bad at all. In fact, leaving aside China, the results are remarkably consistent. There are, of course, a few countries for which different studies came up with quite divergent results, especially Poland, where the two scores Lynn and Vanhanen found were 92 and 106. Still, the correlation among results when there are two or more studies for a country is a striking 0.94.

You shouldn't take every score on faith. The reported IQ for Israel (only 94????!!!) has elicited much criticism. Lynn has replied that he wanted to publish the data as he found it, even if some of it looked implausible. His hope is to encourage further research to resolve seeming anomalies.

The IQ structures of the two giga-countries, China and India, demand more intense study, in part because the future history of the world will hinge in no small part on their endowments of human capital. The demography of India is especially complex due to its caste system, which resembles Jim Crow on steroids and acid. By discouraging intermarriage, caste has subdivided the Indian people into an incredible number of micro-races. In India, according to the dean of population genetics, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, "The total number of endogamous communities today is around 43,000..." We know that some of those communities - such as the Zoroastrian Parsees of Bombay - are exceptionally intelligent.

But we can't say with any confidence what is the long run IQ potential of Indians overall. Their current IQ score (81) is low, especially compared to China (100), the other country with hundreds of millions of poor peasants. Yet, keep in mind just how narrow life in rural India was for so long. In 1952, on the fifth anniversary of independence, the Indian government commissioned a survey to find out if the average Indian villager had heard yet that the British had gone. The study was quietly cancelled when early results showed that the average villager had never heard that the British had ever arrived!

It appears likely that some combination of malnutrition, disease, inbreeding, lack of education, lack of mental stimulation, lack of familiarity with abstract reasoning and so forth can keep people from reaching their genetic potential for IQ. Lynn himself did early studies demonstrating that malnutrition drives down IQ. The co-authors conclude their book by recommending that

"The rich countries' economic aid programs for the poor countries should be continued and some of these should be directed at attempting to increase the intelligence levels of the populations of the poorer countries by improvements in nutrition and the like."

A clear example of how a bad environment can hurt IQ can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries. They average only around 70. In contrast, African-Americans average about 85. It appears unlikely that African-Americans' white admixture can account for most of this 15-point gap because they are only around 17%-18% white on average, according to the latest genetic research. (Thus African-Americans white genes probably couldn't account for more than 3 points of the gap between African-Americans and African-Africans.) This suggests that the harshness of life in Africa might be cutting ten points or more off African IQ scores.

Similarly, West Africans are significantly shorter in height than their distant cousins in America, most likely due to malnutrition and infections. The two African-born NBA superstars, Hakeem Olajuwon and Dikembe Mutombo, are both from the wa-benzi [people of the (Mercedes ) Benz]upper class. Only the elite in Africa gets enough food and health care to grow up to be NBA centers.

This also implies that African-Americans might be able to achieve higher IQs too, although the environmental gap between white Americans and black Americans appears to be much smaller than between black Americans and black Africans. As I pointed out in VDARE in 2000, the most promising avenue for improving African-Americans' IQs is by promoting breastfeeding among blacks mothers, who nurse their babies at much lower rates than whites.

In fact, we know that IQ is not completely fixed over time because raw test scores have been rising for decades, about 2 to 3 points per decade. To counteract this, the IQ test-making firms periodically make it harder - in absolute terms - to achieve a score of 100. Lynn was possibly the first scientist to make this phenomenon widely known, although New Zealand political scientist James Flynn has gotten more credit for this recently. And, indeed, Lynn and Vanhanen scrupulously adjust the test results in their book to account for when each test was taken.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars IQ and national prosperity -- a problem solved, December 14, 2002

By 

Chris Brand "crispian" (Edinburgh, Midlothian United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Hardcover)

This book must be a good candidate for being the most important book of the 21st century. British psychologist Richard Lynn and Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen find that recent IQ data from scores of countries world-wide show really strong correlations, of around r = .65, with national prosperity -- whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated for 1820 or for the 1990s. Quite contrary to the theorizing of most Western economists of the past fifty years, the underdeveloped (later, 'developing') countries of fifty years ago have not generally closed the gap with the help of ongoing Western handouts and advice. Clearly, several East Asian countries have in that time made enormous strides -- as may also happen soon in the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe; but in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. largely Black Africa), mean IQ estimates hover around 70 and progress has been slight. Of the world's 21 countries which steadily tripled their GDP from 1983 through 1990 and 1993 to 1996, none was on or near the African mainland; whereas of the 27 countries whose GDP decreased by 50%, ten were African (Angola, Burkina Faso, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Madagascar, Somalia, Sudan, Zambia and Sao Tome & Principe).

Yet will L&V prove persuasive about causation? Doubters will raise four particular problems.
First, IQ and the Wealth of Nations is published by an American mail order house which charges heavily for the book. Terrorized by the politically correct, mainstream Western 'publishers' have for ten years been entirely unwilling to bring out books that touch on race - whether by Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton or myself. Recently, it turned out that top psychologist Steven Pinker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who had converted to hereditarianism after hearing from friends how a second child was often very different from a first, felt he had to remove a chapter about race from the final draft of his new pro-heredity book, The Blank Slate. L&V are not alone in finding themselves up against the Zeitgeist, and the reception of their book has not so far been auspicious. L&V's reply will have to be that such repression indicates that the liberal-left consensus (which in 1950 persuaded the United Nations to declare all races to be of equal intelligence) is a hysteria that must one day lift.

Secondly, some will doubtless try to quibble with the IQ estimates that are the central novelty of IQ and the Wealth of Nations. L&V typically present some three 'normative' IQ studies for each of the countries they discuss; they do not provide details of social sampling; and they estimate IQ's for some nations by taking the average of the IQs in neighbouring countries - e.g. crediting Afghanistan with IQ 83 as an average of India's 81 and Iran's 84. Surprisingly, L&V maintain that the mean IQ in Israel is only 94 - ignoring the possibility that Sephardic Jews, like other Africans, may have special deficits in the visuo-spatial abilities that are needed to do well on 'culture-fair' intelligence tests like the famous Raven's Matrices. None of this is ideal. However, L&V have a very strong reply from both the general consistency of their IQ estimates and the sheer strength of IQ's correlations with national productivity. If workers had seriously confounded their assessments of national IQ, L&V would simply have had to present the usual miserably low correlations of around .25 that obtain throughout psychology and the social sciences. As it is, L&V have plainly struck gold.

Thirdly, there is the question of cause and effect. Can L&V convince us that IQ actually causes national wealth, rather than vice versa? The literature on the causal importance of IQ is only partially covered here, and L&V settle rather easily for the view that IQ and wealth will both tend to cause each other. This concession will weaken their case in the eyes of those who already deplore the idea that IQ is causal. L&V would have done better to point to the exceedingly slight IQ advantages accruing to Black children in the USA even when their fathers are seriously rich, and to the failure of the American Black-White gap in intelligence to decrease despite many billions of American dollars being thrown at the problem for the past forty years. Even a century of national impoverishment does not lower IQ -- as shown by the cases of mainland China, Poland and Russia in L&V's own data. By contrast, IQ correlates .50 with individual upward social mobility, relative to the position of the testee's father (Touhey, 1972). The simple truth is that a normal national IQ is necessary though not sufficient for prosperity; and that a low IQ holds whole countries back even if individuals can compensate for dullness by good looks or hard work. Neglecting such points, as also the full range of arguments that race differences are of substantially genetic origin, L&V will have partly themselves to blame if their book is set aside.

Lastly, L&V show remarkable modesty about the implications of their findings. This may have been intended as placatory; but it, too, will win them few friends. Rather than stress the need for eugenics in Africa, L&V conclude their book with two bizarrely half-hearted recommendations. The first is that the West should recognize continuing IQ differences and thus continue pumping subsidies into Africa as a matter of "ethical obligation." The second is that some fraction of this conscience money should be spent not on eugenics but on "improvements in nutrition and the like." No change there, then, for this is what the West has been doing ever since it abandoned the responsible idea of empire! It is remarkable that L&V should have troubled to write a 'controversial' book which cannot be published by a mainstream publisher only to come to such feeble practical recommendations. L&V have provided a way of forgetting their book which social-environmentalist ideologues will be desperately eager to take.

52 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book demands a rebuttal. Where is it?, June 29, 2003

By 

Graham H. Seibert (Kiev, Ukraine) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Hardcover)

Our society forms social policy, most recently the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action in Michigan, on the premise that all racial groups are equal. Not Lincoln's "all men are equal under the law" but "all men are equal".

We observe inequality in every aspect of life, most notably educational achievement and financial status. If, as society assumes, all people are equally capable of achievement, there has to be a conspiracy holding some peoples down. And what is it? White racism, they say, as if it could not be more obvious. Well hidden, but still manifest in "low expectations" and "subtle disparagement" etc. We white guys have broad shoulders, but jeez, it gets old after a while. Blacks and liberals have such low opinions of our fundamental morality, we descendants of the abolitionists who freed the slaves and were active partners of the NAACP over the years. It could start to affect our self esteem.

A similar conspiracy theory appears at the international level. African countries supposedly remain poor because they have been exploited by more advanced nations. Their attempts at industrialization supposedly fall victim to greedy foreign companies through a scheme of "globalization" that values them only for their raw materials and cheap labor. Just as the racism theory holds that we white guys are in cahoots to hold minorities down, this one assumes an evil alliance among large companies and advanced countries to depress the market value of the labor and raw materials produced by developing countries. Oppression is a rhetorical staple at the U.N.

It has been almost 10 years since "The Bell Curve" appeared. Since that time many other books have appeared that appear to support its arguments that peoples are different in statistically significant ways, among them "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", "The g factor," "Race, Evolution and Behavior," "Genes, Peoples and Languages," and Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate."

As Pinker so eloquently reports, these books have been vilified by academics. Typical is Peter Irons writing in "Jim Crow's Children" that "virtually all reputable scholars reject claims, most recently leveled by Richard Herrenstein and Charles Murray.." or Hugh Price disparaging "scientifically discredited" theories of intelligence in "Achievement Matters" or Tom Wicker writing in "Tragic Failure" that "...the Bell Curve... received much condemnation as pseudoscience." Strikingly absent from all these well annotated books are footnotes in support of these claims. Who are these "reputable scholars" who have "discredited" these books? Peter Irons offers one name, that of Richard Nisbett, who has authored no books on the subject but does post a 16-page (triple-spaced) bit on his web site. Price and Wicker offer none. The most prominent debunker, Stephen Jay Gould in "The Mismeasure of Man," rather than offering a statistical rebuttal, attacks the premise that statistical analysis is meaningful. He does, of course, cite a few studies that support his case.

The policy implications are vast. If all peoples are equally capable we must find and do away with whatever prejudices are holding some back. If all peoples are not equal we have to fall back a century or so and reconsider the white man's burden. What is the obligation of more richly endowed individuals and nations to the less richly endowed? If society is a Darwinist struggle between equally capable combatants, some simply more industrious than others, one would not have too much sympathy for the losers. If the struggle is truly unequal the humanitarian thing to do is to redistribute wealth. It is probably also the smart thing to do -- buy peace. Give Marx partial credit, though redistributing all of it as under Communism proved to be a disaster. Amy Chua's recommends in "World on Fire" that "market dominant minorities" like Jews and Chinese curry favor by giving back to their adoptive countries.

Whatever the story, policy should be based on knowledge. Would some "reputable scholar" please step forward to poke holes in Messrs. Lynn and VanHansen's argument? If that proves impossible the U.N. might have to take their arguments into consideration. Imagine what it would do to that body's self esteem.