IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Hardcover)

by Richard Lynn (Author), Tatu Vanhanen (Author) "In this chapter the major theories that have attempted to explain the causes of the inequalities in income and wealth between nations are reviewed..." (more)
Key Phrases: capita income independently, moderate negative residuals, dysgenic fertility, United States, Saharan Africa, South Africa (more...)

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

Product Description
Lynn and Vanhanen argue that a significant part of the gap between rich and poor countries is due to differences in national intelligence (national IQs). Based on an extensive survey of national IQ tests, the results of their study challenge the previous theories of economic development and provide a new basis to evaluate the prospects of economic development throughout the world.

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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: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #457,747 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

136 of 157 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)

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.

43 of 51 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

92 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars World Average IQ Equals 90., March 8, 2002

By	J. P. Rushton "Prof" (University of Western Ontario) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This brilliantly conceived, superbly-written, path-breaking book, does for the global study of economic prosperity what Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) The Bell Curve did for the USA. IQ and the Wealth of Nations examines IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 nations. It shows that national differences in wealth are explained first, by the intelligence levels of the populations; second, by whether the countries have market or socialist economies; and finally, by unique circumstances such as, in the case of Qatar, by sitting atop a sea of oil.

One striking fact is that the average national IQ of the world is 90. Few nations have IQs equal or near the British average of 100 (less than 20%). The highest average IQs are found among the Oriental nations of North East Asia (IQ = 104), followed by the European nations (IQ = 98), and the mainly White populations of North America and Australasia (IQ = 98), the nations of South and Southwest Asia from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia (IQ = 87), the nations of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands (IQ = 86), the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85), and finally by the nations of Africa (IQ = 70). Because many nations have IQs of 90 or less (almost 50%), this poses a serious problem if the book's conclusion that IQ = 90 forms the threshold for a technological economy is correct. IQs can vary greatly within a geographic region. In Latin America and the Caribbean, IQs range from 72 in Jamaica to 96 in Argentina and Uruguay, and appear to be due to the racial and ethnic make-up of the populations.

... Mean national IQ correlates 0.71 with per capita Gross National Product (GNP) for 1998, and 0.76 with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 1998, and that national IQs predict both long term (1820-1922) and short term (1950-90; 1976-1998) economic growth rates measured variously by per capita GNP and GDP (mean rs ~ 0.60). 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. They document that IQs predate earnings, are heritable, and are stable from age 5 onwards, and predict educational level and many other positive outcomes as evidence that IQ is the cause, not antecedent. The take home message of IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that national differences in IQ are here to stay and so is the gap between the rich and the poor nations.