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Richard Lynn

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IQ and the Wealth of Nations

by Richard Lynn (Author), Tatu Vanhanen (Author)

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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.

ISBN-10

027597510X
ISBN-13

978-0275975104
Publisher

Praeger
Publication date

February 28, 2002
Language

English
Dimensions

9.46 x 6.34 x 1.13 inches
Print length

320 pages
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About the Author

RICHARD LYNN is Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. Now with the Whitfield Institute, among Professor Lynn's earlier publications are Dysgenics (Praeger, 1996) and Eugenics (Praeger, 2001).

TATU VANHANEN is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Tampere and Docent Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Helsinki, Finland. The author of four earlier books, he concentrates on the comparative study of democratization, evolutionary roots of politics, and ethnic nepotism and conflicts.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Praeger (February 28, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 027597510X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0275975104
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.46 x 6.34 x 1.13 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,573,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,675 in Globalization & Politics
- #5,130 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
- #7,434 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)

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Richard W. Stewart

Unfortunately, this is a book you absolutely must read

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2006

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Why unfortunately? Because it is expensive, because it is stuffed with data and references, and because it is very dry.

But (if your IQ can handle it) it is also a book you cannot afford to be unfamiliar with. [Fortunately, the actual reading time is small, assuming you are familiar with reading scientific journal articles and know how to skip liberally.]

Previous reviews have done an excellent job describing this book and I will not attempt to do a better one. And, based on them, you might be tempted to just familiarize yourself with the book's conclusions without actually reading it. Don't. A thorough understanding of the IQ issue, and the results of Lynn's data analysis, are imperative if you plan to fully understand a wide range of current and future social, economic and political issues.

An example (as far from the relative wealth of nations as I can get). Will India, if it can get its economic act together, become the superpower the world needs to balance China (assuming the US population remains far too small to compete effectively with a fully industrialized China)? I used to hope so, but thanks to Lynn I know better.

India's average IQ of 81, compared to China's 100, not only will make it a much poorer nation, it will also give it far fewer citizens with IQs above 125 (the IQ Lynn says is required for individuals to do well in cognitively demanding occupations such as law, medicine, science, university research, engineering, and senior management).

How many less? Assuming equal populations of 1 billion, China will have 47.5 million high IQ individuals. But India will only have 2.1 million, about 1/20th as many as China. [Reference point: the US has about 10.7 million individuals with IQs of 125 or above, assuming 298 million population with average IQ of 98.]

Does this really matter? Well, perhaps only for our children (I have 4) and our grandchildren (I have 8). And yours.

Read the book.

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Steve Sailer

World-Historical Importance?

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2002

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.

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Jorgen Boberg

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2014

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Interesting topic

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Amazon Customer

One Star

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2018

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ordered by accident

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Paul R. Syms

Worth serious consideration

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2009

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On balance, I think this book makes a valid point, and it deserves to be read. Collating the volume of IQ data that they did, and analysing it in an objective manner, was in itself a considerable achievement. Moreover, if one has any doubts about their methods and their data, the authors have provided an 18-page bibliography listing all their sources, which are largely from the peer-reviewed scientific literature. I have pursued some of these, and have found them to have been fairly represented in the book.

The reason why it evokes such strong emotions is because people would prefer to believe that such differences in mean IQs do not exist, and indeed, it would be a nicer world if they did not. But to deny the possibility that such cognitive differences might exist is like denying the existence of mosquitoes, simply because one does not like them. Viewed from the angle of evolutionary biology, and given that intelligence is the outstanding trait that has evolved in mankind and allowed them to dominate the planet, it would be more extraordinary if such differences in mean IQ did not exist. There have been several measured attempts to demolish arguments such as these, assigning all differences to environmental and cultural factors ('Guns, Germs & Steel' by Diamond, 1997, is a good example) none of which are entirely convincing. If you scratch away at many of these objections that purport to be objective, and you will often find a religious undercurrent, that such theories must be wrong because mankind is somehow special.

My major criticism is that the authors of this book talk about IQ when they should say average IQ, and in so doing, play down the spread of IQs. The measurement of IQ is such an uncertain art, and the natural spread observed lies in the region of 12-18 points SD, such that a difference of two or three points between two population means is likely to be meaningless. But this does not imply that a difference of 40 points, which is more than 2SDs, can similarly be dismissed! So yes, L&V might have overstated their case, but this does not mean that their case is not substantially valid, or at least, contains something that warrants further investigation.

A final word: before jumping to conclusions about this book, and the motivations of the authors, please read their conclusions on p.196.

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