IQ and the Wealth of Nations null

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

45 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0275975104

ISBN-10: 027597510X

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[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

?Lynn and Vanhanen have launched a powerful challenge to economic historians and development economists ...?-Heredity

?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

"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

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 : 1.37 pounds
Dimensions : 9.46 x 6.34 x 1.13 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,529,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #801 in Business Development
- #1,115 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- #1,517 in Development & Growth Economics (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.

45 people found this helpful

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Graham H. Seibert

This book demands a rebuttal. Where is it?

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2003

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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.

77 people found this helpful

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Jorgen Boberg

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2014

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Interesting topic

4 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

One Star

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2018

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ordered by accident

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Read and think

Invalid statistics

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2006

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I am a believer in intelligence as a concept

However this book is a good example of "garbage in, garbage out" where poor input data leads to poor output conclusion irrespective of the intermediary analysis.

The data is based on *** HIGHLY *** inadequate samples.

Example: to establish the average Iq of 25,000,000 Canadians the authors base their values on ** ONE ** sample of ** 313 ** canadians aged ... 7 to 12 years (!) and taken in ... 1979 !!!.

There is not even a mention if the sample is a random sample or if it was taken in a poor or rich suburb, or in a rural or city area, etc, which means in all likelyhood it was unlikely to even ba random sample, or worse the authors didn't seem to realise that this inadequacy would invalidate the whole study.

Many other countries IQ are similarly based on 1 or 2 old non-representative studies.

In the end, the claim that the authors make that they have "found" a relationship between iq of the countries and the wealth of nations is totally unfounded given the inadequacy of the data. I am stunned that the reasonably intelligent authors would not have realise their glaring mistake.

On a more positive note, chapter 1, a review of all the theories explaining the wealth of nation is exceptionally concise and well done and very worth reading, and similarly chapter 2, explaining the current state of knowledge on intelligence research is a good read.

27 people found this helpful

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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.

15 people found this helpful

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