I should have gotten around to posting on this before, but here, via Steve Hsu, is the 2009 paper The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competences of peoples on social development by Heiner Rindermann, Michael Sailer (no know relation), and James Thompson.
To test La Griffe du Lion's "smart fraction" theory, they first synthesize a large number of results from international school achievement tests (PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS), then convert them to an IQ-like scale where Britain has a mean of 100 and the standard deviation is 15. (They don't use Lynn and Vanhanen's database of IQ tests, but Rindermann previously showed strong correlations between L & V's numbers and performance on international school achievement tests. Just looking through this data from international school achievement tests, it's remarkable how few surprises there are if you are familiar with Lynn and Vanhanen's data from IQ tests.
The most notable difference that jumps out at me is that the Irish do fine on school achievement tests (100), where they've done mediocre on some IQ tests, which I never quite believed. It might be worth investigating this discordance. For some reason, I'm reminded of the story of the English traveler in County Kerry who asks the Irish stationmaster why the clock at the north end of the railway station platform says 12:00 and the clock at the south end of the platform says 12:10: "And what would we be needing two clocks for if they both told the same time?" says the Irishman.
There are big concerns about school achievement tests, such as clarity of translations. Or, what does it mean to test fourth graders? For example, Finland doesn't start kids at regular school until seven. And how do we know the tests are nationally representative? And how do we know how hard the kids worked on the tests? Rindermann's aware of these problems (see his 2007 paper) and he's given it a pretty good shot at working out adjustments. But, the point is that we shouldn't put too much weight on any single number. For example, the Kazakhstan score is based on a single test of a single grade for a single year. (Rindermann should try to come up with a way to summarize how many datapoints he has for each country.)
The most notable difference that jumps out at me is that the Irish do fine on school achievement tests (100), where they've done mediocre on some IQ tests, which I never quite believed. It might be worth investigating this discordance. For some reason, I'm reminded of the story of the English traveler in County Kerry who asks the Irish stationmaster why the clock at the north end of the railway station platform says 12:00 and the clock at the south end of the platform says 12:10: "And what would we be needing two clocks for if they both told the same time?" says the Irishman.
There are big concerns about school achievement tests, such as clarity of translations. Or, what does it mean to test fourth graders? For example, Finland doesn't start kids at regular school until seven. And how do we know the tests are nationally representative? And how do we know how hard the kids worked on the tests? Rindermann's aware of these problems (see his 2007 paper) and he's given it a pretty good shot at working out adjustments. But, the point is that we shouldn't put too much weight on any single number. For example, the Kazakhstan score is based on a single test of a single grade for a single year. (Rindermann should try to come up with a way to summarize how many datapoints he has for each country.)
Since these tests report performance at the 5th and 95th percentiles, we can see not only the means but also the performance at the top and bottom by countries. Here, for example, is the last page of their results, Singapore to Yugoslavia/Serbia.
Singapore, a high-income high-cost, well-administered city-state, has the highest school achievement test scores in the world at their 95th percentile. It would be interesting to compare a metropolitan area, such as Silicon Valley, to Singapore. Judging by National Merit Scholar awards, the southern half of Silicon Valley would blow away even Singapore at the 95th percentile.
They write:
The highest values for the smart fractions are found in East Asia (1. Singapore IQ 127, 2. South Korea IQ 125, 3. Japan IQ 124, 5. Taiwan IQ 123, 9. Hong Kong IQ 122). A similar result was found in psychometric (average) intelligence or in student assessment studies (see Rindermann, 2007a). Different from the SAS, Scandinavia reaches in the cognitive elite not such a good rank (11. Finland IQ 121, 12. Estonia IQ 121 [the Baltics are added here], 16. Sweden IQ 120, 25. Denmark IQ 118, 34. Latvia IQ 117, 38. Lithuania IQ 116, 39. Iceland IQ 116, 41. Norway IQ 116). Maybe a homogenizing educational policy furthering weaker but disadvantaging high ability pupils leads to a smaller standard deviation and lower values for a gifted subgroup. Better are the traditional Commonwealth countries (5. New Zealand IQ 123, 7. Australia IQ 122 and 8. United Kingdom with IQ 122). They are followed by Western and Eastern European and North American countries, by South European countries, Arab or Muslim and Latin American countries and finally by sub-Saharan countries.
Most of the Gulf Arab countries do awful, but United Arab Emirates does quite well (mean 92).
The countries with the lowest results [at the 95th percentile] are 84. Botswana (IQ 96), 85. Saudi-Arabia (IQ 95), 86. Morocco (IQ 95), 87. Kyrgyzstan (IQ 94), 88. Belize (IQ 90), 89. Ghana (IQ 89) and 90. Yemen (IQ 84). Presumably many not participating countries would have lower values.Some astonishing results are observable like the high level of Kazakhstan (6., IQ 122) and the comparatively low for Israel (31., IQ 118, mean 93).
You mean, we were lied to by the movie Borat?
For Kazakhstan we have only results from TIMSS 2007 (4th grade); Mullis et al. (2008, p. 34) describe sample anomalies, a correction would be necessary. Israel has participated in several studies, compared to older studies and [for?] Jews in the Western World the results are deteriorating (e.g. Lynn & Longley, 2006). Most probably multiple reasons are responsible and not only the 20% fraction of Arabs (a thorough analysis would be necessary).
Israel's score at the 95th percentile is ahead of Norway's, so it's not that bad, but Long Island would probably do better. Israel is a country where Zionist intellectuals designed a populist, non-intellectual culture, so smart kids don't get as much cultural backing in Israel as in other parts of the Jewish diaspora.
There are also characteristic differences between mean, upper and lower levels. For instance between Canada and USA there is no difference in the upper level (IQ 120 and 120), but in the lower level (IQ 80 and 75). The past history of slavery and a different immigration policy (or different success of migration policies and geographical distance to societies with lower mean abilities) may be reflected into this difference. A similar pattern could be found for Finland and Germany: The difference in the upper level is only 1.20 IQ-points (IQ 121 and 120), but at the lower level 9.60 IQ-points (IQ 85 and 76). Most likely different immigration histories are reflected here, furthermore differences in educational policy (age of tracking, in Germany between age 10 and 12, in Finland at age 16). Early tracking increases ability variance.
I presume Thilo Sarrazin was thinking about results like this? It would be fun to see Jurgen Habermas respond to Rindermann.
Using regression analysis (as predictors mean and lower level) the largest residual (standing for difference between upper level and the rest) is found in South Africa (with its heterogeneous population of European, Asian and African descent), inverted the largest residual (standing for difference between lower level and the rest) is found in Belgium (probably a result of immigration and educational policy).
A few other notes: Armenia has a low bottom but a decent high end, close to Norway and Belgium. Armenia scores better than Georgia. Oddly, Azerbaijan beats Armenia at the bottom but has a very poor top.
Ireland, which has lagged in some IQ tests in the past, does fine (99.9), almost exactly the same as the U.K. (by definition, 100.0).
Mexico does crummy (65, 85, 105). If you want to complain about teacher's unions, start with Mexico, where teachers have a hereditary right to pass their jobs down to their offspring! Mexico ought to be able to bump these numbers up. Brazil is another country with a weak high end (105).
China and India aren't on the list.
Estonia and Finland, neither of which has many immigrants, have about the narrowest 5th to 95th percentile gaps among smart countries: 36 points. In contrast, Japan, which we like to think of as homogeneous, is 41 points, Taiwan 41, South Korea 39, Hong Kong 38, and Singapore 48.
South Korea (106) has the highest mean and highest 5th percentile (86).
They go on to evaluate La Griffe's Smart Fraction theory. Also, here's Rindermann's 2007 paper, with responses.
Ireland, which has lagged in some IQ tests in the past, does fine (99.9), almost exactly the same as the U.K. (by definition, 100.0).
Mexico does crummy (65, 85, 105). If you want to complain about teacher's unions, start with Mexico, where teachers have a hereditary right to pass their jobs down to their offspring! Mexico ought to be able to bump these numbers up. Brazil is another country with a weak high end (105).
China and India aren't on the list.
Estonia and Finland, neither of which has many immigrants, have about the narrowest 5th to 95th percentile gaps among smart countries: 36 points. In contrast, Japan, which we like to think of as homogeneous, is 41 points, Taiwan 41, South Korea 39, Hong Kong 38, and Singapore 48.
South Korea (106) has the highest mean and highest 5th percentile (86).
They go on to evaluate La Griffe's Smart Fraction theory. Also, here's Rindermann's 2007 paper, with responses.
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211 comments:
1 – 200 of 211 Newer› Newest»Think about Barack Obama Sr.:
He waspicked out and won a special scholarship for particularly outstanding students.
The population of Kenya in 1936, when he was born, was 4.3 million, with over half under the age of 18. His age cohort had between 150K and 200K people in it. Let's say just favored males were about 40K. Of those, 80 were chosen to
be a part of the first "education airlift" to the US. In other words, Obama's father was easily in the top 1 out of 500 Kenyans. At least the 998th Millentile!
Now, Kenyans (not in this study) have an average IQ of 72 and a standard deviation of
about 15 points. The 998th Millentile would be at 2.88 standard deviations. So
72+2.88*15 = 115. Let's call Obama SR's IQ at least 120 - an that puts him easily somewhere near the top 5% of Europeans and Asians according to this study (but only the top 10% according to regular IQ distributions).
Obama is the son of geniuses. Remind me again, does his success, which is said to support the case of the human-neurological-uniformity crowd, do so, or does it demonstrate HBD in stark relief?
One problem is that I haven't seen any information in the paper regarding the classic E. Asian tilt toward math -- rather than verbal.
One problem is that I haven't seen any information in the paper regarding the classic E. Asian tilt toward math -- rather than verbal.
I've seen this data elsewhere. Its shows shockingly low mean IQ's for many countries in the "developing" world, which makes me wonder of the validity of this data. The mean IQ figures for the developing world are even lower than L&V's data.
Did they really write "past history"? Tsk tsk.
Kazakhstan is a "diverse" country in a positive sense from an HBD sense, so that result is not that surprising. Instead of attracting poor immigrants it was a dumping ground during the Soviet period for dissidents, who often tended to be smarter than average. Also the Soviet space program was based there, along with significant military research centers, which also attracted some of the USSRs best and brightest. Many left after the USSR fell apart, but some remain, and even those that left may have left more of a mark on the gene pool than is generally acknowledged. The country also still has a significant Russian/Ukrainian population along with Poles, Jews, Armenians, etc. The cultural/business elite of the country is very intelligent. Also a huge percentage of the rural native population was murdered in the 1930s through a genocidal state generated famine, which may have had a side effect of increasing the mean IQ of the remaining Kazakh population. When I lived there Kazakhs struck me as much brighter than Uzbeks or Kyrghiz. In fact I know some simply brilliant ethnic Kazakhs who have gone on to work in fields like private equity or the hard sciences and do very well. Finally, the fact that Kazakhs are clearly related an East Asian ethnic group originally, while Uzbeks,Tajiks, etc. are ethnically more like Persians, may have something to do with higher IQ.
From one of Updike's novels an old Jewish joke: "If we have go to have enemies, thank God they are Arabs.
Atlantic Mag has an article in the current issue from the other side--ie, US schools are bad, we need more effort. Haven't read the whole thing. Would be interesting to see how their data could be compared.
Any explanation why Norway (typically ranked as the county with highest standard of living by the UN) has a lower than expected IQ - 95.8. Also, I've noticed certain countries IQ's seem to vary by as much 4 to 7 points depending on the test or standard of measurement is used. I've seen Germany as high as 108 and as low as 99. Why?
I agree with the general IQ ranges found in regions of the world (ie East Asian, Euorpe and Africa)but there seems to be too much variation in the data for certain countries. I would treat some of the data with a grain of salt before drawing any conclusions.
"I've never seen a figure of "IQ 35" for a human population before "
Presumably, they're illiterate, so a written school achievement test drawn up for literate people just doesn't work on them.
Interesting information on Kazakh cognitive ability Peter A. I've read elsewhere that the key factor determing the IQ of Central Asian population groups was the mode of lifestyle they pursued - sedentary farmers or merchants and traders clustering around oasis-based cities tended to be far more intelligent on average than itinerant pastoral nomads. This implied that the Uzbeks and Uighurs were actually far smarter than the Kazakhs and Kirghiz.
I've read that this is the general situation in Kyrgyzstan - that the native Kirghiz are considered quite dim compared to the Uzbeks, a significant percentage of whose ancestry is doubtlessly comprised of city-dwelling Iranians, and especially dim compared to the Dungan, the Muslim Chinese populations that fled to the region in the late 19the century. Any further info on these topics?
B. Wong.
Rushton went to South Africa and gave IQ tests to students at an engineering college. The black students at the college did decently: 103.
My favorite aspect of the Rindermann paper: that authors in a peer reviewed international journal must cite a pseudonymous author.
HBD is such dynamite that our friend La Griffe is influencing scholars worldwide while incognito.
We live in interesting times.
-Nico
" Different from the SAS, Scandinavia reaches in the cognitive elite not such a good rank (11. Finland IQ 121, 12. Estonia IQ 121 [the Baltics are added here], 16. Sweden IQ 120, 25. Denmark IQ 118, 34. Latvia IQ 117, 38. Lithuania IQ 116, 39. Iceland IQ 116, 41. Norway IQ 116). Maybe a homogenizing educational policy furthering weaker but disadvantaging high ability pupils leads to a smaller standard deviation and lower values for a gifted subgroup. "
I wouldn't be so eager to rule out a certain racial component. The Nordic countries may have a very peaked bell curve, with a lot of people clustered around a smaller range.
In the U.S., there's probably been as many (if not more) Germanics as there have been Anglos, but amongst the WASP high achievers (including statesmen, scientists, industrialists, etc.), more of them seem to be British American than German/Swedish/Norweigan/Dutch put together. Which includes the present day. Perhaps the Brits have a flatter bell curve for IQ, which means more people found at the higher end?
Kind of like how black and white average height in the U.S. are both around 5'10", but blacks produce a lot more 7 footers (as well as the less noticed 5 footers) due to a flatter bell curve.
UAE has lots of Indians and expatriate Westerners. So maybe that accounts for something.
In Central Asia, Kyrgz and Kazakhs are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and have historically been nomads. Many of them are agricultural laborers or continue with their nomadic ancestral traditions. The Uzebks and Uighurs tend to be wealthier and more urbanized, with many being proficient at commerce and trading. The Chinese Muslim Dungan, also known as Hui, are prosperous rural farmers and landowners. At the top of the socioeconomic ladder, there are number of ethnic Russians and Koreans that work as professionals or in administrative roles. Some of them run large scale commercial enterprises.
The general view is that the Kazakhs and Kyrgz are uncultured and poor. The Uzbeks and Uighurs dominate are seen as more business savy and clever, with the Chinese Dungan regarded as being industrious and being affluent by rural standards.
In Kazakhstan, a very large proportion of the population, especially in the north and urban areas, is ethnic Russian or German (Volga Deutsch). They are much wealthier than the Kazakhs and more educated. It wouldn't surprise me if the tested Kazakh pupils were mostly ethnic Russians and Germans.
I wouldn't trust a 103 IQ kid to be my engineer. Realistically, the low end cut off for a competent engineer is maybe 110 and more like 115. 103 would make a good technician.
"Israel is a country where Zionist intellectuals designed a populist, non-intellectual culture, so smart kids don't get as much cultural backing in Israel as in other parts of the Jewish diaspora."
I wonder about this, actually. They're very macho, but the ones I talked to didn't really seem anti-intellectual per se. Seems like they finally figured out the one thing they have going for them...
Did anyone read about the Newton North fiasco in Massachusetts? The neighborhood bankrupted themselves on a SCHOOL....
"... the classic E. Asian tilt toward math -- rather than verbal."
Look at Hsu's earlier discussion of PISA results. He gives both math and reading scores for different countries. Asians are about .5 SD higher on math and slightly higher on verbal.
"As for verbal abilities, we have the following 2006 PISA results: OECD reading avg is about 490; France 488, Germany 495, UK 495, Italy 469, Spain 461. NE Asian scores: Japan 498 Korea 556 HK 536 Taiwan 496. Again, slightly higher scores for NE Asians. Some interesting US data here shows that on 1995 SATs, low-income Asians have lower verbal scores than whites, but by family income of $60k have caught up and Asians with family income of >$70k outscore white families of similar affluence. This strikes me as an immigrant / bilingual family effect. Children raised in immigrant families, where the parents do not speak English at home, tend to score lower on the verbal part of the SAT."
Re: Kazakhstan's smart fraction. Despite huge emigration, there are still many Jews, Germans, Koreans and Armenians living there. All high IQ groups. I suppose Kazakhstan should be grateful to uncle Joe for sending so many smart people to live there. :-)
Fascinating. Argentina's mean IQ is shown here as 81.5, Kyrgyzstan's as 69.93. I'm guessing that something's wrong with those numbers. I would have put both countries' means 15 points higher. Philippines at 73.55? I don't believe that either.
Lebanon's smart fraction is at 105.99, Syria's is at 104.84, but Saudi Arabia's is at 95.4 and Yemen's is at 84.10 (ouch!) I'm not surprised at all. Culturally the Levant has always been ahead of the desert. And Steve Jobs's father wasn't just any sort of an Arab, but a smart Syrian.
Trinidad's smart fraction is at 110.05. Those are obviously East Indians. Wouldn't Caribbean Indians be mostly descended from peasant castes? They were brought to Trinidad and Guyana by the Brits to work sugarcane. That 110 number isn't bad. Yes, I know that's not their mean, but it's still pretty high.
Albania's 81.1 mean: if that's an underestimate, it's not a huge one.
Some astonishing results are observable like the high level of Kazakhstan (6., IQ 122) and the comparatively low for Israel (31., IQ 118, mean 93).
Astonishing to who? That Israel scores relatively poorly on intelligence related tests should not be news to anyone in HBD-land.
I'm sure Tom Friedman would be stunned though.
Mexico does crummy (65, 85, 105).
Which figure includes all the Castilian/Hapsburgian Mexicans, plus the Bolshevik Mexicans, the Lebanese Diaspora Mexicans, etc etc etc.
Throw out all the first-worlders, and I imagine that the aboriginal Mexicans are no better than {60, 80, 100}, and possibly even worse than that.
Rushton went to South Africa and gave IQ tests to students at an engineering college. The black students at the college did decently: 103.
IQ 103 is about two standard deviations below where you'd need to be to do real engineering work.
In fact, it's at least one standard deviation below where you'd need to be to do fake engineering work [as epitomized by e.g. the Microsoft Certified Systems "Engineer" (MCSE) designation].
As Arthur Hu has pointed out, the Wonderlic folks want to see an IQ of 100 to 108 just to be a "Driver, bus or truck".
In 2006 the World Bank did a TIMSS test in Orissa and Rajastha, two backward North Indian states
The Average Indian score was around the level for Egypt, Iran and Philippines.
However, the scores had a very wide skew
The 90th percentile ( corresponding to North Indian Brahmin ) was at the 75th percentile for white countries ( 110IQ )
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5422
Test takers per 100, above 625 in TIMSS
Mexico = 0.29
India = 0.93
US = 6.5
Based on results from Orissa and Rajasthan, two backward North Indian states
Any explanation why Norway (typically ranked as the county with highest standard of living by the UN) has a lower than expected IQ - 95.8
Note the scores are from school performance tests not classic-IQ.
Anyway, your point demonstrates the fallacy of strong IQ-fetishism. It's like sports statistics: Why even play the games, we know which teams are better on paper already.
Steve,
I think you did mention this late last year?
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/12/smart-fraction-theory.html
"Singapore, a high-income high-cost, well-administered city-state, has the highest school achievement test scores in the world at their 95th percentile. It would be interesting to compare a metropolitan area, such as Silicon Valley, to Singapore. Judging by National Merit Scholar awards, the southern half of Silicon Valley would blow away even Singapore at the 95th percentile."
Large numbers of those National Merit Scholars in the Silicon Valley area are Chinese Americans. Large numbers of Singaporeans are also ethnically Chinese. So essentially the question boils down to which group of Chinese are smarter.
***Also, here's Rindermann's 2007 paper, with responses.***
Rindermann provides an interesting comment on the objections of Wicherts & co on page 770. I like that Rindermann described Rushton & Lynn's attempts to provide a genetic explanation for differences as "courageous".
Also, good to see a number of hereditarians commenting on that 2007 paper, such as Volkmar Weiss, Helmuth Nyborg & of course Rushton & Lynn.
We do very little to help the top kids in the US really hit their potential. Of course many of them have obsessive parents who do it for them. I think that the money would much better be spent their than at the bottom.
Steve, while there has been no similar study conducted for China, India actually has been surveyed and the results are unsurprising for any Sailerite if I may be so bold to use the term.
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~tzajonc/india_shining_jan27_flat.pdf
The Indian states surveyed are 44th out of 51 of nations surveyed. The bottom vigintile scores only higher than 3 surveyed countries; Ghana, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. Spreads in Indian test scores are the highest of any nation surveyed excepting South Africa. Keep in mind that scores are in all likelyhood even lower in India considering that student attendance is over 90% in South Africa and only 40% in India.
Other independent surveys have shown that the Indian states in question, Orissa and Rajasthan are fairly representative of the Indian national average with Orissa being higher and Rajasthan Lower.
Basically India has a small cognitive elite of similar capacity to middling European nations which by virtue of it's vast population is not insignificant. On the flipside, India has an order of magnitude more people who are near the global bottom in cognitive ability.
Israel isn't as smart as Jews?
The US isn't as smart as whites?
man, if only we could find a common factor here
nope, nothing comes to mind
Jews just ain't as smart as we thought, right, Steveo?
The sub-Saharan African scores really aren't that surprising if the average is around 70 and their IQs have a normal distribution, SD 15. Their IQs have proven to be this low based on culture-fair tests. Although I can't quite figure out how people with IQs of 30 would function...like even dress themselves.
Here is another little piece of blank slatism from your favorite author, David Shenk. It is only notable for informing us that it is not a blank slatism:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/what-is-talent/66684/
About Norway, maybe people are just lazy there, because of the oil money.
At least what I`ve heard from the working class Finns, a workman is forever spoiled if he works in Norway.
Fascinating how Israel always gets shellacked in IQ tests. Maybe the whole Jewish intelligence thing is overrated.
Steve, don't tell me you actually believed the Irish had an IQ of 91 did you?
Richard Lynn is a right wing professor from the University of Ulster. That should tell you one thing if nothing else; his opinion on the Irish is about as objective as a Bob Jones U's opinion on queer theory.
Useful and all though he is...
It is nice to see a new international comparison of tested IQ.
Lynn and Vanhanen should be commended for trying, but their work was a bit sloppy on this point, and is outdated too.
I get a lot of students from Kazakhstan, including some ethnic Russians. They do seem pretty bright.
"... the southern half of Silicon Valley would blow away even Singapore at the 95th percentile."
Yes, so would my high school, but remember that Singapore has a population of 5M!
"Fascinating. Argentina's mean IQ is shown here as 81.5, Kyrgyzstan's as 69.93. I'm guessing that something's wrong with those numbers."
Right, Borges complained all the time about how his fellow Argentines didn't value literature enough, but he didn't emerge from an 81.5 mean culture. As for Kzryrgzxysstan, my immediate question from looking at the data was: if it were that low, why hadn't it been conquered by the geniuses from Kazakhstan?
Lots of things can go wrong with testing (like the students saying, "Why bother?"), so it's not surprising that there's dubious results. From a glass is half full perspective, what's amazing is how often the results make sense.
India is an astonishingly poor, uneducated, and malnourished nation. Low test scores for Indian slum dwellers are the same thing as low test scores for Puerto Ricans in Spanish Harlem.
Anyway, lots of Indians in the UK are peasants from Punjab or Bangladesh or Pakistan. They aren't academic superstars, but they do alright. So I think India's legitimate IQ value must be considerably higher than the often cited 80 value. Maybe, under Western conditions, something in the low 90s makes sense. At that point, India would be smart enough to produce lots of engineers and scientists, but still lower than the Western mean.
Richard Lynn is a right wing professor from the University of Ulster.
Well the term "thick Mick" that the British use didn't come out of nowhere.
The value for the smart fraction for the USA is 120, the same as Canada. I thought Ashkenazi Jews would push up the US result. I did not realise that they were so few, so as to be statistically irrelevant.
COGNITIVE GROWTH CURVE OF BARACK OBAMA + OTHER POLITICIANS - take a look!
Hi Steve,
The cognitive growth curves for the 2008 Democratic Primary candidates are here:
http://www.requisite.org/2008%20Democratic%20Primary.pdf
The Republican 2008 Primary is here:
http://www.requisite.org/2008%20Republican%20Primary%20.pdf
I do hope you'll pay a bit of attention to these cognitive complexity/time horizon growth curves for politicians, found using assessments based on Elliot Jaques' model.
As far as I know these growth curves *do not* necessarily directly correlate with IQ.
Perhaps Jaquesian cognitive complexity can tell us things that IQ can't?
Perhaps a more accurate model needs to take both into account?
There's a page explaining it all here:
http://www.requisite.org/2008%20Presidential%20Election.html
Here's a snippet:
Elliot Jaques "developed tools designed to measure the level of work complexity or problem solving complexity in a role and assess the level of current and future potential capability (that is, the degree of complexity a person can effectively handle at the present time and 10, 20, 50+ years into the future.)
Hence, there is a tested methodology that can provide an objective determination of the fitness of our Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates for the role of President of the United States, independent of their political ideology.
The applicability of the Jaques/Cason tool, known as CIP (Complexity of Information Processing) was tested in the political arena and shown to be an important predictor in the election of a United States president."
In the U.S., there's probably been as many (if not more) Germanics as there have been Anglos, but amongst the WASP high achievers (including statesmen, scientists, industrialists, etc.), more of them seem to be British American than German/Swedish/Norweigan/Dutch put together. Which includes the present day.
In the Wordsum on the GSS, people who register their ancestry as British Isles and are American born simply have a higher score than their cohorts who register German ancestry and the same standard deviation, by around 5 points when converted to IQs. Perhaps due to differential retention of British signifiers amongst the elite (Anglophilia seems higher status in US populations)...
Dextrology: Although I can't quite figure out how people with IQs of 30 would function...like even dress themselves.
May we assume that you were never a teenaged boy who had to settle for a National Geographic when he couldn't steal one of his Dad's Playboy magazines to whack off to?
From the bad old days, I.Q. scores and terms for describing their possessors:
50–69: Moron
20–49: Imbecile
0–20: Idiot
Kevin Myers has some thoughts on this
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-isnt-a-childish-desire-to-be-popular-a-reason-why-our-toenails-are-teetering-on-the-abyss-2427220.html
"if {Kyrgyz IQ} were that low, why hadn't it been conquered by the geniuses from Kazakhstan?"
To what purpose over the last 20 years? Kyrgyz independence is a weird anomaly of Soviet history. It was never an independent nation state - it is an arbitrary Russian designed combination of part of the Ferghana valley - always under the rule of local Uzbek/Persian lords, jammed together with an isolated mountain range where nomads have pastured animals for millenia. And my understanding is that Kazakh and Russian "business" interests DO in fact control Kyrgyzstan.
"Maybe the whole Jewish intelligence thing is overrated."
Askenazi Jews are the Jews with the high average IQ. IIRC, less than half of Israel's Jews are Askenazi, and they're likely the ones with low birth rates. Other Jews and Muslims in Israel have much higher fertility and much lower IQ...
Off-topic [kinda] - the Sicilian Mafia just fired a huge shot across the bow of the Jewish Mafia:
Suit Seeking Wall Street Ban Spoils Ex-Car Czar's Big Day
NOVEMBER 19, 2010
online.wsj.com
Steven Rattner began Thursday basking in the glow of a job well-done, as the one-time auto czar watched General Motors Co. emerge from a government bailout to be warmly received by the stock market again.
Then, a nemesis took the shine off the day: New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sought to ban Mr. Rattner, a Wall Street star, from the securities industry in New York for the rest of his life. And Mr. Cuomo filed two lawsuits seeking to collect $26 million from him...
BTW, you also have to wonder whether Bill & Hillary have a hand in this.
Peter A,
Your info is interesting but why do Kyrgyz people who by appearance are just as East Asianish as Kazakh do so poorly?
"Fascinating how Israel always gets shellacked in IQ tests. Maybe the whole Jewish intelligence thing is overrated."
Really dumb. Achievement speaks for itself.
"Basically India has a small cognitive elite of similar capacity to middling European nations which by virtue of it's vast population is not insignificant."
What percentage of the pop. is this small cognitive elite?
"Wouldn't Caribbean Indians be mostly descended from peasant castes?"
Not necessarily. The Indian/Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul is a Brahmin.
If (as the 2009 paper indicates) the smart-fraction theory is correct, then it would seem to follow that the smartest people generally -- not just in the West -- find their way to positions of leadership or responsibility. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain how the smartness of a country's smart fraction (as opposed to the country's median smartness) can be positively correlated with the country's success.
-- JP98
Re: Israel
According to 2005 numbers, 20% of Israel's population is Arab, which doesn't help IQ scores.
Israeli Arabs are also reproducing at twice the rate of Israeli Jews, so it's not going to get any better!
Brutus
"I suppose Kazakhstan should be grateful to uncle Joe for sending so many smart people to live there. :-)"
This is an ignorant statement. Russians, Ukrainians, etc. were mostly brought to northern Khazakhstan during Khruschov's Virgin Lands campaign. The campaign consisted in ploughing up the formerly nomadic steppe for agriculture. This required an influx of millions of experienced farmers (Kazakhs themselves were nomads). Kazakhstan's Russians got there after Stalin's death and are not descended from prisoners.
Someone here has also mentioned Khazakhstan Germans. They were descended from farmers invited to come to Russia by their fellow German Catherine the Great in the 18th century. Early on they were based on the Volga, but were later moved to Kazakhstan. From what I understand most of them moved back to Germany in the 1990s.
OT
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/50260/qa-noam-chomsky/print/
Did Cameron lift 'Navi' from navi?
"The word 'prophet' is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on."
Dear Kiwiguy,
Thanks for having a better memory than me! I looked at the comments to the brief post I made last year when this paper came out and rob considerately made this useful post:
The paper presented enough data that with some caveats and assumptions, we can calculate the standard deviations of different countries, and maybe answer whether East Asians have less variance than whites.
Countries with more ethnoracial diversity tend to have high SD here (Brazil, South Africa, US, Israel) Ghana's was huge, no idea why.
Country IQ SD
Korea south 106.37 11.89
Singapore 104.56 14.70
Japan 104.55 12.60
Hong Kong 103.66 11.61
Taiwan.RoCh 102.93 12.66
Finland 102.91 10.93
Estonia 102.26 11.05
Kazakhstan 101.93 12.94
Netherlands 101.89 11.31
Canada 101.75 12.38
Australia 101.12 13.03
Macau 101.11 10.18
Liechtenstein 100.93 12.89
Sweden 100.14 12.39
New Zealand 100.11 14.19
United Kingdom 100 13.91
Czech Republic 99.96 12.47
Ireland 99.92 12.58
Switzerland 99.83 13.01
Austria 99.65 12.51
Hungary 99.37 12.67
Belgium 99.13 12.61
Germany 99.08 13.37
Slovenia 98.57 12.20
Denmark 98.46 12.55
United States 98.41 13.80
Luxembourg 98.31 12.96
France 98.17 12.39
Slovakia 97.59 12.83
Latvia 97.47 12.12
Russia 97.27 12.89
Lithuania 96.96 12.07
Poland 96.95 13.04
Italy 96.57 13.18
Iceland 96.45 12.36
Croatia 95.96 11.50
Norway 95.8 12.79
Spain 95.65 12.10
Malaysia 95.54 12.51
Greece 94.37 13.37
Bulgaria 93.46 14.98
Armenia 93.06 14.47
Ukraine 92.99 12.89
Israel 92.57 16.07
Malta 92.41 16.20
Moldova 92.29 12.96
Portugal 92.12 12.54
UAE 91.91 14.37
Cyprus 91.59 13.37
Bosnia 90.6 12.21
Yugoslav/Serbia 90.2 13.13
Thailand 90.11 11.81
Romania 89 13.68
Uruguay 87.99 15.53
Georgia 87.62 12.56
Turkey 87.06 13.52
Jordan 86.08 14.31
Mexico 85.37 12.31
Azerbaijan 84.62 7.85
Macedonia 84.58 14.29
Trinidad/Tobago 84.55 15.94
Bahrain 84.24 13.31
Montenegro 84.22 12.28
Chile 83.62 13.68
Lebanon 83.61 13.52
Iran 82.83 13.32
Indonesia 81.75 11.83
Brazil 81.59 14.05
Argentina 81.5 15.52
Egypt 81.14 16.27
Albania 81.1 14.50
Tunisia 80.81 12.25
Oman 80.64 14.80
Colombia 80.61 13.14
Syria 80.57 12.13
Algeria 80.56 10.55
Palestine 79.96 16.35
El Salvador 77.53 11.19
Kuwait 75.72 13.57
Saudi Arabia 74.4 12.85
Peru 74.03 14.35
Botswana 73.93 13.78
Philippines 73.55 16.53
Qatar 72.11 14.23
Morocco 71.02 14.55
Kyrgyzstan 69.93 14.46
Belize 63.55 14.90
Yemen 63.52 12.41
S.africa 63.26 19.56
Ghana 61.25 17.18
To guess about the answer to Rob's question about Ghana, I believe it's the best run West African country, so it's the only one to participate in any of these international exams. Probably a fair number of the young people subjected to the test turned out to be illiterate, so they just answered randomly.
Test design is this odd business where it's pretty easy when the demands aren't extreme, but then it can suddenly break down when the envelope gets pushed too far. There's no real way to come up with an internationally fair school achievement test that doesn't underestimate the IQs of illiterates. You can come up with nonverbal IQ tests for illiterates that other illiterates will agree do a pretty good job of picking out the smarter illiterates, but by definition they aren't school achievement tests.
Similarly, pushing tests to answer subtle questions -- e.g., why do Norwegians do lousy relative to other northern Europeans? -- can run into imponderables. Maybe the test translation was bad? Maybe the teachers didn't whoop up the test enough to get the kids to care? There are a lot of ways things can go wrong.
You've got an obsession with race and iQ, and nationality, sir.
no denying it.
less than half of Israel's Jews are Askenazi, and they're likely the ones with low birth rates
Bzzt, wrong. 80% of Haredi Jews in Israeli are Ashkenazi, and they all have insane birthrates.
But they aren't interested in non-theological intellectual pursuits and might not even participate in these IQ surveys.
According to 2005 numbers, 20% of Israel's population is Arab, which doesn't help IQ scores.
Israeli Jews themselves are a heterogeneous bunch. There's the whole Sephardi/Ashkenazi division, of course, plus even these groupings contain Jews from every country in Europe. (And these days, from the US as well.)
So you'd expect to see a large SD even within Jews in Israel. In fact I would not be surprised if the numbers listed are just those of Jews in Israel, with little Arab participation.
An national average IQ of 61? yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
Otherwise, it would be hard to explain how the smartness of a country's smart fraction (as opposed to the country's median smartness) can be positively correlated with the country's success.
When we say leadership or responsibility, it's important to remember that government is not the only large institution. Plus, it seems like a country full of dumb leaders appropriating the products and cognitive frameworks made by smart folks would prosper more than one without any such smart folks (all things being equal).
Askenazi Jews are the Jews with the high average IQ. IIRC, less than half of Israel's Jews are Askenazi, and they're likely the ones with low birth rates. Other Jews and Muslims in Israel have much higher fertility and much lower IQ...
Yeah but America, a nation of 300 million, would be MUCH WORSE OFF without our 6 million Ashkenazis. I know this because I've been told over and over again. So Israel should be putting the finishing touches on fusion right now, without all those goyische kopfs in the way.
This is an ignorant statement. Russians, Ukrainians, etc.
Sir, if someone wanted to get up to speed on the kinds of Soviet population movements you describe, what books would you recommend?
The 95th percentile for Israel does cast serious doubts about either A) the much trumpeted Ashkenazi jewish intelligence or B) the value of these tests at reflecting true IQ.
Even if "smart jews" made up only half of Israel's population, you can form the top 5% of Israelis from the top 10% of smart jews. The often cited figure for smart jews is an average IQ of 115, so assuming a SD of 10 the IQ of the top 10% of smart jews should be 128, and so the figure for Israel should be AT LEAST 128, and that's assuming that every single one of the top 5% in Israel has to be drawn from the half of the population that is Askenazi. Since the top 5% of Israel is at 118, then clearly the mean for Ashkenazi jews is nowhere near 115. Or the tests are biased.
It's not strange, I guess the tests are usual designed on the anglosaxon type of teaching, also because you, the americans, are obsessed by this sort of test...It's not an offense, only my tought.
Not only Ireland in positive terms, also Italy in the negative one: Italians do very good in IQ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_Global_Inequality , and not so fine on this school achievement tests.
"I suppose Kazakhstan should be grateful to uncle Joe for sending so many smart people to live there. :-)"
This is an ignorant statement.
It's not. The statement was about high IQ groups, "Jews, Germans, Koreans and Armenians", not about "Russians, Ukrainians" who, indeed, moved en mass during Khruschov times. And Russians and Ukrainians are not high IQ people. All data suggest a little less than 100 for these, admittedly heterogeneous, groups.
Someone here has also mentioned Khazakhstan Germans.
The same person who made the "ignorant statement" mentioned Germans. Yes, they are Volga Germans and almost all of them were deported to Kazakhstan during WWII. Not all of them emigrated. Of my three German classmates, two remain there. Of my five Jewsih classmates, three remain in Kazakhstan (one returned after emigrating to Israel).
OK, looking at those numbers, it appears the average IQ of what I will take the liberty of calling Hispanic nations in the western hemisphere is fairly low. Not Africa low, but low.
So as the US continues to fill up with just these people, to the point where they'll be the largest ethnic group in approx another couple of generations, and the inexorable national decline follows, at least we'll know a good part of the reason: they have low average IQs. And going by Mexico, their potential to compensate for that (somewhat) via an extraordinary ability to organize efficiently would seem to be rather low.
Ready for the next post.
"Some astonishing results are observable like the high level of Kazakhstan"
Close to half of Kazakhstan's population is ethnically Russian, or at least was right after independence.
@Anon - What percentage of the pop. is this small cognitive elite? - reg India
--
There are 3 main IQ groupings in India
40% - Untouchables, Forest Tribals and muslims - with good nutrition about African American levels - In the diaspora, they are mostly Fiji and Caribbean Indians
40% - peasantry - with nutrition about blue collar white - Sikhs and Patels
20% - Cognitive elite, merchants and brahmins - with nutrition above white
Felix,
Suppose 1/3 of Israelis are the "smart kind" (the rest are Arabs or non-Ashkenazi). Then if the top 5% all come from the smart group they would comprise the top 15%, or > +1 SD. If the SD in the smart group is 10-12 (like other populations in the data), then the Ashkenazi average would be 106-108, which is just a bit higher than, e.g., Korea.
As Steve Hsu has mentioned in the past, the biggest open psychometric question which is relatively easily answered is: what is the national IQ in China? Considering the population of 1.3 billion this has enormous consequences for the total number of smart people on the planet.
Most Chinese do not regard Singaporeans or HKers or Taiwanese as particularly smart. (Even individuals from those places would find it implausible that they are smarter on average than other Chinese.) There *are* provinces in China that are reputed to produce smart people (e.g., Zhejiang), but they aren't the ones that historically populated Singapore, HK, Taiwan or the overseas diaspora.
For a number of reasons it is likely that the mainland average (perhaps after another generation of Flynn-like catch up) will be similar to that of Korea or Japan.
"Your info is interesting but why do Kyrgyz people who by appearance are just as East Asianish as Kazakh do so poorly?"
Well, East Asian features alone clearly don't imply intelligence, any more than white features do, as a trip to Serbia or West Virginia will quickly demonstrate. And you would expect nomads to be less intelligent - so the low Kyrgyz scores kind of make sense. After giving it more thought, I'm coming to the conclusion that the intelligent ethnic Kazakhs I've known are probably anomalies in the general ethnic Kazakh population. It is certainly true that intelligent Kazakhs moved to the cities during the Soviet period while slower rural Kazakhs were forced to stay on the farm or at best work in dangerous physical occupations like mining. As a result there may be a huge gulf between urban and rural Kazakhs by this point. Intelligent urban Kazakhs also often married intelligent urbanites of other ethnicities (Russians, Koreans, Chechens, etc.) so the people I, and some others on this thread, are calling "Kazakhs" are probably not ethnically pure compared to the rural population.
Re: Sabril, Remember when discussing Israel one has to take into account that the Jewish advantage in IQ is in the Ashkenazim sub-population of Jews ( Jews from Eastern and Northern Europe ) and excluding Sephardi Jews from other parts of Europe and the Middle East, whose IQ's are similar to other Europeans, plus all the non-Jewish ethnics in Israel such as Arabs and Druze. Those other various sub populations probably drag the Israeli mean back into the pack of other European countries.
Re: Felix, Just looked a Wikipedia entry on the the ethnic composition of Israel, although Ashkenazim make up 80% of the Jewish Diaspora, they only make up 47.5% of the Jewish population of Israel, and therefore an even lower percentage of the total population which as I pointed out earlier has a substantial portion of non-Jews such as Arabs and Druze. This alone would drag down the IQ scores to lower European Gentile levels. Plus if Ashkenazim in Israel are anything like the Jews in this country they probably have a low birth rate, which means their percentage of the school age population could be even lower still.
"For a number of reasons it is likely that the mainland average (perhaps after another generation of Flynn-like catch up) will be similar to that of Korea or Japan."
What if the Chinese turn out to be smarter than the Japanese once everything shakes out?
There is no significant economic distinction between the Kazakhs and Kyrgz. Both groups have historically been nomads and today occupy similar economic niches in Central Asia. The difference between the two countries (Kazahstan and Kyrgzstan) is the proportion of high performing ethnic foreigners (Russians, Germans, Koreans) and also Kazakhstan's access to plentiful natural resources and energy.
Almost the entire Chinese diaspora originate in the southeast (Fujian, Guandong). Historically, the southeasterners have been affluent due to rice farming, which allowed them to open a large number of schools, enabling them to produce the large majority of China's top exam takers. The wealth accrued through rice farming also allowed the southeasterners to dominate much of the transnational (even far north), and more especially, international commerce.
Outside of the southeast, academic performance was historically much weaker. Large swathes of north China produced few, if any, top exam takers. The exception was the large cities, such as Kaifend, which were home to much of the gentry and commercial class. These cities put restrictions on internal migration from poverty stricken rural areas. On the exams, they did decently too, though the coastal southeaasterners really killed on the exams.
I don't know if the southeasterners are smarter or culturally more ambitious or just fortunate enough to have fertile land. It'd be interesting to find out.
Gladwell suggested that rice farming has something to do with the level of industriousness among the Chinese, though he posits more of culture-based hypothesis. Others have suggested a "Farewell to Alms" genetic hypothesis for the Chinese. It's interesting to note that northern China farmed wheat, southern China farmed rice, and southeastern China had the best, and most grueling to farm, land.
I doubt it Steve. For one, it presumes that development in China will progress at the current pace, AND spread out extensively to the rural regions, where I've heard education is still a big problem.
Even accounting for that, we already have examples of chinese populations that have already virtually plateaued (I think) - Hong Kong and Singapore. We are not smarter than the Japanese.
"What if the Chinese turn out to be smarter than the Japanese once everything shakes out?"
Actually, this might even be the case for certain regions of the country. According to Raven's results for different regions there is almost 1 SD of variation from region to region (remember China is much bigger than Europe), so there may be big chunks of population that have (the genetic potential for) averages above that of Korea/Japan. A province in China can have 50-100M people so a single outlier region could generate a lot of high IQ talent.
"What if the Chinese turn out to be smarter than the Japanese once everything shakes out?"
That is why we need genetic engineering. An intelligent immigration policy alone will not be sufficient.
" Gladwell suggested that rice farming has something to do with the level of industriousness among the Chinese, though he posits more of culture-based hypothesis. Others have suggested a "Farewell to Alms" genetic hypothesis for the Chinese. It's interesting to note that northern China farmed wheat, southern China farmed rice, and southeastern China had the best, and most grueling to farm, land."
I think the crucial point concerning the S/E Chinese is that they could not be just fair to average farmers , they had to be exceptional farmers.
Every one of them.
Population and land pressures dictated this.
To maintain a huge output on a small plot of land and learn the skills of trade and commerce is quite a challenge. The S/E Chinese and the Dutch, arguably the two best horticultural groups in history, both had an intricate, sophisticated canal-based horticultural system, offering good transport and available fertility by clearing the canals.
Also strong family tradition, government support and a willingness and skill to try new crops.
11/19/2010
It has been posted that various non-IQ factors can drag the tested average IQ down - such as students being illiterate, not interested in the test, bad test translation, etc.
However, all those factors only drag results down, and there are no concievable non-IQ factors which would boost it in a systemic way. Therefore, one can safely assume that among the test-takers which scored in the top 5% (or so) neither depressing nor boosting non-IQ factors affected the results much. Therefore, if one only uses the cumulative distribution function of those in the top-5% one should be able to calculate good values for mean and standard deviation for the whole tested group, provided that the real IQ values (without non-IQ factors) follows a Gaussian curve. The difference between the Gaussian curve constructed from the values gleaned from top performer results, and the distribution curve observed for all test-takers, will show just how important those depressing non-IQ factors are.
Most Chinese do not regard Singaporeans or HKers or Taiwanese as particularly smart.
I wonder if they regard Macanese as particularly dumb...?
They still do pretty well in this paper with an "IQ" on 101.11 though, which is only "low" relative to other East Asians. The Macanese seem to have a pretty awesome GDP per capita though (more like Hong Kong than Shanghai).
Re: Felix, Just looked a Wikipedia entry on the the ethnic composition of Israel, although Ashkenazim make up 80% of the Jewish Diaspora, they only make up 47.5% of the Jewish population of Israel, and therefore an even lower percentage of the total population which as I pointed out earlier has a substantial portion of non-Jews such as Arabs and Druze. This alone would drag down the IQ scores to lower European Gentile levels.
Except for the fact that even the smartest people in Israel scored relatively poorly. It's not just the overall average which is low. The top five percent only scored 118.
Fascinating how Israel always gets shellacked in IQ tests. Maybe the whole Jewish intelligence thing is overrated.
That's always struck me as being the case.
As Steve Hsu has mentioned in the past, the biggest open psychometric question which is relatively easily answered is: what is the national IQ in China? Considering the population of 1.3 billion this has enormous consequences for the total number of smart people on the planet.
Unlikely. China is not a homogeneous country so its average IQ probably won't tell us much.
And though the IQ-fetishists are loath to admit it, IQ is not an accurate predictor of how innovative countries are. If no test data was available on this topic, how many people would have guessed that South Korea is the country with the highest IQ, based on that countries record of achievement?
This is interesting data in an academic sense, but IQ does not determine the fate of nations. It's just one factor among many.
"The exception was the large cities, such as Kaifend, which were home to much of the gentry and commercial class."
Wasn't that where the Jews were in the old days? ;)
"China is not a homogeneous country so its average IQ probably won't tell us much."
Not sure what you mean by this. FST between regions in China is less than that between N and S Europe, so it's relatively homogeneous. There has been a lot of mixing and inter-migration over the last thousands of years.
You're right that IQ doesn't determine everything. But it's at least one factor we can track relatively easily.
Even if E. Asian societies don't foster creativity (or E. Asians lack it for some genetic reason), you can still predict that they'll provide a huge chunk (perhaps the dominant one by far if China's IQ turns out to be like Korea's) of the global STEM workforce in the future.
"How many would have guessed that South Korea is the country with the highest IQ, based on that countries record of achievement?"
I dunno: 2011 Hyundai Sonata: 200 horsepower 4-cylinder engine with 35 mpg on the highway.
I've read this blog for a long time, but I'll comment for the first time.
I was born in Israel, but grew up in the US. The Ashkenazim in Israel are nowhere near as intelligent as their cousins in the United States, so these results do not surprise me in the slightest.
I go back to visit my 'homeland' quite frequently, and am always amazed to see such primitive and non intellectual Ashkenazim behaving like proles.
What one must realized is that all the famed uber Jews in New York "running the world" reflect a selection bias (the cognitive elite of our subethnicity).
This should not be a surprise given the brain drain effect of the United States with regards to all other ethnic groups.
But seriously, go visit Israel and talk to some "white Jews". One will be surprised they are not your typical nebbish overly educated American variety. This is also partially explains why Israel is losing the PR/guerilla war to it's neighboring enemies (bad tactics).
Long story short, the cognitively elite Jews all found a way to make it to the US at some point or the other. The bottom half of the bell curve took the path of least resistance to Israel.
israel has the worlds most honest and healthy debate on immigration part 2:
http://www.hartman.org.il/ReflectionNewsletter_View.asp?Article_Id=565
Even if E. Asian societies don't foster creativity (or E. Asians lack it for some genetic reason), you can still predict that they'll provide a huge chunk (perhaps the dominant one by far if China's IQ turns out to be like Korea's) of the global STEM workforce in the future.
They may. But if they do it will have nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with the worldwide desire for cheap labor and open borders. This notion that the STEM workforce is an IQ meritocracy is deeply misguided.
I dunno: 2011 Hyundai Sonata: 200 horsepower 4-cylinder engine with 35 mpg on the highway.
You're easily impressed. Those are the sort of figures I'd expect from a modern 2.4L fuel-injected four cylinder engine. The Honda Accord. with a similar engine, puts up virtually identical numbers.
Steve Sailer, glad to see your completely unbiased white nationalist readers criticizing both Jews and East Asians.
Intelligence is a very difficult thing to understand, and more difficult to describe in numbers.
But I think, IQ is a relative good method, to the contrary these achievement school tests are, in my opinion, too anglocentric and misunderstand the different school systems and behaviour: tests are very important in american school, for example for university admission, and the people take that very seriously. It's not the case for other countries in Europe, in my country for example I guess only few guys make attention in PISA tests et similia...It's ever difficult to make valuations in different countries with the same mean ( also in GDP-PPP) but this difficult is stronger when the valuation depends on tests.
I hate to be the grammar police, anon, but "that countries achievement" is glaring. "That country's achievement." Korea has done quite a bit in recent years. Samsung, LG and Hyundai come to mind.
self appointed s.o.b.
My impression, on purely anecdotal evidence, is that most mainland / Taiwan / HK Chinese consider Malaysian Chinese to be fairly unintelligent. Certainly Malaysian Chinese strike me as being less "driven", and less ambitious on the whole, than other elements of the Chinese diaspora.
In China, the ethnic Koreans are very well educated and affluent by local standards. In Central Asia, the ethnic Koreans, along with Germans and Russians, constitute a professional and entrepreneurial elite.
I don't know if Koreans are super smart, but they're at least reasonably bright people and are immensely industrious. Think East Asians - and then some - in terms of their work ethic.
Korean visuospatial skills are also likely quite good. While Flynn didn't find any IQ advantage for East Asians, he did find that they have the strongest visuospatial abilities of all the ethnicities.
Hey Israeli born American,
I like to know your take on the intelligence of the Sephardim. The estimates of low 90s seem way too low. How on earth can they be so successful if that number is true?
20% - Cognitive elite, merchants and brahmins - with nutrition above white
I'm not outright rejecting this but I think if 20% of the Indian population (1.2 billion) are smarter than the white average (i.e. 105) then shouldn't the country be in a lot better shape? Shouldn't there be more superstars from 250 million people?
India is 20 years into economic reforms and before then it had decades of stability and a socialist economy (which shouldn't be the end of the world)
Re: Peter A "East Asian features alone clearly don't imply intelligence, any more than white features do, as a trip to Serbia or West Virginia will quickly demonstrate."
I am not so sure about Serbia. I don't see a reason why Serbian IQ would be much different from other countries of the former Yugoslavia, or from their Balkan neighbors (Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, etc.). I would guess that Serbian lower score could be due to smaller sample size, lack of motivation for taking tests, difficulty in mapping school performance to IQ, societal chaos over the last two decades, or all of the above.
If you look at Serbian results from the International Mathematical Olympiad, Serbian average rank over the years of participation is about 22 (I calculated this from the data available on the IMO site), which is just a little behind France and ahead of Italy. Of all the countries of NW Europe, excluding UK, only Germany does as well as you would expect; Nordics, Dutch and Belgians don't do nearly as well as their average IQs. All of the Eastern European countries do really well compared to their size. Russia/USSR and China of course dominate, followed by the US.
I understand that International Mathematics Olympiad results are subject to sample size, population size, self-selection, etc., but notice how for some countries IMO results correlate very closely to their average IQ, while for other countries they are off, either above or below. One advantage of the IMO results: they are real test results measured against all other participants in a given year, not estimates based on school performance.
It would be interesting to determine why some countries differ so much in IMO rank compared to their average IQ: are their elites further to the left or right on the IQ Bell curve, or are they more or less motivated to do well in the competition, or are average kids less or more motivated in school, or are estimates of their IQ off? Many of those reasons could be at play.
"How many would have guessed that South Korea is the country with the highest IQ, based on that countries record of achievement?"
Best StarCraft players in the world:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18763_5-insane-true-facts-about-starcraft-professional-sport.html
That 20% of Indians who can perform on the U.S. average is somewhat of an overestimate.
You can extrapolate from the data yourself from the earlier link I posted to here with Indian test results.
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~tzajonc/india_shining_jan27_flat.pdf
US mean 50th percentile score is 505.
The Indian upper quartile only averages out to around 465. The Indian top 5% is 560 which is actually exactly the same as the U.S. top %25.
The interesting thing is, is that Indian top 5% scores BELOW the east Asian 50% percentile and in Singapore's case is spitting distance from it's bottom 25%. Forget India catching up to China, it still has further to fall behind.
For much of the world, you can come up with a pretty simple IQ-achievement model that predicts national development.
In the cases of something that's a bit anomalous, it can be explained through a few other factors. For example, the low IQ Middle East is wealthy because of oil and foreign labor. Eastern Europe is poor due to Communism, but is now developing nicely. China was constrained by Communism and may have a non-representative IQ elite on the southeastern coast, but the southeast has turned very wealthy under capitalism.
India, however, is so convoluted and has so many conflicting data points that I don't know what to say about it.......
-Historically, very advanced.
-Then, lethargic for a few centuries.
-Now growing pretty quickly and vibrant technology sector, but huge amounts of enduring poverty and illiteracy
-Peasants from all parts have gone overseas and done well in some places (ie UK and Singapore) and only okay in other places (ie Fiji and Carribean)
-Low caste dominated South India is the wealthiest region
-Many non upper caste groups (Patels, Jats) have done pretty well overseas.
-Does poorly on IQ tests
-Indians in UK do alright on their IQ tests (96?) and U.S. Indian do even better
-India is the world's biggest source of skilled, high IQ labor. Moreso than even China or the rest of Asia.
-Indians run UAE's economy pretty well.
-India combines one of the world's most competitive university systems with an atrocious public school system, but then again so does China....
India baffles me.
I hate to be the grammar police, anon, but "that countries achievement" is glaring.
Blog comment sections are not the best place to hang out if that sort of things gets on your nerves.
Korea has done quite a bit in recent years. Samsung, LG and Hyundai come to mind.
We're talking intellectual achievement, not business achievement. When Hyundai comes up with some cool new technology instead of repackaging existing technology in a cheaper box, you'll have a point.
@Anon wrote - Shouldn't there be more superstars from 250 million people?
--
They are throttled by affirmative action between 50% to 70%
In the diaspora, when the affirmative action pressure is lesser, they thrive.
In the list of chess grandmasters under 15, there is a list of 19 and there are 2 upper caste Indians
Anish Giri (brahmin) and P.Negi(Rajput / Nobility )
The World chess champion for the last 5 years Vish Anand is a brahmin.
Intelligence is a very difficult thing to understand, and more difficult to describe in numbers.
But I think, IQ is a relative good method, to the contrary these achievement school tests are, in my opinion, too anglocentric and misunderstand the different school systems and behaviour
Then it's curious that the Asian countries did better in this comparison (relative to the European countries) than in the pure IQ test evaluations. Are the Koreans and Japanese more anglocentric than the Germans and French?
Hey Israeli born American,
I like to know your take on the intelligence of the Sephardim. The estimates of low 90s seem way too low. How on earth can they be so successful if that number is true?
In case he doesn't answer, I'll just say that Sephardim are smarter than North African Arabs but are dim bulbs compared to Ashkenazim. They weren't always this way; the Sephardim of 15th century Spain (and later, Netherlands) were considered quite brilliant, so perhaps they interbred with the North Africans, who from what I can tell are about 1/4 sub-saharan African (i.e., definitely mulatto).
"This notion that the STEM workforce is an IQ meritocracy is deeply misguided."
IQ is only one factor but there is probably a lower threshold of around 120. Only very hard working 120s can do high end STEM work, whereas a 135 with average conscientiousness or motivation can. (You can substitute your own definitions or numbers here but I doubt they would be very different.) Thus, only 5% (at best) of Euro populations can do it, and perhaps a larger percentage of E. Asians. If China's 95th percentile IQ in 20 years is like Singapore's today, then the high end STEM workforce there will exceed the rest of the world combined.
To the commenter(s) who prefer IQ tests to school achievement tests, you should look at Rindermann's 2007 paper that Steve linked to. He establishes that, at the national level, the are highly correlated -- so, interchangeable for most discussions.
"I presume Thilo Sarrazin was thinking about results like this? It would be fun to see Jurgen Habermas respond to Rindermann."
More like this:
"Within North, Middle, and Western Europe, which have been the most frequent immigrant destinations in Europe since the 1950s, the means for immigrants by themselves are unequivocally worse than they are for nonimmigrants, which is in contrast to other countries such as Australia (see also OECD, 2006). And within immigrant groups in Western countries, there are large differences in educational success,student assessment scores, and intelligence tests scores, which correspond to the levels observed in their countries of origin. Because their scores resemble those from their countries of origin or those of emigrants from the same country in other host countries, there is some concern that these scores could increase only slightly or even persist for immigrant groups for generations to come (Boe & Shin, 2005; Levels, Dronkers & Kraaykamp, 2008; te Nijenhuis, de Jong, Evers, & van der Flier, 2004; Vinogradov & Kolvereid, 2007). Thus, it is not immigration per se or being a speaker of a minority language that appears to be important in the formation of cognitive ability at home and at school, but rather hailing from a country that holds an affinity for education and the associated academic values (Guiso et al., 2006, obtained similar results for other attributes
such as attitudes)."
Rindermann and Ceci, Educational Policy and Cognitive Competences
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pps/4_6_inpress/Rindermann_final.pdf
"You're easily impressed. Those are the sort of figures I'd expect from a modern 2.4L fuel-injected four cylinder engine. The Honda Accord. with a similar engine, puts up virtually identical numbers."
Hondas are made by another very high iq group, and so I'm not sure what your point is. Compare it to a US or Euro car at least. Outside of their own brands, Koreans do a lot of design for American brands. Few nations have risen as quickly from the third world to industrial and technological leadership.
Since the intelligence of politicians is something discussed in the paper, it is interesting to note that Lee Kuan Yew's son, Lee Hsien Loong, "studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1974 with First Class Honours in Mathematics and a Diploma in Computer Science (with distinction). He subsequently obtained a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in 1980." (from Wiki).
Lee Hsien Loong's son, Li Hongyi, "studied in the Gifted Education Programme at Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) before attending Raffles Junior College. In 2006, he received a Singapore Public Service Commission merit scholarship to pursue a degree in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[1][2] In the 2008-2009 academic year, he went to study at Trinity College, Cambridge (where his father obtained his bachelor degree) as an exchange student through the Cambridge-MIT Exchange program."
Another of Lee Kuan Yew's grandchildren, topped his course in Oxford. Relevant excerpt below:
"Three Singaporeans topped their respective courses at Oxford University this years, in a rare and extraordinary showing. They did politics, philosophy and economics (PPE); physics; and law.
One of them is the grandson of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.
Mr Li Shengwu, 24, whose father is Fraser and Neave chairman Lee Hsien Yang, took top spot in his PPE class of 240 students. Mr Shyam Srinivasan, 22, was first among 70 who did physics while Mr Colin Liew, 23, scored first in law and bagged a pound 1,250 (S$2,900) award."
There's some good genes in that family.
And then there's yet another grandson of Lee Kuan Yew's who has an IQ of 140 and is dyslexic. Link below:
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Soc/soc.culture.singapore/2006-04/msg01717.html
"2011 Hyundai Sonata: 200 horsepower 4-cylinder engine with 35 mpg on the highway."
Any chance of a introducing a few car posts into iSteve?
Steve, this Lee Kuan Yew video is insightful. Yew alludes to the use of psychometric tests to choose ministers in Singapore (7:30 approximately):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnlPfvx7Cgg
South Korea's IQ goes up.
"Those other various sub populations probably drag the Israeli mean back into the pack of other European countries."
Sure, but by definition they can't drag down the top 5%. Certainly Israel seems to act like a country with a smart fraction which is reasonably smart in terms of scientific and technological achievement. Maybe the numbers are screwed up somehow.
I wonder what the right parameter to look at is. Is it the fraction of your population above 100? Or how smart your smartest 5% is? Or simply having enough people to do the intellectually-demanding infrastructure sort of jobs that make growth possible? (Like, you need *enough* people bright enough to be doctors and engineers and lawyers and such, to keep the lights on and the society functioning.)
re: Anonymous said...
Steve why can't you force those that post under "Anonymous said" to get a handle or take away the Identity choice Anonymous since you screen comments to force them to use a handle.
All of these "Anonymous said" postings gives one a headache.
Just a thought.
Dan Kurt
In fact, it's at least one standard deviation below where you'd need to be to do fake engineering work [as epitomized by e.g. the Microsoft Certified Systems "Engineer" (MCSE) designation].
Obviously this commenter has an ax to grind. Usually this sort of bitterness is expressed by someone who can't pass a certification test. But this guy sounds like someone who got an EE somewhere and resents the intrusion of this new kind of "engineer" coming into a competitive job market. He seems to think that those of "his" kind are Gosh-Almighty Whoopdy-Doo smart.
I hired and fired lots of networkers and coders. I taught lots too. My problem with MCSEs when I was hiring for my own development group was that I couldn't get enough of them. In fact I almost never got a candidate with an industry certification. The Internet start-ups I worked at usually couldn't afford them. The commenter doesn't believe in industry certifications but the market does.
But when I was a 100% commission recruiter I only dealt companies that had sufficient funds. For example I placed several network engineers in the corporate networking group at Novell. All of them were graduate engineers from good schools who had good work histories at good companies. Nobody at Novell expected or cared much if any of their network engineers had a Novell certification. They wanted a resume with words like - "MIT" and "MSEE" on it. They seemed to assume that specific Novell expertise could just picked up on the way.
So if you match a person with only an MCSE credential versus some other person who did post graduate work at Caltech, it's not much of a contest. But that's not what such industry certifications are for.
The MCSE is for the guy who decides to go into computers at 25. He's already too old for CalTech. We need lots of software engineers and networkers. We do not need very many research chemists. So the guys who are not at the very top of the class are looking forward to being a bottle washer with a Master's degree. These career switchers make up a significant fraction of MCSE students.
"Real" graduate engineers from a "real" university have an IQ from about 104 to 110. The talented top's IQ is less than 115.(http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx). Good but hardly unique.
Most MCSE holders are that smart. The commenter suggested that "real" engineers need an IQ of 133 or greater.
This is fantasy. Most engineering specialties have IQ means about 110. So Rushton's African's with a mean of about 103 were clearly sub par but not sub human.
Albertosaurus
Israeli born American said:
But seriously, go visit Israel and talk to some "white Jews". One will be surprised they are not your typical nebbish overly educated American variety. This is also partially explains why Israel is losing the PR/guerilla war to it's neighboring enemies (bad tactics).
Reminds me of the last sentence of something I wrote elsewhere...
Interestingly, Herzl for a time tried to persuade Kaiser Wilhelm to sponsor the National Homeland for Jews Inc., but after consideration Willy wisely passed. After which jewry supported Germany initially in WWI ( only partly for the same reasons as the socialists did: hatred of Tsarist Russia ) but then switched sides to the British after the latter suddenly discovered a profound sympathy for that cause and the resources of jewish finance and made a promise to create a National Homeland in Palestine. The British make a lot of promises. Occasionally they keep them. Sadly they kept this one.
Perhaps the Israelis could afford to pay the Pallies off: it would still leave the problem of where they would live. They are a large population presently forced into a small amount of land: Israel can not afford to give them full rights in Israel since they will swamp them and turn it from being a purely jewish nation into a muslim nation with a jewish fringe on the top --- just as large parts of the present USA will be majority hispanic soon enough ( and rapidly turn more conservative ) ---- whilst the orthodox settlers, of a grim old testament frontiersman temperament will still want to keep taking more bits of Palestine land as did the American settlers from the natives.
One thing that is often overlooked by the lunatics who hate jews, and the lunatics who admire them, is that just as historically, [...] jews have made better soldiers than thinkers: they are basically rednecks.
Albertosaurus,
if you're talking IT I agree with you ( I have a degree in that field too so I can tell), but serious engineering in aeronautics, machine development and even high-end civil engineering requires more than 110 or so. I think there you need to be in the range 130-140.
Speaking of countries and national performance, here is a Gladwell article from a few years ago explaining the Irish economic micracle.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact
"Now, Kenyans (not in this study) have an average IQ of 72 and a standard deviation of
about 15 points. The 998th Millentile would be at 2.88 standard deviations. So
72+2.88*15 = 115. Let's call Obama SR's IQ at least 120 - an that puts him easily somewhere near the top 5% of Europeans and Asians according to this study (but only the top 10% according to regular IQ distributions).
Obama is the son of geniuses. Remind me again, does his success, which is said to support the case of the human-neurological-uniformity crowd, do so, or does it demonstrate HBD in stark relief?"
I've noticed this about blacks. Even ones who may not be intelligent are fabulously good talkers. What they say may not make much sense but they keep talking like a mofo. Alan Keyes and Al Sharpton just steamroll everyone else with their constant barrage of yabba dabba yammering.
Blacks may not use language rationally all too often but they know how to use it stylistically and musically.
And because white 'racism' is the worst possible sin in America, it gives black the moral advantage to go on the offensive at all times whereas white conservatives must always play defense.
"Real" graduate engineers from a "real" university have an IQ from about 104 to 110. The talented top's IQ is less than 115... Most engineering specialties have IQ means about 110...
A-saurus, I think maybe we have a problem with semantics here.
Nowadays, "real" engineers are expected to know things like fourier transforms and complex analysis.
And you can't even begin to teach that stuff to students below about IQ 130.
"I've noticed this about blacks. Even ones who may not be intelligent are fabulously good talkers."
Yeah I've noticed this too. And there are many excellent black lawyers. But you won't find them setting up tax shelters.
Actually, I think it's part of the reason many people have a hard time believing that a country can have an average IQ of 60 or 70. Because a black person with an IQ of 70 doesn't come across as a drooling idiot. Often, it's not until you ask them a question which requires some abstract thinking that you realize just how stupid they are.
Alberty-boy, come on; are you saying that your average person with a 104 IQ can pass Calculus II or Differential Equations?
Question re the paper:
The authors state that they are using Greenwich mean IQ as their standard (UK=100, SD=15), yet according to their papar the 95th percentile for the UK is 121.92. Shouldn't it be 125? Are they setting 100 as the UK mean but using the SD for the total sample, not the UK, as 15?
>Anon wrote - Shouldn't there be more superstars from 250 million people [India]?
--
They [East Indians] are throttled by affirmative action between 50% to 70%<
Think how much more forcefully this applies to whites in America.
The annual economic cost of "Affirmative Action" is $1.1 trillion.
Source (pdf): "Cost of Diversity: The Economic Costs of Racial and Cultural Diversity" by Edwin S. Rubenstein, National Policy Institute, Oct. 2008. He makes a good case.
Now fantasize that Obama decides to abolish "Affirmative Action" (linchpin of "diversity"), as Steve has urged him to do here. Assuming the end of AA took effect at the end of 2012, by the end of his second term Obama would be responsible for $4.4 trillion in savings. Think what the native intelligent people, who created that wealth, could do with it were they permitted to keep it.
Oxford Medalist Singaporeans. Mr Shyam Srinivasan, 22, was first among 70 who did physics - Tamil Brahmin
Halfsigma had a long article on IQ of Engineering majors
Engineerin BS degree holders had 115IQ on average.
Engineering MS degree holders had 125IQ on average.
>Again, as to the IQ 115 to IQ 125 range, I implore you folks to glance at the handful of known non-Ayers/non-Favreau works in the Obama "corpus".<
For that link, I thank-you.
>The Obama phenomenon (Barack & Michelle) was created by a core of Chicago Jews (the "Dohrn" Ohrnsteins, the Pritzkers, the Klonskys, the Sunsteins, the Minows), and I don't have any doubt that they knew exactly what they were dealing with in Barack & Michelle - namely, a couple of easily manipulable, middling talents whom they could latch onto and mold[...]. Newton Minow (together with Bernardine "Dohrn" Ohrnstein) was Michelle LaVaughn Robinson's mentor at Sidley-Austin. One of Newton Minow's daughters is Martha Minow (who just replaced Elena Kagan as Dean of Harvard Law), and she no doubt was responsible for moving both Michelle's & Barack's applications up to the top of a massive stack of thousands (tens of thousands?) of similar quota-admissions applications which deluge an HLS admissions office every year.<
We Americans are utterly degenerate. Look at our allowing such scamsters to step all over us.
It's what I've said before: the POTUS is just a figurehead, a puppet of the real rulers.
Indy, Barack Sr. was a genius in Kenya (IQ 120), but he would have been a secretary in the USA. (That is, he would have been *if* he hadn't had all the black baggage that his story clearly shows he had.)
All that's assuming that your understanding of the "education airlift" isn't as screwed up as your definition of "genius" is.
PeterA:"East Asian features alone clearly don't imply intelligence, any more than white features do, as a trip to Serbia or West Virginia will quickly demonstrate."
I am not so sure about Serbia. I don't see a reason why Serbian IQ would be much different from other countries of the former Yugoslavia, or from their Balkan neighbors (Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, etc.). I would guess that Serbian lower score could be due to smaller sample size, lack of motivation for taking tests, difficulty in mapping school performance to IQ, societal chaos over the last two decades, or all of the above.
Or then again it could just be true. Blow to the nationalist ego, sure, but otherwise I don't see any essential problem with accepting the evidence as it stands. (Samo da potvrdim da sam i ja iz srpskog porekla.)
But this stuff about any trip to Serbia "quickly" confirming that Serbs aren't very smart is, of course, utterly laughable. That's just typical village HBD blather. These people know a couple of factoids about race and IQ and all of a sudden feel competent to declaim on any and all aspects of human existence.
I suppose in cases like Peter's their TVS beamed them images of some slivovica-swilling, bearded chetniks in the 90s and that was all it took: Serbs are demonstrably morons. But aside from that, how does any trip to any place or any brief interaction with members of a group "quickly" demonstrate anything about a people's (an entire people's) intelligence? Psychometricians pour over the data for years and then draw only tentative conclusions not just because just they're "race deniers" but also because there's little about a group's mean that immediately jumps out one from brief interaction with a selection of its members. PeterA, in contrast, would have you believe that one look at group X was all it took and he was convinced. Sure.
Best StarCraft players in the world:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18763_5-insane-true-facts-about-starcraft-professional-sport.html
I know you said this as tongue in cheek, but this is actually relevant. As somebody who follows e-sports (which is, yes, professional video gaming. Don't laugh, it's big and getting bigger every year), it's so obvious to me that East Asians have superior reflexes and hand eye coordination. Whenever the question arises in the pro gaming community as to why all the best e-sports "athletes" are East Asian, the standard explanations are brought up and accepted. "They practice so much".
BUT WAIT A MINUTE! You guys said it yourself: All East Asians ever do is study all day long. Tell me: How are they supposed to study and play video games all day at the same time?
"Indy, Barack Sr. was a genius in Kenya (IQ 120), but he would have been a secretary in the USA."
Probably more 120 IQ secretaries back in the day when that was nearly the only job opening for women who didn't want to teach or do social work. 120 is the average for some of the better universities, and not that much below the average for Ivy League. Perceived-IQ-Inflation strikes again.
"It's what I've said before: the POTUS is just a figurehead, a puppet of the real rulers."
I knew that when I saw the first nation-wide article about him circa 2005, touting him as some sort of "new man." According to Time Magazine (owned by?) he was just the ticket for an American president, since he was not really very American. The double-speak gave me a headache. However, I know many people, gentile, Jewish and even poc, who think the same way I do about all this.
btw, although they scrubbed it from the web, I saw an article from a newspaper in 2004 (from Ohio I think), were Obama is referred to as a "Kenyan born senator." It made the rounds, looked like a screen-shot of the newspaper arfticle.
He's complicit but he's not the worst culprit--after all, he's not really all that "American" and his wife was never proud of being one--remember?
No, there are even more guilty parties, some of whom have families in this country going back 350 years.
Good God -- when you think about the liars and traitors in high places who pulled this off, you have to puke. And most of them make up a smart fraction--of brains and of evil.
Regarding Ashkenazis' in Israel, it should be mentioned that birthrates for that group are actually at or slightly above replacement rates. This is partly due to the high birth rates of the Haredi and Hasidic Jews, but non-haredi Ashkenazis in Israel IIRC have a birth rate that is close to the replacement level. Another factor is mixing between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis' and Sephardim, nearly 30 percent of all children in Israel are now a mix of these groups. This number has been steadily rising.
I find this post fascinating, but I find it troubling that your very own readers aren't able to distinguish between group norms and the performance of individuals. It's obvious to any mildly intelligent person that Barack Obama is very intelligent (e.g., magna cum laude at harvard law school), but a good number of your readers will still tear him down as being unintelligent because he is at least partially from a race that has a low IQ average.
If any IQ researchers are out there: please do research on the effect of IQ research on peoples of various IQs. I have no doubt you'll find that those with lower IQs will have difficulty interpreting IQ research (e.g., groups vs individuals).
"BUT WAIT A MINUTE! You guys said it yourself: All East Asians ever do is study all day long. Tell me: How are they supposed to study and play video games all day at the same time?"
Uh oh, I think a few guys just got doubled over with a hard body blow...
I'm anxiously awating the whiteboy response to this one!
Israeli born American said...
"Long story short, the cognitively elite Jews all found a way to make it to the US at some point or the other. The bottom half of the bell curve took the path of least resistance to Israel."
If I remember correctly, Yuri Slezkine, in some of the later chapters of his book The Jewish Century, conveyed the impression that in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s there was a tendency for the less clever members of Jewish families to emigrate to Israel and for the more clever ones to emigrate to America.
it's so obvious to me that East Asians have superior reflexes and hand eye coordination.
If true, shouldn't that superiority show up in real sports and not just "e-sports"?
If true, shouldn't that superiority show up in real sports and not just "e-sports"?
Size and strength are major factors in real sports. Any advantages in reflexes and hand-eye coordination is probably mitigated by less size and strength. Baseball seems to be a sport where reflexes and hand-eye coordination can take you pretty far, relative to other sports like football and basketball where size and strength are so important. If you've seen the World Baseball Classic the East Asian teams do pretty well competing against bigger and stronger teams from the US and Latin America.
If true, shouldn't that superiority show up in real sports and not just "e-sports"?
Anecdotally good at ping pong and billiards (and derivatives). "Real sports" have the issue where gross movements are more of an issue than fine motor movements, where it may be that EAs excel.
Interestingly, women supposedly have some superiority at fine motor movements (relative to men).
Be interesting to look at pilot data and sharpshooters. Perhaps also compare percussionists and pianists?
BUT WAIT A MINUTE! You guys said it yourself: All East Asians ever do is study all day long. Tell me: How are they supposed to study and play video games all day at the same time?
I'd guess they achieve this through no TV or hanging around on 4Chan like losers (unlike white kids)? Videogames and study not being in, like, zero sum competition. Even Asians find time to hug and care for their life size moe anime pillows!
(Would this the whiteboy response? I wonder what the yellowboy and blackboy responses would be, to say nothing of the brownboy responses).
Re: Silver "Or then again it could just be true. Blow to the nationalist ego, sure, but otherwise I don't see any essential problem with accepting the evidence as it stands."
Of course it could be true that Serbian average IQ is indeed around 90. It doesn't hurt my ego--I know what my IQ is.
My point is: I would love to see a real measure of Serbian IQ, i.e. a large sample assessment using something like Raven's Progressive Matrices. I am not really convinced by conclusions from PISA/TIMSS/PIRLS results, i.e. I don’t think they can be taken as evidence at face value. If Serbian average IQ is 90, how come the country has been doing so well on International Mathematical Olympiad? Would you care to try to explain this?
Or, if you look at Figure 2 in Rindermann's 2007 paper, Serbia looks like an island of dummies in a sea of smarter surrounding nations. I see neither a reason for nor a casually observable evidence of this.
There are a large number of studies that show East Asians tend to study a lot more than people of other ethnicities. In East Asia and India, school days are longer, kids go to cram school afterward, and there are more school days. I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes on test scores, but Asians/Indians seem to think that studying a lot is important.
I would guess that the tough agricultural environments of East Asia and India, especially in rice farming regions, must've selected for very long term oriented, industrious, and thrify folks. So maybe they've carried over these traits to the academic realm.
East Asians have strong visuospatial skills. Does anybody know if this would help them at Starcraft?
"If true, shouldn't that superiority show up in real sports and not just "e-sports"?"
East Asians dominate at certain sports that require hand-eye coordination, like table tennis. They're also good at baseball, which is another sport that requires hand-eye coordination to a tremendous degree.
I'll throw my 2 cents on the engineering debate. I sit in the mid to high 130's on IQ, top decile of my med school class, 760 math under the old SAT system. I had a hard science (Chemistry) undergrad background, but had the misfortune finding myself in the honors Differential Equation class at Purdue with mostly engineers--ME's for the most part. I was completely, utterly out-gunned, and eventually had to run back to the "Diffy Q for poets" track with my tail between my legs. I would guess my 130+ish IQ was at least bottom tenth in a class of maybe 200. As an unbiased observer, I'd have a pretty hard time swallowing a sub-115 average IQ for engineers, especially for the Mechanical/Aeronautical ones I ran up against. Podunk-U types might pull the average down a bit, but not anywhere near that extent.
" but I find it troubling that your very own readers aren't able to distinguish between group norms and the performance of individuals"
I can't speak for others, but my skepticism about Obama's intelligence comes not jsut from my knowledge the black IQ distribution, but from my general experience with blacks in positions of authority or responsibility.
Most of the time (but not all the time), such blacks are very underqualified and not very intelligent compared to the requirements of their position.
There seems to be a hyper-peter principle at work with blacks.
And I see no evidence that this is not the case with Obama. Why else would he refuse to release his transcripts and test scores?
"If true, shouldn't that superiority show up in real sports and not just "e-sports"?"
It shows up in sports such as table-tennis (even badminton) where the empahasis is on reflexes and not muscle.
"I would love to see a real measure of Serbian IQ, i.e. a large sample assessment using something like Raven's Progressive Matrices."
Strangely, no one on this blog ever admits that he comes from a cohort of stupid people, regardless of what the "facts" say. Most of you do not, however, have any problem using the very same tests as evidence of another group's stupidity.
Truth...
Strangely, no one on this blog ever admits that he comes from a cohort of stupid people, regardless of what the "facts" say. Most of you do not, however, have any problem using the very same tests as evidence of another group's stupidity.
The simplest explanation is the overwhelming number of interesting commentators here seem to be from easily identifiable high-IQ groups: Jews, NE Asians, SE Asians and high IQ WASPs or other Europeans. For everyone, including outliers of other groups, an insightful post speaks for itself. No disclaimer is necessary or relevant.
It's embarrassing to have to point this out to someone named "Truth", but you should know groups have individuals with IQs far from the group mean. You conflate a particular individual's IQ with his group's IQ to create a contradiction which does not exist.
East Asians can't just be grinds, given the immense success of their companied and their ability to master technology. They've obviously got a lot of natural curiosity and smarts to be running high GDP/HDI societies.
I just don't believe that their mean level of intellectual ability is significantly higher than the West. If it were, they would've long since surpassed the West. That they haven't and seem to have plateaued, despite their superior work ethic and greater willigness to follow social standards, is hard to explain.
My general impression is that Westerners and East Asians have similar levels of competency. East Asians have greater conformity and work ethic, while the West is more individualistic and entreprenuerial. There are advantages and disadvantages to each situation, but overall both groups end up pretty similar, especially when ideas are readily transmittable across the world.
For Israel to have so many underperforming Sephardim and Arabs, but still do respectably well, says a lot about Ashkenazi intellectual prowess.
Re: Truth "Strangely, no one on this blog ever admits that he comes from a cohort of stupid people, regardless of what the "facts" say."
Now you're twisting it: personally, I wouldn't have a problem admitting that I come from a cohort of stupid people, if I thought that way; but based on my life experiences, I do not. Rindermann’s 2007 paper is a great correlation study, not a primary source of measured IQ data across nations. So rather than trying to guesstimate IQ via correlation with scholastic performance, I have pointed out the importance of having real measured IQ data for each country. If you think you have a better measure, feel free to share it, or to show how Math Olympics results DO NOT correlate with IQ.
Re: "Most of you do not, however, have any problem using the very same tests as evidence of another group's stupidity", I do not get the impression that most people here use test results as primary evidence of another group's stupidity; rather, people use test results to confirm or refute impressions they already have of other groups. That was a cheap shot at the commenters on this blog.
"I just don't believe that their mean level of intellectual ability is significantly higher than the West. If it were, they would've long since surpassed the West. That they haven't and seem to have plateaued, despite their superior work ethic and greater willingness to follow social standards, is hard to explain."
Too bad every psychometric test argues against your beliefs. Also, East Asians Americans dominate elite high IQ competitions in the US at disproportionate rates, despite evidence arguing against a selective immigration thesis.
When did East Asians plateau? The East Asian tigers are still developing and China is rapidly ascending. The fact that you would argue that East Asia has plateaued during the era of China's rise, probably one of the most discussed themes in contemporary politics, reveals how incredibly stupid and biased you are. It's hard to take you seriously after that gaffe.
East Asians can't just be grinds, given the immense success of their companied and their ability to master technology. They've obviously got a lot of natural curiosity and smarts to be running high GDP/HDI societies.
I think it might be simplistic to try and separate out these factors; there might be a setup whereby personality is shifted in East Asians, on a genetic level, which causes changes behavioural change and changes in IQ are a consequence of a behavioural change driven by personality. Personality > "grindish" qualities > particular interests and problems > IQ through feedback. I think it's plausible that at least some racial differences between groups are driven by this (probably also the case for Whites and Blacks), rather than changes in neurotransmitter efficiencies or brain sizes of such. Of course, I know conscientiousness has no association with IQ, but conscientiousness is not nerdishness (which is what I'm really talking about here). It's a shame there isn't any attempt to develop a quantified "nerdishness" factor and to see any differences within and between populations.
Of course it could be true that Serbian average IQ is indeed around 90. It doesn't hurt my ego--I know what my IQ is.
Right, which is why "indeed" it could be "around" 90. Come on, take up Truth's challenge and repeat after me: "it's indeed true that it could be precisely 90 -- or even lower."
how come the country has been doing so well on International Mathematical Olympiad? Would you care to try to explain this?
I'll give it a shot: because IQ tests measure aptitudes beyond what is captured by maths tests?
That said, I agree with you that, having lived in the region and travelled about it, there is nothing casually observable whatsoever to suggest that Serbia is indeed an island of dummies amid a sea of smarter countries. (Lynn rates Croatia at 89 which also seems strange, particularly considering their mostly justifiable historical self-regard as "more cultured," -- something fairly regularly discernible, imo, among the better sort of croat.)
Whites who are looking for romance in East Asia should think twice before getting into a relationship with Asian women.
They may be intelligent and educated, but they are different from us in many ways.
Social engineers are going to have to face that they are going to need to start paying the bottom x% not to breed. People who are really dumb will sign up plenty quick to be sterilized for a one time large(to them) lump sum of x thousand dollars. It will be far less than all of the expense they cause society in crime and dependency. Once we round that psychological corner and the <80 IQ crowd effectively stops breeding, we will have a shot at saving the planet.
Too bad every psychometric test argues against your beliefs. Also, East Asians Americans dominate elite high IQ competitions in the US at disproportionate rates
I've seen you (always as "Anonymous") making this same argument on all the HBD blogs. The trouble is it's a diversionary tactic and not a proper response. If somebody comments on the relatively low rate of Asian accomplishment relative to their IQ, you need to counter with examples of their accomplishment.
The fact that you believe that dominating "elite high IQ competitions" is an example of accomplishment simply points to a fundamental difference in the way Asians and Europeans look at the world.
Strangely, no one on this blog ever admits that he comes from a cohort of stupid people, regardless of what the "facts" say.
Most of us on this blog do not come from a cohort of stupid people. Most of us on this blog are of either European or Asian descent, neither of which are stupid cohorts.
Most of you do not, however, have any problem using the very same tests as evidence of another group's stupidity.
Trooth, your comments on this site are sufficient evidence of your stupidity.
You are ignorant. I was referring to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea - all of which have long plateaued after very spectacular growth. Which is not consistent with a higer mean IQ, but suggests are roughly equal level of competence. China will continue to grow, until it plateaus too, but it starts from a much lower base and also has a glaring urban-rural income gap that reminds one of South Africa.
Academic competitions in the U.S. take a lot of prep and parental support. East Asians do very well, but so do Indians. Both groups outdo Jews in these competitions, but would you say Indians/Asians are smarter than Jews? No. However, both groups value these competitions much more and outwork Jews. This is also partly why the most academically competitive Asians tend to be FOBs, as opposed to 3rd generation kids.
As to your contention that East Asian immigration is not selective, you are wrong again. Check the stats. Asian immigrants are much, much better educated than their native home populations. The only non-select Asian immigrants are the Vietnamese and pre-WWII Asians.
Pyschometric tests are highly influenceable by environment. The highly academically rigorous and test-focused East Asian educational system likely boosts East Asian scores.
"The East Asian tigers are still developing and China is rapidly ascending"
I remember back in the 80s everyone was saying that Japan was going to surpass the US. But it never really materialized despite their higher average IQs and superior work ethic and discipline.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese also fail to become the world's premier superpower.
So far, it does seem that Europeans have a certain je-ne-sais-quois which lets us kick ass (when we have the will to do so.)
Perhaps China should seek out an alliance with Israel. China could agree to generally stick up for Israel in the UN and elsewhere. Israel could deliver some European mojo. Together they could build some fantastic weapons.
Taiwan, Korea and Japan are all being hollowed out by a rising China. Significant entrepreneurial and financial capital that would have been invested in those countries has gone to China in recent years. The drop in GDP growth rate in Korea and Taiwan from (roughly) 7-8% to 3-4% in recent years has largely been due to China.
See Eamonn Fingleton for a contrarian evaluation of Japan's lost decade(s).
"Pyschometric tests are highly influenceable by environment. The highly academically rigorous and test-focused East Asian educational system likely boosts East Asian scores."
Pyschometric tests are highly influenceable by environment. The highly academically rigorous and test-focused WHITE educational system likely boosts WHITE scores RELATIVE TO THOSE OF BLACKS AND HISPANICS.
"Pyschometric tests are highly influenceable by environment. The highly academically rigorous and test-focused East Asian educational system likely boosts East Asian scores."
Glad to hear you sounding like a typical liberal. :) I had a debate with a liberal who denied racial differences in IQ and argued the exact same thing when I asked him to explain higher East Asian IQ scores.
"As to your contention that East Asian immigration is not selective, you are wrong again. Check the stats. Asian immigrants are much, much better educated than their native home populations."
Should I begin by checking stats posted by Sailer himself?
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/03/legal-immigrants-hints-of-iq-scores.html
White natives are at 100, with a standard deviation of 15.
European legal immigrants' kids: 99
India: 112
Northeast Asia: 106
Southeast Asia: 104
sub-Saharan Africa 89
Mexico 82
Central America/Caribbean 83
South America 86
Notice that the East Asian American IQ scores are basically more or less in line with East Asian IQ scores in general. Every other minority group shows evidence of selective immigration, except for East Asians. What you see is that East Asians Americans are roughly 6-7 points above white European Americans in IQ, which is fairly consistent with the general psychometric literature. There's no sign of real selective immigration for East Asians into the US(the same isn't true for Indian Americans for instance).
"I remember back in the 80s everyone was saying that Japan was going to surpass the US. But it never really materialized despite their higher average IQs and superior work ethic and discipline.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese also fail to become the world's premier superpower."
Given Japan's relative small size compared to the US, it was never seriously going to overtake it as the premier world-power. It did though surpass America in nominal per capita GDP at the peak of its economic prowess. Given China's size, i.e. more than 10x that of Japan, you're looking at an entirely different point altogether.
@Severn
You seem to miss the point. High IQ is almost certainly a necessary if not sufficient requirement for real life accomplishment. If the pool of high IQ East Asians is significantly larger than the pool of high IQ Europeans, that doesn't bode well when you consider where future accomplishments are likely to become from. Take Japan for instance. It didn't really establish itself as a major scientific/technological power until probably during the 1980s. Most Nobels face significant time-lag, that is they're awarded for stuff done decades ago. If you look though, since the year 2000, ethnic Japanese have won more Nobels in the hard sciences than those of another other nation except the US. Every year now, there are Japanese in the running for Nobels, for work that they did during the 70s, 80s, or 90s, etc. When China/South Korea, both nations which started their developmental process long after Japan, reach the same level of scientific/technological development, you're going to see the global landscape alter drastically. Imagine 10 more Japans suddenly popping into the picture(the combined populations of China and South Korea are more than 10x the population of Japan).
The fact that Asian Americans are dominating so many of the competitions from which former accomplished scientists/intellectuals were drawn from, i.e. the Putnam Exam, Intel Science Talent Search should be worrying. The current cohort of white European American children are increasingly being displaced from the most elite and productive sectors of science and technology.
So far, it does seem that Europeans have a certain je-ne-sais-quois which lets us kick ass (when we have the will to do so.)
Perhaps China should seek out an alliance with Israel. China could agree to generally stick up for Israel in the UN and elsewhere. Israel could deliver some European mojo. Together they could build some fantastic weapons.
There are no Jews on the lists here:
http://mangans.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-did-we-ever-get-along-without.html
And Israel isn't European.
There are many genuine European nations. If China wanted an alliance with Europeans it could choose among many options.
Asian women should also think twice before getting into a relationship with White men.
As to your contention that East Asian immigration is not selective, you are wrong again. Check the stats. Asian immigrants are much, much better educated than their native home populations. The only non-select Asian immigrants are the Vietnamese and pre-WWII Asians.
Not true. Korean immigrants, for example, tend to be of lower class background.
It's hard to know of the selectivity of the Chinese/Korean immigration in the last decade.
There were a million new permanent residents from China (2000-2010).
You have graduate students, scientists, software developers, etc. But you also have places like Chinatown, San Francisco that have seen a large wave of country people from a country near Fuzhou in the last decade.
By crude "looks okay" estimation I would say the software developer/scientist cohort of the last decade could only number at most in the few hundred thousand.
"Pyschometric tests are highly influenceable by environment. The highly academically rigorous and test-focused East Asian educational system likely boosts East Asian scores."
Pyschometric tests are highly influenceable by environment. The highly academically rigorous and test-focused WHITE educational system likely boosts WHITE scores RELATIVE TO BLACKS AND HISPANICS.
"Perhaps China should seek out an alliance with Israel. China could agree to generally stick up for Israel in the UN and elsewhere. Israel could deliver some European mojo. Together they could build some fantastic weapons."
"And Israel isn't European."
Errrrr, maybe when Sabril says Israel could "deliver European mojo," he doesn't actually mean Israelis HAVE European mojo, but that Israelis have ACCESS to European mojo, and that they can deliver it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4101961.stm
US 'anger' at Israel weapons sale
Quote
..."The statement followed Israeli reports that the sale of a sensitive weapons system to China had angered Washington."
Quote
"The head of the Israeli parliament's defence committee, Youval Steinitz, said tensions, hidden from the public, had appeared in the last few years over Israel's weapons sales to China."
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/world/israel-selling-china-military-technology-cia-chief-asserts.html
Israel Selling China Military Technology, C.I.A. Chief Asserts
Quote:
..."the bluntness of the C.I.A. assessment surprised Congressional specialists and appears to reflect a growing concern among American intelligence experts that China is seeking to use Israel indirectly to obtain military technology that United States and other Western nations have refused to sell to Beijing."
The fact that Asian Americans are dominating so many of the competitions from which former accomplished scientists/intellectuals were drawn from, i.e. the Putnam Exam, Intel Science Talent Search should be worrying.
I don't get the impression that you are worrying, I get the impression that you're rubbing your hands in glee.
High IQ is almost certainly a necessary if not sufficient requirement for real life accomplishment.
Yes, and America and Europe possess that high IQ in more than ample supply. Did you actually look at the data we're discussing here?
Every year now, there are Japanese in the running for Nobels, for work that they did during the 70s, 80s, or 90s, etc.
That's wonderful for them. And yet, I'm strangely unworried about the economic threat we're going to face from Japan ... any day now.
China's recent economic expansion has nothing to do with Chinese IQ and everything to with the decision of Americas political and business leaders to outsource manufacturing to that country, a decision which in turn is driven entirely by the cheapness of Chinese labor.
Glad to hear you sounding like a typical liberal.
Because everyone knows that typical conservatives sound like silly Asian supremacists?
Notice that the East Asian American IQ scores are basically more or less in line with East Asian IQ scores in general. Every other minority group shows evidence of selective immigration, except for East Asians. What you see is that East Asians Americans are roughly 6-7 points above white European Americans in IQ, which is fairly consistent with the general psychometric literature.
Comparing a high IQ subset of Asians to Europeans as a group is logically nonsensical. Lets add in the populations of Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia etc to the Asian pile if we want to compare Asians to Europeans.
What mean is the second generation of Indians regressing to? Whatever stock these Indian kids come from, it's unlikely that they're regressing to a group mean on 81.
Someone should call Yan Shen's bluff about the US getting a representative sample of the Chinese population.
http://www.levininstitute.org/pdf/Asian%20Population%20Studies-2008.pdf
"Between 1978 and 2007, more than 1.21 million Chinese went abroad for study and research, of
whom only about a quarter have returned. The Chinese government’s policies of attracting first-
rate overseas academics back have yielded mixed results at best. "
That's over 900,000 Chinese-Americans + their descendants + others who came on H1-B visas. These 3 groups comprise a large chunk of the Chinese-American population and aren't representative of the actual Chinese population.
Link 2:
http://www.soc.duke.edu/GlobalEngineering/pdfs/media/losingtheworlds/nam_usexperiencing.pdf
" The five-year stay rate for Chinese holding Ph.D.s has been 92 percent and for Indians 85 percent. Most end up staying permanently. "
Yeah, they did historically return home after their education, right?
Further, Yan Shen, read Vivek Wadhwa's (ironically of Asian, though not Azn, ancestry) research on the quality of Chinese/Indian "engineers" versus American ones.
For Chinese and Korean immigrants, something like half have college degrees. Which is pretty good, considering how competitive the educational systems are in those countries. Also, for the Chinese, there is economic selection for immigrants, even from Fuzhou.
The non-affluent, non-educated Asians came pre-WWII. Since then, it's been elite immigration, even for Japanese. The exception are the Vietnamese, who mostly arrived as boat people. The only way current AA immigrants are not elite is if, somehow, college educated Asians are no smarter than the peasants, which would be bizzare.
There are IQ values for the middle class children of pre-WWII Asian immigrants, obtained through testing done in the mainland and Hawaii back in the 1950s-1970s. Filipinos were far behind the white mean. Chinese and Japanese were equal to whites, but not greater.
Asian IQ is assessed anywhere from 100 to 110, depending on the source/test. 103 is the most commonly given value. If you take 106 as the Asian IQ value, then it still doesn't explain the massive Asian overrepresentation in the good universities and academic competitions.
Indians are displacing whites as much as Asians in technology. Silicon Valley is even more Indian than it is Asian. Come up to Seattle and see how super flooded technology companies are with Indians. Though there are a fair number of Asians too.
Wall Street is starting to see a big influx of Indian kids too, as are the London investment banks. Some of those kids come from doctor/engineer/dentist parental backgrounds, but more than a few have gas station or motel owning parents. Just look at all the Patels and Singhs you see in VC/IB/PE - these kids come from motel owning families. Medical schools are being Indianized very rapidly too. I don't know if you would ever suggest that Indians are smarter than whites, but at least you'd agree that their hungrier, more industrious, and more money/status/education oriented - and that this drives a lot of what we see.
For China to be 10 Japans assumes that the average Chinese peasant is more similar to a Japanese than a Mongolian, Hmong, Lao, Kazakh, or Uighur. I honestly don't know enough to say if that's the case, but many of these groups have lived side by side with Chinese peasants for many centuries. Gene flow either way is very likely, given the genetic similarity among the populations.
The Japanese, and Koreans, have a striking amount of genetic homogenity in their population, which would allow favorable mutations to spread quickly. Not the case in China, which historically has had massive varying levels of performance by geographic territory. That doesn't mean the northern/central Chinese peasants are slow, but they don't have the same historical achievements of the southeast. The urban and southeast of China have historically been very, very different from the rest of the country.
Taiwan, Korea and Japan are all being hollowed out by a rising China.
China is hollowing out everybody. East Asian countries are better insulated actually, because they pursue very protectionist and nationalist trade policies. Unlike the delinquents in Washington DC, who have decided to:
a.) Invite the whole world to live here
b.) Let our manufacturing base go overseas
c.) Allow foreignization of the IT workforce
d.) Borrow lots of money to pay for wars and overseas troop deployement that doesn't even benefit us
Maybe Asians do have higher IQs after all. When you get down to it, nobody is more retarded or mentally rotted out than the Clintons, Kennedys, Gores, Bushs, and other buffoons that run this country. Our political leadership must have an average IQ in the low 20s.
A lot of the Vietnamese boat people were Chinese merchants or urban Catholics who were unpopular with the Commies for ethnic / religious / class reasons. I remember talking to a a newly arrived boat person in 1979.
She: "The Communists would come every few months and tear our house apart, saying grandpa had lots of gold hidden in it."
Me: "Why would they think he had lots of gold."
She: "Ha-ha, you very funny! Because he had lots of gold hidden in our house."
Me: "Did they ever find your grandpa's gold?"
She: "Grandpa laugh and laugh over Communists thinking they could outsmart him over where to hide gold."
Now that I think about it, the conversation was a lot like Charles Kinbote's attitude to the Crown Jewels in "Pale Fire."
As DraganPNW and others have observed (based on subject-area competitions such as the Math Olympiad), perhaps there is more to it than the Lynn etc test #s themselves indicate:
1) Some areas with relatively low stats have a higher level of scientific, mathematical and technical accomplishments than would be implied by their average IQ, or even their “elite” IQ. Perhaps some have a fat right tail?
2) Perhaps there is a diaspora effect (the highest IQ elements of some countries tend to emigrate)
3) Perhaps the highest IQ groups in some countries will go into politics, while in others they will pursue “portable” education that can translate to jobs/businesses when they emigrate
4) Factors such as political strife/disruptions in education, whether the test is treated as important, etc play a role as well
I’ve read some claims that East Asians will do less well because of having a smaller % of very high IQ people, but perhaps its not the % of high IQers that matters, but rather having a sufficient absolute #, plus a populace with a high enough IQ to make reasonable decisions, participate in industry, etc
Re: Silver ”Right, which is why "indeed" it could be "around" 90. Come on, take up Truth's challenge and repeat after me: "it's indeed true that it could be precisely 90 -- or even lower."
Without a proof, that’s merely an assertion. Feel free to provide ANY data to back it up. Not Rindermann’s 2007 paper, or Lynn and Vanhanen, but primary data.
Re: Silver ”… because IQ tests measure aptitudes beyond what is captured by maths tests?”
Well, duh! If you go the easy route and convert your GRE score to IQ (here 1 or here 2), it’s equally weighted between math and verbal. I’m giving you the math part, you figure out the verbal part.
Here’s a list of countries ranked by their average (over all years of participation) results on Math Olympics (I calculated it from the data available on International Mathematical Olympiad site (you’re welcome). Some observations: some high-IQ countries (NW Europe) with small populations don’t do that well; practically all East European countries, even relatively small ones (Hungary, Bulgaria) do really well. Possible explanations: a) per country IQ-estimates based on academic performance are off; b) some countries have fatter right tails; c) smaller countries just don’t have a big enough pool to draw genius-level math material, despite high average IQ; d) some countries are more/less motivated in competitions of this sort; e) some countries are just better at teaching math; f) other reasons; g) any combination of the above.
2.28 USSR
3.04 China
3.05 Russia
3.61 USA
4.00 Commonwealth of Independent States
5.07 E Germany
6.44 Hungary
6.53 Romania
7.76 Bulgaria
8.18 Czechoslovakia
8.82 Vietnam
9.55 Germany
10.65 S Korea
10.84 Taiwan
11.00 Japan
11.00 N Korea
11.80 Iran
11.88 UK
13.51 Yugoslavia
14.39 Ukraine
14.44 Poland
17.83 Canada
18.78 Belarus
18.83 Australia
19.07 France
19.18 India
20.19 Turkey
22.60 Serbia
22.69 Israel
24.04 Hong Kong
27.49 Mongolia
27.52 Singapore
27.53 Austria
27.67 Serbia and Montenegro
28.00 Brazil
28.35 Kazakhstan
28.55 Thailand
28.74 Italy
28.74 Sweden
29.56 Slovakia
30.43 Netherlands
31.78 Czech Republic
32.91 Greece
33.89 Georgia
34.00 Colombia
34.27 Argentina
35.56 Belgium
37.39 Croatia
38.00 Finland
38.94 Moldova
40.81 Cuba
41.00 Nicaragua
41.44 Mexico
41.78 Armenia
42.59 Peru
43.47 South Africa
43.78 Latvia
44.00 Uzbekistan
44.89 Norway
45.30 New Zealand
45.62 Algeria
46.25 Spain
46.56 Lithuania
46.75 Morocco
47.06 Macedonia (FYROM)
49.37 Tunisia
49.50 Switzerland
52.56 Slovenia
52.88 Azerbaijan
52.95 Indonesia
53.28 Bosnia and Herzegovina
53.44 Estonia
54.33 Bahrain
54.95 Denmark
56.04 Luxembourg
56.88 Cyprus
57.20 Macau
59.08 Iceland
60.61 Ireland
60.62 Turkmenistan
61.09 Portugal
65.00 Tajikistan
65.05 Trinidad and Tobago
65.82 Philippines
66.46 Kuwait
67.00 N Cyprus (Turkish Republic of)
67.06 Malaysia
68.13 Albania
68.17 Kyrgyzstan
69.00 Ivory Coast
69.20 Sri Lanka
69.76 Venezuela
70.17 Costa Rica
70.29 Chile
71.62 Uruguay
73.00 Panama
74.50 Bangladesh
75.00 Ecuador
79.83 El Salvador
79.92 Paraguay
80.09 Puerto Rico
80.50 Cambodia
81.00 Brunei
81.60 Pakistan
82.89 Guatemala
85.00 Saudi Arabia
85.75 Nigeria
86.00 Honduras
87.00 Montenegro
87.20 Liechtenstein
87.33 Mozambique
90.00 Bolivia
91.00 Syria
98.00 Mauritania
98.00 United Arab Emirates
100.00 Zimbabwe
101.00 Benin
Comparing a high IQ subset of Asians to Europeans as a group is logically nonsensical. Lets add in the populations of Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia etc to the Asian pile if we want to compare Asians to Europeans.
Then you'd have to add in Arabs and other assorted Mideasterners. The genetic distance between Europeans and Arabs is closer than the one between NE Asians and SE Asians.
Asia is a complicated place. Korea and Japan are pretty advanced. The southeast coast of China has historically been pretty affluent and educated - and seems to have reverted to type. The nations built by southeasterners (Taiwan, HK, Singapore, Macau) are, not surprisingly, doing pretty well.
Much of rural and inland China is fairly backward. Central Asia is very letharic, as is Mongolia. SE Asia has a large Chinese mercantile class, but otherwise is not very developmentally advanced.
My guess is that some regions of Asia (SE China, Korea, Japan) came under selection for cognitive abilities or development an achievement-geared culture, but other regions.... less so.
By the way, the advanced areas (SE China, Japan, Korea) have traditionally had very intensive rice farming. So think Farewell to Alms on steroids.
SE China also used its wealth, from rice farming, to open lots of academic academies and ended up owning the imperial exams.
"Then you'd have to add in Arabs and other assorted Mideasterners. The genetic distance between Europeans and Arabs is closer than the one between NE Asians and SE Asians."
Cite? Not that I really see the point of amalgamating "South East Asians" and "East Asians" (it seems fairly clear that Han and Koreans and Japanese are not smart because they are Mongoloid but because of the particulars of their specific trajectory). What would it tell anyone?
For China to be 10 Japans assumes that the average Chinese peasant is more similar to a Japanese than a Mongolian, Hmong, Lao, Kazakh, or Uighur.
57 Taiwans is still kind of a big deal!
"There are no Jews on the lists here:"
So what?
"And Israel isn't European."
Neither are the US, South Africa or Canada.
The post by DraganPNW, measures the far right tail rankings of various countries
India = 19.1
Israel = 22
Bangladesh = 75
Pakistan = 84
The retarding effects of islam are clearly seen.
@Anon,
Indian kids in UK, 90% of whom are mid-level castes like Patels and Sikhs regress to IQ97
and academically outperform whites.
Indian kids in US, 50% mid-level castes and 50% upper castes, regress to 112IQ
"Unlike the delinquents in Washington DC, who have decided to:
a.) Invite the whole world to live here
b.) Let our manufacturing base go overseas
c.) Allow foreignization of the IT workforce
d.) Borrow lots of money to pay for wars and overseas troop deployement that doesn't even benefit us."
You make a compelling case. Those running this country have little invested in it -- quite literally. Any American businessman or politician who wants to move operations and jobs overseas, should move himself overseas and give up American citizenship. We are funding traitors.
The genetic distance between Europeans and Arabs is closer than the one between NE Asians and SE Asians.
As measured in what? Miles, Kilometers? Liters? Ohms?
Since you seem determined to participate in these discussions, you really should give yourself a name. Or is that a task beyond your IQ?
Not that I really see the point of amalgamating "South East Asians" and "East Asians"
What about amalgamating all the East Asians? Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam are all "East Asian" rather than "South-East Asian".
Cite? Not that I really see the point of amalgamating "South East Asians" and "East Asians" (it seems fairly clear that Han and Koreans and Japanese are not smart because they are Mongoloid but because of the particulars of their specific trajectory). What would it tell anyone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Analysis_of_genetic_distance
A combination of rice farming, academic institutions and imperial exams, and genetic isolation can probably explain the development of elevated cognitive abilities in China's southern coast, Japan, and Korea.
Racially, the people of Mongolia are pretty similar to the people of Japan, but the variation in human capital is significant.
We're assuming that places like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have the same human capital as Taiwan.
What you see is that East Asians Americans are roughly 6-7 points above white European Americans in IQ, which is fairly consistent with the general psychometric literature.
"Roughly two to four points" would be a more accurate summation of the existing studies.
As measured in what? Miles, Kilometers? Liters? Ohms?
As measured by fixation index (Fst).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index
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