Make Poverty History: A Constructive Suggestion

Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof are working together to make a very big deal out of getting more aid for Africa out of the G8 countries this week.

Sub-Saharan Africa's single biggest problem is its average IQ of around 70. Since African-Americans score around 85, and they share about 80% of their genes with their African cousins, it's likely that the poor environment in Africa depresses the average IQ substantially.

Probably the cheapest way to raise IQs in Africa is to attack diseases caused by a lack of micronutrients that are known to lower IQ, such as "cretinism," which is caused by lack of iodine. Western countries started fortifying salt with iodine and flour with iron back before WWII, and that quickly eliminated what had been a substantial problem here.

UNICEF sponsored a big study of the problem last year. I wrote about what we could be doing to help the Third World in this regard here and here. But nobody else in the media seemed very interested because they aren't supposed to write about black IQ. See, good people think it's more moral to let cretinism and the like ravage Africa than to mention IQ in polite society. Only evil people like me are so disreputable as to try to get the world to solve the problem.

By the way, does anybody remember Geldof's band, the Boomtown Rats? He seemed smart, funny, inauthentic, and insincere - I especially liked his faux-Springsteen pseudo-epics such as "Johnny's on the Street Again." They were awfully catchy, but their phoniness kept them from catching on big here in the US. Who would have guessed he would make a future career for himself in saintliness?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer