A recurrent topic at iSteve is trying to estimate the long term average IQs of the two most populous countries, China and India. If you want to know what the world will be like in a generation, a question that is interesting to investors, strategists, and anyone with a general interest in the human race, then one of the really big, obvious, but seldom-asked questions is: what is the IQ potential of the populations of the two biggest countries?
Obviously, there are a fair number of very smart Chinese and Indians in the West. But a big question is: How deep is the bench in each country?
The consensus of Western observers going back to Marco Polo has been that the average Chinese has a fair amount on the ball. We need to learn far more about regional and class differences within China, but it seems likely that the national average will shake out into the three digit range.
India, however, seems much more complicated than China. For one thing, while the Chinese like to paper over their differences to present a show of unity and harmony to the world, the Indians have tried to increase their internal differences through the caste system, endogamy, and the like.
Moreover, Indian historical inventions tend to be rather more esoteric than Chinese historical inventions. For example, the medieval Chinese had a natural gas drilling and pipeline industry not all that different from the modern natural gas industry. Using bamboo for pipes, Chinese drilled up to a couple of miles deep, and piped gas up to 20 miles to use in city streetlights, something Europeans, for example, didn't catch up with until the 19th Century. In contrast, the Indians invented the concept of zero.
Natural gas drilling versus zero is an obvious apples and oranges comparison. I don't really know what to make of it. (Another aspect is that we have quite good records from much of Chinese history, but terrible records for most of Indian history)
Some Western intellectuals such as Schopenhauer, were greatly impressed by the profundity of Indian thought. On the other hand, a Western genius who knew India well, Kipling, was not as impressed. (Kipling was the kind of guy who would have been more impressed by a working natural gas industry.)
A few years ago, I published a lengthy attempt by Rec1Man to estimate the long-term potential for Indian average IQ. Here's NSAM's summmary of the revised version. He came up with 94, which sounds plausible to me, but I certainly don't know enough to comment on the components.
Here's another Indian's attempt at pulling together some of the evidence. I'll give away the bottomline, which is that Pensive Brahmin comes up with the same number: 94.
Indian IQ: Contained within is an alternative to the rec1man model of Indian IQ - it is not very structured but instead a mess of observations as a citizen.
First off, I think we can all agree that the 81 figure in Lynn &Vanhanen's 2002 is deeply suspect, and does not tally with the historical record of highly advanced Indian civilization. Noted here is the fact that malnutrition at the moment in India exceeds that in sub-Saharan Africa by a significant margin, and the simple removal of that malnutrition certainly makes up a huge portion of the 1 S.D. gain of blacks from Africa to the U.S.A.
And Lynn & Vanhanen emphasize the role of nutrition in raising average IQs (including micronutrients -- South Asians suffer a lot from iodine shortages, which can lead to cretinism).
IQ is segregrated by caste. Castes are still chiefly endogamous even in relatively modernized areas, and thus there is genetic IQ difference. It seems likely that Brahmin > Kshatriya/Vaishya should be the usual IQ stratification among the upper castes or dwijas.
After this broad division - contrary to what most would say - the subdivisions are very murky. Parsis perform on a Brahmin level or above it. The Kayasth - an administrative Kshatriya subcaste - have contributed 1 nobel laureate - Amartya Sen - and are competitive with Bengali Brahmins in Bengal. They seem to have done well in the sciences - Satyen Bose of Higgs boson fame for instance. Tamil Brahmins dominate the IITs , as well as hard sciences and mathematics. Compare with the Bengalis, who have nobels in economics and literature.
Visual-Verbal split ? Quite likely, imo. The backward castes and dalits follow the forward castes. Backward castes do quite well in some places - dalits not so much.
Factors depressing Indian IQ at the moment include poor literacy and nutrition, but also Islam. Nutrition as I noted earlier is worse than SS Africa. Literacy is rising, and with any luck will keep maintaining the strong growth it has now. [ Incidentally, it would be interesting to study Sri Lankan IQ - highly literate, low malnutrition, similar racial makeup with South India...and the only study we have is one way back in 1954 with a sample size of 46, that too on eight year olds, when IQ is not very heritable. The figure of 79 it gives is quite meaningless in the present context. ]
Islam needs a whole book unto itself. It promotes intellectual coma to a degree that no other religion can. I am positive that the Middle-Eastern IQ would be higher if those nations simply converted to something like Judaism. Sephardim , I think, illustrate my point by outscoring Arabs comfortably
There are various racial minorities in India. Of note is the fact that Mongoloid populations in the NE region - similar to Thailand/Tibetan/Burmese people underperform compared to the rest of the country. All these regions fall below average income and are not very developed. Since Thai IQ is 91, this puts a floor on true Indian IQ of somewhat above 91.
Interestingly, the eastern city of Kolkata has held a sizeable minority of Chinese. They do not have any history of academic excellence per se, and are more famous for bringing their cuisine to India. Perhaps a segment of the left half of the Chinese curve, as I do not believe that Indians have a mean IQ above 105.
Raw Income/IQ/Academic data from the diaspora
With the significant retarding effects on Indian IQ in India, we must look elsewhere.
In the U.S.A, Indian Americans outperform the Chinese. But they are highly selected and barely representative, and hence unsuitable as samples.
In the U.K., the Indian sample is quite representative of India. Lynn in his Race Differences in Intelligence gives some figures for Indians in Britain -
87 - 1967 , 91 - 1978 , 94 - 1983 , 97 - 1985 , 87 - 1992 [ 97 data point for Indians resident in Britain for 4+ years - the study used FoB immigrants scoring 83 as a comparison. Since this shows clear environmental influence, the FoB score which has presumably been environmentally deflated has been removed. ]
Unfortunately, Lynn has fudged the original Mackintosh data points, as Mackintosh mentioned in his review of the book.
Using Mackintosh's review as a basis, the data points become 87, 91, 94 , 97, 97, 91. You can read the relevant portions of his review at Dienekes :
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-massaged-data-from-richard-lynn.html
Well, you have to massage the data to account for the Flynn Effect. But that makes it more likely for errors to creep into the process.
The IQ in the UK averages out to 93, which does not square with the Indians outperforming whites in terms of education and income. Perhaps a further relative flynn has taken place since 1992 ? Or perhaps culture is a huge bonus for Indians.
British school tests have a huge gender gap, with girls badly outperforming boys within each racial group. I don't know whether there's something wrong with the tests or with boys in Britain.
Mauritius - Mauritius is a mostly lower caste-based sample of Indians and may be taken as a lower estimate. The Mauritian IQ is 89 for Indians and creoles. Indians are 70% of the sample and have a mean IQ of 2.5 points more than the creoles. Using basic algebra, we find that the Indo-Mauritian IQ is 90. Note that Mauritius is far from a selective migration case - calculations are basing off Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence.
Singapore : No IQ data here. But according to the 2005 Singstat income data -
Median income monthly : Chinese - 2500 Malay - 1800 Indian - 2480
Average income monthly : Chinese - 3610 Malay - 2200 Indian - 3660
Malaysia : IQ data of 88 just after the heyday of NEP which widely discriminated vs Chinese and Indians in Malaysia, hence testing those children who suffered under it. The chinese of course were not hit as hard. The Malays at the same time averaged 89. During this time the Indian economic situation put them in a very bad state. Now however the Indians perform midway between Malays and Chinese in income - see http://www.malaysianews.net/story/308459 . Plotting Chinese IQ as 105 and using a crude linear basis, the Indian IQ from that distribution is 96.
For a diaspora of plantation workers, 96 is quite impressive.
In sum, the true Indian IQ should be around 94 corrected for environment and very multi-modal. India's prospects in the 21st century in terms of IQ, while worse off than China's 105, are not that bad, primarily as Verbal IQ is more helpful in terms of GDP prediction than IQ - see La Griffe Du Lion's revised SFT - and East Asians lack verbal IQ comparatively.
Finally, allow me to mention two studies of Indian IQ that have not drawn much attention :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8240214 - note control group IQ
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15004297 , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10740303 - two studies, same cohort - note control group IQ
Indian IQ deserves a book length treatment, considering how diverse India is. What are your thoughts on Indian IQ ?
My thoughts are that it is a difficult and important question.
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286 comments:
1 – 200 of 286 Newer› Newest»The Indian population in Singapore has doubled over the last decades mostly because the state has encouraged migration of smart professionals. It's hard to figure how the old Tamil base of Singapore performs.
In Mauritius, a French and Chinese minority of about 5% dominate the business sector. The Indian population also includes high caste migrants.
Rushton did a study of engineering students at a good university in South Africa. The IQs of blacks, Indians, and whites were:
103, 106, 117
http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/RavensIVb.pdf
Trinidad is around 40 percent Indian. Somebody could take the PISA score and project an average IQ.
"Indian IQ deserves a book length treatment..."
Another thing that deserves book-length treatment is the taxonomy of India. Something that lists each of the thousands of caste and religious groups together with estimates of their population, occupational profile, geographic distribution, history, famous representatives, self-image, the whole thing. I'm not Indian, and yet I would buy such a book. Or this could be a wiki project. A real reference work.
I think that there are quite a lot of high IQ Indians, in other words, the variation might be greater than in other countries.
Just a feeling, no data. Perhaps based on a selected sample of emigres from India.
Anon.
94 is a pretty realistic estimate for Indian IQ, in my opinion.
Caste differences in IQ may exist, but I think many tend to overstate things. In general, the 1 SD gap between blacks and whites isn't going to exist among Indian caste populations. Also, having interacted with Indians from many different backgrounds, I haven't seen any noticeably large differences.
The mainland stereotype used to be organizational cleverness vs. insularity (Zheng He's armada). I suppose if I lived in Taiwan I'd be in favor of continued insularity.
Not to go all VDare but isn't it wiser to bet on linguistic and ethnic cohesion, and a visual-spatial adroitness evident from the ideographic script, as opposed to the ability to postulate the Chandrasekhar limit in the right setting? I'm sure they've got guys better than V.S. Naipaul and Satjayit Ray too, and the demonstrated tendency of 3-4 centuries between civil wars counts for a lot of IQ data imho (caveat new gender imbalance)
Guyana would be another interesting example. Like Mauritius, its Indian population is descended mainly from low-caste laborers and peasants.
Peter
Economic metrics like average and media income are not a very reliable indicator of cross cultural IQs IMHO.
Indians seem single-mindedly focused on matertial success unlike even compared to the Chinese. It seems every Indian I've met feels the need to go to Indian weddings and other family/community reunions as an MD, JD or successful businessman. They do remarkably well based upon the very non-representative samples I've known.
I've met only one hippy Indian in my entire life but a fair number of Chinese, Korean and especially Japanese ones - all of whom were 2nd generation US-born.
India clearly has groups of very intelligent people, but it also clearly has groups of very unintelligent people. The Indians in Britain are NOT representative of India because they do not include as high a percentage of low IQ people as exists in India.
India does have a very high rate of malnutrition, but malnutrition does not depress IQ as much as Lynn and others have suggested. Kuwait and Qatar have much higher living standards and much less malnutrition, but still have average IQs well below 90.
While the estimates of Wicherts et. al. may be somewhat biased in favor of more gifted Africans, they are probably right that Lynn's estimates of average African IQ are too low. Thus, malnutrition, while certainly undesirable, has not pulled down African IQs as much as Lynn has thought.
The bottom line is that in both India and sub-Saharan Africa, the average IQ of even well-nourished people is quite low -- below 90 in the case of India, and below 80 in the case of sub-Saharan Africa.
"East Asians lack verbal IQ comparatively"
I thought this has been disproven by subsequent tests of East Asians born and raised in the UK or US?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/07/chinese-children-school-do-well
"Remarkably, in 2009, in English key stage 2 tests, Chinese FSM pupils outperformed not just their counterparts from other ethnic groups – easily outstripping white children – but even Chinese pupils not eligible for free meals."
Pertinent as well with respect to Chinese vs. Indian IQ:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/chinese-pupils-eclipse-all-other-ethnic-groups-in-english-tests-436560.html
With regard to Chinese verbal:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/chinese-perform-better-in-english-than-white-children-571204.html
"Chinese children in British schools are outperforming every other ethnic minority group in tests and exams - including the English at English."
"In the U.S.A, Indian Americans outperform the Chinese."
This is itself a debate. And one that we can all probably contribute to unlike all the hard to verify characterizations on here.
Hmmm, considering what tiny Israel seems able to extract out of its IQ of 94, we can expect India with its population to become an absolute powerhouse of innovation and genius.
I'm blown away that the Chinese were drilling for natural gas 2000 years ago. Amazing. To paraphrase a line from My Big, Fat Greek Wedding, my Scot-Irish and English ancestors were still pretty much swinging from trees at that point.
Undoubtedly there are many factors that will interact with asymptotic IQ for a nation; one that's inevitable is aging and how it interacts with mental acuity.. Indians whether via diet (curcumin?) or genetics seem less affected by dementia (and undoubtedly sub-threshold effects on IQ) as a result of aging, at least when compared to europeans and chinese. http://www.alz.co.uk/adi/pdf/prevalence.pdf seems to indicate a 2:1 advantage and seems relevant for the ability of the upper tail to contribute when relatively old; the retirement age for civil servants currently is however less than 60 and doesn't make a whole lot of sense; typically the more able go into the private sector or consulting for a number of years after retirement. Steve's concerns regarding fertility across groups is also quite valid; if Chinese-like measures had been taken (for population control) India would have been better off with a much smaller population. Still an almost 10 point differential in mean IQ between India and China seems pretty steep and limits India's options for economic development. Chinese, being more ethnically homogeneous, also have an enormous capacity for cooperation esp. in matters of subordinating their will to the good of the group (temperament via genetics, confucianism or both); there is a lot of empty talk about the communist party being overthrown; I just dont see that happening any time in the next 20 years. Indian democracy is chaotic and governance depends on a mix of borderline criminal political class and an elite bureaucracy which is corrupted by the political process. To get an insider's view see http://bfn.sabhlokcity.com/ It has some discussion of IQ (but doesn't go into HBD at all). So overall one has to be bullish on China and I say this as an Indian.
This analysis is deeply flawed. For starters, the groups of higher intelligence such as the Brahmins,Parsi, etc. are a small subset of the Indian population. Its kind of like claiming the US IQ must be somewhere around 115 because of IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, without mentioning that they comprise only a small pct. of the population, so would have a negligible impact on the average.
Secondly, diaspora Indians cannot be used as representative of their homeland countrymen (as the author mentions in some parts of his analysis, but then uses it anyway in other parts) for IQ calculations of their home country as they represent the cream of the crop and their progeny.
Similarly, claiming that a region is comprised of SE Asians and does poorly, and using this as a base for estimating the IQ overall (based on Thai IQ), is not very satisfying. They may not be representative of their homeland, they apparently may not even be Thai, they may suffer other factors, like poorer access to education, etc, as minority groups; the region itself may not be a representative average environment for India, etc.
These represent only a few problems with this analysis, though the author does indicate that it is a crude estimation. Bottom line- There may be disparate groups of Indians, but is there any evidence that the reported IQ estimates, typically pulled from multiple published samplings of wide numbers of individuals, is not a representative estimation? Why should we place more value on individuals' assumptions?
Well before getting too excited about China's accomplishments, consider this.
Peter
"In the U.S.A, Indian Americans outperform the Chinese."
Only if you are more impressed by spelling bees than mathematical olympiads.
American IMO team recently announced:
http://amc.maa.org/imo/2011imo.shtml
- Wenyu Cao,
- Benjamin Gunby,
- Xiaoyu He,
- Mitchell Lee,
- Evan O'Dorney,
- David Yang
4 East Asians and 1 Indian.
Chinese and Indians may have decent IQ but they are too messy. Japanese have the Hai-Q.
"I'm blown away that the Chinese were drilling for natural gas 2000 years ago."
But with bamboo sticks?
"I've met only one hippy Indian in my entire life but a fair number of Chinese, Korean and especially Japanese ones - all of whom were 2nd generation US-born."
Good point - because no Indian in human history has ever been a drop out or religious ascetic, abjured material wealth or wilfully engage in self-deprivation. Shakyamuni or the Jains anyone?
I think Chinese also made rockets out of bamboo. Maybe Chinese--and Japanese--became too fond of bamboo and woodstuff and didn't develop metallurgy like the West.
I'm blown away that the Chinese were drilling for natural gas 2000 years ago.
But with bamboo sticks?
Not surprising. Bamboo can be enormously strong.
Peter
"Tamil Brahmins dominate the IITs , as well as hard sciences and mathematics. Compare with the Bengalis, who have nobels in economics and literature. "
A flawed comparison.
http://www.envizions.in/blog/?p=6
"Of note is the fact that Mongoloid populations in the NE region - similar to Thailand/Tibetan/Burmese people underperform compared to the rest of the country. All these regions fall below average income and are not very developed."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_by_GDP
And from my observations, Biharis make up the second-largest group after the Telugu-speaking kids in IITs.
"Famed national institutes of learning such as IITs, IIMs, NITs and AIIMS have always have had a good representation from Bihar which is usually higher than their proportion of the population."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bihar#Education
"Well before getting too excited about China's accomplishments, consider this."
Disappointing Peter - cherry-picking incidents really doesn't prove anything. I could point to the one Jewish guy I know who's of below average intelligence and asserts that this finally puts to rest the myth of their heightened IQ.
"But with bamboo sticks?"
Isn't the intelligent thing to make do with the most convenient and efficacious materials at hand? And weren't China's metallurgical technologies the most advanced in the world at the time?
I think a fair estimate is 88-90. But will India be able to get it by 2050?
Chinese seem to have it more together, but India influenced East Asia much more than the other way around. Buddhism had a huge impact on East Asia, but I don't think East Asian ideas had a huge impact on India.
This could be interpreted in two ways:
1. Indian culture was more profound and spread to other cultures.
2. Chinese and Japanese were more open to foreign ideas and gained by taking good ideas from India whereas Indians were either too arrogant or solipsistic to adopt or learn from other cultures--unless they were outright invaded, as by Mughal Muslims.
---
Btw, didn't the teacher in Stand and Deliver say that they Mayans invented the zero?
I think Asian-Indians came up with the so-called 'Arabic numerals'.
So, if current immigration and demographic trends continue, The national IQ of India will surpass that of the US in...?
A mean Indian IQ of 94 is much more believable than the Lynn figure of 81. Also, I stumbled across a study on the internet a few years ago that showed mean Sub-Saharan African IQ as 82, which is also more believable. I can't remember the source or I would have linked to it here.
I think that India is evidence that smart fraction theory is incomplete. There are plenty of smart Indians in top 5% but tons of decidedly not smarts drag the whole country back.
Using bamboo for pipes, [medieval] Chinese drilled up to a couple of miles deep
Any links for that? Just so hard to believe. 2 miles is 3200 meters. I was under impression that Chinese drilling holes even in 19th century never exceeded ~1000 m.
Regarding the IQ-lowering effects of islam
http://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx
There are 6 math questions with 7 points each and there are 6 members in each team
Maximum total points available = 6 x 7 x 6 = 252
Bangladesh ranked #72 out of 100 countries with a score of 50.
The Bangladesh team had 2 Hindu members who got 29 points and the 4 muslim members got 21 points.
Hindus are 9% of Bangladesh and yet 33% of their math olympiad team.
With muslim members alone, Bangladesh would have ranked 82, behind Pakistan, which got 35 points
Sri Lanka with all-Buddhist Sinhalese
ranked 73 with 49 points
India ranked 23 with all Upper caste team with 119 points
India tied with Israel for 23rd place
http://www.cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011
US welfare rate by country of origin
UK = 7%
India = 19%
Canada = 24%
Korea = 25%
Philipines = 30%
Russia = 30%
China = 35%
Pakistan = 35%
Peru = 40%
Vietnam = 50%
2009 US census survey
College rate / Median Household income
Indian = 70.7% / 90400
Chinese minus Taiwan = 51.2% / 69200
Taiwan = 74.1% / 81600
Korean = 52.7% / 52000
White = 29.3% / 53100
Filipino = 47.2% / 78000
http://www.ruralmedicaleducation.org/underserved/admissions_ratio_by_birth_origin.htm
The above URL shows what fraction of US High School students of each ethnicity go to Medical School
Indians = 1 in 22
Chinese = 1 in 59
White = 1 in 214
Black = 1 in 422 ( with Affirmative action )
Hispanic = 1 in 900 ( with Affirmative Action )
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/04/do-doctors-look-like-america-or-not/
US Med-school students / Population for various ethnicities
Asian = 4.75 X
Buddhist = 2 X
Muslim = 2 X
Jewish = 3.5X
Hindu = 10X
Perhaps it's an interesting question. My naive answer might be: There seems to be enough 'smart' Indians to make the generally shitty living conditions in India seem something of an anomaly.
But from a WN/'national question' perspective, I'd actually be more interested in how to stop Indians moving to the US. Since there are more than enough of them here already. And they look rather 'un-American' to me.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf
This has the PISA scores
In Math, Thailand scores 419
whereas Trinidad scores 414
Trinidad has 40% Blacks, and 40% Indians of mainly plantation worker lower castes.
I dont know what the PISA score for Afro-caribbeans is, but Indian stand alone is likely to be 0.5 SD at least over blacks in the same Socio-economic setting , which would likely give a stand-alone Indian PISA score in Trinidad of probably 430-440.
Stand-alone, Lower caste Indians with good nutrition score above Thailand.
Thai IQ is the lower limit for long term Indian IQ
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/India/IndiaSmiling.html
Indian nuclear weapon team in 1974
Raja Ramanna - Tamil Brahmin
P.K. Iyengar - Tamil Brahmin
Rajagopala Chidambaram - Tamil Brahmin
Satinder Kumar Sikka - Punjabi Khatri
Pranab Rebatiranjan Dastidar - Bengali Brahmin
Sekharipuram Narayana Aiyer Seshadri - Tamil Brahmin
Vasudev K. Iya - Tamil Brahmin
T.S. Murthy - Tamil Brahmin
C.V. Sundaram - Tamil Brahmin
P.R. Roy - Bengali Brahmin
Jitendra Nath Soni - Punjabi Khatri
Anil Kakodkar - Maharashtrian Brahmin
B.D. Nag Chaudhuri - Punjabi Khatri
Nagapattinam Sambasiva Venkatesan - Tamil Brahmin
Muthuswamy Balakrishnan - Tamil Brahmin
Waman Dattatreya Patwardhan - Maharashtrian Brahmin
S.N. Joshi - Maharashtrian Brahmin
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/spo_che_gra-sports-chess-grandmasters
Has list of Chess Grandmasters by country.
China has 19
India has 11, including Vish Anand ( Tamil Brahmin ), who has been world chess champion for the last 8 years
I wonder how the 81 IQ number stacks up against Vish Anand
@Anon wrote - I've met only one hippy Indian in my entire life but a fair number of Chinese, Korean and especially Japanese ones - all of whom were 2nd generation US-born."
--
Indians belong to extended families ( usually 2nd cousin or more ) which feed, educate and otherwise act as a social safety net.
In return, one has an obligation to get educated, make money, generously fund educational / medical needs of the extended family and not marry outside of an upper caste.
Response to criticism - model author here :
Firstly the Singaporean diaspora is not representative of India for the same reasons as the US
I noted as much when I said that Indian IQ cannot be over 105, yet it seems to be as much re the Income data from Singstat.
Re : South Africa
I hesitate to take any samples from nations where overt discrimination was practiced - see Malaysia and NEP - but in terms of IQ data of Indians in SA :
data points : 77, 88, 86, 83, 91
firstly the 77 data point is from 1929 and seems to have been an outlier
secondly, the 83 data point seems to come from the same sample as the 91 sample but with a different test - fishy. I could not check up the reference though.
all data from Race differences in Intelligence so far
Omitting the 1929 study
average : 87
now all these samples are from apartheid, which officially ended in 1994
judging how buraku in japan average 1 sd below other japanese
the 87 figure is almost certainly too low
It's a bad idea to pick university students as your samples as they are very far from representative of the population.
Indian culture attaches importance to education and will pressure children belonging to the left half of the curve into it
re : Kuwait and Qatar
As I said Islam and IQ are inversely correlated - Qatar specially is very religiously conservative tallying with a 78 IQ
Take a look at the criticisms of Saudi Arabian education which focuses on the Quran
For another example Indians in the UK outperform Pakistanis significantly - see the Mackintosh review
Now I have been able to find a paper on Kuwaiti IQ norms :
http://www.wpe.info/vault/khalek/khalek0508.pdf
Salient features of the paper :
The UK-Kuwaiti 50th percentile gap is 5,11,6,9,6,7,3,4,1,2,1,2,0,1,1,1
when ordered by age youngest to oldest
as kuwaitis age and their IQs revert more towards genetic mean
the gap decreases greatly
this shows cultural factors at work
one might argue for an inflated score of kuwaitis due to use of 1979 norms
but the flynn effect has stopped/reversed in britain : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/British-teenagers-have-lower-IQs-than-their-counterparts-did-30-years-ago.html
therefore one may take those kuwaiti IQs as relative to current Brit IQ
other interesting data :
gaps in general of all countries diminish with age at 50th percentile suggesting a cultural factor
the china-uk distribution is very similar
the two indian cities of pune and mumbai posit a gap with UK norms at 50th percentile of 11, 7, 2 resp with increase of age
suggesting cultural factors
at the 95th percentile
the Indian-UK gap is 3,1,0
^ Higher variance
using US 2000 norms
gaps of 4 and 0 at 50th percentile
with kuwait
gaps of 2 and 1 at 95th percentile with Kuwait
w/ India : gaps of 8 and 1 at the 50th percentile
gaps of 1 and -1 at 95th percentile
Qatar makes 1 appearance and performs at slightly above Kuwaiti levels and below UK levels - data of older kids would be good here - also Kuwait is apparently 86 iq and qatar 78, so the middle east data is not clear at all
unless the lower iq of qatar is an artifact of the older iq data of qatar in race differences in intelligence , as the flynn effect is faster in the 3rd world - see Daley 2003
I'm aware that kuwait and qatar are not 3rd world countries in terms of income - but western culture , knowledge and scientific outlook should also raise iq and said outlooks are still rising in the middle east
this is similar to the "flynn effect due to cognitive stimulation" theory
Re: Wicherts data
if we take below 80 from your comment for SS africa - let me use 79 for an optimistic estimate
then the flynn from Africa to USA is 6
this is equivalent to flynn over 2-3 decades
SS Africa of now is not the USA of 2-3 decades back in terms of environment, not even close
something is evidently wrong here
one cannot cherry pick data - while estimates of higher SS African IQs exist so does estimates of higher African IQ out of africa
like low 90s for UK blacks
91 for 13 year old US blacks
and before you scream child data, MOST data points in every one of Lynn's books are child / adolescent data
Re: East Asian verbal IQ
Comparatively means relative to their spatial IQ
Due to higher mean IQ and good home values they are still on top in terms of verbal ability overall in the GCSE
but their spatial-verbal gap is well documented, see Race Differences in Intelligence
In your quoted article I note that Indians are midway between chinese and whites - hard to square with an IQ of 93 , more on this later
Re : High IQ groups as a % of the pop
Parsis and brahmins are a small fraction but
The forward castes are in total about 40%, so a significant amount
Moreover I also use backward caste diasporas
Diaspora selection : Mauritius and Malaysia and the UK are mostly descendants of laborers and plantation workers with a lesser overlay of high achieving castes - like Indians from Africa in the UK
But as I showed earlier even the punjabi sikhs do well for themselves despite being workers and laborers originally
The only genuine example of selection is Indians in the USA and I have noted so
"Similarly, claiming that a region is comprised of SE Asians and does poorly, and using this as a base for estimating the IQ overall (based on Thai IQ), is not very satisfying. They may not be representative of their homeland, they apparently may not even be Thai, they may suffer other factors, like poorer access to education, etc, as minority groups; the region itself may not be a representative average environment for India, etc."
duly noted but they are indeed with thai admixture. However all other points raised are quite valid - but if you take education as a factor you also acknowledge that Indian IQ as a whole is similarly deflated due to poor literacy.
"I've met only one hippy Indian in my entire life but a fair number of Chinese, Korean and especially Japanese ones - all of whom were 2nd generation US-born."
Good point - because no Indian in human history has ever been a drop out or religious ascetic, abjured material wealth or wilfully engage in self-deprivation. Shakyamuni or the Jains anyone?
I see your thinking. I once met a black physicist who was clearly smarter than most Ashkenazi Jews. Therefore all blacks are clearly smarter than all Ashkenazi Jews. QED
Or you could just look up the meaning of the phrase: "the exception that proves the rule".
Check out the international math olympiad results
http://www.imo-official.org/
India seems to consistently put up mediocre scores whereas China seems dominate the event like the US dream team used to dominate international basketball.
Re:East Asians in IMO
Sanity check
200 mil Non-hispanic whites with 74 million having 105+ IQ
6 mil East Asians in America with 3 mil having 105 IQ
IQ alone cannot explain the East Asian over-representation
Culture is evidently at work here
Re: TamBrams in IIT
Bombay and Madras are both in Southern India - Bombay is also near Gujarat, another high achieving state
So thanks for illustrating my point
http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/26/stories/2011052657981500.htm
Andhra Pradesh is also very Southern
Regarding Bihar, it is a nutcase with L.P. Yadav's terrible rule and cannot be taken as a good sample - also a source other than wiki would be good as wiki does not cite the source for your statement.
I note that from your link the IIT guwahati has the lowest passrate, situated in the NE region.
Re : Indian culture
"Hippiness" is not something easy to measure and cannot be racialized in terms of anecdotes
Would be good to have a study on obedience to parents by nation for this
Regarding income, it is true that Indian culture places value on income and education , and so does Chinese culture. This contributes to the success of the two groups.
It may be proposed that for the UK, the household income/GCSE data is biased towards resident Indians with average IQ 97, while the IQ data has a mix of FoBs who average 83
This is sufficient to explain the gap of model and reality w.r.t. education and income in the UK
East Asians in IMO refers to overrepresentation of East Asians in US team, also the figure of 105 for them should be 105+ to indicate that 3 mil have 105 or above IQs
fig. of whites for U.S.A
Obvious facts but clarifying nevertheless
I find assessing Indian student applications to my Masters University course quite difficult. They are so much more varied than most other populations. And they don't put 'Brahmin' on their applications, which would really help a lot!
In general, my impression is:
Top-caste Indians seem to be comparable to Western elites in intelligence. This is in huge contrast to eg Saudi Arabia, where the elite (top 5%) median IQ is 95. My female students from the elite seem to do notably better than the males, possibly they are 'more elite', or it may be they work harder.
Middle-caste Indians are moderately intelligent by world standards, but very often incapable of performing at Western University level unless they have grown up in the West, in which case a decent work ethic can substitute for limited IQ. The contrast here is more with places like China, where the middle class are at least as smart as their Western equivalents. A middle class Indian student who'd been caught cheating told me on Thursday: "In India I was a good student. Here I'm zero!" - and that sadly is all too common.
Lower caste - hard to tell, I only see the exceptional ones (who are often political leaders back home), but the mass seem to have very low IQ on average, some down around Australian Aborginal level.
Re UK state education - it's a complete disaster, as you know. The discrimination against boys is truly breathtaking. Where else in the world do lower class black girls routinely outperform lower class white boys?
Re:Indian Americans
I base my data on the 112 IQ data point for them based on digit span test , beating the chinese
They probably have a verbal-visual split - over-represented in medicine and spelling bees
hindus have higher SAT scores than the asian average and the buddhist average. Using buddhist as a proxy for East asians - we get hindus > chinese.
they are also higher earners than their chinese peers in the U.S.
So yes, Indian americans outperform the chinese
"Re UK state education - it's a complete disaster, as you know. The discrimination against boys is truly breathtaking. Where else in the world do lower class black girls routinely outperform lower class white boys? "
I am well aware that the measure is imperfect - but this is the social sciences, not physics.
"In the U.K., the Indian sample is quite representative of India."
Well, Indians are totally outperforming white Britons in the UK:
"Fifty-five per cent of Chinese pupils and 31 per cent of Indian pupils who took GCSE maths last year achieved an A...
Among white British pupils, the figure was 16 per cent. For black African pupils it was 14 per cent, for Pakistani 13 per cent and black Caribbean 8 per cent."
Daily Mail: http://bit.ly/aSVMr7
I believe there is an overrepresentation of Sikhs among UK Indians though.
As for Norway, Asians don´t seem to be overachieving the way they are in the US/UK. There aren´t enough Indians and Chinese to have detailed statistics for them, but second generation Tamils (from Sri Lanka) perform almost at the same level as ethnic Norwegians in high school, and the same is true for second generation Vietnamese (descendants of boat refugees). Both Tamils and the Vietnamese are very ambitious though, and go on to college at a significant higher rate than Norwegians. Pakistanis (from Punjab) are underperforming Norwegians, but even they now go to college at a higher rate.
Simon, it is not a matter of work ethic per se
Indians resident in UK for four or more years put up an IQ of 97 as I noted earlier
While FoBs give 83
Growing up in the West has little to do with bestowing a good work ethic but can boost IQ with better nutrition, education and cognitive stimulation
@Rec
I'm not sure if this is relevant or not, but keep in mind on the census they didn't start introducing Pakistan as an option until very recently I believe. Until then it was Indian, there was no distinction made. And many Pakistanis may still continue to tick Indian.
"British school tests have a huge gender gap, with girls badly outperforming boys within each racial group. I don't know whether there's something wrong with the tests or with boys in Britain."
This might be because of an overly feminized (not feminist) culture that is having the effect of retarding the development of a healthy male psyche. I spent some time in the UK back in the 90's and found the culture to be extremely feminized and hostile to anything associated with being masculine. As matter of a fact, I often found the line between gay and heterosexual males to be very blurry. It was a major culture shock for me, even though I am from California.
I live in a UK city with many Indians (immigrants and born here) and a fair few Pakistanis. Indians strike me as being fairly similar in average physical build to British people, and slightly less intelligent (94 sounds realistic). Pakistanis come across as somewhat less smart than Indians; given the ethnic proximity of Indians and Pakistanis I suspect that Islam is mostly responsible for this. Many young male Pakistanis in the UK study Islamic scripture for hours a day.
Indian school kids tend to be brought up to study harder, which for me explains their higher grades. Given the miserable password-guessing nature of our public "education" system, I would never use this as a proxy for IQ.
I've never been struck by any group of Indians being unusually smart, in the way that Jews and to a lesser extent North-East Asians genuinely appear, and frankly I suspect that the super-high-IQ of Brahmins may be a self-serving myth for certain Indians (e.g. the owners of the blog GNXP).
As you say Steve, it's a very difficult problem for an outsider to evaluate and make judgements upon - chiefly because of the myriad racial, sociological and religious differences within India, the natural tendency of Indians being to 'split' differences as far as possible, rather than to 'lump' people together as the Chinese do.
My own impression, and it is only an impression, mind you, is that *average* Indian IQ is severely depressed due to the vast swathes of 'primitive, tribal' groups that live within India (who in fact make up the substrate of the Indian people) and the huge numbers of Indians who are affiliated by caste to the 'adivasi' population.Even today the tribals and primitives are distinguished by a very low level of material and intellectual culture - and I fear this deficiency is genetic and shared by vast swathes of lower caste Indians.
Yes, the Indians produce many great and accomplished men, many of whom have emigrated to the west.But it is my contention that these being of the higher casres have inherited a radically different genome to the tribals and lower castes.I fear the lower castes (those are the horrible, nudey, beggary bodies you see on TV), will never amount to anything.
OTOH the vast majority of Chinese are Han, they know they are Han, there is little distinction between them and importantly they make no distinctions.
It's remarkable that just a few decades ago when the Chinese were just as poor as Indians you never ever swa TV or news pictures of Chinses people living in horrible, insanitary, beggary squalor.Even the poorest and most wretched of the Chinese has more self-respect than that - that trait is probably linked with IQ and industriousness.
Re Simon in London-check out the Wall Street Journal article on Indian universities
India graduates millions but few are fit to hire.....
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html
Re India's abstract vs Chinese tangible achievenments
Granted China is viewed more for its amazing pragmatic applications of its soso esoteric knowledge which create among other things -paper, printing,gun powder,wheelbarrow,water wheel etc
while India is known more for its metaphysics,logic,astronomy ,geometry .medicine and math.
While the general perception is not entirely inaccurate I feel many are unaware of India's engineering achievements
In architechture ,India has been somewhat unappreciated because Western historians tend to go on and on about the lack of Doric and Ionian pillars or arches!
The "ghats" or riverside steps amongst major riveris a very complex engineering task
As
for large civil engineering works, some of the most remarkable
examples of this are temples which are submerged during most times of
the year. During the Sagar Mela(Ocean festival), people visit such a temple by boat
near the Bay of Bengal where the Ganga ends. That the temple still
stands in the middle of the river/ocean is a remarkable testament to
the engineering capability of ancient India.
Furthermore you have refigeration methods such as "ghara" or "surahi"
which were used to create a modified form of ice in a tropical climate in the era preceeding refridgeration.
If you want to delve further into legend and myth ,you may find that behind the overt fantastic religious imagery were very practical projects.
The 1st incarnation of Vishnu (Matsya or fish) refers to the is allegory for the discovery of the magnetic compass.
The bringing down of the Goddess Ganga from "heavens" refers actually to a enormous civil engineering project to divert the flow of Ganga from Tibet into India.
Perhaps due to the religious symbolism of these events, historians and scientists dont look too closely but instead try to seek palaces,gymnasiums,assembly halls and other secular buildings no longer exist due to ancient Indias curious attachment to wood as construction material in a tropical climate!
Re Tamils -which Tamils do you speak of , is it the relatively mild mannered(for themost part!) Indian Tamils who excel at science and technology or Sri Lankan Tamils who more known for their business acumen ....and well LTTE , Tamil gangs in London and Toronto(interestingly in the latter case they drove out the more tall and muscular Sikh gangs apart from winning many skimishes against Neo Nazi skinheads)
Of course one population of indian descent has been tested for IQ many, many times under the most scrupulous and scientific conditions, and have been the subject of a great deal of remedial research by a huge number of educational psychiatrists.
ALL the testing shows them to be completely undistingished regarding IQ, bordering on the retarded level.
That particular Indian population is, of course, the Roma Gypsies of Europe.
Indians do really well in business -- especially Jains. Maybe that is their proclivity for their high IQ subset: Look at the number of CEOs in this article http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-08-01/news/29836043_1_indian-origin-persons-mumbai-indians-ceos
Dipak Jain recently named dean of INSEAD business school. So many other Indian b-school deans too -- Nitin Nohria (Harvard), Yash Gupta (Hopkins), Sunil Chopra (Northwestern, Sunil Kumar (UChicago).
A lot of British Indian immigrants are Gujaratis or professionals. I believe the children of both groups probably would tend to skew the population upward. Rather than look at the British Indian community as a whole, it's better to just focus on the substanial minority of the British Indian community which is Sikh, as the Sikhs mostly arrived as industrial laborers. They might be a good representation of India's average ability.
I believe British Sikhs are about the equivalent of British whites in education and income. Slighty higher in networth, but more likely to live in an extended family too. That's not bad for a community that's likely pretty representative of the average Indian intellectual potential, but perhaps a little harder working.
Does anybody here know much about Tamils, their culture, etc? The only stereotype I've heard about them is that they have a reputation for being hard workers. I get the idea from other Indians-mostly from the North-that they're kind of a people apart.
Steve, I love your blog but have you considered the possibility of source bias? The comments here by India's best and brightest anglophone elite don't lend any support to an average IQ near 94. The sorts of astounding leaps in logic from people two standard deviations above their group means depresses me.
For example when comparing different immigrant groups you have to control for several variables that are available in the census data but not directly obvious. Before you make direct apples to apples comparisons you have to compensate for age distribution, sex distribution, household size, family origin, etc.
Otherwise you can have two groups of 40 year olds with per capita incomes of 80,000 per year and 0 by having one group composed entirely of actual prime working age 40 year old people and the other group evenly divided between 5 year old children and 75 year old pensioners.
One interesting note is how often I hear that Indian Americans score higher than Chinese Americans on the SAT. I've never actually seen the first hand data for this assertion and all of it has come either second hand or worse. However, I did find this comprehensive California assessment of pupil performance which actually does break down the nebulous "Asian classification".
http://star.cde.ca.gov/star2010/SearchPanel.asp
From this assessment of 108,621 Chinese students and 53,108 Indian students, it would appear that the Chinese are more diligent pupils. It is certainly far more rigorous and reliable of a dataset than a backwards digit span test given to 35 people.
"I'm blown away that the Chinese were drilling for natural gas 2000 years ago. Amazing. To paraphrase a line from My Big, Fat Greek Wedding, my Scot-Irish and English ancestors were still pretty much swinging from trees at that point."
-Not quite. This is actually a myth promulgated by the lefties. By most objective measures, Europe was ahead of China throughout most of history. China was really only ahead of Europe for the milennia or so of dark ages following the fall of Rome, when European society crashed, and during which several plagues occurred wiping out large swaths of Europeans. China never did develop many of the core fields of math and science that we consider fundamental to technological and scientific advancement.
An interesting aside relating to China and India- Much of the philosophy and culture that are considered to be "Chinese" extending back into antiquity developed in India. This is the case for Buddhism, Shaolin martial arts, etc.
One of the artifacts of the caste system, is that the artisan castes ( practical knowledge ) are separate and lower from the brahmin caste ( theoritical knowledge ).
The Indian advantage is in the theoritical realms
Zero, Decimal numbers, Sine Table in Trignometry.
From wiki - In 718, an Indian mathematician Gautam Siddha ( Qutan Xuda ) corrected and updated the chinese calendar, using the Indian navagraha calendar
The alphabet in south east Asia is Indian, - Thai, Tagalog, Bahasa, Khmer
*Yunnan in China was ruled by Indian kingdoms until they were ousted by the Mongols in 1300
Funny you should mention Sikhs...
The Sikh median household wealth is 229,000 pounds , Jews at 422,000 [!!!] , Christians at 223,000 pounds, Hindus at 206,000.
Very weird as the Sikhs were laborers. It makes no sense for laborers to outscore other Indians with presumably higher brow occupations.
SAT is a better measure of g than school tests. And the Indian American dominance on SAT isn't anything nebulous. Look up SAT scores by religion, India is as good a proxy for Hindu as you can get.
Re: the digit span tests, they turned up data consistent with the achievement levels and also consistent with other IQ data for non-selected groups, so...
Israel. China. India. All those high IQs. And such utopias.
http://www.arthurhu.com/99/12/cminor.txt
1990 SAT data based on old SAT
White Unitarian = 1073
White Quaker = 1037
White Jews = 1030
Asian Hindu = 1029
Asian Average = 938
White Average = 934
Asian Islam = 923 ( Islam lowers IQ again )
The chinese are split into their religious denominations but all are below Asian Hindu
Did anyone actually read the synopsis for those studies from the NIH. I did and I found some interesting things.
All three studies particularly the first have sample sizes that are too small to be extrapolate to India as a whole, particularly the first one with only 50 children studied in each group. For a population the size of India's you will need almost 400 perfectly randomized individuals for a bare minimum of 95% confidence level with a margin of error of 5%. None of the studies referenced come close to this.
The data collected from the second two surveys in Pune do not even make a pretense to gather a representative sample. Note the setting, "Infants discharged from a Neonatal Special Care Unit of a referral hospital".
Which Indian parents can afford to send their infants to a Neonatal special care unit of a tertiary care referral hospital? How representative are they to the general population? Questions with fairly intuitive answers, excepting of course to the certain Indians here who would rather you not look to closely into their claims. How prevalent are underweight children in India as a percentage of the total population (Hint world health organization's latest data shows 39%).
Simon in london said:
------
Re UK state education - it's a complete disaster, as you know. The discrimination against boys is truly breathtaking. Where else in the world do lower class black girls routinely outperform lower class white boys?
-----
That is surprising, to say the least. Can you elaborate on the topic of anti-boy bias, with examples?
Re: Studies
First we have the Aligarh study. Yes, it is not representative of India , and has a small sample size.
Yet, Aligarh's literacy rate is 69.6%, compared with the national 74% - below average, not above.
The Pune study is the opposite - Pune is a pretty developed city. The IQ obtained is likely not that far off from Pune as a whole, but far off from India as a whole.
As I have repeatedly emphasized, these data points are NOT perfect. One cannot expect them to be. You will note that I do not claim an European level IQ for India as those two studies indicate, because I acknowledge those imperfections.
Re: TamBrams in IIT
"Bombay and Madras are both in Southern India - Bombay is also near Gujarat, another high achieving state
So thanks for illustrating my point"
Kota falls under the Bombay zone. Rajasthan is by no stretch of imagination a southern state, nor is Gujarat.
"Andhra Pradesh is also very Southern"
but not as southern as Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
http://qna.rediff.com/questions-and-answers/why-tamilians-are-less-in-iit-madras-compared-to-t/121675/answers/121701
http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/27/stories/2011052758900800.htm
"Regarding Bihar, it is a nutcase with L.P. Yadav's terrible rule and cannot be taken as a good sample"
Then NE has even more reasons to be not a good sample.
Besides that, JEE coaching, which is a big factor in admissions, is dismal here.
http://www.askiitians.com/franchisee/guwahati.aspx
As for Bihar and IITs,
http://arunbharti.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/proud-facts-that-you-should-know-about-bihar/
PS: An anecdote about Gujarat and JEE.
The smartest guy I came across in IIT was a gujarati who had cleared JEE without any coaching or extra preparation over his state board curriculum and had taken the exam only because someone had suggested it to his parents.
He was perfectly oblivious to what it meant before he was selected.
"That is surprising, to say the least. Can you elaborate on the topic of anti-boy bias, with examples?"
Angry Harry has many good articles and links to such practices.
http://www.angryharry.com/esStopHelpingBoys.htm
http://www.angryharry.com/esWellDonetheGirls.htm
others:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7961956/GCSE-results-girls-pull-ahead-of-boys.html
and stereotype threat for boys:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/01/girls-boys-schools-gender-gap
We will soon have a good IQ estimate of modern India by the end of this year when PISA results come out.
Two Indian states have participated this time. Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh. Both are above national literacy though roughly at national income.It'll be interesting to see how it goes.
Oh and re:NE regions , literacy data shows 2 NE states ranking near the top by literacy, debunking the idea that they have low access to education.
>Gog
"By most objective measures, Europe was ahead of China throughout most of history. China was really only ahead of Europe for the milennia or so of dark ages following the fall of Rome, when European society crashed, and during which several plagues occurred wiping out large swaths of Europeans."
Not true. China had superior technology up until the Renaissance. Plagues happened in China too, and they has just as many barbarians harassing them.
>rec1man
"The alphabet in south east Asia is Indian, - Thai, Tagalog, Bahasa, Khmer"
SEA alphabets come from South Indian alphabets. They are also incredibly unefficient. Trust me, learning to read Thai or Burmese is a nightmare. Not a sign of civilization.
*Yunnan in China was ruled by Indian kingdoms until they were ousted by the Mongols in 1300"
Not true. Neither Dali nor Nanzhao had anything to do with Indians. They were tribal kingdoms with some Burmese cultural influence.
Continental SEA cultures are very indianized, but there was no Indian invasion or genetic admixture. Same as Arab influence in insular SEA. Doesn´t say anything about Indian superiority. Its not hard to impress jungle dwellers.
Just a few thoughts on Indian IQ:
To my knowledge, the majority of Indians in former British/French tropical colonies (Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, Malaysia, Guyana, etc.) are mainly descended from Dalit laborers, and are thus probably the lower ~20% of India's Bell-Curve. Bangladesh is also probably ~50% Dalit (though they're Muslim). There are very few Dalits in Britain, and, from what I've learned, Indians are economically very successful in the UK.
If Dalits regularly score in the Mid to late 80's/early 90's on IQ tests, then it's a fair bet that India's non-Dalit population scores substantially higher. A 94 IQ sounds reasonably plausible, with a very high SD.
Secondly, I'm a little suspicious of Lynn and Rushton. They seem to be complete ignoramuses when it comes to population genetics. For example, they claim that Indians are genetically similar to Egyptians, Qataris, Moroccans, etc. I KNOW that this is total baloney. Even genetic studies have shown that the Gypsies are, overall, not genetically THAT similar to Indians in India.
Some more thoughts on Indian IQ: given that many Indians in the UK are still first generation, it's likely that Indian incomes there are still slightly depressed (since the lower 1st generation incomes pull the overall score down-think of Poles in the US 100 years ago). As the Indians get more settled in the UK, I'd expect to see income/education levels rise.
Secondly, Mr. Sailer claims that Indian inventions were more 'esoteric' than Chinese inventions: that may be true in a general sense, but even India and Persia's technological contributions give Chinese ones a run for their money.
One interesting note is how often I hear that Indian Americans score higher than Chinese Americans on the SAT. I've never actually seen the first hand data for this assertion and all of it has come either second hand or worse.
My impression is quite similar.
As a useful objective datapoint, there was that statewide listing of CA National Merit Scholars which Steve discussed some months back. As I recall, the preponderance of East Asian names to others, certainly including South Asian ones, was quite enormous, and that included most of the Silicon Valley schools which include very large numbers of South Asian students, presumably of similar elite status. This sort of listing filters out most of the extraneous factors discussed in the comments.
I think the evidence of a large East Asian/South Asian gap is very strong, though certainly nutritional or other deprivational factors might mean it's actually just 1 SD or so, rather than the 1.5-2 SD presented by Lynn. And as others have already suggested, the South Asian distribution is probably the world's most multimodal.
Pensive Brahman simply doesn't get it. The data obtained from the Pune hospital cannot even be extrapolated to the rest of Pune let alone India. Or rather it can be but leads in the completely opposite direction of where he is leading readers.
As recently as 2007, less than 50% of child births in India were attended by "skilled" health staff.
These children surveyed were born between 1987 and 1989 at a neonatal special care unit of a tertiary referral hospital in India.
Draw your own conclusions about the socio-economic and caste status of the parents and children in the Pune study.
Re:IIT
The Bombay region encompasses Northern states, yes , but also Maharashtra and Karnataka which are by no means Northern states. Also state education in Rajasthan is worse off than in either of the other three states, leading to greater demand for IIT. Rajasthan is also a much poorer state, so you can't just go abroad for an IIT alternative.
The IIT Madras zone, more to the South, has the highest success rate, so again, it bears out my assertions.
Re: comparisons between NE and Bihar
There has been nothing analogous to L.P. Yadav's obsession with caste politics in the NE region to my knowledge. Look at Bihar's progress under Nitish Kumar and compare.
Alternatively it may be that the Bihari IQ due to muslim genocide of Hindu upper castes in North India is lower than the NE IQ , but the fact that Bihar has better coaching makes up for it. Also Bihari population is 2.5x the NE states' population together, meaning a bigger right tail.
A news article with the number of Biharis clearing the JEE/year would be useful.
Gog said:
"Much of the philosophy and culture that are considered to be "Chinese" extending back into antiquity developed in India. This is the case for Buddhism, Shaolin martial arts, etc."
What like Daoism, Confucianism, Legalism and Mohism - these are all of Indian origin?
The first great flowering of Chinese thought occurred during the Eastern Zhou period - the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Eras which concluded with the establishment of the first Qin Dynasty circa 200 BC. The first foreign thought system to enter China - Buddhism - probably made its debut in the empire around the start of the Eastern Han Dynasty - a good two centuries later.
Buddhism is immensely importance for Chinese civilization, and is a genuinely Vedic import. But the Chinese took it, completely changed it, and made it utterly their own.
Anyone who has been to India and is not of Indian extraction (Indians are very patriotic) should recognize this entire article as nonsense.
This sentence alone is enough to disprove everything else: "In the U.K., the Indian sample is quite representative of India." If the author believes that they are breathtakingly ignorant of the country. Truly vast swathes of India live in literal servitude or don't earn enough to obtain basic nutrition. These people are never going to immigrate to another country.
In India it is routine to see people living below the level of animals. There is no one home when you look in their eyes. There are hundreds of millions of Indians who fit into this category. There is zero chance of these people ever reaching the level of being a call center worker. The idea that they will get on a plane and immigrate is preposterous.
Most of the confusion around Indian IQ stems from the intelligent Indians who actually do immigrate. The majority of these people have generations of wealth behind them. In fact, out of several thousand US Indians I have met, not one has come from what can be realistically described as a modest background.
"As a useful objective datapoint, there was that statewide listing of CA National Merit Scholars which Steve discussed some months back. As I recall, the preponderance of East Asian names to others, certainly including South Asian ones, was quite enormous, and that included most of the Silicon Valley schools which include very large numbers of South Asian students, presumably of similar elite status. This sort of listing filters out most of the extraneous factors discussed in the comments."
This is true, but as I noted in my review of the IMO team of the US, IQ alone cannot explain this.
Re:Pune
Pune is currently the third highest city in India in terms of income, which is why I maintain that those figures aren't that far off from Pune's own IQ.
Of course, Pune's own IQ =/= India's IQ, but I've already acknowledged that.
There's an interesting reality show on one of the cable channels called My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which features Irish Travellers living in England. Physically they are indistinguishable from the native British, but their levels of socioeconomic development are abysmal. Very few stay in school past their early teens or have more than basic literacy. It's hard to be sure, and keep in mind that I've only watched bits and pieces of the show, but my impression is that the Travellers aren't inherently stupid, and that if they were in cultures that cared more about education and self-improvement they'd fare significantly better.
Peter
"Look up SAT scores by religion, India is as good a proxy for Hindu as you can get."
No it is not. Christians, Sikhs and Jains are VERY heavily over-represented among Indian-Americans. Together they are above 40% of the Indians in America. Then there are the Muslim Indian-Americans, under represented but still there. Of the hindu Americans, the low caste or non-dwija are the majority, primarily gujaratis.
What percentage of Indian Americans are Brahmins? Certainly substantially fewer than the percentage of Sikhs. A good way to calculate this is comparing the number of Brahmin last names vs Sikh last names in the Internet White Pages.
Mr Brahmin,
I wasn't disparaging Indian alphabets per-se, they work pretty well with Indian languages. I never understood the need to have different glyph shapesfor each language, but still, they are quite efficient as they are.
They just are a nightmare when used to write SEA languages. It's worse even than writing IE languages with Arabic script i.e. an awful mess.
Chinese difficulty is more an artifact of the strong classicism of chinese culture than anything else. They just can't let go of their heritage.
There is too much self-aggrandizing BS splattered all over the Internet, by Brahmins like rec1man here. Here is the reality:
The majority of the 50+ million Brahmins live in the north-central states of U.P. and Bihar. These happen to be poor and backward states with per capita incomes lower than almost all African nations. In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh Brahmins are the poorest community while Christians are the richest. The most common job for a Brahmin in A.P. Is domestic servant.
Since independence from the British, India has been politically and bureaucratically dominated by Brahmins. The sorry results of this dominance are testimony to stupidity not intelligence.
"That is surprising, to say the least. Can you elaborate on the topic of anti-boy bias, with examples?"
Not from UK:
http://www.illinoisloop.org/gender.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/failing-boys/failing-boys-and-the-powder-keg-of-sexual-politics/article1758791/
Rather than taking a view of India's future orientation by considering its average IQ, wouldn't it be far more interesting to establish as fact that India is highly heterogenous in terms of IQ, that caste differences will continue to maintain that heterogeneity, and make predictions from that point?
There's no point in discussing the strength of the 'bench' of a team if the various members of the squad don't even think they're on the same side. It'll be far more important to determine how they're going to tear one another apart, or when they're going to do so.
"Re:East Asians in IMO
Sanity check
200 mil Non-hispanic whites with 74 million having 105+ IQ
6 mil East Asians in America with 3 mil having 105 IQ"
Yes, culture is involved. But your numbers are missing something important.
It's possible that 10% of these E. Asians came for STEM graduate school and have average IQ >135. Do a little calculation and see what it tells you about production of children who could be IMO winners. (Nearly 100% assortative mating in this subpopulation.)
BTW, I think that overall the S. Asian population in the US is even more selected (therefore less representative of the home country) than the E. Asian one.
Re:Irish travellers
Yes, such phenomena need to be studied. I've read on similar things with Burakumin and Korean minorities in Japan.
Re:SAT
It's true that Asian Indians are more than just hindus. But there is no other group other than Hindu which is almost purely Asian Indian. Hence this is chosen.Hinduism is the most common religion among Indian Americans nevertheless despite existence of other religions.
Again, there is no data for Sikhs in terms of SAT scores, nor Jains, so how am I supposed to dig it up ?
I only have a Hindu data point, so I go by that. But judging by the performance of Sikhs above Hindus in the UK, all that would do is inflate the Asian Indian value [ though Hindus in US likely > Hindus in UK , but again, same for sikhs ] . Could go either way.
In short, we need :
test scores of asian Indians as a whole on SAT/GRE/comparable tests relative to the Chinese
or
performance of Sikhs/Jains/Indian Christians on said tests
Would be nice to find any such thing - I haven't so far. Let me know if you do.
"Buddhism is immensely importance for Chinese civilization, and is a genuinely Vedic import"
Actually, Buddhism is a non-Vedic religion. The Buddha explicitly rejected the Vedas and brahminism/casteism.
Compare the Buddhist nations to the Hindu majority nations, it is a pretty stark difference that damns the Vedic religion. Even within the subcontinent, Buddhist majority Sri Lanka is miles ahead of India in the Human Development Index. Travel from anywhere in Asia to India and you will be shocked by the level of poverty and degradation.
Some Indian perspective.
The IITs are a good indication of where our talent comes from. Tamil Brahmins and brahmins in general did dominate early on but the mix is more diverse now. I studied there about a decade back and Brahmins were definitely overrepresented but not overwhelmingly so.
My pet theory is that the Indian weather has been pleasant enough and the winters moderate enough through the millennia that the threshold iq for survival wasn't too high. This doesn't mean that we have lower absolute numbers of high IQ people. We probably have more 100-130/140 iq people than just about any other country in the world other than China.
One aspect of cognitive abilities that gets short-shrift in the IQ debate is the possibility of "modality IQs" Yes, these will be influenced by the general g factor, but controlling for that, I do think there are inter-group differences. Indian climates and the abundance of cheap labor have not made it necessary for us to focus on labor-saving efficiencies.
Consequently our thoughts and energies have been spent in the spiritual domain. Our ideas do not weigh on how we may make life better, but on whether making a life materially better is any good.
Of course, there are caste-based differences here with the Brahmins specializing and selecting for abstract intellectual thought and the Baniyas and other merchant class specializing in commerce. Aside: I think early commerce and trade required excellent social thinking and theory of mind to juggle all the economic actors and benefits, so our best fiction writers come from these classes.
Re: brahmins
Perhaps that is why most famous brahmins are from the East and South, not the North and the West.
I think that the Muslim invasions which took the North-Western path have killed off the Brahmin elite in these regions - but just a hypothesis. Don't take it for granted.
Although, the famed Bengali brahmins do come from Bengal, which is heavily Muslim...but that may just be a side effect of British power being consolidated at Kolkata and English education reaching the Bengalis faster than all other groups. Bengal still remains more anglicized than other parts of India.
But the Southern brahmins do, in fact, excel : http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000201.html for IIT
also srinivasa ramanujan was a southern brahmin, as is vish anand
they've mostly got the Indian science nobels, few as those are.
Well, Indians are totally outperforming white Britons in the UK:
"Fifty-five per cent of Chinese pupils and 31 per cent of Indian pupils who took GCSE maths last year achieved an A...
Among white British pupils, the figure was 16 per cent. For black African pupils it was 14 per cent, for Pakistani 13 per cent and black Caribbean 8 per cent."
I am absolutely shocked at the relatively decent figure for Pakistanis. It was my understanding that they are the absolute bottom of the socio-economic barrel. Never would I have imagined that they're doing better on these school tests than the much more middle-class Caribbeans.
Peter
"It's a bad idea to pick university students as your samples as they are very far from representative of the population.
Indian culture attaches importance to education and will pressure children belonging to the left half of the curve into it"
Parental pressure pushes not as bright kids into lower tier schools or Caribbean med schools.
However, the Rushton data comes from Wits, the top school in South Africa.
"The forward castes are in total about 40%, so a significant amount"
I'm most interested in knowing who are the 40% that are the forward castes and how smart they are.
It seems there are a few small groups in India, Parsis, Tamil Brahmins, Jains, and more that are very smart. If the 40% was anywhere near their intelligence then India would be an amazing source of innovation. But this doesn't seem to be the case. My hunch is that the forward castes apart from these small groups has an IQ close to the median.
I am sick of Brahmin charlatans spewing their BS all over the HBD-blogosphere, selectively citing stuff, removing inconvenient "outliers" while including convenient datapoints. There is neither rigor nor honesty in their methods.
What I expect for India: an average IQ of 88-90. India will be like Turkey if things work out well. And this Indian would be very pleased if that were to happen.
Finally, I must saw I find the intellect of the Chinese awesome. They shall indeed inherit the earth. That such a conscientious and (individually) non-arrogant, non-boastful people shall do so is heartening.
Best,
Humble, honest, non-supremacist, self-hating Indian-Brahmin (i.e. the very antithesis of what Brahmanism and Brahmins stand for).
"There is too much self-aggrandizing BS splattered all over the Internet, by Brahmins like rec1man here. Here is the reality:"
Much of this "BS" by Brahmins was usually in response by anti Brahmin lower castes whose venom in the newsgroups was especially severe.What most lower castes forget is that they are the victims of violence and discrimination more from middle castes than Brahmins.
"Since independence from the British, India has been politically and bureaucratically dominated by Brahmins. The sorry results of this dominance are testimony to stupidity not intelligence."
Errr....actually the sorry results are more due to Brahmins pursuing WESTERN models of economic governance such as communism and socialism which the Oxford attendees(not graduate) Nehru and Indira Gandhi picked up in Ole England.
To my knowledge only Ambedkar(the Dalit firebrand) was somewhat enthuastic about capitalism.Every caste and ethnic group was wild about the socialistic model which devastated the Indian economy for more than 40 years.So there is plenty of blame to go around for that!
As for the claim that Christians are the richest community in Andhra Pradesh, I highly doubt that its due to their intelligence and work ethic!Indeed Christians have a reputation of being thugs and gangsters who terrify even the Muslims(themselves no shrinking violets when it comes to violence).
The most notorious example of this was the late Chief Minister YS Rajashekhar Reddy. Oh and his last name (influential middle caste Reddy) brings me to other Christian tricks.
When they apply for university they remember their pre Hindu caste names for reservations(Indian affirmative action) and after graduation,insist on cushy government jobs by reasserting their minority status.
In the case of Rajashekhar Reddy, I didnt even know he was a Christian until he was elected.The good people of Andhra Pradesh were just as unaware as I was.
Dont get me started on AP Christians!
India and China have been my HBD research priority for about three years now.
I've been working on a novel and expansive IQ data-set for the subcontinent for over two years. This involves a lot of expense, as I've been paying Indian students to scan dozens of unpublished dissertations from numerous Indian universities; dissertations which go back to the beginning of the 20th century. I've collected unpublished data from Universities in over a dozen different nations.
I can't promise when I'll make this information public -- it's very time consuming -- but I will say I have usable intelligence test data from hundreds of studies for diverse South Asian demographic groups.
I also have over a hundred usable studies for China right now, and many more that need translation. But most of this work will happen only after I write about India.
"They seem to have done well in the sciences - Satyen Bose of Higgs boson fame for instance."
For the record, Satyendra Bose had nothing much to do with the idea of the Higgs Boson. Bosons were named after him in his honor. Bose is best known for co-creating the field of quantum statistics with Einstein, Dirac, and Fermi.
"Check out the international math olympiad results
http://www.imo-official.org/
India seems to consistently put up mediocre scores whereas China seems dominate the event"
Yes, China's domination in international math competitions is really amaziing. Even many of the contestants from other nations, including the U.S., are ethnic Chinese.
The Islamic Republic of Iran also outperforms India despite India having a FAR larger population and sending more students to the competition. Iran actually won the competition once. India never. So much for the Islamic handicap.
Most Muslim nations rank far higher than India in the Human Development Index as well. The per capita income of Muslims worldwide is substantially higher than the per capita income of Brahmins.
"American IMO team recently announced:
http://amc.maa.org/imo/2011imo.shtml
- Wenyu Cao,
- Benjamin Gunby,
- Xiaoyu He,
- Mitchell Lee,
- Evan O'Dorney,
- David Yang
4 East Asians and 1 Indian."
There is no Indian in that list. That's 4 Chinese and 2 white Americans.
Re:mike
While you can make such anecdotes all day long, the fact remains that the UK and to a greater extent Mauritius, Malaysia etc get their Indian influx chiefly from low caste plantation workers and such.
Interestingly, the eastern city of Kolkata has held a sizeable minority of Chinese. They do not have any history of academic excellence per se, and are more famous for bringing their cuisine to India. Perhaps a segment of the left half of the Chinese curve, as I do not believe that Indians have a mean IQ above 105.
This is a good example of the diversity of the Chinese population, which is often vastly understated. The Chinese of Kolkata/Calcutta are drawn from two regions in the Chinese southeastern Canton/Guandong province - Hakka territory and the Saz Yop dialect counties.
The Hakka, like many other ethnic groups from China's highly academic southeast, have a tradition of excelling on the imperial exams and have done well overseas. In Kolkata, they used to own many decent scale tannery businesses and were fairly prosperous by the standards of the city.
The Saz Yop dialect speakers, who farmed under difficult conditions, have generally been less prosperous than other southeasterners/Cantonese and weren't distinguished on the imperial exams. To be fair, however, only a few regions ever really put up a strong performance on the exams. In Kolkata, most of them are small scale restauranters or work in construction.
This class divide among the Kolkata Chinese isn't unique. In American and Cuban Chinatowns, the Saz Yop socioeconomically occupied a much lower position than the Hakka and other Cantonese (Som Yop, Chung Shan). In the Phillipines, the Fujianese are a market dominant minority while the Saz Yop tend to cluster in lower end Chinatown ghettos.
China, while more homogenous than India, is actually a pretty diverse place. Assuming homogenity among the Chinese population is a mistake.
There is too much self-aggrandizing BS splattered all over the Internet, by Brahmins
I think there's a tendence for everyone to boost his caste. The reality is that most Indians are pretty similar across caste lines. Differences likely exist, but aren't as significant as America's racial gaps.
South Indian Brahmins were recruited by the Dravidian kings to act as advisors. So, perhaps, they're a more selected population and a little smarter than Brahmins elsewhere.
Indian-Americans form the largest Asian subgroup in American medical schools. They also seem to be pretty well represented in other grad school programs (engineering, economics, MBA, etc.)
Mathcounts results for 2011:
https://mathcounts.org/Page.aspx?pid=1872
34 East Asians and only 10 Indians in the list of the top 56 contestants.
Totally squares with RKU's observation, and shows, once again, that comparing Indians to Chinese is a JOKE.
The general trend globally is that the warmer the climate, the higher the fertility, the lower the IQ. Why this trend would be completely and inexplicably reversed in India (a 94 average is way higher than all of the Middle Eastern and SE Asian countries) is impossible to explain...
Common sense, people: expat Indians are extremely smart because it's mostly just the upper or upper-middle classes that have any chance to emigrate. They're not a remotely representative sample.
My family is Indian-descended (from the Bihar region) Guyanese. First things first, I am very grateful to my ancestors for leaving India. I'm very thankful to have been born in Guyana and raised in the U.S. rather than India.
I have many cousins who are Hindu, but in my direct family tree my foreparents converted to Christianity in order to better their chances of getting a good job. I'm not a religious person at all, and I certainly think that someone who mouths one religion's dogma and benefits from it, is smarter than someone else who sticks to another religion's dogma and suffers for it.
That said, I don't think my nuclear family is the representative of the average. Both of my parents have decent middle class jobs and my siblings and I all attended college.
tl:dr Don't dismiss the descendants of plantation workers so easily.
BTW, the Army tells me I(a descendant of those Indian migrant plantation laborers) have a GT score of 128.
"Errr....actually the sorry results are more due to Brahmins pursuing WESTERN models of economic governance such as communism and socialism which the Oxford attendees(not graduate) Nehru and Indira Gandhi picked up in Ole England."
Errr, India practiced the License Raj not socialism or communism. Brahminism/casteism is the very antithesis of communism or socialism.
As for socialist "Ole England", it looks like heaven compared to the horror that is most of India. Especially the states with the most Brahmins.
"Christians have a reputation of being thugs and gangsters"
You Brahmins sure have a knee jerk hatred towards Christians and Muslims. And low caste hindus. It is gonna come back to bite you in your butts big time someday.
Right now the most powerful political personality in India is an Italian catholic woman; and the two Indian-Americans who are Governors of American states are both Protestant Christians. The state with the highest per capita income, Goa, also happens to be a state with a very high percentage of Christians.
Most of China's most successful ethnic groups (Cantonese, Fujianese, Zhejiangese) are from the hot weather southeast. The stereotype in China is that southerners are smarter than northerners.
In India, nobody believes northerners are smarter than southerners.
There is reason to reject the climate-IQ hypothesis.
"Indian culture attaches importance to education "
So why is the literacy rate of India lower than that of Papua New-Guinea? Why is the education system of India so pathetic? Why does India spend such a pitifully small percentage of it's GDP on education while spending many times more on foreign military hardware that it is too stupid
to make itself despite trying for many decades?
Making such irrational claims is surely a sign of low IQ..
"Among white British pupils, the figure was 16 per cent. For black African pupils it was 14 per cent"
Note also that black girls outperform white boys from the same socio-economic class in the UK as another poster mentioned above.
It should be obvious that IQ is more nurture than nature.
Note also that the mongoloid ethnicities of central Asia, Tibet, Mongolia etc test much lower than the mongoloids of the Confucian cultures....
"Pakistanis come across as somewhat less smart than Indians; given the ethnic proximity of Indians and Pakistanis I suspect that Islam is mostly responsible for this."
From what I understand, in the past Indian converts to Islam tended to come from the lower classes. Islam says that everyone is equal under God. Hinduism, on the other hand, stands squarely behind the caste system. So the Islamic message was popular with the lower castes.
I doubt that Islam actually lowers anyone's IQ. It looks very negatively on drugs and alcohol - substances which very well might lower it. Liberalism, by taking a casual approach to dope, might well lower one's IQ. This may be relevant to white British underperfomance with respect to culturally conservative immigrants.
Islam doesn't attract the intelligent.
That's not the same as lowering people's potentials. THAT is the specialty of leftism.
Jason Malloy,
Can you give a synopsis of the South Asian IQ data that you've collected? What predictions could be made about India's future potential?
Jason Malloy, can you give us an estimate based on what you've discovered so far?
"There is no Indian in that list. That's 4 Chinese and 2 white Americans."
I noticed that too. The guy who keeps on bringing up math Olympiad names is more dull and dumber than rec1man.
I think that 81 is a good estimate of the average Indian IQ.
I've worked with many Indians and they are not anywhere nearly as bright as the Chinese. Period. I know this is merely a personal observation, but after you have been around many of the supposed "best and brightest of India" you can tell that they are not really too bright, esp. when it comes to mathematics and computer programming.
I think that Tim Stephanini summed it up best:
http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_102709.htm
Norm Matloff has found the same:
http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back508.pdf
The problem with discussing the "Indian" IQ is that there are no "Indians" - it's a term which covers all sorts of different people. Europeans are a homogeneous bunch by comparison.
So what have we learned today children?
That Indians have yet to demonstrate the ability to build and sustain developed first world economies and societies on their own but according to some (mostly their own elites) they have IQ's just shy of the White Mean as long as they are properly "uplifted" by providing them the levels of education, nutrition, health care, and employment they are incapable, for whatever reason, of generating on their own.
I believe the answer is obvious. Indian immigration is the solution to Europe and America's demographic decline. Afterall, these Hindustanis are hard working, religious (more than one god even!), and come with their own colorful cuisine. They will add even more double plus good diversity to the West. Since they have proclaimed themselves so capable, and who are we to question it, we might as well open up the floodgates of immigration from Hindustan henceforth. Afterall they are caucasians too! What could possibly go wrong?
I'm blown away that the Chinese were drilling for natural gas 2000 years ago. Amazing. To paraphrase a line from My Big, Fat Greek Wedding, my Scot-Irish and English ancestors were still pretty much swinging from trees at that point.
My Italian ancestors were doing very well though.
People who think that Lynn's 81 is too low of an average IQ for Indians are either:
(1) Indians wish it were higher out of ethnic pride
or
(2) Westerners (whites) who have never been to India and have only met Indians from the far right end of the bell curve.
If you actually spend time in India, you will see that 81 is not an underestimate.
In fact, as colleague noted, 81 is probably too high, as India is probably closer to Nigeria's 67.
The WSJ article on the skills shortage is a troubling sign for India. Although the exported services sector only employs a few million, there's now a lot of trouble finding workers.
Regarding the English perception of Indians --- this is a bit off topic --- but check out:
Lowri Turner's: "English woman confesses difficulties in having mixed-race baby with man from India"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-467787/I-love-mixed-race-baby--does-feel-alien.html
"Rushton did a study of engineering students at a good university in South Africa. The IQs of blacks, Indians, and whites were:
103, 106, 117
http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/RavensIVb.pdf"
This basically confirms my experience in computer programming that Indians aren't much more intelligent than blacks.
Most the Gulf economies are run by Indian businessmen and workers, with oil money providing the financing.
I'd say that something around 92 is probably a little bit more reasonable for India as a whole, if you include tribals.
Old SAT analogy sample:
Pensive Brahim:Indian Boosterism
Whiskey:"Scotch/Irish" Boosterism
To take one example:
Re:East Asians in IMO
Sanity check
200 mil Non-hispanic whites with 74 million having 105+ IQ
6 mil East Asians in America with 3 mil having 105 IQ
IQ alone cannot explain the East Asian over-representation
Culture is evidently at work here
Yes, IQ alone largely explains IMO results. Advanced mathematics and physics at such world class levels are as close to a raw IQ test as it gets in academic pursuits. Put the brain on the scale and weigh.
The International Math Olympiad is not something one can excel at due to a superior work ethic or more educationally supportive culture. If you don't understand this you didn't advance very far in studying mathematics.
Also, NE Asians' overrepresentation in the IMO does not result from directly testing their purportedly higher visio/spatial IQ either.
With apologies to the many decent, reasonable and intelligent Indians I have worked with in academia and industry, Indians do seem plagued by a sizable number of nationalistic and subtribal BS artists and propagandizers like "Pensive Brahim" and "rec1man".
The future can be very good for China indeed.
The involuntary lack of adequate sustenance in India in many cases is compounded by voluntary vegetarianism.
And there's a cultural dimension - the over hierarchical approach. An Indian friend told me about a minor accident at a small factory - the boss came and sorted it out in half an hour. He commented that, in India, the boss would tell the head clerk, who would tell the foreman, etc, and it would take at least half the morning.
Perhaps this is why India can produce proportionately more individual excellence (chess, math, etc) than organisational excellence?
That Indians have yet to demonstrate the ability to build and sustain developed first world economies and societies on their own but according to some (mostly their own elites) they have IQ's just shy of the White Mean as long as they are properly "uplifted" by providing them the levels of education, nutrition, health care, and employment they are incapable, for whatever reason, of generating on their own.
The non-white caucasoids could have said the same about whites only a few thousand years ago: "Why do these whites think they're so smart when the first civilization is in the middle east?" It's incredibly unwise to conclude that just because India is currently a malnourished hellhole with lots of low scoring people, that therefore Indians couldn't possibly have the genetic potential to average IQ's above 90 especially when their genetic relatives built a civilization before Europeans did.
I believe the answer is obvious. Indian immigration is the solution to Europe and America's demographic decline.
So because Indians have enough self-respect to deny that they have genetic IQ's near the retarded level, suddenly they're campaigning to come to your countries?
While Indian immigrants might be very happy and grateful to come to the West, it's actually better for India if they use their brains to build up their home country, especially since India invested the money educating these people in the first place.
> The Jains are probably the most
> wealthy and upstanding major
> religious community in India
A frequent error I've seen made in this thread is to assume that Jainism and Hinduism are separate religions. Yes its true, dogmatically, the Jains are heretics from the Vedic standpoint. The practical reality is that Hindus and Jains commingle without problems. Most Gujarati Vanya (merchant castes) have "Vaishnava" and "Jain" branches whose members will intermarry -- but not with people of the same religion of different castes. (See sec. 201 here.)
> With less than 1% of the population
> they pay a quarter of the taxes. You > don't see Jains or Sikhs starving in > India.
Neither do you see Marwadi or Gujarati Hindu Vanias (Jain equivalent) or Punjabi Hindu Khatris and Jats (Sikh equivalent.) starving either. Please stop grinding that axe and start basing your remarks on reality if you wish to be taken seriously.
> It is overwhelmingly the Hindus who
> live in the most degraded conditions: > hungry, naked, homeless, hopeless.
And its Hindus (won't say overwhelmingly) who are fixing these problems. As few as the Hindu "reformers" are, the number of Sikh and Jain reformers is even more minuscule. Theological protestations of equality (assuming they even exist) do very little to ease "degraded conditions." And don't get me started on Christianity which is quite prepared to put up with holy suffering.
> Hinduism is a religion that teaches
> that their suffering is the fruit of > their karma in past lives and so
> compassion towards the suffering is
> too often an alien concept among hindus. Hence the horrors of India...
Well then how do you explain the material success of the Jains whose philosophy is even more ascetic and karma oriented? In fact their highest religious value is starving to death. Doesn't stop them paying taxes though does it?
1. Indian IQ.
There's no point in quibbling about
a few dated IQ studies. Indian IQ norms are available (for example:
Deshpande and Ojha. 2002. “Indian Norms for Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices.”). Just email the authors.
2. Heritability of Indian IQ.
To disentangle the Indian phenotypic IQ for the Indian genotypic IQ, you need to look at studies that contain heritability estimates. The only such IQ estimate I could find was: "Pal, Shyam, and Singh 1997. Genetic analysis of general intelligence ‘g’: A twin study." In this study the population heritability was .81 and the score was well below the UK norm. Given the high heritability, the cause of the gap could not be environmental factors that vary within populations but would have to be either "x-factors" (see: Jensen 1998) or genetic factors.
Steve.
Speaking of Asian IQ, Jones has a new paper out which you might be interested in: "National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia."
"Most of China's most successful ethnic groups (Cantonese, Fujianese, Zhejiangese) are from the hot weather southeast. The stereotype in China is that southerners are smarter than northerners.
There is reason to reject the climate-IQ hypothesis."
Those who made that hypothesis must have been totally ignorant of history. In Chinese history the worst barbarians lived in the far north. The Great Wall was built to keep them out. Similarly, in Europe to the ancient Greeks and Romans the barbarians lived north of the Alps....the blond tribes who never created a civilization of their own until the Romans handed one to them. In India the people from the northwest were considered unclean mlecchas or barbarians.
The earliest civilizations were also founded in hot climates.....
"Errr, India practiced the License Raj not socialism or communism. "
WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens...
"Brahminism/casteism is the very antithesis of communism or socialism. "
lol what the brahmin promises in the next world, communist promises in this world.
My Italian ancestors were doing very well though.
That may be, but the fact remains that the Romans exported their men as colonizers and soldiers and imported subjugated peoples as slaves in their place. And then freed them
Before the era of Western ascendancy, India had the same level of economic output as China and was pretty advanced by the standards of the time. Rushton, Lynn, and other WN types are quick to point to China's leading economic position and historical advancement as evidence of high Chinese IQ.... For some reason, they then seem to forget about these things when discussing Indians. Comparisons between the Indian and Chinese are difficult, but there's no reason to think that the IQ gap could be all that vast.
One possibility is that differences in personality type make it harder for the government to kick the economic pedal into overdrive in India, but also make it more difficult to do anything insane like Mao's Cultural Revolution. It seems like India has more stability and resistance to change, while China has a tendency to experience lots of positive and negative volatility.
"You Brahmins sure have a knee jerk hatred towards Christians and Muslims. "
Sorry no.Brahmins really have no dealings with Muslims and Christians and are happily unaware of what goes on with them!
OTOH Muslims and Christians had it in for Brahmins.Muslim invaders would go out of their way to massacre Brahmins as they saw them as the upholders of Hindu culture(true to some extant) and as for Christians well..ever heard of the Inquistion in Goa and Maharashtra?
"And low caste hindus. It is gonna come back to bite you in your butts big time someday."
As I said the middle caste persecuted low castes far more than Brahmins.The only tyrannical Brahmin caste I can think of that utterly devastated a society were Nambuthiris of Kerala.I loathe them.It was Sree Narayana Guru a low caste Ezhava who brought Kerala Hinduism back to normalcy.And more power to him for that.
In case you wanted to credit communism for the relative egalitarianism in Kerala and the cordial relations between Hindus,Muslims and Christian,I hate to disappoint you again..Communism reaped the whirlwind but didnt create any desirable social conditions.
In fact under communist rule,Hindus are discriminated against.The temple boards are dominated by the government while the Muslim and Christian equivalents are untouched.
If the Brahmins in the North were participants in persecution then they are breaking their own rules as Brahmins are supposed to be apolitical and not crave political power.
As for biting us in the butts ,it already has in the form of reservations.FYI take a look at what low caste dominance and driving out Brahmins have done to universities in Tamil Nadu...have they become better or worse in the past 60 years?
"Right now the most powerful political personality in India is an Italian catholic woman;:
Very good and how did she achieve that political power ,pray?
"and the two Indian-Americans who are Governors of American states are both Protestant Christians."
Puhleez get your facts straight before you spew your propaganda.One of them ,Bobby Jindal is a Catholic.Both Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal converted to their respective faiths and were not born into them.
Either way,good for them.But if you believe they will spend their time in the governors mansions scheming how to best to get back at Brahmins(with whom they have no axe to grind) then you have one more screw loose than I thought.
"The state with the highest per capita income, Goa, also happens to be a state with a very high percentage of Christians."
I would like to see the stats on this.Last I checked people arent fleeing to Goa looking for jobs but to have a good time!
Kerala also has a"very high percentage of Christians" ,how is its economy?
Also though Goa is known for its Portuguese culture,Hindus are still the majority.
How do the Hindus income stack up against the Christians?
Sorry there are just too loose ends in that claim you stated so it is unimpressive.
"Christians have a reputation of being thugs and gangsters"
I love how you paraphrased my quote about Christians in Andhra Pradesh in particular and made it sound like I speak of all Indian Christians!
For the record, Christians in Maharashtra,Karnataka and Kerala are decent,hardworking people.Tamil Christians are almost as militant as AP ones.
Remember Christians were overrepresented in the Marxist LTTE.The young SL Tamil girl who assasinated Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bombing was Christian.
You have not refuted the claims I made about AP Christians especially those like YSR Reddy.And how can you.Its pretty out in the open.
And then you make fantastic claims such as Brahmins being fit only as domestic servants!
It is amazing how many hate filled people confuse what is with what they think should be!
Responding to criticism again.
Re:East Asians in IMO
The selective migration effect is next to nil, they register as 106 on the digit span.
As for a 10% proportion of all Asian Americans having come for STEM graduate school, bear in mind that once they come and breed, their children regress, and unless you have one, single, huge influx of such people, the gradual regression to the mean will decrease the actual proportion of EAAs > 140 at any given time. Not to mention that >135 and 10% are both pretty high figures. In fact, 135 is higher than what the PhD STEM IQ looks like - as physics PhD students are at 130.
And yes, S. Asian population is more selected, and has a higher IQ than the E. Asian population in USA. Which makes it even more strange that the IMO doesn't take them in.
Re: S. Africa university students
Doesn't matter what the threshold is. As long as it is reached, the Indians will have a greater pressure to come in.
Just examine the IQs of the different groups in S. Africa. According to L&V 2002 Indians are at 83, blacks are at 66. What's the university gap ? 3 points.
Re:Forward caste
The rajputs and Jats are probably lower IQ among the forward castes.
Re:Jason
What is the median value you have obtained so far for a sample in India proper, and a non-selected immigrant sample to a relatively high standard country ?
Re:Mathcounts
If 44 of the 56 contestants were Asian American, then basing by IQ alone, you'd think that Non-hispanic whites have an IQ elite smaller than that of AAs in absolute terms, which is not true.
Again, as I pointed out in the case of IMO, people are treating IQ as a golden hammer here.
The IQ-demographic split does not bear out the mathcount results.
I really do not want to repeat this again : The g of Indian Americans is higher than EAAs if anything.Posting about mathcounts is all well and good but IQ alone does not explain this data. Those competitions are not a replacement for real IQ data from the digit span, whichs shows IAs>EAAs. Using these competitions as a replacement for IQ gives the NHW IQ as impossibly low.
The spelling bees and such also show a IA dominance not explainable by IQ alone. Cultural factors are again at work.
Re:Education in India
The economy liberalized 2 decades ago. Since then, the rate of rise of literacy hasn't been bad at all. You can't compare pseudo-socialist India ruled by red tape pre-1991 to modern India, that is analogous to comparing S. Korea and N. Korea. North Korea lags the south hard, and is behind most African nations, but their fundamental culture of valuing education can't be that different. Nor is the North lower IQ which reflects in putting a nutcase on the throne.
Also, investment in military is a necessity. We are the ones bordering Pakistan. Pakistan which is frequently involved in terrorist attacks in India itself and other countries.
Re: Sikhs and Jains
I know, but I don't have those data points, do I ?
Re: Insistence that IQ explains IMO purely
That is nothing but IQ dogmatism. The demographic-IQ splits simply do not bear out this assertion.
Re: Indian IQ norms, Heritability
Thanks. I emailed Deshpande.
Regarding heritability, 0.8 is quite in line with what the majority of studies suggest.
Though, that study isn't really very good - 30 as a sample size ? Also I doubt environments between rural parts of Haryana vary as much as , say, between Chandigarh and the villages of Haryana.
The above really is my main problem with the heritability estimates in general. How many of those have an environmental range running from SS Africa to the U.S.A. in the same study ? The vast majority of adoption cases are within the same country. If the rise of SS African IQ from 67 in Africa to 85 in U.S.A is anything to go by , the heritability estimates would drop.
Also the negligible role of environment on IQ from those studies isn't really very congruent with the Flynn effect's magnitude. That, or Flynn's model of cognitive stimulation is correct.
"SEA alphabets come from South Indian alphabets. They are also incredibly unefficient. Trust me, learning to read Thai or Burmese is a nightmare. Not a sign of civilization."
And learning to read English ,French and other phonetically challenged languages is....?
From a strictly reading pointing of view English is far more of a nighmare than any other language for a beginner.
The vowels and consonants in the words of Indian languages sound like what they are supposed to!Which is more than I can say for English ,which has different rules of pronunciation for different words!
Maybe due to English being a clumsy amalgam of Olde English(closer to German...indeed there is a dialect in Hanover where the German sounds very similar to English) and Norman French.Neither of which were wild about phonetic accuracy!
This so called inefficiency may actually be pedantry as there are far more alphabets in the languages you mention.
Its not they are hard to read but hard to LEARN!Blame your European background with its limited alphabets which lead to inaccurate words utterly lacking in any phonetics!
The proponents of the climate-IQ hypothesis already have countered the fact that civilizations started earlier in the Middle East.
People migrated earlier to these regions, and because of the fact that food was more plentiful and easier to obtain, and easier to cultivate for agriculture, and the environment was less brutal, this allowed an earlier head start for the specialization of some people as farmers and others as soldiers, priests, builders, etc. and cities and civilizations to arise.
On the other hand, even though there was a later start in the north for these reasons, there was apparently a stronger environmental selection for intelligence and social cooperation as the these are found more in Northern peoples. When they did reach that stage a little later, they took off at a much higher trajectory. These are the people who created the vast majority of what we know as the modern world.
The problem with arguing against the Climate-IQ hypothesis, is that you are arguing against facts. The fact still remains that lower IQ averages predominate among peoples of equatorial ancestry, and IQ averages of the natives tend to rise as you proceed away from it. Your alternative hypothesis must address this fact, as well as addressing how overwhelmingly most of the modern world was created by the West.
i don't know if anyone mentioned this already (i didn't read through all the comments), but don't forget that there's also some amount of inbreeding in parts of india that may contribute to low iq.
dunno about differences between castes, but there is a broad north/south divide in india with greater inbreeding in the south than in the north.
there's also differences in the amount of inbreeding between different religious groups in india (see chart here).
"In Chinese history the worst barbarians lived in the far north."
But Chinese civilization, including the Chinese state, language and writing system, comes from northern China, from the lower portion of the Yellow River. These northerners conquered the south in historical times, partly mixing with them. The original population of southern China was related to modern SE Asians.
"In Chinese history the worst barbarians lived in the far north."
What's meant by "worst" here is "successful". China's northern neighbors were successful at invading it several times. China's southern neighbors like Vietnam were only ever successful at being invaded by China. By and large European history has displayed a similar pattern.
"Similarly, in Europe to the ancient Greeks and Romans the barbarians lived north of the Alps....the blond tribes who never created a civilization of their own until the Romans handed one to them."
A large percentage of Romans were indeed blond. The popular Roman name Flavius literally means "blond".
A few more thoughts on Indian IQ:
Nepalis are, on average, FAR more genetically similar to Tibetans/Chinese/Burmese, yet they don't seem to have any major IQ advantage over Indo-Aryans (Nepal is also cold as heck). In Burma, a Mongoloid nation, Indians are heavily economically-dominant (and they're not even Brahmins!).
NE Asians (who supposedly lived through cold winters) are supposedly the smartest people, but many NE Asians: Mongols, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars, etc., who are genetically VERY similar to Koreans/Japanese, don't seem to be that bright, do they?
I dunno, I think India's average IQ is a bit higher than we give it credit for. I mean, why else do average, working class Indian peasants do so well in the UK?
Because India is much less homogenous it seems likely that the normal curve of IQ will be more elongated ie that there will be a disproportionate number of really smart Indians (& really dumb ones but the innovation rate of dumb and really dumb are both zero).
That would equate with the Indians who get to foreign universities being smart enough tom get on Big Bang Theory. Also the experience of the Parsees being as amart as the Jews, but more cheerful.
"Those who made that hypothesis must have been totally ignorant of history. In Chinese history the worst barbarians lived in the far north. The Great Wall was built to keep them out. Similarly, in Europe to the ancient Greeks and Romans the barbarians lived north of the Alps....the blond tribes who never created a civilization of their own until the Romans handed one to them. In India the people from the northwest were considered unclean mlecchas or barbarians."
Garbage, all it means is that intelligence is only one factor in civilization. Those barbarous peoples of central Asia lived on steppes and mountain ranges that were unsuited for any kind of agriculture in most areas. Not so easy to have civilization, much less high culture, when the only way to survive is tribal pastoralism. Many of those peoples did, however, prove quite capable of civilization after they conquered agrarian lands(Aryans, Mongols and Magyars to name a few). Northern Europeans had their own environmental challenges to deal with in antiquity, which took a long time to overcome technologically. But those same challenges also selected for higher intelligence and allowed for a higher peak of achievement down the road.
The Saami might be high IQ people(although I am not sure) but in that climate and with that lifestyle it doesn't matter, their society still is not going to amount to anything.
"WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC"
And North Korea calls itself a "Democratic Republic"! It is as much a democracy as the casteist License Raj run by stupid and corrupt brahmins was socialism. India would not have such a high illiteracy rate if it had actually practiced socialism.
"i don't know if anyone mentioned this already (i didn't read through all the comments), but don't forget that there's also some amount of inbreeding in parts of india that may contribute to low iq."
Inbreeding doesn't necessarily lead to lower IQ; in fact, endogamy can maintain a higher IQ, as is the case with Ashkenazis.
"The WSJ article on the skills shortage is a troubling sign for India. Although the exported services sector only employs a few million, there's now a lot of trouble finding workers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html
Yes, the WSJ article shows how shallow the right end of India's bell curve truly is.
From my experience, 81 is probably too high for India's average IQ. I suspect it's somewhere in the 60s or 70s.
LOL. Digit span more reliable or g loaded than IMO or PSAT/SAT (National Merit Scholars).
You Indians crack me up. What was the sample size again?
You missed what I said about assortative mating among E. Asians who come here for grad school.
You also don't understand that the admissions bar is much higher for foreign students than for US-born applicants. (Hint: the foreigners are doing everything in an alien language. Try to get admitted to Beijing University as a regular student after being raised in an English environment.)
There hasn't been much time for regression as we are only talking about 1 generation here. The kids representing the US in IMOs are (typically) children of a highly selected subpopulation -- both the moms and pops. The E. Asian immigrant population can be just as multi-modal as in India. Both S. and E. Asian groups here are smarter than the average back home.
For about 50 years, until just recently, most of the top STEM talent in S. and E. Asia (ex-Japan) came to the US or Europe to do a Ph.D.
I don't dispute your point that groups that care about the IMO and push their kids in that direction will be overrepresented. That's part of the effect, but not all of it.
Pensive:
"Doesn't matter what the threshold is. As long as it is reached, the Indians will have a greater pressure to come in."
But it's the premier university in South Africa. There are a limited number of spaces. With or without parental pressure, the very top spots should be filled by the cream of the crop.
Catperson:
"Also you have lots of blacks to choose from in South Africa so it's not surprising that cream of the crop blacks would be almost as high as the cream of crop of other races with smaller local populations to select the best and brightest from"
I have no idea what the composition of Indian South Africans is like but this is the top university so no race should have to go to the bench to fill seats.
Also don't the top castes of India number 5% or so? Their high scores wouldn't affect the average greatly.
If the rise of SS African IQ from 67 in Africa to 85 in U.S.A is anything to go by , the heritability estimates would drop.
Just to be precise, the rise of SS Africans from Africa to the U.S. is 67 to 80. The overall African American average IQ is 85, but Lynn claims that the most unmixed black Americans average IQ 80 and these are the ones you want to compare to the African IQ of 67 since blacks in Africa are much more genetically pure than America's overall black population.
Also the negligible role of environment on IQ from those studies isn't really very congruent with the Flynn effect's magnitude. That, or Flynn's model of cognitive stimulation is correct.
I don't think Flynn's model is correct. A good analogy is height. Height is extremely heritable (0.9+) but people keep getting taller. The same thing with IQ. Nutrion appears to differ enormously between generations, but very little within generations, at least within generations within the same country. Heritability would certainly be much less if calculated on international samples.
People migrated earlier to these regions, and because of the fact that food was more plentiful and easier to obtain, and easier to cultivate for agriculture, and the environment was less brutal, this allowed an earlier head start for the specialization of some people as farmers and others as soldiers, priests, builders, etc. and cities and civilizations to arise.
That just underscores my point about how unwise it is to judge India or any other country's IQ by how well that country is functioning now or at any other snapshot in history. You have to take a long term view as Steve Sailer is doing.
Comments on latitude, IQ and invasions -
The chinese dynasties started very early compared to the Greek/Roman ones, yet doesn't look like they're lower IQ....also sub-saharan africa didn't civilize much at all, by your argument, they should have been the first to found a major civilization.
Also, this "higher trajectory" is bullshit historically pre-Renaissance. Pre-1453 and the Renaissance, despite a good start with Greece and Rome, the dark ages didn't contribute much to civilization at a time when the Chinese and Indian civilizations were still going strong. Even Arabs were doing well. Now, if we are to plot a higher trajectory, why does it show up only recently ?
And why, if the North is so set for a higher recent trajectory, does the North-east greatly underachieve the North-west post-renaissance ? I mean, yes, there are chinese inventions. But to compare them to the industrial revolution and post that in Europe is folly.
Re:Invasions
The mongolian tribes to the far North of China were barbarians indeed...what do you think they built the great wall for ? I severely doubt Genghis Khan has contributed as much to civilization as his Southern Shang cousins.
If invading other people is a sign of success, then I suppose you think mongols were more "successful" than the chinese ? Or that the Macedonians were more "successful" than Athenians ? I suppose my ignorant self forgot how successful the Huns, Vandals etc were in comparison to Rome. Seriously, what is your measure of success ?
As for people invading North to South, post-industrialization figures are obviously high as it took place in N. Europe, but before that, it's a wash. Mongolian and Macedonian empires follow the N->S route.Roman,Inca and Arabian empires show no such thing.Invasions into India are also from the Northwest - Delhi Sultanate, Mughal empire, Kushans. But, many Indian empires e.g. Maurya, Satavahana and Devapala show Northward expansion as well.
And I couldn't care less whether Romans were blond or not. The fact is , as a S. European tribe they conquered their Northern brethren and were far more civilized, putting a dent in your theory.
"Tamil Brahmins and brahmins in general did dominate early on but the mix is more diverse now."
How "early on"?
"But the Southern brahmins do, in fact, excel : http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000201.html "
Faculty, not students. Huge difference.[cue Jairam Ramesh :)]
http://cosmicvoices.blogspot.com/2007/03/iit-for-andhra-pradesh.html
"Chinese children in British schools are outperforming every other ethnic minority group in tests and exams - including the English at English."
Yes, it is easy to outperform native English speakers on English grammar tests because most of the items are native dialect errors that only native speakers make. There are virtually no items that test the errors that non-native speakers make such as whether or not to use a definite article.
So you get questions like,
1) She is taller than me.
which test whether the person notices it should be 'I' not me.
But you don't get questions like,
2) John, shut door, please.
which tests whether the person notices the missing definite article, 'the' before the word, door.
English tests are designed to discriminate against lower class whites, because they are the only ones who make the errors that are tested.
If there were items like 2 instead of items like 1, foreigners' English usage would look as bad as it really it and lower class whites would be more reasonably represented.
"
I think that Tim Stephanini summed it up best:
http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_102709.htm
Norm Matloff has found the same:
http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back508.pdf"
Why are Indians pathological liars? Seriously. When teaching at the college level, I found that Indians cheap more than any other group. I have had this observation confirmed by other college instructors. Is there an evo-bio explanation for it?
They definitely are NOT the kind of people you want immigrating to your country.
"People who think that Lynn's 81 is too low of an average IQ for Indians are either:
(1) Indians wish it were higher out of ethnic pride
or
(2) Westerners (whites) who have never been to India and have only met Indians from the far right end of the bell curve.
If you actually spend time in India, you will see that 81 is not an underestimate.
In fact, as colleague noted, 81 is probably too high, as India is probably closer to Nigeria's 67."
Exactly. I would guess India's average IQ to be around 75.
"Why are Indians pathological liars? Seriously. When teaching at the college level, I found that Indians cheat more than any other group. I have had this observation confirmed by other college instructors. Is there an evo-bio explanation for it?
They definitely are NOT the kind of people you want immigrating to your country."
That was cheat, not cheap.
Why are Indians such cheaters? Is there an evo-bio explanation?
Pensive brahmin:
"Simon, it is not a matter of work ethic per se
Indians resident in UK for four or more years put up an IQ of 97 as I noted earlier
While FoBs give 83
Growing up in the West has little to do with bestowing a good work ethic but can boost IQ with better nutrition, education and cognitive stimulation"
I think Indians who grew up in the UK have a better work ethic instilled in them by their families than do white British, and much better than Pakistani British, though some Pakistani girls work hard, I think in an effort to avoid getting married off. This better Indian work ethic vs the natives more than compensates for a slightly lower median IQ.
Re: American Thinker
Yes, Nepalese and Burmese underachieve Indo-Aryans. Funny how Nepal scores 78 [!] despite being a Tibetan population which shouldn't score that low by any means. Plus, they live on the highest mountain range on Earth - bitterly cold. You'd expect them to have higher IQ...
Re: digit span data
Backward digit span is a lot more g-loaded than the forward span version, and is a good measure of g [ not as good as RPM, of course, but no RPM data on Indian Americans ]. SAT correlates strongly with IQ - 0.8 - but digit span is IQ, it's a subset of the Wechsler tests, and not some random rubbish.
Another thing is, if some of the E. Asians in the U.S. are indeed so selected, but have a median of 106, then their variance should be really high - something I have never seen reported. The AA population as a whole has high variance as might be expected from their diverse origins - but no data for EAAs specifically.
That is , assuming that they do have such a subpopulation according to the values you estimate. I should note that hard data is useful here. Even allowing the assortative mating factor [ though spousal IQs are correlated across all races anyway... ] there indeed has been time for regression as 50 years isn't 1 generation, more like 2. People from the older half already likely have regressed, dumber grown men as their offspring. The younger cohort has toddlers and teenagers instead.
The language barrier is significant, but bear in mind families rich enough to afford an US education and have those high IQ genes would likely also know some English. Also loads of Chinese Americans are from HK/Taiwan, where english is spoken a lot more widely.
Anyway, as always, some data on the proportion of those highly selected EAAs to their population would be useful. 10% just seems off to me, as is your idea that graduate EA students would have to be above PhD levels to stand a chance.
Re: S. African university
Witwatersrand is certainly one of the best - so I decided to take a look at the paper. 40 Indians, 67 whites - in a nation of 4.5 mil whites and 1 million Indians.
The left half of the Indian curve has been dragged in, as you can see, perhaps due to their hard work, or, alternatively, though my knowledge of SA is very hazy, perhaps affirmative action has led to cleansing of the white left tail during admission ?
Either way, the demographic mix is not right here.
BTW, I agree with what catperson said. While no race will be dipping very far into their curve from any place but the rightmost, the absolute value of the black population skews up their absolute value of the rightmost curve part.
Re:catperson
Interesting that Lynn found that. Can you link me to the paper ? I remember reading something to the effect that high IQ blacks weren't on average more caucasian.
Re:IITs
Andhra has a long history of doing well - plus IIT Madras = highest success rate.
Re: silly girl
Very interesting - I would say that the second type of error is more egregious than the first.
Re: people who think India has a nigerian level IQ
To quote Murray : You’re out of touch with reality in that regard.
Re: Indians as cheaters
I have to say, reluctantly, that I agree - cheating on prestigious examinations is very widespread in India itself. This probably has something to do with being endogamous within your own group and not having regard for rules , doing everything to advance yourself and your group at the possible expense of others.
Re: Simon
It would be interesting to see if such work ethic gains disappear after a few generations [ a cultural reaction to extreme poverty ] or stay, suggesting a genetic cause in Indians for the trait.
Indian "intellectuals" need to stop spreading lies and false statistics on the interweb. Nobody is buying that BS anymore. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say:
http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/filthy-india-photos-chinese-netizen-reactions.html
Those pictures clearly tell you 80 is a pretty good estimate of their IQ.
"SAT correlates strongly with IQ - 0.8 - but digit span is IQ, it's a subset of the Wechsler tests, and not some random rubbish."
This provides an immediate upper bound on both your IQ and your understanding of psychometrics and factor analysis. Single factors in IQ batteries do not typically correlate higher with g than .8.
"Also loads of Chinese Americans are from HK/Taiwan, where english is spoken a lot more widely."
This shows you know nothing about E. Asia.
BTW, where are you getting your 106 for E. Asian average in the US? If you go by SAT score in predominantly E. Asian high schools or by National Merit numbers the average is likely much higher. 106 might be a better average for countries like S. Korea or Taiwan. The US E. Asian population is a selected subset of those populations.
10% is just a made up number. The point is that if there is a significant, very high avg IQ subgroup (i.e., STEM immigrants), that could very well produce the small set super-high achievers that are dominating MathCounts, etc. Remember, I accept that cultural factors also play a role in this enhancement.
Simon, there's a class divide among the British Pakistanis. Pakistanis in the northern towns were recruited as industrial labor in the 1950s/1960s and tend to be downscale, uneducated, crime-prone, backward, etc. Pakistanis in London come from professional and middle class backgrounds and are doing decently well. I believe that both groups are about half of the overall population.
There's been a big slide intro criminality among the less educated Pakistanis/Bangladeshis and a lot of them have started to imitate the white underclass chav lifestyle (drugs, loitering on the street, dropping out of the workforce). Girls are better than boys due to parental control, but apparently the drugs and other isuses have started to affect plenty of them too.
Among Indians, there's a little bit of a class divide too. The Sikhs mainly came as industrial laborers back in the 1950s/1960s, but they mostly ended up in the working and middle classes. They're not really intellectual people, but they do work hard and have strong enough family values. They used to not care much for academics, but more recent generations are starting to go to university in decent numbers. I'd believe something like a 94 IQ for them.
There's also the Gujaratis. Many of them came as refugees from East Africa. The Gujaratis started off as laborers and small scale peddlers in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the other East African countries. Later they made the jump to larger scale business and professional clerical work. When they were expelled, most went to Britain and did really well in small business. Lots of corner shops in Britain are Gujarati-owned. I believe a lot of British Gujaratis (often referred to as "African Asians") have kids that are doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, etc. Very successful. Not neccessarily that they are a super high IQ ethnic group, but more that they value money/status immensely and work very hard. These guys will pull 15 hours a day for years on end to build a successful business.
There also a number of Indian doctors, working for NHS, and other Indian professionals in the UK too. They're doing well, as their education level would predict.
Indian and Pakistani parents do have a lot of control over their kids and try to instill in them values like unquestioned obediance, submissiveness, education, and upward mobility. There may be genetic factors at work too, as South Asians seem to be a lower testosterone and more submissive race in general. Likely there is a tendency to overperform acacdemically and economically due to this.
Indians and Pakistanis are overrepresented vastly in British medical and law schools, but seem to have lower pass rates. That seems to support the hypothesis that they work hard and are under parental control, but there's no IQ edge.
And I couldn't care less whether Romans were blond or not. The fact is , as a S. European tribe they conquered their Northern brethren and were far more civilized, putting a dent in your theory.
The Romans and Greeks themselves came from the north, and are kin with the blond European peoples. They soon surpassed the Etruscan and Pelasgian precursors.
Both the Arabs and Indians acknowledged Greek sciences to be superior.
The reason why civilizations developed in lower latitudes first is the same reason why USA far surpasses Canada. (For the moment, lul!)
Civilizations developed first in areas well suited to easy cultivation. It is precisely the harshness of the northern environs which improve the minds of men.
That said, larger populations furnish more mutations and consequently more adaptive mutations. And a large society presents its own cognitive problems.
Given these factors, why have not the oldest civilizations done more to account for themselves, having had such a head start, large populations, and supposed civilizational superiority?
"And both Indians and blacks experienced apartheid in South Africa which probably left them malnourished."
Why are you assuming apartheid would leave them "malnourished?" Many of the coloreds and Asians were living just fine. Sort of like Mexico--nobody ever finds Mexicans to be "malnourished" however poor; indeed, their rice/bean/tortilla diet is not bad nutrition at all. I once read the daily life of child laborers living in an English factory in 1835. Their main meal was two pieces of bread (brown I think), one piece with treacle, the other with butter. Another group ate "onion porridge" as their main meal. Oliver Twist asking for more was not fiction; he was fact. They starved their child laborers; the Irish starved en mass in the 1840s; many European peasants were "malnourished" by today's standards, well into the 20th century, yet somehow they never passed this on as a genetic legacy.
In Switzerland I knew an attractive woman from S. Africa of Chinese/Dutch/African descent. She had been a teacher in South Africa and was sort of unhappy in Switzerland because the Swiss man she married had a possessive family and she wanted to be free. She said conditions were fine for her in South Africa. Apartheid was not implemented until afer WWII and had not affected her parents at all. It did not much affect her in the area of South Africa from which she came. She showed me pictures of her and her South African family with whites, back in the 40s, working in the same school.
I don't pretend to be an expert on S. African social conditions, but do not assume "malnourishment" because people are not eating roast beef, parkerhouse rolls, and tossed salad. The indigenous diets they were eating provided plenty of nutrition as long as the calories count was sufficient. Africa even now has less malnourished people, even as far as calories they consume, than does India. Most indigenous diets are better not worse than much of what we eat today. Although people were not so tall on average i nthe middle ages, the skulls mostly show excellent teeth and palatal formation. This is true of most people living on indigenous diets. For crying out loud, they've found teeenagers with arteriosclerosis from eating too much fast fried food.
We have muchness of food, but bigger is not necessarily better.
LOL at anonymous's bitter comments. We're trying to have a rational discussion here. There's no need for vitriol. Are you worried about losing face? Isn't it enough that East Asians and Europeans have a higher average IQ? I think some civility is in order.
"There may be genetic factors at work too, as South Asians seem to be a lower testosterone and more submissive race in general. Likely there is a tendency to overperform acacdemically and economically due to this."
Lower testosterone? Sometimes I entirely too much attention is put on that substance. Apparently, in the 19th century, English soldiers stationed in India had earned themselves the title "village cocks" among local ladies who had sampled the wares. These women were used to more sustained performance by Indian men, who went so far as to read the newspaper (there were hundreds of newspaper titles printed in Bengal especially--they were great newspaper readers under all circumstances) in order to "sustain" themselves long enough for their partner to achieve satisfaction.
So maybe lower testosterone has its sexual benefits. We should be looking into this. After all, we're so smart.
There is no way that India (whatever the average in the country) has the same sort of IQ levels as black Africa. India produces scientists of great note and did so in the distant past. Black Africa does not and never has. But there's that exception that ... I did know of a black African mathematician from west Africa (Cameroon I think) who was sought after in Europe and America as a teacher/researcher. Although he looked typically black African as far as most of his racial traits, he had, according to his daughter, blue eyes. That might explain something.
He had married a Canadian Jewish lady. When the daughter that I later knew was about 6, the dictator who ran the country decided the family should die and sent thugs to kill them. No reason that made any sense. The kids were all under 8. The family was forewarned by friends, and managed to get out to Europe, saving their lives.
So many black, brown, and yellow people "oppressed" by the white man have run to his countries to be saved. That's all well and good, but once they're here, please dont' beat us on the head because we already have a race and culture to which we're committed.
Hindus in general are very servile people. To this day they worship white people like they are gods. You see that if you travel to India. If you are white European-looking, Indians will pretty much treat you like colonialism never ended. I don't know how that translates to IQ, but my guess is that Hindu IQ is very low.
It is also a very strange culture. It treats life as if it is dirt, which is very odd function of Hinduism. Which is why there is such a cavalier attitude towards mass abortions of female fetuses.
I came across an Indian doctor who routinely aborted girl fetuses of Hindu and Sikh women. She was completely detached about the issue. And she was educated with a training degree from the UK.
This cavalier attitude towards death is seen in the way India lives in complete filth. No one even bothers to clean these heritage sites that they have. For a few paisas, someone could pay a beggar to clean the sites that tourists visit, but no one cares. So you see the dead bodies that rot the Ganges, and the smell of death is everywhere, with people swimming in the water and drinking the water.It is crazy.
The love affair our press has with India started in 2006 really with India's normalization of relations with Israel. It is now our ally, and because it is servile, we can use it as a strategic post between those nutter countries.
I have to say that I have been to Pakistan, and compared to India, it was much more civilized. It was at least clean. Not saying that there is higher IQ, but the Muslim rule for prayer and constant cleaning at least gives the country some semblance of civilization. It's still backward, but even compared to those savage's country, large parts of India are still in the neanderthal age.
Anyone who buys into India's success is not seeing our military strategy propaganda at play. India will be very easy to control so it is a good idea to hype it.
Indians who come to America are servile too. They are very easy to mimic white people. They like to present themselves as the brown jews or hang around with mostly white people. A lot of Indians don't make friends with blacks or other Asians. They want to be in with the whites. The advantage for us is to use their need to assimilate.
Muslims hang onto their culture and have attitude and are very arrogant. They seem to be of soldier mentality. They fight till the end.
So I say that we close off borders to Muslims, who will not bow down to us. Open borders to low IQ Hindus because they will do anything to please us. Who knows, maybe, like the East India Company that was the result of Hindus just handing over India to the Brits, we can one day have a American-Indian Company and have a permanent base in India. That way, China will be contained to the East and Iran to the West. We already have Afghanistan because we are never going to leave that place without leaving a large military base in place, and we are in the process of occupying Pakistan.We need to control that entire region, and so, let's not antagonize our best bet in that region, which is the Hindus. Everyone should be nice to Indians. They are our best bet right now.
These posts about Indian IQ may not be helpful. Keep in mind our larger goal here, please.
1. The left half of the Indian American IQ curve, namely the Patels and Sikhs are often richer than the Upper caste Indian Americans. This is because most Upper castes are salaried employees, whereas Sikhs and Patels being business owners, such as trucking companies, farmers, and motel owners and can earn a lot more.
2. In Nepal, the elite are Indian origin Rajput and Brahmins, whereas the mongoloid population of the Himalayas are lower status. Millions of Mongoloid Nepalese work in India as security guards and are not known for any academic prowess
3. From 1890 to 1930, Indian migrants took over most of the economy of Burma. This led the Burmese to agitate for a partition of British India in 1937, since they could not compete with Indians and Tamil Merchant Chettiars had taken over 80% of the farmland from the lazier Mongoloid burmese
4. South Indians who live in hotter climate have higher IQ than North Indians who live in colder climates.
5. In 1984, in the Sue and Abe study in California, of University of California Freshmen, based on old SAT
Verbal SAT
Indians = 520
White = 512
Chinese = 473
Math SAT
Indian = 605
White = 577
Chinese = 612
Total SAT ( old SAT )
Indian = 1125
White = 1089
Chinese = 1085
Re:catperson
Interesting that Lynn found that. Can you link me to the paper ?
It's in his book Race Differences in Intelligence.
http://analyseeconomique.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/race-differences-in-intelligence-an-evolutionary-analysis-richard-lynn/
Scroll down to chapter 4, section 15 called "Estimation of the genotypic African IQ"; pg 48
Lynn also estimates in this section that African Americans with 50% white ancestry have IQ's of 90.
Perhaps such mulattoes might be genetically somewhat equivalent to "Coloreds" in South Africa.
In South Africa Blacks average IQ 69, Coloreds average IQ 83, Indians average IQ 86, and whites average 100. I imagine that because of appartheid, Indians and Coloreds share similar environments (less deprived than blacks but not as priveliged as the whites) so the 3 point gap between Indians and Coloreds is probably genetic.
If Indians are 3 points smarter than Coloreds in South Africa, and assuming Indians in South Africa are genetically representative of India, it implies that a genetically representative sample of Indians reared in America would score 3 points higher than American mulattoes (IQ 90 + 3 = IQ 93)
So evidence continues to converge suggesting Indians have a genetic IQ in the mid 90s. Pure blacks see their IQ's rise by 13 points when reared in the U.S. implying India's IQ of 81 would also rise by 13 points to 94 if reared with American nutrition.
Meanwhile British Born Indians average IQ 97. All evidence points to Indians having a gentic IQ somewhere in the mid 90s.
Single factors in IQ batteries do not typically correlate higher with g than .8.
True, backwards digit span only correlates 0.6 with g (which is better than forward digit span), however there's no reason to think the imperfect g loading would cause Indian American IQ to be inflated. Just the opposite. Group differences tend to get smaller when tests are less g loaded because noise in the measurement causes the scores of all American ethnic groups to regress to the American mean.
And while the SAT probably has a g loading around 0.8 for the general American population, it is not uncommon for people to study and be coached for it, so when comparing ethnic groups with very different backgrounds, work ethics, language and cultures, I'd put more faith in the culture reduced backwards digit span test.
Pre-1453 and the Renaissance, despite a good start with Greece and Rome, the dark ages didn't contribute much to civilization at a time when the Chinese
In many respects Europe during the so-called "Dark Ages" was considerably more advanced than China. For instance, the Europeans had the better architecture and metallurgy. They exceeded the Chinese in the practical sciences even if their astronomy was second rate.
https://mathcounts.org/Page.aspx?pid=1872
Has the 56 mathcounts finalists for 2011
34 north-east asians
10 Indians of which 7 are brahmin
( brahmins are less than 20% of US Indian diaspora ).
0 muslim
0 black
0 hispanic
0 South east Asian
0 Japanese
12 Whites including Jews.
0 Patels ( 20% of US Indian diaspora )
0 Sikhs ( 20% of US Indian diaspora )
No 81 IQ group will ever show up in these lists.
*Among the 4 Semifinalists, 3 east asians and 1 brahmin
*Among 12 Pre-Quarter Finalists
8 north east asians, 3 brahmins and 1 jew
Based on above, would it be fair to discuss the lack of high end iq of gentile whites
So do smart groups in India make up a 40% forward caste or 5-10% top fraction?
This is probably the key question.
If it's 5-10% then it's easy to see how the overall IQ can be low yet India produces so many geniuses.
If 40% of groups in India have an IQ around 100 and above, then it's very difficult to understand how it could be so disorganized of a country.
anon:
"Simon, there's a class divide among the British Pakistanis. Pakistanis in the northern towns were recruited as industrial labor in the 1950s/1960s and tend to be downscale, uneducated, crime-prone, backward, etc. Pakistanis in London come from professional and middle class backgrounds and are doing decently well. I believe that both groups are about half of the overall population."
I only deal with London Pakistanis - many hundreds over the years. The boys often have a thuggish, chavish look, they tend to be fairly lazy and rarely do well. Some of the girls are dim bulbs, others are fairly smart and some work hard, although many don't (by contrast 1st generation African girls are consistently hard workers). One thing I've noticed is that the Pushtun Pakistanis seem notably brighter than the Punjabis.
Re:guy posting pictures
If you think that's a valid form of argument - I have nothing to say.
Re:digit span
I'm getting the 106 figure from the same digit span data. And my point regarding the backward digit span stands - there's a very good reason why it's there and that's because it's g-loaded.
The old US SAT scores as posted by rec1man somewhat support me but I'd be wary of citing that - source is too old and may not account for recent immigration.
As for HK and Taiwan, are you seriously going to deny that they have more english speakers proportionally than mainland china ?
As for the figure, we need a hard figure for demographic-IQ calculations.
Also bear in mind that those kids are not very old - most are US-born - so they already have experienced regression for 1 generation [ even if both parents are smart, there is regression ]
Also, what catperson said.
Re:Low testosterone
I've seen studies in Pakistan showing a lower T level in them compared to US whites.
Re:Civilization
You miss the point. Even if Romans had N. European ancestry, they seemed to have no problems conquering the even more Northern regions of Britannia and Gaul. Populations which continued to live in such colder regions would keep evolving towards higher IQ, right ? Unlike the Romans settling by the comparatively warm Tiber.
Regarding the oldest civilizations thing, they did give a very good account of themselves till the Renaissance - I think we can agree that the Industrial revolution was something much, much more revolutionary than the invention of even the wheel, so it completely upset the world order. Earlier revolutionary inventions could be used to conquer neighbours , etc. In the era of the industrial revolution Europeans had access to the entire world, and the impact of their invention was that much more widespread, in terms of conquest.
Re:Nepal
Nepal is tropical but on the Himalayan range, thus very cold.
Re:Apartheid
It is an assumption. I do not have data. But in general, underclass groups in general tend to show more malnourishment - blacks, dalits, tribals.
Also, apartheid in effect began a lot earlier than WW2 - Gandhi experienced severe discrimination in S. Africa due to being Indian.Again, the standard of racial segregration and discrimination in S. Africa would flabbergast even most HBDers.This is real discrimination we're talking about. Not just modern "hate speech". No IQ data can possibly excuse those immoral actions.I can't imagine that being good for IQ of the minority groups.All this real discrimination was well reflected in education, wealth etc. as well. This is not inequal performance with equal opportunity, it's inequal performance with inequal opportunity.
Also the fact that Indian IQ has never been tested that low in S. Africa again confirms my assumption. In fact, looking back on the chart, 88 is the best number for Indians in S. Africa - only study on 18 year olds. But this is still under apartheid. Without apartheid I expect them to cross the Mauritius mean of 90 [ lower caste, hence floor IQ ] and reach 91-92 approx.
Re:Genotypic African IQ
Hm. An environmentalist would say that Southern states also have had a history of more discrimination, so that data is not foolproof. Nevertheless, the convergence of admixture and IQ is compelling.
Do you happen to have data on pure black populations in states without that history ?
Re:Europe in the dark ages.
This is debatable. Comparing civilizations is a messy task and subjective, as is well reflected in Steve's original post - mines or zero ?
Re: Forward castes
The dalits and tribals are together 25% of the Indian population.Dalit about 16%, Tribals about 8%. The rest is almost evenly split into FC and BC.
Only mauritius is a good sample for estimating IQs of castes as other diasporas are very mixed with no ideas of caste proportions.
Mauritius is mostly BC/dalit, with a 90 IQ. This is equal to Turkey's. Add the FC , subtract the tribal impact with their IQ in the 80s, and you get a value much like what I proposed : 94.
My main beef with people who propound N->S invasions is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. Romans are N. European when conquering the North, and turn S. European when getting conquered.
Science !
@Thomas and @Simon in London
"Why are Indians such cheaters? Is there an evo-bio explanation?"
Its true.As an Indian ,I find it disgraceful.Truth be told ,I did some cheating too(more showing my work rather copying but cheating is cheating) when I was under the Indian CBSE school system but scrapped it after moving to U.S for university.
For me to answer this question ,I would need to provide historical background which had affected socio cultural motives for the behavior you described.
I dont think it has much to do with "bio" but more culture.You may look no further than Chanakya or Kautilya circa 320 BC ,the political adviser to Chandragupta Maurya(who defeated Selekus Nicator-the only defeat the Greeks suffered while Alexander was alive).Chanakya was the author of the book on politics and strategy-Arthashastra.
IMO it does not compare well to Sun Tzu's Art of War which is far more lucid and effective.
Nonetheless, the crux of Arthashastra is sham,dham,dhand,bhed ie treachery,deciet,bribery,violence are perfectly acceptable methods of achieving your goals.Dharma (code of conduct) be damned.
Chanakya (though ethnically a South Indian Brahmin) had studied at the University of Taxila in the present AfPak badlands where Tehreek e Taliban rules the roost.This was the home of Kambojas (ancestors of Pushtoons) who were notorious for their dishonorable conduct and dirty tricks.
Chandragupta Maurya initially expressed some alarm over such tactics but succumbed to them(his allies against Seleucus were the armies of Persians,Bactrians,Scythians who were promised their sovereinity upon victory against the Macedonian general.However CGM proceeded to stab them in the back and kept thelands for his own empire-A violation of the Vedic code of conduct)
The "honor system" was briefly resurrected during the later Gupta Empire(400 AD) and the heroic Rajput era.When the Turkic Afghan invader Muhammad Ghori invaded India ,he was promptly defeated by Prithviraj Chauhan no less than 17 times.Each time Chauhan released Ghauri after having the latter promise that he wouldnt invade!However the 18th time Chauhan was defeated.While Hindus had exagerrated sense of ethics and conduct ,Muslims had none.
This lesson did not go unnoticed by the Marathas who did what they had(including assasinating ambassadors) to defeat the Mughals.
The thoroughly disagreeable methods by the British East India established itself as the major power in India had by then put a nail in the coffin of ethical code of Vedic Dharma in the Indian psyche which had been accustomed to cheating,lying and stealing under the nearly 1000 year of Islamic domination in order to survive.
I would say that India is currently for the most an amoral(though not neccesarily) society where people refrain from committing crimes not because it is sinful to do so but because due to more pragmatic reasons of losing face!
I was always amused that middle class Indians were fans of Ayn Rand.And why not?She is the same lady who wrote "virtue of selfishness"
How far the Indians have fallen!There was a time when the Greek historian Arian had described them the most righteous people in the world.
The idea tenaciously spread by Brahmins here and everywhere that they are a super intelligent breed is laughable nonsense.
Their primary religious rituals, which only they are qualified to perform, involve such indefensible silliness as sacrifices to the gods and absurd worship of black stone idols of numerous other gods.
The brahminical/casteist religion Hinduism condemns it's followers to the most abject poverty, hunger, unsanitary conditions on the face of the planet.
In India the citizens of the states with the most brahmins, the cow belt of the north, are hungrier, more poverty stricken than almost all Africans. The poorest state in India, Bihar, with 84% Hindus and less than 0.5% christians has a per capita income of ~$350 a year! The richest state in India, Goa, with ~30% Christians, has a per capita income ten times higher!
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh 75% of working Brahmins are employed as domestic servants. Here too Christians earn multiple times in per capita income.
Kerala another southern state which has less than 1% Brahmins and ~ 20% Christians, has the highest literacy rate and life span in India and a per capita income 4 times that of Bihar.
Meanwhile the northern state of U.P. India's most populous state which has the highest concentration of Brahmins by far has a per capita income of less than $500 a year!
Based on this evidence it is safe to say that the 50 million Brahmins must be among the very lowest IQ people in the world. A nation comprised entirely of brahmins would be among the poorest, if not the very poorest, in the world. A handful of successful Brahmins from the dravidian south does not change that conclusion.
"The dalits and tribals are together 25% of the Indian population.Dalit about 16%, Tribals about 8%. The rest is almost evenly split into FC and BC."
FC, "forward caste", is not the same as dwija or upper caste. Low caste sudras who are doing well economically such as nairs or patels can be considered FC. The dwijas, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, taken together are less than the Dalits.
Dwijas or upper caste Hindus are underrepresented in the Indian diaspora. Sikhs, Christians, and Jains are over-represented. In India itself the majority of dwijas live in the poorest and most backward states, also known as the Cow Belt. Based on that and the assumption here that IQ is related to national prosperity the conclusion must be that dwijas are a very low IQ people. Ditto for dalits.
"Africa even now has less malnourished people, even as far as calories they consume, than does India"
The fact that India is incapable of feeding itself properly despite enough rainfall and farmland, is incapable of providing running water, building even third world level infrastructure and a sanitation system, etc, is conclusive proof of low intelligence.
"The Romans and Greeks themselves came from the north, and are kin with the blond European peoples. "
Reality Check:
1. The Greeks and Romans did not consider the blond tribes living north of the Alps their kith and kin. Far from it. They considered them barbarians.
2. The blond barbarians could never create a civilization on their own. They were cannibals, human sacrificers, illiterates, worthless people who left behind no literature, no philosophy, no impressive relics etc
https://mathcounts.org/Page.aspx?pid=1872
*Among 12 Pre-Quarter Finalists
8 north east asians, 3 brahmins and 1 jew
All these brahmins are SI brahmins ( about 10% of US Indian diaspora )
Sukanya Roy - Bengali Brahmin - winner of 2011 spelling bee, also did well in other g-loaded contests ( like most Indian spelling bee finalists )
She won first place in the individual portion of the Northeast Pennsylvania Chapter Mathcounts Competition. Last summer, she was selected to participate in Jeopardy! Kids Week at the regional level.
*The Indian population is 20% Upper caste ( of which 5% brahmin ), 40% backward caste, 15% muslim, 15% Dalit and 10% tribal.
*Indian castes have quite different Y-Haplogroup profiles and these splits go back 30,000 years.
North India -
Upper Caste = R1A
Backward Caste = H1 ( Gypsies )
Bengali Backward caste = R2
South India -
Brahmin = R1A
Backward caste = L1
And from wiki, Indian R1A is ancestral to Russian R1A, with the split about 10,000 years ago.
"The Romans and Greeks themselves came from the north, and are kin with the blond European peoples. They soon surpassed the Etruscan and Pelasgian precursors."
There were as much "kin" to the blond European peoples are the Arabs were!
No Greek or Roman considered themselves "kin" to the blond people up north as their descendents do in the modern "Indo European family" sense.Heck even Macedonians who were a Greek speaking tribe were treated with contempt and were described as people from whom "one couldnt even get a decent slave".
Most likely the latter were a Northern people who were Hellenized.That probably accounts for Alexanders auburn hair and blue eyes.
Romans atleast started getting more blond with the conquest of lower Germany and Gaul which brought light skinned slaves.And thats why "Flavius" as a name became more common.
Also Roman ladies especially took to bleaching their hair or wearing wigs as they were fond of blonde hair.This definitely indicates that it didnot occur naturally to them.Of course it does indicate their admiration for blondeness which is a different issue altogether.
"Both the Arabs and Indians acknowledged Greek sciences to be superior."
It wasnt that hard to impress Arabs but Indians would have considered the Yavanas(their corruption of the word Ionians-where they assumed all Greeks hailed from) to be barbarians if it wasnt for their contributions to astronomy.Also on the military front,Indians were impressed with the Greek siege engines.
But thats it.
"The reason why civilizations developed in lower latitudes first is the same reason why USA far surpasses Canada. (For the moment, lul!)
Was Europe colder than Northern Canada that civilization became that impossible in ancient times?Much of Canada is very close to the Arctic and do not benefit from warm water currents from the Gulfstream as many Western part of Europe and the British Isles do.
Civilizations developed first in areas well suited to easy cultivation. It is precisely the harshness of the northern environs which improve the minds of men."
Ok, the question remains.Why werent the Northern Europe as developed before as they are now?Obviously Scandinavia,Germany,UK,France,Belgium,Netherlands et al are advanced in any field one can think of.And they are still pretty damn cold.Again Northern Europe wasnt under permafrost(as much of Canada) since the end of the ice age.After all, Romans who came from a warmer climate were colonists in areas as far north as Scotland.
Again why did say the Germans build only mud huts around the era of the Republic and the Reichstag only later on?
Pensive Brahmin,
Scroll down to page 49 of Lynn's book (this link seems to have the entire book in detail)
http://www.velesova-sloboda.org/archiv/pdf/lynn-race-differences-in-intelligence.pdf
It doesn't have data on pure blacks in ideal environments however it does talk about the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study which compared typical African Americans (about 25% white ancestry) born in the North West and raised from birth by upper middle class white families to African Americans with about 75% white ancestry (according to Lynn's estimate) also born in the North West and adopted from birth in white upper middle class families. The study found that by late adolescence, the typical African Americans averaged IQ's around 83 and the "quadroons" averaged IQ 95. If you extrapolate from this, pure blacks should score around 80 if reared in a good environment.
I agree that living in the South might lower black IQ though this phenomenon might be limited to the rurar South where blacks are almost never tested. Jensen found that blacks in rural Georgia averaged IQ's of 85 as children but had plummeted to 70 by late adolescence. Whites at all ages averaged IQ 100. Jensen concluded that the environment was so bad it was dragging black IQ lower every year. Jensen also suspects that a similar phenomena might occur in the inner city but these extremely low scores are not measured because the inner city is too chaotic for any testing to occur.
ysv_rao
OTOH Muslims and Christians had it in for Brahmins... Christians well..ever heard of the Inquistion in Goa and Maharashtra?
More anti-Christian agiprop from the more extreme type of anti-Western nationalistic Brahims.
First, Catholic Inquisitions had no authority to judge anyone who was not already a self-professed Catholic. In nearly all cases, all a Catholic had to do was verbaly reject whatever heterodoxy got them in trouble with the Church in the first place to be set free.
The very few stubborn people (<= 2%) who refused to recant and were killed were usually religious fanatics that publically advocating schismatic teachings.
Given the historic context of the brutality of the Catholic-Prostant Wars (Upto 50-75% of the population were killed in various areas of Germany), one can see the lesser evil in setting up and continuing the Catholic Inquisition for so long to maintain the peace.
Secondly, Catholic Inquisitions were positively benign compared to Muslim and likely Hindu wars over religious doctrine. The Goa Inquisition is documented to have resulted in 0.2 deaths/yr (57 deaths over 256 years).
The main Spanish Inquisition resulted in 2.3 documented deaths/yr. over 354 years. The very highest guesstimate cited is 14 deaths/yr with caveat that many of these executions used the Inquisition to dispose of common criminals and for personal vendettas rather than religious reasons.
Pensive Brahim
Again, the standard of racial segregration and discrimination in S. Africa would flabbergast even most HBDers... No IQ data can possibly excuse those immoral actions.
Immoral actions? This attempt at moral shaming is the peak of hypocracy coming from an anti-Western nationalistic Brahim.
This from same Brahim class which has been far more oppressive of and indifferent to the miserable fates their fellow citizens for thousands of years.
I respect India's long history and culture and have mixed feelings about Christian missionaries operating there.
Also, it's clear that New Testiment Christianity is a direct threat to Indian ruling elite groups and is incompatible to the morals that justify it. Thus, it is no surprise that nationalistic Indian elites would despise Christianity prima facie.
However, much of what makes parts of India a living hell is precisesly the lack of such values as propagated by Christianity and parts of Western liberalism. It would be preferable if India could evolve both indigious moral system and cultural customs that addresses such problems.
"the crux of Arthashastra is sham,dham,dhand,bhed ie treachery,deciet,bribery,violence are perfectly acceptable methods of achieving your goals."
Kautilya who wrote the Arthasastra was a brahmin and his treatise explains why Brahmins are such deceitful con artists. A recent poll found that 75% of Indians agree that Brahmins are a dishonest and deceitful lot.
Another treatise by a Brahmin, the Laws of Manu or Manusmirti is a very disgusting example of staggeringly unequal punishment for the same crimes, based solely on caste.
The Vedas, the "revealed" scripture of brahminism, is also
chock full of nonsense and obscenities. Animal sacrifices are the norm in that "holy" scripture.
"The Indian population is 20% Upper caste ( of which 5% brahmin )"
Wrong. Brahmins are 4% of the population and the total upper caste population is around 15%, same as the population of dalits/outcastes.
You miss the point. Even if Romans had N. European ancestry, they seemed to have no problems conquering the even more Northern regions of Britannia and Gaul. Populations which continued to live in such colder regions would keep evolving towards higher IQ, right ? Unlike the Romans settling by the comparatively warm Tiber.
Basing a country in the temperate zone is a better prospect than one in, say, the arctic. That's the point you're missing. Besides, they do have higher iQ :)
Now, latitude is not the only factor in the evolution of IQ; Eskimos actually have IQs slightly lower than the peoples of the temperate zones. Large populations have their advantages in generating variation and adaptation, and if they are founded by high iq stock then there will necessarily be more complex societies. Neverthless all else being equal it is simply a given that northern environments are more demanding than southern.
Moving on, it seems to me that there are indeed certain ethnic groups better adapted to exploiting aspects of civilization than Europeans, i.e. the conditions of a distant, oppressive state ruling over disparate servile populations
My main beef with people who propound N->S invasions is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. Romans are N. European when conquering the North, and turn S. European when getting conquered.
The Romans exported their men as colonizers and soldiers and imported subjugated peoples as slaves in their place. And then freed them
In addition, people may not know that the Romans had access to a powerful contraceptive, silphium. It seems to have been the inspiration for our heart symbol. It was in such demand that it went extinct. Naturally, the upper classes got first dibs.
"The idea tenaciously spread by Brahmins here and everywhere that they are a super intelligent breed is laughable nonsense."
For what its worth, I believe (and have seen) lower castes do just as well in academics as Brahmins despite lacking the academic tradition that Brahmins do(after all Ambedkar studied at Columbia1).However I am stronly opposed to any reservation in colleges and jobs.
"Their primary religious rituals, which only they are qualified to perform, involve such indefensible silliness as sacrifices to the gods and absurd worship of black stone idols of numerous other gods."
Yes, how much more intelligent to handle snakes,speak in tongues ,talk about the God as a bridegroom and the congregation as a bride.
Let us not get started on what is essentially a cannibal ritual of eating the body and drinking the blood.And not to mention the morbid imagery of a corpse nailed to two pieces of plywood.
No offense to my Christian friends re above.My point is to show that religious rituals may seem strange to outsiders but that itself shouldnt be a criteria for dismissing them as "indefensible silliness"
"The brahminical/casteist religion Hinduism condemns it's followers to the most abject poverty, hunger, unsanitary conditions on the face of the planet."
Funny how the Brahminical India was not known as a cesspool of poverty and hunger BEFORE your saviors -the Mughals and British came along
"In India the citizens of the states with the most brahmins, the cow belt of the north, are hungrier, more poverty stricken than almost all Africans. The poorest state in India, Bihar, with 84% Hindus and less than 0.5% christians has a per capita income of ~$350 a year! The richest state in India, Goa, with ~30% Christians, has a per capita income ten times higher!"
These stats dont prove anything except the regions that were frequented by missionaries were most favored by the British!And that legacy persists.
There are exceptions such as Punjab where the Sikh religion frowned upon missionary activity.But then the Punjab was also favored by the British!
"In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh 75% of working Brahmins are employed as domestic servants. Here too Christians earn multiple times in per capita income."
More fantastic stats which I addressed before.
"Kerala another southern state which has less than 1% Brahmins and ~ 20% Christians, has the highest literacy rate and life span in India and a per capita income 4 times that of Bihar."
Keralas economy is a joke!Despite its high literacy,same goes for Bengal!
Bihars growth rate right now is stratospheric.
Meanwhile the northern state of U.P. India's most populous state which has the highest concentration of Brahmins by far has a per capita income of less than $500 a year!
"Based on this evidence it is safe to say that the 50 million Brahmins must be among the very lowest IQ people in the world."
It is safer to say that you are thoroughly ignorant of Indian history and the caste system.As far back as Megasthenes(Seleukus ambassador to India) ,it was noted that India didnt practice slavery.Such practices were introduced by Central Asians(both Hindu and Muslim) ,the former also introduced Sati.
"A nation comprised entirely of brahmins would be among the poorest, if not the very poorest, in the world. A handful of successful Brahmins from the dravidian south does not change that conclusion."
Once again,Brahmins ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEEK POLITICAL POWER FOR THEMSELVES!That makes them lose caste.At the most ,they should only be advisors ,ministers and consultants.
Most of these Brahmins you refer to are North Indians such as Mishra,Sharma,Bhumihars etc.There was only one prominent South Indian Brahmin politician PV Narasimha Rao who ironically had a Sikh(Manmohan Singh-current PM) as his political adviser!
"More anti-Christian agiprop from the more extreme type of anti-Western nationalistic Brahims."
Sorry to dissapoint you but Im very pro Western(so much so that I recognize and respect U.S.A as a mostly white Christian nation)
"First, Catholic Inquisitions had no authority to judge anyone who was not already a self-professed Catholic. In nearly all cases, all a Catholic had to do was verbaly reject whatever heterodoxy got them in trouble with the Church in the first place to be set free"
WOw,just wow.I never thought I would meet a Catholic extreme enough to justify the Inquisition but here we are!
"The very few stubborn people (<= 2%) who refused to recant and were killed were usually religious fanatics that publically advocating schismatic teachings."
Oh that settles that then, I was worried you would say something utterly stupid,narrow minded and intolerant!
"Given the historic context of the brutality of the Catholic-Prostant Wars (Upto 50-75% of the population were killed in various areas of Germany), one can see the lesser evil in setting up and continuing the Catholic Inquisition for so long to maintain the peace."
Bad,bad Protestants for being so rude as to stand up for your beliefs.Wouldnt have been better for all if they had just laid down and died?
"Secondly, Catholic Inquisitions were positively benign compared to Muslim and likely Hindu wars over religious doctrine."
Please dont comment on matters you are completely ignorant of- intra Hindu wars.Hindus were known for debates in matters of religion,not wars.A trend that most Popes were quite uncomfortable with.
"The Goa Inquisition is documented to have resulted in 0.2 deaths/yr (57 deaths over 256 years)."
A.I never said that the Goa Inquisition indulged was genocidal in nature or indulged in massacres but were about persecuting and humiliatig Hindus esp Brahmin(ala the dhimmi status)
B.Do you even read the links you send me?
According to the historian, "the screams of agony of the victims(Hindus) (men, women, and children) could be heard in the streets, in the stillness of the night, as they were brutally interrogated, flogged, and slowly dismembered in front of their relatives.""Eyelids were sliced off and extremities were amputated carefully, a person could remain conscious even though the only thing that remained was his torso and head.[20]
Diago de Boarda, a priest and his advisor Vicar General, Miguel Vaz had made a 41 point plan for torturing Hindus. Under this plan Viceroy Antano de Noronha issued in 1566, an order applicable to the entire area under Portuguese rule :
I hereby order that in any area owned by my master, the king, nobody should construct a Hindu temple and such temples already constructed should not be repaired without my permission. If this order is transgressed, such temples shall be, destroyed and the goods in them shall be used to meet expenses of holy deeds, as punishment of such transgression."
I suppose those silly Hindus had it coming.If only like those Jews and conversos, they wouldve renounced their heresy and became good Catholics none of this would be neccesary.So in a way its the fault of Protestants,Hindus,Jews and Muslims that compel Catholics to commit this evil!I suppose we owe you an apology.
Ill start a petition to the concerned religious groups!
"Kautilya who wrote the Arthasastra was a brahmin and his treatise explains why Brahmins are such deceitful con artists. A recent poll found that 75% of Indians agree that Brahmins are a dishonest and deceitful lot."
Most Europeans believed Jews were a decietful lot as well.Does thatmake them right?
Furthermore these Brahmins in question are those in political power -mostly North Indian Brahmins who are descended from Scythians and Huns who have no business being in the Vedic fold in the first place.Same Central Asian peoples along with Kambojas were populating Taxila where Kautilya learnt his tricks.FYI he and CGM were rather unpopular due to his methods (which indicates that such tactics were frowned upon by all Brahmin and non Brahmin).So much so that the legend was the Chandra Gupta Maurya slept ina different room everyday due to fear of assasination.
"Another treatise by a Brahmin, the Laws of Manu or Manusmirti is a very disgusting example of staggeringly unequal punishment for the same crimes, based solely on caste."
Manu was not originally a Brahmin,he was a South Indian king who travelled to the North during the Great Flood and then acquired Brahminhood.Manusmriti had many horrible versus against low castes but the veracity and date of those verses is in doubt.Manusmriti as opposed to Kautilya has very strict rules of warfare and fair play.It has injunctions as against killing or enslaving civilians or raping women during war.Who else in ancient history has such a moral code for war?
"The Vedas, the "revealed" scripture of brahminism, is also
chock full of nonsense and obscenities. Animal sacrifices are the norm in that "holy" scripture."
More ignorance,a good many of the Vedas authors were Kings or other minor Kshatriyas.Some of the more prominent sage authors such as Vishwamitra were actually kings who attained Brahminhood by renouncing their political power.
Animal sacrifice was practiced in most cultures throughout the world.Eating of host,drinking of the blood in Christianity is a vestige of that practice.Jews ,since the destruction of the 2nd temple ,dont sacrifice animals though some renegade sects like Samaritans still do.Islam still sacrifices animals(Bakri Id) to commemorate Abrahams near sacrifice of IShmael(of course Jews and Christians believe it was Issac)
"The fact that India is incapable of feeding itself properly despite enough rainfall and farmland, is incapable of providing running water, building even third world level infrastructure and a sanitation system, etc, is conclusive proof of low intelligence."
The person who writes such drivel as above himself demonstrates low intelligence as the feeding a population has nothing to do with availability and ability to produce food but with supply and demand variables.India is self sufficient in food.
Whether most of the masses can afford the food is another matter.You can thank the British educational system which drummed Fabian socialism into the heads of Nehru and Indira Gandhi.Those policies devastated the economy of a country that barely had a running start in the first place.
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