The conventional wisdom expressed in Obama Administration speeches and the like is that American students get crushed by kids in China and India on international tests of school achievement. But the evidence for this is not as abundant as you might assume ... especially not for India. While the city of Shanghai shot the lights out on the 2009 PISA, test scores haven't been released for other parts of China.
But, Westerners going back to Marco Polo have generally assumed the Chinese have a lot on the ball, so they are likely to do pretty well.
What about India, the other giga-country? I first noticed in early 1981 that there were a lot of smart Indians in the U.S., and over the decades this has become a cliche.
But, what about India itself? India has never participated as a country in broad-based international tests.
The future of India is A) an intrinsically interesting subject; B) one that could make or lose you a lot of money; C) could make or lose the whole world a lot of money (just as the widespread assumption that the population of the Sand States could pay back those big mortgages proved costly for everyone, so could an unrealistic assumption down the road that the Indian masses are ready for big loans could spark a future global bubble and bust).
But, what about India itself? India has never participated as a country in broad-based international tests.
The future of India is A) an intrinsically interesting subject; B) one that could make or lose you a lot of money; C) could make or lose the whole world a lot of money (just as the widespread assumption that the population of the Sand States could pay back those big mortgages proved costly for everyone, so could an unrealistic assumption down the road that the Indian masses are ready for big loans could spark a future global bubble and bust).
Last year, I pointed out in VDARE that TIMSS had been given unofficially in two Indian states, Orissa and Rajasthan, and both had done badly.
Now the OECD has released 2009 PISA test scores for 15-year-olds for ten more places, two of them Indian states. The new news is that the Indian states, Tamil Nadu in the southeast (east of Bangalore, the technology center) and Himachal Pradesh, a Hindu state in the Deep North, did miserably, fighting it out with Kyrgyzstan for last place out of 74 countries or regions on all three tests: reading, math, and science. (Not surprisingly, the southern state beat the northern state on all three tests.)
And there isn't much inequality in the Indian scores: it's not like some geniuses in these states score high but the places are dragged down by illiterates. There are a lot of illiterates, of course, but almost nobody scores at the top level, at least not in the schools where these tests were given. (Allow me to insert here my usual caveat about testing, which is that an 80/20 rule applies to methodology: it's pretty easy to get a crudely accurate picture, but really hard to get a highly accurate one. For example, how representative were the tested students in India? Beats me.)
Here's the 13 meg PDF.
India ought to be able to do better than score at sub-Saharan levels. Indians in other countries do better. For example, this same report has Mauritius, a mixed race country in the middle of the Indian Ocean where 52% of the population is Hindu, scoring like a Latin American country rather than a sub-Saharan African country.
But, India itself has a long way to go. It's likely to take 1-2 generations to get India up to speed, and we don't really know what up to speed for India means yet.
In other news from this report by Australians on the additional ten marginal places to take the test, Costa Rica does pretty good for a Latin American country (as stereotypes of Costa Rica as a nice place would suggest), Malta does okay, the rich United Arab Emirates do pretty good for an Arab place, and Moldova and Georgia do very bad for white countries.
In other news from this report by Australians on the additional ten marginal places to take the test, Costa Rica does pretty good for a Latin American country (as stereotypes of Costa Rica as a nice place would suggest), Malta does okay, the rich United Arab Emirates do pretty good for an Arab place, and Moldova and Georgia do very bad for white countries.
Those scores correspond to an IQ of 77 for Tamil Nadu, and lower for Himachal Pradesh.
ReplyDeleteIndians appear to have done even worse in PISA than in TIMSS. One would expect the very high school attrition rate to show the reverse.
I suppose that education, unlike IQ, gets less genetic as the years go by. If you don't have a base, you can't build much.
Also, those two states have a higher enrolment than the two states in TIMSS, which depresses scores. On the bright side, both have nearly universal primary enrolment, so it's assumable scores can't get any worse.
Apparently high scorers also get weeded out/ discouraged by the school system. In TIMSS, 95th percentile Indian students beat the 95th percentile of almost all developing nations and the 95th percentile of Norway.
That's fallen too.
In general, the TIMSS-PISA rise seems correlated with wealth of a nation. Moldova, Romania and Russia, 90-100 IQ and comparatively poor nations all fall during the period. India follows the trend.
Moving on to expatriates, UAE (50% Indian ) and Mauritius both did well. Raise both scores a few % for the Indian scores compensating for Arab/Black scores resp.
Given the genetic basis of IQ, it can't actually 'go' anywhere, except to ride the Flynn Effect up a few points, as the young get tuned into violent video games and other benefits of Western Civ.
ReplyDeleteI have often thought, as a repeat visitor to India, that the smart Indians one finds in North America, Europe and even in Africa, are actually highly selected and very unusual people, and not generaly representative of anything other than a small elite.
However, the average IQ of a country has to be the major determinant of that country's achievements, more than a minority, however talented.
Which opens up another theme; how naive and 'fair-minded' Westerners are frequently misled about the true prospects for the third-world by a narrow exposure to the best and brightest, who are, of course, the only ones who routinely make it out, and succeed in places like the UK and New York.
By the way, I love visiting India; I never feel unsafe, the people are friendly and curious,the food is wonderful (if cooked), the contrasts are staggering, the wildlife beautiful and much of the country has the feel of 1950's colonial Africa.
Anon.
In general, India doesn't seem very good at providing public goods relative to, say, South Korea or Denmark.
ReplyDeleteTamil Nadu is the most urbanised state of India’s 28 states and 4th largest contributor to India’s GDP, home to globally (Liberal mass media) known "high tech" powerhouse.
ReplyDeleteHimachal Pradesh has the highest per cap income in India, ranks 2nd in terms of least corrupt states amongst 28.
These 2 regions, the posterchild of India's "high tech" might, were carefully selected by OECD in the first place to showcase India's most developed regions and (of course) their self-proclaimed myth that "Indians are smart and good at Maths".
If these 2 regions score low, then the rest of India would, for certain, score lower.
I am perplexed that why Steve somehow thinks the results are odd and India ought to do better.
Actually, the results were fair enough compared with Kyrgyzstan which has average IQ like a Middle Eastern country, and lower than Peru and Panama (IQ middle to high 80's) which rank at near bottom of the list. So the smartest of Indian regions score along the line of IQ mid 80s - this is consistant with Rushton and Lynn's findings on ethnic Indian average IQ score in varies countries (e.g. England, Holland, South Africa, East Africa, the Pacific and Carribeans).
The only exception is USA where the myth, as shown in Steve's blog frm time to time, is Indian Americans are smart, yet we have NEVER been shown ANY hard evidence on what is the average IQ of these so called "smart" Indians in America. Evidences such as average IQ, or at least SAT scores with Indians ONLY, not mixed together with other high achieving East Asians under a ridiculous concept of "Asian" category.
Perhaps the inconvenient fact that Steve doesn't want to recognise is that Indians are not smart, and genetic vriations alone amongst 1.2 billion of them have logically made some smart ones who have by and large flocked into North America under H1B.
As for India itself, underlike what main trean liberal media paraded, India is recognised as a failed state in Asia, a pit that no one even Indians want to live (except some ocational western tree-hugging pop & Hollywood stars such as lady Gaga and Tom Cruise? ) - a pretty strong evidence of what is India's average IQ.
Perhaps the inconvenient truth is that "high" caste Brahamins are not that smart at all since Brahamins cities in India are like a dump without an exception. The serious question is What hold Brahamins back in India where there have been no Communism and no civil war for a century???? The fact that there are millions upon million of Brahamins makes the genetic variations robust enough to produce some smrt ones (who again most imigrated to USA) - which is true of ANY population cluster of the similar size, not due to some mystical innate high average IQ though.
Contrary to what previously conceived that there is a devide between north India and the south, a recent book on Indian caste genetics in India suggests that Indians are actually homogeneous at the subcontinental level.
India has huge genetic diversity, and I suspect that test scores for states such as gujarat are likely to be much higher.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I'd agree that indians in the west are typically far more intelligent than those in India (selection bias, as only they had the intellectual ability to be allowed in to western countries).
As someone else pointed out too, the top percentiles of indians probably do outscore the top percentiles of other countries (e.g. observe the high regard the IITs are usually held in internationally), but when you work off such a huge population base, you're bound to see a small number of off-the-scale guys doing well in IQ related tasks.
India is not really a true political unit, but the administrative and governance structures inherited from the Raj attempt to treat it as such, and worse, are prone to endemic corruption. Democracy tends to weaken states over time, particularly when (like India) the average man in the street is so easily bribed by corrupt politicians.
India will end up developing in a multi-speed way, with the southern states and the north eastern ones in particular lagging a long way behind the more developed states in north and west india. This will create huge tensions within the country, as the political need to transfer wealth from the rich states to the poorer ones will be compelling.
Its not really clear that India would split into smaller nation states (in fact, the political elite will do everything they can to prevent this, and will likely use the spectres of China and Pakistan as reasons to keep the hindu nation intact and "strong"), but from a pragmatic standpoint it would seem the natural way for the different parts of India to achieve their respective potentials.
People interested should see where India is coming from:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063914/ ('Phantom India', Louis Malle). It's long, but get vlc (videolan, free software) and watch at 1.2 - 1.5x speed. It was made in 1969, but it gives a baseline.
Somewhat OT, one comment made here a long time ago has stayed with me - that whites may also have genetically about the world average IQ of 90; only, we have a century of Flynn Effect behind us.
"In general, India doesn't seem very good at providing public goods relative to, say, South Korea or Denmark."- Steve
ReplyDeleteNot too much to do with public schools IMO, neither with nutrition level, or income level – 2 to 5 IQ points more or less? or the equivalent x PISA points more on average ?
(OECD mean average income is about 10X that of Shanghai. What happened with so called income level? According to OECD’s Mark Schneider that the scores (yet to be released) of other much more underdeveloped inland provinces including some impoverished areas tested in China were all well above OECD average. By the way, any neutral mainland Chinese student can tell you with confidence that Shanghai scores are nothing in China - average Shanghai scores have not been in the top 10 ranking lists in either Reading or Science in China´s GaoKao for the last 20 years. Inland poor provinces and some coastal one have dominated China´s GaoKao maths and science. Shanghai, having its own criteria for university entrance favouring the privileged locals, usually score average or slightly below average nationwide amongst China´s 30 or so provinces in GaoKao - FACT.).
North Korea is a dirt poor communist state, yet if one is to test their PISA, you almost can bet that North Koreans could make it to global top 10 in Maths at least.
Regardless what is Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh´s statue on public schools (both of them are in fact amongst the best in India – hence assuming at least comparable to most public schools of middle eastern countries nearby), they should have done better at Maths (unlike Science and reading which can be more affected by schooling) which is much more depending on innate capabilities than schoolings, if their average IQ are above 85 or even higher like what Steve might like to be or as per what they advertise on global stage.
Yet the fact is they can´t do well or even regularly decent on Maths. The hard fact revealed is that all banana republics in the world scored higher on average than the best of India could offer on Maths, Science and Reading. Very telling indeed, Steve.
Correction to my above comment...
ReplyDeleteDid you notice that in the Pisa results document you linked to, the comment at the bottom of several charts [indicates] that in Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu "Student sampling did not meet PISA standards"?
[Appendix A of the document describes the many ways in which these standards may not have been met.]
Unless I've mis-read the document, this would seem to invalidate your conclusions.
"In general, India doesn't seem very good at providing public goods relative to, say, South Korea or Denmark."
ReplyDeleteI would think that's generally true of heterogeneous societies. Koreans and Danes are willing to pay for public goods since the beneficiaries are their relatives. That's less true in India, Brazil, and, increasingly, the US. Southern whites don't want to pay for amenities for southern blacks.
"In general, India doesn't seem very good at providing public goods relative to, say, South Korea or Denmark"
ReplyDeleteIn general, Nigeria doesn't seem very good at either...
High-IQ Indians make up a substantial portion of US immigrants, but are a small proportion of the Indian population.
ReplyDeleteHere are some impressions of the Indian intellectual elite & semi-elite I've garnered over 8 years of teaching lots of postgraduate Indians in London:
1. Ability varies a lot. It is very easy to peg the likely quality of a German, Greek, black Caribbean, Saudi, or Brazilian student. Indians vary from high-Merit to very low ability.
2. There are some Indians who are intellectually competitive with the best Europeans, which is not the case with eg Gulf Arab nationals, but still, not very many at all. Most of their best & brightest are closer to our 'lumpen intelligentsia'.
3. Lynn's national IQ data matches my experience. Indian is a billion people with a median IQ around 85.
4. The women are generally better than the men. This is true for most countries, except a few northern European ones where men work hard. In most societies, women have to work much harder, and it shows in academic results.
5. India is part of the academic 'cheating belt' that extends from the Middle East through Pakistan into south-east Asia, including Thailand. Lower ability Indians will often have recourse to cheating, eg essay mills, although higher ability Indians seem readier to rely on their own abilities.
6. Taken as a whole, by world standards India has pockets of moderate ability, but is not intellectually competitive with the West, and never will be. The educated Indian elites have IQs well below their Western counterparts, although there are exceptions*. This contrasts with China; Chinese IQ is comparable to Western IQ.
7. *This is actually an important point. The elites in many countries are low-IQ without significant exception. Probably thanks to the caste system, India is unusual. But we are still talking about a small minority of a small minority. Efforts to raise a broad Indian middle class to western IQ levels are not succeeding.
To estimate the maximum wealth induced rise in PISA/IQ/TIMSS, you should probably take the Botswana ( rich African country from diamonds ) and Ghana gap in the TIMSS. It's around 100 points , or 1 SD I think.
ReplyDeleteThat's pretty much the max rise, Ghana is dirt poor, while Botswana is pretty rich at the moment.
Not surprising. But also not an accurate reflection of IQ.
ReplyDeleteGovernment run schools in India are pretty horrible. There was a report of something like 25% teacher absenteeism during random audits. And only 50% of teachers actually engaged in teaching.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/SOUTHASIAEXT/0,,contentMDK:20848416~pagePK:146736~piPK:146830~theSitePK:223547,00.html
Anyone who can afford it sends their kids to private tuition classes, and preferably private schools.
eg. http://www.aljazeera.com/focus/2009/07/2009797207338966.html
I thought Australians were supposed to be stupid? They seem to do OK mate.
ReplyDeleteIn India, almost all middle/upper class Indians choose private schools.
ReplyDeleteI looked at the data from Marutius. This country is middle income and is 68 percent Indian, 27 percent blacks, and 5 percent Chinese and white French. Setting black IQ at 83.5 and French/Chinese IQ at 100, I calculate an Indo-Marutian IQ of roughly 92.
ReplyDeleteNow if you look at half-black, half-Indian Trinidad and Tobago (whose GDP is higher than Marutius but still much lower than first world), Trinidad scored about 25 points below the African-American mean. That implies that environmental depression at least is taking 4 IQ points off Trinidad's mean score (likely even more, since Indians outscore Africans). We can assume that this 4 point negative differential, or an even greater value, could be applied to poorer Maritius.
Add 4 points to the Indo-Marutian score, and you get an IQ of 96. Lynn found a mean IQ of 96 for UK Indians.
A study from 2002 found that Hindus, who would mostly be Indians, scored above average on the SAT:
ReplyDelete'Study Shows Average SAT Scores by Religious Tradition of Students
On May 7, 2002, The Plain Dealer featured an article on "a College Board statistical finding that ranked the SAT scores of college-bound seniors by their religion. Unitarians finished first, averaging 1,209 on the college-entrance exam. Jews averaged 1,161 followed by Quakers at 1,153 and Hindus at 1,110. The average SAT score for college-bound seniors is 1,020."'
Lots of British Indians came as laborers from rural Sikh Punjab. Today Sikhs perform slightly below the white British average, but quite a bit better than Muslims or black Carribeans. So there is hope.
ReplyDeleteAnother Anonymous upthread commented that Indian communities outside India are self-selected high achievers, or from SSHA stock. That's true for some Indian communities, but many, including Mauritius, are the result of the British bringing in Indian coolie labor, in other words the Mexicans of Queen Victoria's Empire.
ReplyDeleteRe: another Anonymous @ 2:25, who accused Sailer of ignoring the inconvenient truth of low Indian IQ--Sailer is certainly known for ignoring stuff like that, rather than looking for more data to confirm or refute.
--Discordiax
I am an Indian-American whose father earned a PhD. So did I. My wife is Indian and a medical doctor. Our eldest son has scored in the gifted range on talent search.
ReplyDeleteIn general, the children of my parents' Indian friends, who were mostly doctors, engineers, and scientists, have done well academically and all graduated from 4-year colleges. Many have become doctors. If India were a homogeneous gene pool with IQ of 85 and the Indians who come here were just the right tail, one would expect substantial mean reversion of their children's IQ toward 85. I am not seeing that.
Do children of white parents of a certain educational level outperform the children of Indian-American parents of the same educational level? It seems to me that they do not.
If children of smart Indians are not reverting to a lower mean, that suggests that there are multiple gene pools in India, perhaps stemming from the caste system.
Is there a Sea People civilization vs River People civilization vs Well People civilization? I'm sure there are tons of books on the role of water sources and how they shaped civilizations.
ReplyDeleteThough nearly all major regions have rivers, some rivers are much more bigger and important than others.
Nile River surely. Yellow River too. The Amazon. And India has the Ganges.
Egyptian civilization was essentially built along the Nile, on which Egptians wholly depended on, especially since there was almost no rainfall.
Hindus weren't as dependent on the Ganges since there were rainy seasons in India, but Ganges was still important(and also in a spiritually significant way). Since a great river stays in one place and sustains life for a people again and again, it might lead to a kind of conservatism. Also, a river metaphorically reminds men of the continuity of things and that everything comes from a source. It makes people feel that they are dependent on something that goes back. Like we use the term 'river of time'.
If Egyptians were a River People, Greeks were a Sea People. Greece has rivers too but no great ones. Greeks depended on rainfall, but there was no great river to define or unite the Greek civilization. Also, there wasn't much rainfall to sustain much fortunes in Greece itself, so Greeks ventured outward for conquest and trade.
Greeks used the seas and moved all over the place. Since people freely navigate out in the seas, a sea people might become more adventurous. And since the sea doesn't flow only in one way, it doesn't reminds one of the continuity of time. Also, winds on the ocean blow this way and that.
Egyptians too had boats and knew the art of navigation. But they were less adventurous than the Greeks. Maybe River mentality made them prefer home over all else.
I wonder what India might have been like without the great Ganges.
(Well-people would be like desert Arabs. No great rivers, no much rainfall. They depended on waterholes. There's the Euphrates but many Arab tribes had no access to it. Somehow, the ocean of sand is not the same thing as ocean of water. On the other hand, given the saltiness of sea water, I suppose being stranded out at sea isn't much different than being stranded in the desert. But rain can still save you out at sea. And you can rest while winds take you places whereas in the desert, you gotta keep moving.)
Oh, forgot to mention--people have argued that India's borderline failed state status indicates low IQ.
ReplyDeleteCommenter said that India wasn't handicapped by Communism or civil war. I could also argue that a billion-person democracy divided into 100's of language groups, several sizable religious minorities, thousands of castes that HASN'T dissolved into a subcontinent-wide Sarajevo or had to be held together by Sahib Saddamputri Stalinpatel is somewhat impressive.
--Discordiax
anon:
ReplyDelete"I thought Australians were supposed to be stupid? They seem to do OK mate."
IME white Australians have the same native smarts as other white Anglos, are as well educated as white Americans, and better educated than white Brits. Roughly the same as the French. Only the Germans (and to a lesser extent Scandinavians & Finns) are noticeably superior.
2. There are some Indians who are intellectually competitive with the best Europeans, which is not the case with eg Gulf Arab nationals, but still, not very many at all...---Simon in London.
ReplyDeleteIt's not surprising though. Misconceptions?
Which Gulf Arab state has 1.2 billion popuplation to play with?
Even with a tiny population in the Gulf, how many of Gulf State upperclass IQ/intelectual elites would send their kids to London public schools or to USA with H1B1 visa? I doubt there are many, or even more than a few. Most of them would logically stay INSIDE their own countries.
If you exam data from London or the US, no doubt it would appear that Gulf States upperclass elites are no comparable to their Indian counterparts. However, if you talk to any Joes inside Gulf States (Syria, Jordan, UAE, Saudi, Bahrin...)or SE Asian countries (such as Thailand, Malaysia, Lao, Indonesia...), they would most likely laugh to your face if you mention that "Indians in general, or even Indian elites, are smart" in a stereotypical manner.
It's well-known that (pure)Arab and SE Asian intellectual elites look down upon their Indian counterparts historically. These people, unlike majority living Anglo-Americans who are used to NYT/BBC PC brainwash, have known Indians extremely well throughout the history as their immediate neighbours and trading counterparts via extensive interchange at all levels of social/economical spheres.
"Malta does okay, the rich United Arab Emirates do pretty good for an Arab place, and Moldova and Georgia do very bad for white countries."
ReplyDeleteGeorgia is only marginally whiter than the Unites Arab Emirates. Its culture is entirely Middle Eastern (though Christian; there need not be a contradiction between those two things). Moldova is moderately whiter than Georgia.
I don't think micro-level stats like PISA scores are that relevant for the short and medium-term as the Flynn effect has still a long way to go (it is relevant to long-term predictions ; such as whether Indian GDP or even PPP can approach Latin American levels). One can look at macro-level indicators (diversity and governance and the needs of coalition politics) to conclude that there are real barriers to high short-term growth rates in India. Its very hard for politicians not to pander to their electorate (think of affirmative action for 80 percent of the population). The dollar has strengthened and the rupee has declined significantly recently. The investment climate in India has turned negative and businessmen are seeking to hedge their investment bets. See
ReplyDeletehttp://bit.ly/rNntW5
It is amazing how this guy makes judgements about the intellectual capacity of the populations of countries that have hundreds of millions of people based on a few tests taken by a few thousand people in a few regions of the respective countries, tests for which excelling at them requires significant amounts of rote learning and training and not innate problem-solving skills...
ReplyDeleteMost of their best & brightest are closer to our 'lumpen intelligentsia'.
ReplyDeleteWhat's that? Obama?
India is a highly stratified society. They probably have 300 million people who's IQ's are the same as the USA's. If their intellectuals avoid intermarrying outside that caste, they can create an economy to rival ours; it just has to be distributed among four times as many people.
ReplyDeleteRecalman1; he just called you out.
ReplyDelete"Government run schools in India are pretty horrible. There was a report of something like 25% teacher absenteeism during random audits. And only 50% of teachers actually engaged in teaching."
Is that cause of IQ or effect?
"I thought Australians were supposed to be stupid?"
ReplyDeleteWho says?
Despite the country's inauspicious origins as a dumping ground for Britain's undesirables, Australia has made remarkable progress in a relatively short period of time. The colonial-era Australians managed to turn an isolated, arid wasteland of a continent into one of the world's most advanced, stable and prosperous nations within the space of a few generations. Australians today enjoy living standards higher than any other Anglo country.
Not bad for "stupid" people.
Perhaps, IQ test are flawed...
ReplyDeleteOn a slightly diferrent note, for the past few years amny commentators have pontificated about China and India as if they're one and the same and both nations are equally poised to dominate.
ReplyDeleteWhilst I'm totally convinced of Chinese future dominance, I'm not of India's and recent economic statistics seem to bear this out.
The lateset economic news from India is dire - high inflation, huge trade deficit and rapidy slowing growth - all the factors, in fact, that presage foreigners pulling out money and a general collapse, a re-run of the India bubble of 1990 in fact.
But if you watch the conventional media the problems of India are totally ignored and it's non-stop 'China is finished!', 'China is finished!' by many pundits who seem to take a joy (no doubt inspired by envy) about this prediction, which in all probability won't happen.
Another point.In the summer a hi-tech railrpad system in China suffered an accident and scores of passengers died.Commentators in the west crowed about this non-stop pontificating that ite was emblematic of China.
Yet during the same summer dozens, literally dozens of rail accidents occurred on India's decrepit railroads, killing hundreds if not thousands, yet not a word from the pundits.
Similarly the recent Indian hospital fire.
Knowing India as I do, I would be very, very cautious about accepting any test result delivered by Indian staff at face value - cheating and corruption are omnipresent.
ReplyDeleteHere are my observations.....
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the average IQ of India is only 81 (IQ and the Wealth of Nations).
Second, on studies of Indians in Africa, Indians don't score much higher than blacks:
http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/RavensIVb.pdf
Third, in just one decade, India has already burned through the very shallow right side of its bell curve:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html
I know that white people like to Romanticize Indians because they've met a few smart ones (i.e. a non-representative sample from the far right of the Indian bell curve) but for those of us who've been to India it's pretty easy to see that Indians aren't much brighter than blacks and are similar to blacks in many of their behaviors.
Also vegetarian diets deficient in protein generally and animal protein especially stunt brain development. That might be hindering them somewhat.
ReplyDeleteIndia is a basket case with few redeeming features. The intelligent Indians that do well here and in Europe are the best of the high caste of a population of over a billion people.
ReplyDeleteTest scores entirely miss India's vast population of low caste people that are unlikely to ever see the inside of a classroom. These unfortunates live lives of literal slavery - sleeping on the floors of their "employers", waking before the sun rises to make chai and clean and going to sleep after the last member of the household is asleep.
Corruption in India is beyond any level that can even be conceived of in the West and seems to almost be in the DNA. Indians will cry about corruption and then boast of paying a bribe in the same story with no sense of irony.
Looking at the Indians in the US and extrapolating that make as much sense as looking at Obama and thinking you understand African American culture.
"the wildlife beautiful"
ReplyDeleteThat's the key. You found out what is important to India and 90% of the world's population. That's actually a breakthrough for a Westerner, who prize themselves as being on a developmental vanguard in their own imagination.
Let's keep the "the wildlife beautiful" and rearrange things in the West so the wild returns to what it was- beautiful.
Inbreeding among Hindus is often worse than that among Muslims, from what I've gathered. Even the Muslims get creeped out by the uncle-niece marriages which are fairly common among the Hindus. A lack of inbreeding, after all, is what distinguishes Caucasoid Europeans from Caucasoid Muslims.
ReplyDeleteI should point out that Indian-Americans are disproportionately Christian, even if not from Christian backgrounds themselves (Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley being good examples of this). A little tip: it's easy to tell an Indian who is from a historically Christian background, because they have Portuguese surnames.
Ah, India... I have merely eyewitness impressions of that country, from my travels. I thought about going again this winter. I went to the Indian Consulate website for Hong Kong, and was appalled by the rigamarole. Even for Vietnam almost anyone can now get a visa on arrival. Not with India. Passport, photo, copy of utility bill or birth certificate, etc., a week's delay and two visits necessary unless you're a HK resident; hard to believe it's the 21st century! It reminds me of my emotions when I traveled in that country. Initially, anger. Then, merely bemusement.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the really low castes and scheduled tribes in India have tended to migrate anywhere, even other less developed countries like Mauritius or Trinidad. What's that island country in the south pacific where they're quite numerous? There too.
ReplyDeleteYeah in those cases Brahmins don't tend to migrate there but other high and middle castes often seem to.
Indian regional castes serve in many ways like mini races since they are notionally entirely endogamous, and in practice pretty much so as well.
ReplyDeleteWell the course ahead is crystal clear.
ReplyDeleteGiven the poor Indian scores, it is now the solemn duty of all Legendary Smart High-Scoring Indians living in Europe and America to return at once to the holy Hindu Motherland, and unceasingly devote all their efforts to raising Indian scores and Indian GDP, to build a bright Indian future.
Fly, bold High-Scoring Indians! You have the noble Right of Return to India! Go forth with battallions of Nice Brown Ladies, boldly wade deep into the Indian muck-hole, and raise it up to new and glorious heights!
Oh, wait... what's that? You'd rather squat here on what somebody else painstakingly built, and suck the marrow out of another civilization's efforts and achievements?
Well who could've sen _that_ one coming.
Well that's somewhat comforting news - that there's a limit to the number that can compete with us or have opportunity to move here.
ReplyDelete@Doug: Mauritius, etc. are mostly dalits, scheduled caste, backward caste, etc. with a small overlay of later immigrants from comparatively higher castes. Negligible Brahmins/tribals.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the data definitely seems to suggest India lags far behind China in IQ, what's interesting is that I can't think of a famous Chinese scientist or mathemetician, but I can immediately think of two exemplary individuals who were Indian. There is Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who did some groundbreaking work in astrophysics, and was the first to calculate the mass a star would theoretically need in order to collapse into a black hole ("The Chandrasekhar Limit"). Then there was the mathematician Ramanujan, who was the inspiration for the main character in "Good Will Hunting" (and was indeed referenced by name in the film).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, 2 factors to keep in mind :
ReplyDelete1) Those two states have the highest upper primary enrolment ( i.e. till 14 years ) in India. Tamil Nadu in particular has 100% UPE. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the left half has been almost fully tested.
( I am extrapolating here, based on the fact that the enrolment for primary schools in India as a whole is 93%, while TN = 100%. Assuming a similar gap in 15-16 year olds, where India = 81%, yields about a 90% figure for TN. )
2) PISA tests irrespective of grade and based on age level. In India, where at least one third ( back of envelope estimate based on the 15-16 cohort data ) are out of their proper grades, this is a huge factor.
India is a big place, and the variance in all sorts of traits is large compared to the US. I wouldn't be surprised if Indians from one area are quite a bit more intelligent than Indians from other areas.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there's still a lot of hunger in that country, which may be keeping them from fulfilling their genetic IQ potential.
Indian Guy: If children of smart Indians are not reverting to a lower mean, that suggests that there are multiple gene pools in India, perhaps stemming from the caste system.
ReplyDeleteOr heritability is just higher in India (which is more or less the same thing, just means your kids have a lower probability of scoring very, very high).
That would reconcile with the fact that there are not particularly more extraordinary individuals in India (probably far fewer, even with the high population), and the long term Caste breeding structure of India (which would tend to increase non-random association of alleles, thus increasing heritability).
I think this is going to wind up being a very big issue in the 21st century--India seems to lack the cognitive capacity to develop. From IQ tests, to this new PISA data, to the persistence of "open defecation"--things look grim.
ReplyDeleteI'm not an India-hater, BTW--India is a lot nicer of a place than say Pakistan!
So tired of the unquestioned belief on iSTeve that Indians and Asians are so much smarter than Whites on the whole. So. Tired. Maybe they test better, but if you ever really worked closely with Indians (in the same field, same degree, same office, mano a mano) you'd know they are not that smart. Sure, there are smart ones but they're as few and far between as smart white people. The upper caste ones are like Jewish and Asian parents - they push their kids into prestigious, intellectual careers. In that they are unlike most whites who don't push their kids to (and beyond) their full potential.
ReplyDeleteLike a few other commentators here, I would be surprised if these results included private school students. Sending a least one of your (male?) children to a private school is pretty much the definition of where the Indian middle class, such as it is, begins.
ReplyDeleteHaving studied, and lived and worked in Elite Institutions in the US, I moved back to India recently. I am appalled by the moral degradation and crass commercialism that has taken hold. My generation were raised better we respected people, our culture, Nature etc. Only a few people here now are good, hard-working, disciplined etc.
ReplyDeleteNothing lasts for ever, or at least for ever. Downfall of the Hindu Civilization has been Afghanistan. If we had secured it way back, we would still be the great civilization.
In spite of our downfall, our culture has always stressed respect for Nature, All Plants and Animals, recycling, Living within our means which a few still practice.
What good is Linear Logical thinking when we cannot respect nature, and not see Unity in Diversity of Nature?
Did you notice that in the Pisa results document you linked to, the comment at the bottom of several charts [indicates] that in Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu "Student sampling did not meet PISA standards"?
ReplyDelete[Appendix A of the document describes the many ways in which these standards may not have been met.]
Unless I've mis-read the document, this would seem to invalidate your conclusions.
I doubt those problems in the data have a large enough effect to invalidate the results. The problems are discussed on pages 101-104 in the report. It seems that that some statistics such as the total number of 15-year-olds in the population are not available for the Indian states, and, more problematically, there are some irregularities in the way students were sampled in each school in India. However, I doubt that these sort of problems would distort the results to the extent that Steve's general conclusions about human capital in India are in doubt.
If children of smart Indians are not reverting to a lower mean, that suggests that there are multiple gene pools in India, perhaps stemming from the caste system.
Yes, that seems likely.
Hapalong Cassidy said...
ReplyDelete“Although the data definitely seems to suggest India lags far behind China in IQ, what's interesting is that I can't think of a famous Chinese scientist or mathemetician, but I can immediately think of two exemplary individuals who were Indian…”
To be famous and well known you have to be in the right place at the right time speaking the right language, generally speaking. Even you were Marilyn Monroe of the time, you could forget about big time global movie career and a household name if you are not in Hollywood. Unlike fluent English -speaking smart Indians who have immigrated to Anglo Sphere countries ( the most advanced up to now), for the last 200-300 years thanks to the colonial Brits. Some of them naturally ended up in the right labs under the right tutors doing the right research in the right area, and became famous.
Their equally or even much more gifted Chinese counterparts, and other East Asians for that matter, however, by and large have stayed in their own home countries (which were far less advanced than the West in general particularly in the 18th, 19th and a good part of 20th century) in some unknown institutions doing some borderline trivial projects compared with said Indians in Anglo-American institutions. So there you have it, it’s no surprise one could recognise far more familiar Indian faces in the West, being mathematician, dentist, stand-up comedian, or 7/11 , car wash guys, even though one usually discount the latter despite the fact that 1-room Convenient Store career is the single largest employer for overseas Indians being in the US, the UK (if you count the illegals as well) or in South East Asia.
moldova is not only the worst place in europe, it goes for international levels of suckage. not the worst as far as being dangerous or violent, but it is a total backwater. i used to talk to this guy from romania about how much moldova sucks and man it was bad.
ReplyDeletei draw the line at the border of geogia. that's not in europe and the people there are not europeans. there's plenty of sucky places like albania and macedonia and bosnia that are though. come to think of it, everything immediately north of greece sucks.
Ive been informed that Serbia is a nice enough place despite the bad wrap it received in the aftermath of the Yugoslavian breakup and the Kosovo conflict. Also apparently it has a high ratio of comely women, though again I have been unable to verify this firsthand...
ReplyDeleteWell, it seems to me that one source of confusion is that elite Indians tend to be quite verbally skilled and socially aggressive, which may serve to greatly magnify their perceived intelligence. Meanwhile, East Asians are the reverse, skewing less verbal and much less aggressive, thereby producing an opposite effect.
ReplyDeleteAs a comparison, I seem to recall that a year or so back Steve had a post discussing the published list of California Merit Scholars, who scored in the top 0.5% or whatever of the student population on the PSAT. Given the presence of Silicon Valley, I would expect CA to contain a very substantial fraction of America's highest-ability South Asians, but I seem to recall their numbers on the list were totally dwarfed by the East Asian names, being outnumbered something like 10-to-1 or more.
On the other hand, the skill set of South Asian elites has meant that their presence in the highest ranks of America's political and Wall Street elite seems much greater than that of the East Asians, who hugely outnumber them. I'm sure that strong South Asian "networking" ability is a major factor in this.
Indeed, over the last generation or two, I think that the commanding heights of American social and economic life have generally has been restructured in ways that much more closely align it with South Asian traits and away from East Asian traits, and this partly accounts for perceptions of ability becoming rather sharply decoupled from apparent academic performance. Obviously, neither South nor East Asians played any significant role in this social tranformation.
I've long suggested that basic "personality traits", whether or not substantially innnate, are probably just as important as IQ-type issues in determining the behavior of a given population.
I'll expound a little on my assertion above that Georgia is entirely Middle Eastern.
ReplyDeleteIts culture is extremely extended-family-oriented. Politically it's 100% corrupt 100% of the time. One can say "sounds like Sicily or Greece", but there's a difference.
First, Georgia is more like that than any place in southern Europe. Second, Sicily, Greece, Portugal are all long-time members of the European cast. All the main characters in the story of Europe have known them forever. Many have had lengthy, complicated involvements with them.
Georgia's not like that. It's always been a member of an entirely different cast. There's almost no shared history. Even Russia's involvement with it only started around 1800.
I am baffled by the simplistic one-size-fits-all analysis that Steve, of all people, offers up in characterizing 1 billion Indians as more or less a homogenous group after thousands of years of a rigid caste system. Why? Because Steve knows this isn't so, and has written about the topic:
ReplyDeletehttp://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/indias-average-iq-in-2100.html
It seems to me that in terms of significance to the rest of the world, what does it matter if most Indians score very poorly on IQ tests if 100 million do well? Those 100 million people could accomplish a lot.
We Australians like to pretend to be stupid and lazy. It is a joke. It is partly that British modesty and desire not to show off.
ReplyDeleteWe are socially conservative, but that is probably due to our ethnic mix. We never got that Puritan strain of progressivism and self-improvement, which breeds political correctness. We are pragmatists.
Most early immigrants were not actually convicts. Most were free settlers. And migrants tend to be smarter than average. The British Isles were a good place to leave in the 19th Century. Same with Europe after WWII.
I notice that the Iranians are now claiming they tricked that drone into landing in Iran. " Damn clever, the Persians".
Just off the topic, I found something interesting thing about China’s PISA test.
ReplyDeleteI did some online research and noticed that China educational authority actually worked with OECD and administered a pilot PISA test in three Chinese cities (Beijing, Tianjin and Weifang of Shandong Province) back in 2006, using exactly the same test material as PISA 2006. But the results were not released to pubic(and researchers were told not to release the results as they are for policy research only).
However, you can still find some sketchy information from some Chinese publications. I found one of them.
http://cexam.neea.edu.cn/cexam/showpdf.jsp?article_id=247
The text is in Chinese although there is a short summary in the end. In page number 23, there is a graph showing the results of 50 schools in a specific region (my guess is Tianjin, because it appeared from other sources that only Tianjin had 50 schools participated in this test while smaller number of schools from Beijing and Weifang took the same test). Each data point represents the average PISA science score for a tested school , Y-Axis is the test score (science) and X-Axis is ESCS (Economic, Social and Cultural Status) score of that school, showing obviously some rural schools were tested. Reading from the graph, the average score is around 550, next to Finland. Tianjin is a northern coastal city in China, it is above the average in terms of economic development but not known for student academic performance.
For 2009 PISA test, besides Shanghai, total 12 provinces participated, including some of poorest province with large Muslin population. I am not sure if these results will be released in the future.
Just for a side note, China probably has one of the richest data set of children IQ test. Millions of children (including Han and minority children) had been tested in last three decades mainly for tackling Iodine deficiency problem which widely existed in rural China due to poverty. These data were partially published in some of Chinese medical journals (in Chinese). It would be interesting if someone could dig out these data.
Continued with Chinese PISA results, I found another Chinese source for PISA 2009 China results.
ReplyDeleteLocal newspaper of Zhejiang province reported that Zhejiang’s results were quite impressive too. Students from Zhejiang province has achieved scores only second to Shanghai in Science and Math: Math (598), Science (567), Reading (525).
http://www.anhuinews.com/zhuyeguanli/system/2011/01/11/003654070.shtml
Noting that total 12 provinces (including several poor western provinces ) participated in 2009 PISA, the average PISA results of 12 provinces are far less impressive, especially the reading score is 486, below OECD average of 493. But Math and Science scores are higher than OECD average: Science 524 (compared 501 OECD average), Math 550 (compared with 496 OECD average). These scores show that Shanghai PISA results are by no means representative of china as a whole.
Few point i want to make
ReplyDelete1:PISA study DO include private schools. So, there is no excuse for Indian poor results. Tamil Nadu is the most urbanized states, and Himachal Pradesh have the highest per capital income in India. They are way about average. Just imagine how bad the rest of the India will do in PISA.
2:A lot of Indian kid enroll in school, but they don't really got educated. Just spending the time and learning nothing.
3:The reason why most westerner overestimate India is because Indian by nature is pretty talkative and argumentative, and Westerner equate eloquent speech with IQ. And they are stunned to find out the ground reality of India is so far from the flowery language used by educated Indian to describe that imaginary India.
4:Indian lack the courage to look at their own shortfall objectively, While their media is open and free, they generally self-censor themselves and report only good news about India/Indian (there is a New York Time article about how Indian media editors try to "encourage" their reporters to report only upbeat news), and most Indian middle class drink that Kool aid. Every achievement of any Indians will be reported and repeated and celebrated. And lot of Indian believe they are the smartest.
5)While i agree the PISA result don't mean everything, but it DOES mean something. It show how badly India doing in educating their youth.
6)The high iq/achievement of Indian in US/UK is the result of extremely competitive immigration selection. Nothing to be proud of and should sadden any Indian to know that their best and brightest countrymen will leave their homeland at the drop of a hat.
"Moldova is moderately whiter than Georgia."
ReplyDeleteUnlike Georgia, Moldova is entirely European in culture and population, with its people being ethnically a mixture of Romanian, Ukrainian and Russian.
UK didn't get the brightest Indians. It got lots of Indian villagers from Punjab. Big difference between UK and US Indians.
ReplyDeleteUK Indians represent what commoners can do under first world conditions.
As for Tamils, there are a lot of Tamil refugees in Toronto. Academically they do fairly well, if you look at their test scores.
Right. Indians are stupid. Which is why companies bring in lots of Indian computer programmers. After all, why not hire incompetents? Sure American firms could hire Mexican, African, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern programmers for cheaper than they get Indians...... but why do that?
ReplyDeleteWhen China beats India in IT, which requires a high IQ, then we'll talk.
ReplyDeleteBlacks indeed.
Although the data definitely seems to suggest India lags far behind China in IQ, what's interesting is that I can't think of a famous Chinese scientist or mathemetician, but I can immediately think of two exemplary individuals who were Indian.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how India does produce some fine scientists from time to time. Our numeral system also came from there. All I can chalk it up to is that India's IQ distribution is wider. Makes sense; Europeans have a wider IQ distribution than Asians. So India produces both people who invent the modern numeral system and posit black holes and subatomic particles, as well as the retarded kleptomaniac gypsies plaguing much of Eastern Europe.
[Georgia's] culture is extremely extended-family-oriented. Politically it's 100% corrupt 100% of the time. One can say "sounds like Sicily or Greece", but there's a difference.
First, Georgia is more like that than any place in southern Europe. Second, Sicily, Greece, Portugal are all long-time members of the European cast.
Steve Sailer himself noted how old-time Armenian immigrants who came back around 1920 have assimilated well, but the post-Soviet Armenian immigrants are notoriously corrupt. I suspect the 75 years of Soviet rule didn't help the functioning of any of those people. Think of Ukrainians and Moldovans. You'd think they'd be just like Western Europeans. Nope -- and for the same reason.
Dare i suggest that no Indian newspapers or websites will report this PISA result because it is too embarrassing and didn't fit the image that Indian middle class try hard to project to the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteis that elite Indians tend to be quite verbally skilled and socially aggressive, which may serve to greatly magnify their perceived intelligence
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, East Asians are the reverse, skewing less verbal and much less aggressive,
I'd probably substitute "much less aggressive" for "antisocial, misanthropic, low self esteem and obedient", but I don't think this comparison is necessarily incorrect.
I'm skeptical that people overestimate intelligence either because of extraversion or verbal bias.
I mean, if we're talking raw IQ scores, or g, I think people would overestimate IQ more based on having math skills demonstrated to them, or knowing that that person was good at math, more than verbal skill.
For extraversion, it seems like "dumb loudmouth", "smart but shy" are as common stereotypes as the belief in the intelligent as extraverted and socially commanding.
It applies if we decide that verbal ability is "not really intelligence" but that goes against the formulation of IQ and g as valid that we use.
I think extraversion helps mainly because it helps you not stay at home with a lovedoll and because at some point you actually have to tell employers what you do, rather than because it causes people to upestimate your ability.
I'm not sure Indians in Mauritius are mostly the descendants of laborers.
ReplyDeleteHere is the Wikipedia article on the group:
"After having abandoned the Indentured labourer system in Mauritius, Indian immigrants had already formed the majority of the population of the island, but there were later waves of immigrants to complement them. These immigrants came from all over India, with most being Hindus. [Indian natives came during the French period (i.e. a century before the British) for the construction of the city of Port-Louis and construction of churches, mosques mandirams and kovils. They are known to be the first people to bring Hinduism on the island.
Since the early 1900s, doctors, businessmen, lawyers, scientists, people in the IT sector, traders and their families began arriving in Mauritius. The later waves came from various regions of India, with significant numbers from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Bengal, Gujarat, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi. These people have greatly contributed to Mauritius' economy and knowledge."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Mauritian
Interestingly, the Chinese physicists on wiki seem to skew far more (but not without exception) experimental and applied than the grand theoretical (that is what gets you publicised as a great physicist or a great scientist, a lot of the time) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chinese_physicists. I don't know how typical this is.
ReplyDeleteI know engineers tend to have an even more skewed math:verbal profile than physicists and mathematicians, although they are less smart in general (so their math score only tends to be similar to the physicists and mathematicians, rather than far beyond).
Perhaps there is some connection to this, and we'd find a "engineer, applied physicist, experimental physicist, theoretical physicist, metaphysicist" order with increasing movement from a skewed to balanced math-verbal profile (although I'm sure theoretical physicists are still very math skewed).
Experimentalists don't really get the prestige in the Anglo-American tradition of physics, which is fair, but maybe they get less than they deserve.
Or perhaps Chinese have less of a desire to Mr Big Bollocks and throw themselves at the really challenging fundamental theory.
....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_scientists
One other reason why Indians might be more known as scientists might also be their greater involvement in medicine. Indians are probably more warm and sociable and person oriented and have a bedside manner, probably more so than Chinese. A more person interested profile might lead you to care more about curing disease. Plus, as India is a tropical pesthole, they'd have more motivation. We celebrate medical pioneers in our society.
The big question.
ReplyDeleteIf the investment community continues to believe that India will be a sustained high growth economy then how can any of us make money betting against this prediction?
This blog comes to a lot of insights but I think this one is most ripe for making money.
I haven't noticed differences in Indian-American v. Asian-American social skills. Both groups are not as confident and outgoing as blacks or whites. I also don't think there is a difference in how far either second generation group has made it in business/finance.
ReplyDeleteGood question - how do you short Indian when the plan eventually comes down to financially empower the masses?
ReplyDeletep. 78 of the report. I'm curious to know what the interpretations of this portion are:
ReplyDelete"The socioeconomic profiles of Tamil Nadu-India and Himachal Pradesh-India are closely matched (Figure 4.9).
Both populations have low socioeconomic status relative to the OECD average. This is indicated by the large
portion of the bar representing the socioeconomic gradient being located to the left of zero.
For both participants, there is a weak overall relationship between students’ socioeconomic background and
reading performance: a one-point increase in the ESCS index is associated with a performance increase of around
15 score points. Within schools the variance in reading performance that is due to differences in socioeconomic
status is very small and practically non-existent in Tamil Nadu-India. These results indicate that socioeconomic
status is not a strong predictor of reading performance, as measured by PISA, in these populations"
"Dare i suggest that no Indian newspapers or websites will report this PISA result because it is too embarrassing and didn't fit the image that Indian middle class try hard to project to the rest of the world."
ReplyDeleteThey prefer this kind of story that reflects other comments here.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/have-you-heard-the-one-about-the-dumb-australian-20090822-eugj.html
What really matters are the number of high IQ Indians there are, not what caste they belong to. The latter is especially true if said caste only has a small number(say, 1-2 million) of individuals comprising it.
ReplyDeleteDoes it include private schools?
ReplyDeleteIt seems most PISA samples include private schools but I'm not sure about these 10 countries. In the paper only Venezuela is mentioned as including private schools.
Two Indian states Orissa and Rajasthan were tested by TIMSS in 2007. Both scored near the bottom but the top 5% scored in the top 10 range. So I assume that study included private schools. PISA in comparison says the Indian states didn't have enough highly proficient students to warrant giving a percentage.
In those states maybe half of secondary school kids are enrolled so there are a handful of countries below India in the TIMSS ranking because so many poorer students are left out of testing unlike in South Africa.
According to above comments HP and TN have the highest enrollments so the PISA scores reflect just how bad the bottom 80% in India is but doesn't measure the elite.
I think Simon in London probably has the best idea.
@ Steve
ReplyDeleteHow to short India? I guess you have to look for details on how Jim Rogers does it. He has been long China while short India as a hedge for ages.
Mauritius won't be Mauritius as we know today, just as Malaysia won't be Malaysia, without the leading minority elites.
ReplyDeleteThere is a theory around for a long time that makes lots of sense: for a society with low average IQ, if the minority high IQ elites have made a deal with low IQ mass to lead, then the society could be somewhat prosperous - better than it ought to be.
Mauritius has the highest average income amongst all Indian-majority countries. Why? Because "the deal" has been that Mauritius must be led by the tiny Franco-Chinese elites. The same with Malaysia.
Interestingly, relatively higher IQ Brahmins as the minority inside low IQ India have never been able to lead India anywhere close to the prosperity of Mauritius and Malaysia, even they (and other Indian high castes) have single-handedly dominated Indian society via Caste System. Perhaps this could also help to shed a light on what is this mystical "high IQ" of Brahmins and other Indian "high castes" from another angle.
One could then argue that India has 1.2 billion, plus deversity, plus democracy and corruption as excuses. Yet it boils down to the same old question: are these "drawbacks" in India causes of IQ or the effects?
Wow! I'm stunned. I'd always imagined that India was a low mean, high variance country. The high variance is absent. At the very least, the thick tails are absent. As an Indian (I'm not ethnocentric in any way), this is discouraging. It's also shocking to imagine to what degree I was socially insulated from real India - pretty much everyone I knew was not stupid by reasonable Western standards, while a non-trivial number were smart. That was pretty much an illusion, I realize.
ReplyDeleteI guess I now have a very good sense of what it feels like to be an African. I feel stupid seeing these results though I'm far from stupid. The burden of racial inferiority (yeah, loaded term, I know).
ReplyDelete"Which is why companies bring in lots of Indian computer programmers. After all, why not hire incompetents?"
ReplyDeleteActually, Indians are notoriously bad computer programmers:
http://www.vdare.com/letters/a-silicon-valley-executive-calls-indian-h-1b-workers-incompetent-cheats-and-frauds
The only reason companies hire Indian computer programmers is because they can pay them black/mestizo wages.
In my personal experience, the code produced by Indians is often so inferior that at the end of a project a senior white or North Asian programmer will usually be brought in to smooth out all the kinks in the Indian-produced code.
Another question....
Some HBD bloggers need to write about Indians' propensity toward cheating and fraud. As nearly any college professor will tell you, Indians by far are the most notorious group of cheaters on American college campuses. These tendency carries over to all the fraud one sees among Indians in start-ups and in finance. There must be an HBD explanation for all the cheating / fraud among Indians.
Does anyone have any ideas?
We often associate stupidity with recklessness and laziness. In many cases that's justified. Tell me how dumb a man is, and I'll tell you how reckless and lazy he'll turn out to be.
ReplyDeleteIndians confuse and complicate that picture. I've known a lot of not-bright-at-all, but disciplined, hard-working Indians. They were lacking in altruism, at least for anything other than their families and caste-type communities, but they were definitely great at self-denial. We don't normally associate the latter with the bottom of the IQ distribution.
When Westerners overestimate some Indians' IQ, I bet it has more to do with Indians' self-discipline, their capacity for self-denial, than with their verbal abilities.
Trying to infer the overall intellectual capacity of a country wih hundreds of millions of people from a few tests, for which excelling at rote learning is more important than innate brain power, done on a few locations of said country with a sample of a few thousand people is completely ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteBut then again, Steve Sailer is the guy who once stated conslusively that Brazilians - a country of 200 million people! - don't like reading based exclusively on the testimony of a guy who was delayed at an airport for a few hours. How can anyone take Sailer seriously besides his red neck fans?
I am an Indian-American whose father earned a PhD. So did I. My wife is Indian and a medical doctor. Our eldest son has scored in the gifted range on talent search.
ReplyDeleteIn general, the children of my parents' Indian friends, who were mostly doctors, engineers, and scientists, have done well academically and all graduated from 4-year colleges. Many have become doctors. If India were a homogeneous gene pool with IQ of 85 and the Indians who come here were just the right tail, one would expect substantial mean reversion of their children's IQ toward 85. I am not seeing that.
Do children of white parents of a certain educational level outperform the children of Indian-American parents of the same educational level? It seems to me that they do not.
If children of smart Indians are not reverting to a lower mean, that suggests that there are multiple gene pools in India, perhaps stemming from the caste system.
I think any regression to the mean we see in second generation Indians is negated by the massive boost in nutrition (aka flynn effect)one gets from being born in north America. The first generation Indian immigrant with an IQ of 120 and a height of 5'5", probably has a genotypic IQ and height about 1 or even 2 sigma higher, and when planting his seed in nutritious American soil, will not only fail to see his kids regress to the mean, but watch them far exceed him both mentally and physically.
I think the average IQ in india is low, perhaps even much lower than 82 (especially if the dumbest and most australoid Indians from the lowest caste and most tribal regions are not being tested) however I also believe India is perhaps the most malnourished country on the planet. 60% of the population is said to be stunted, the average height for men is about 2 SD below the west.
I think with western level nutrition, the average IQ of India would balloon to 93. I base this figure on the fact that in south Africa Indians and coloreds both enjoy intermediate living standards (higher than blacks, lower than whites) and Indians score 3 points higher than coloureds (iq 86 vs iq 83). Colourreds in South Africa are genetically very similar to light skinned African Americans who have an average IQ of 90 (compared to dark skinned African Americans who average IQ 80). So if coloreds have a genotypic IQ of 90, than Indians have a genotypic IQ of 90 + 3 = 93.
I don't think we have to assume a complex caste system and stratified society to explain all the brilliant Indians. A typical bell curve with a mean genetic IQ of 93 and a standard deviation of 15 and a population exceeding a billion will produce a lot of genetic geniuses, and if the best seeds are planted in nutritious western soil, they will reach their full potential.
I went through the 213 page report and the 81 previous comments
ReplyDeleteHere is my take
1. There are segments of the Indian populace who score 70 IQ, such as gypsies. I also saw a recent in-breeding study on Indian muslims that showed a 69 IQ, and Indian muslims are 15% of the populace
2. The study does not show the Private-school to Public school mix
Public schools are mostly attended by slum dwelling low castes who want the free mid-day meal. Private schools are also very often caste segregated in Tamil Nadu. and it is necessary to know which Private school was involved to get an idea of the caste mix, The extent of malnutrition is also not clear.
3. Indian vegetarians are mostly from the higher IQ, 20% upper castes , such as brahmins, merchants and jains ( who outcompeted jewish diamond merchants ), and the non-vegetarian meat-eating castes are the 80% lower IQ, lower castes who need affirmative action.
4. Tamil Nadu, has 2 main IQ groups, the higher IQ vegetarian group is the 3% brahmin migrants from North India, such as Ramanujam ( math ), Subrahmanya Chandrasekar ( black hole ) and Vish Anand ( chess ). The lower IQ meat eating group is the 97% dravidian indigens who marry their cousins and nieces and need 70% affirmative action.
5. Per a study by Carol Upadhyay, most IT workers are from the upper castes and virtually none from the lower castes.
6. Indian IT workers do back office stuff and that requires english fluency rather than super-programming skills. The west is competing with the 20% upper castes and not with the 80% low IQ masses.
7. Regarding performance in PSAT, national merit, Intel awards, etc, virtually all Indian winners are from the 20% upper castes. Patels and Jat sikhs and Caribbean Indians who form 50% of the Indian US diaspora is absent from these lists
8. There is a sizeable Tamil population in UK and Canada , who came as refugees and are non-elite and their second generation is keeping up with white kids.
9. Indian income is much higher than what their IQ would suggest. They have a caste network and extended family structure. Extended families live in a joint house and share expenses. Pre-marital sex and illegitimate kids are banned. Hindus are a low crime culture. Almost no Hindus in UK riots. Very few Hindus are drug addicts or alchoholics.
Many groups like sikhs are very rich in low IQ blue collar work. In Yuba county, no Sikh farmer has gone bankrupt while several higher IQ white farmers have gone bankrupt. Even Caribbean Hindus who are mostly descended from farm workers are doing well in US, though they drive taxis and run 7-11s. A hindu group with 0% illegitimates will outcompete whites with 50% illegitimates, even with a 15 point IQ handicap
Anon:
ReplyDelete"If you exam data from London or the US, no doubt it would appear that Gulf States upperclass elites are no comparable to their Indian counterparts. However, if you talk to any Joes inside Gulf States (Syria, Jordan, UAE, Saudi, Bahrin...)"
Syria and Jordan are not Gulf Arab states, and IME they are a fair bit smarter, as are Iranians, Turks, Lebanese etc. The IQ data support my impression.
anon:
ReplyDelete"Even with a tiny population in the Gulf, how many of Gulf State upperclass IQ/intelectual elites would send their kids to London public schools or to USA with H1B1 visa? I doubt there are many, or even more than a few. Most of them would logically stay INSIDE their own countries. "
This assumes that there *are* 'intellectual elites' in these countries. I once taught a nephew of the finance minister of a Gulf Arab state. He really struggled on his postgraduate degree, repeatedly failed modules. He scraped through eventually. That's typical.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/other-news/School-with-Indian-kids-named-Britains-best/articleshow/11156686.cms
ReplyDeleteLONDON: A primary school in Britain where the majority of students are of Indian and Asian origin has achieved the best exam results in the country.
More than three-quarters of pupils are from " minority ethnic groups", mainly Indian and other Asian backgrounds, and speak a language other than English at home,
'including a large number of Tamil-speaking pupils.'
--
Tamil refugee kids in UK seem to be doing well in school
In response to "Anonymous" about regression to the mean:
ReplyDeleteNo, all regression to the mean happens in the first generation. Indian Guy's observation of no regression among the children of his Indian acquaintances is probably explained by the compensating factors of better nutrition and Flynn-effect bump resulting from growing up in America.
In individual cases, it sometimes possible to disentangle heredity and environment. For example, my wife and I are both very high-IQ MIT grads, but we also come from several generations of ancestors who were the smartest in their own families. Since siblings have differing heredity but similar environments, one would expect that our IQs are more due to heredity and less to environment than is typical at our level, and would therefore "breed true". Our kids have comparable test scores to ours, so regression is not apparent yet.
About Indian programmers: I was a software manager for a company whose founders were Indian immigrants to the USA (IIT grads). We hired lots of Indian programmers most of whom were nothing special; the best programmers at the company were a Chinese woman and an ethnic Hawaiian. In general I found that programmers from Eastern Europe and Russia were the most able, and that growing up with inferior hardware had made them better than American-born programmers (who tended to be lazy and rely on Moore's law too much) at writing creative and efficient code.
ReplyDeleteI should probably also mention that all the H1B visas for programmers have made salaries in this industry stagnant for 20 years.
http://www.dli.gov.in/rawdataupload/upload/insa/INSA_1/20005bbc_407.pdf
ReplyDeleteHas a study on muslim IQ of the Ansari caste in bihar.
It looks at the effects of IQ on cousin-marraiges
Rural - Outbred = 79 IQ
Rural - Inbred = 69 IQ
Urban - Outbred = 93
Urban Inbred = 79
--
Ansaris are about 20% of Indian Muslims, and Indian muslims are 15% of Indian pop
"India is a highly stratified society. They probably have 300 million people who's IQ's are the same as the USA's. If their intellectuals avoid intermarrying outside that caste, they can create an economy to rival ours; it just has to be distributed among four times as many people."
ReplyDeleteIt isn't just a matter of being distributed among 1.2 Billion people, as the presense of some 900 million cheap laborers will destroy any labor saving capital investment. The history of America is one of scarce labor, until quite recently.
All of that assumes that they are in the 100 IQ range, which we have little evidence of to date.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/other-news/School-with-Indian-kids-named-Britains-best/articleshow/11156686.cms
ReplyDelete--- rec1man
2 major reasons for that:
1.UK mass media are known for cherrypicking news that fit into their most desired “diversity is a strength” religion.
For example, has anyone noticed that the world's main stream media are boycotting this news of PISA 2009 result on 2 Indian states?
PISA results are theoretically far more important than any nameless primary school exam in a city, yet NONE of UK major media even care to mention a line. They hate this PISA 2009 result so much as an inconvenient truth that they have decided to completely shun the story.
Now 2 days after the news came out, try google “PISA 2009 results, India” , you will find that all western major media, left or right, are mystically while completely missing in the search list; then try to switch to Blog Search, you’ll find this glorious i Sailer Blog entry standing ALONE there in the ENTIRE world of WWW. This is a darn good example of how world media boycott unfavourable news that contradict their preferred religion. Amazing , isn’t it?
In fact if one only listens to the major UK media, one would think that India is indeed the knowledge superpower full of highly skilled workers and intellectual giants who dwarf the rest of the world.
Back to this exam in that primary school in the UK you quoted: how important was that single exam for a primary school? Was that a nationwide competition? How serious/ or important was that completion to a school? Was the test administrated by a third party ( to prevent cheating and fraud) ? How many participant schools were there? What were the make-ups of the participant schools racial-wise in comparison? How many the similar tests the school takes every year? What were their average scores (statistically valid preferablely) for the past year, and past 3 years in comparison to others? And how easy were the test questions?? … these are all important question marks left unanswered in that news line. Then one can pretty much cherry pick ANYTHING to fit their story, if required, Frankly, I won’t find it surprising at all to see headlines such as A School of Majority Somali Immigrants tops the UK ranking in a major UK newspaper any of these days.
2. It’s related to my aforementioned last question “And how easy were the test questions?”, namely one should take UK test results of the last decade less seriously, because the majot nationwide tests such as Level A , GCSE etc have been systemically dumped down by the socialist Labour Party to such a level that nowadays No one fails- Every one passes - more than 20% can get straight As , A plus and A plus plus –- it proves that “Diversity Works”!
In a rough analogy, those test questions have been dumped down from what is 213*17-54 from a decade ago into what is 12+18.
Under such circumstances, every Tom and Dick can get it right, while the usually brightest could on the contrary make a careless typo mistake and ended up as the last in the class – - result: one has no much clue who is whom. Is the test you mentioned one of these “what is 12+18”? We’ll never know.
I should probably also mention that all the H1B visas for programmers have made salaries in this industry stagnant for 20 years.
ReplyDeleteSo what are you saying? That we should end H1B visas so American programmers don't have to compete with highish IQ immigrants (many of whom are smart despite malnutrition)? By insisting only Americans should get these jobs you are advocating affirmative action for Americans yet you're probably against AA for African Americans. That sir is hypocrisy!
Wow! I'm stunned. I'd always imagined that India was a low mean, high variance country. The high variance is absent. At the very least, the thick tails are absent. As an Indian (I'm not ethnocentric in any way), this is discouraging.
ReplyDeleteThe low variance in these samples is a good reason to expect that India is a low mean, typical variance, high heritability country - put simply caste marriages don't mean Indians really have separate subpopulations, just that they're all a lot more like their parents.
This could be good and bad.
On the good side, smart Indians know where the next smart Indians are coming from (ancestor smart caste and ability matched parents). Helps them target their educational resources at the clever, rather than having to scattershot the whole population to get the smart kids from dumb parents. Thus why there are more successful Indians in the West, in tech fields and in Indian institutions, than from places you'd expect to have similar mean IQ - they all have high IQ parents who are interested in getting them into high IQ institutions, whereas in, say, Thailand, the smart kids will tend to have dumber parents and the smarter parents will have dumber kids.
On the other bad side, this probably means they'll invest very low in educating the whole populace and being invested in making them successful (there's less return in it). Thus, to a certain degree, the state of India, where common or garden Indians perform less well than populations they are probably comparably smart to (such as Africans) because low investment is made by society's rich in their education and skills.
"Our (India) ‘best’ schools need to become good
ReplyDeleteThe basic conclusion of the study was that India’s best schools were not in good shape. Actual learning levels of students in our best schools were below global averages."
http://www.livemint.com/2011/12/12004717/Our-8216best8217-schools.html
The results from the 2011 study continue to remain unsurprising or shocking—depending on how involved you have been with schools.
ReplyDeleteOur “best” schools continue to be sharply behind global averages as measured by learning levels of students. Let me emphasize: We are talking about our best schools compared with global averages. If anything, the scores suggest that things have deteriorated since 2006.
Both the 2011 and 2006 studies had their bright sparks—some schools did do well. But that should not hide the primary message: India’s school education is in bad shape, not just the government- and low-fee private schools, but even the “best schools” that are the exemplars for all other schools to emulate.
http://www.livemint.com/2011/12/12004717/Our-8216best8217-schools.html
Indian Newspapers did carry the story with all the gory details.
ReplyDeleteNo idea of any reactions in the ministry of education, though.
Simon is London said:
ReplyDelete"Only the Germans (and to a lesser extent Scandinavians & Finns) are noticeably superior."
Superior in 'native smarts' or
their level of edumacation?
By insisting only Americans should get these jobs you are advocating affirmative action for Americans yet you're probably against AA for African Americans. That sir is hypocrisy!
ReplyDeleteWell, insisting governments should acting to benefit all citizens of your state equally while opposing racial preference systems within a state is not really hypocrisy. Citizenship and race are quite different things, although they can be made to coincide.
It does not follow that if a party is opposed to racism between citizens, and between citizens and non-citizens, that you are then required to treat citizens and non-citizens identically.
The claim you are making is like saying, if South Africa chooses to reject apartheid, they are then required to stop acting in the national interest of their citizens at any point in the future.
I don't think anyone actually believed that, or ever proposed that, or finds that coherent. Most people find it perfectly proper for states and individuals to act in the interest of their fellow citizens, while rejecting racism.
I don't think anyone has a problem with benefiting citizens at the expense of non-citizens, even if they believe that we should try to make sure citizens are from particular racial groups that they prefer (for whatever reasons).
----- On the link that “Tamil / Indian majority school best the UK” (note that the head teacher is also an Indian – extra suspicious given the “stereotype”, to be honest):
ReplyDeleteIt is along the same line of reporting that Miss. England winner is an ethnic Caribbean. I mean come on, everyone knows if you are not a recent Nigerian immigrant, the chance that you win the sexiest and most talented Mr Ireland or Mr Norwegian of the Year is surely close to nil.
“The Tamils / Indians best the UK” thing is just another poor attempt by the liberal media to prove that race doesn’t exist and IQ is nonsense because we are all the same and have the same potential - see that result of the Tamils? However, I would bet my family silver that when compared with a school of majority Whites or NE Asians in a fair and square competition, that Tamil one wouldn’t be anywhere close.
The sad truth is that many brainwashed Brits buy this rubbish nowadays. Several UK primary schools have cost-cut away their entire Maths dept. to outsource it to India through call-centre alike remote learning. Hilarious, to be honest. In a BBC TV campaign on Indian brainpower about a year ago when asked about why they decided to do so, the head teachers self-righteously answered “because as we all know that Indians are good at Maths, better than us Brits… and plus we can save lots of original budgets…” Well, God bless you is all I can say.
Himachal Pradesh people look like Kashmiris, extremely caucasoid and Aryan looking, and they dont marry their cousins and they score less than the Dravidian, cousin and niece marrying Tamils
ReplyDelete"Almost no Hindus in UK riots. "
ReplyDeleteYou're kidding, right? Indians started the riot in Birmingham.
"“Ministry of Justice figures also showed that 46 per cent of defendants were black, 42 per cent were white and seven per cent were Asian [e.g. Indian and Pakistani].” ~ The Telegraph
These defendant figures show what people observed all along: Whites were very underrepresented among the rioters (given that they make up 93% of the population) and blacks and South Asians over-represented (given that each group only makes up around 2 or 3% of the population)."
Indians are almost as good as another ethnic group I know if at lobbying on their own behalf and creating an image of themselves completely contrary to reality.
In the UK, in terms of intelligence and behavior, Indians aren't much different from blacks.
http://blog.american.com/2011/10/the-ashkenazim-of-india/
ReplyDeleteThe Ashkenazim of India
By Sadanand Dhume
October 20, 2011, 2:59 pm
A A A
Over at The American, Lazar Berman has a fascinating story about the high proportion of Jewish Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, a subject that has also been written about by AEI’s Charles Murray. In passing, Berman mentions how, relative to its population of 1.1 billion people, India has produced few Nobelists—between six and eight depending on how you count.
In itself, this is hardly surprising for a poor country yet to achieve universal literacy. Drill down further, however, and you come upon an obscure factoid mentioned by the historian Patrick French in his book India: A Portrait. Three of the four Indians or persons of Indian origin who have won a science Nobel come from a community said to number under 2 million people—Brahmins from Tamil Nadu. They include C. V. Raman (physics, 1930), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar (physics, 1983), and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (chemistry, 2009). The odd man out: Punjab-born Hargobind Khorana, who won a Nobel for medicine in 1968. The tiny Tamil Brahmin community also accounts for Viswanathan Anand, India’s only world chess champion, and the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.
In India, public discussion of this subject is more or less verboten. Caste is a touchy subject, and any such debate would likely devolve quickly into an exercise in caste chauvinism and name calling.
http://tamilnation.co/caste/nambi.htm
ReplyDeleteHas interesting statistics on historical male literacy in Tamil Nadu
1901 - Literacy Rate in Tamil
Brahmin = 73%
Dravidian Merchant = 32%
Dravidian Landlord = 15%
1901 - Literacy Rate in English
Brahmin = 18%
Dravidian Merchant = 0.2%
Dravidian Landlord = 0.2%
Both the Dravidian Merchant and Landlord were far richer than the brahmin and this was under british rule
rec1man = propaganda agent for USINPAC
ReplyDeletehttp://www.usinpac.com/
If you read between the lines of what rec1man writes: Indians have an average IQ of 300, can walk on water, and are the saviors of humanity.
Anonymous @ 1:23 pm: you ( but not all the other anonymi ) are an idiot. I made a statement of fact about H1B programmers causing salary stagnation in the programming Industry, without stating any policy opinions or moral judgments, so you chose to impure policy opinions and moral judgments to me in order to criticize them. Either rebut my factual statement, or take your straw man and go away.
ReplyDelete@Anon, Steve ran an analysis based on UK rioters names and Hindus were virtually absent, most of the rioters were muslims and some sikhs
ReplyDeleteCorrecting typo in my previous comment: "impute", not "impure" (that's what I get for commenting from an iPhone with the auto-correct feature turned on)
ReplyDeleteNext year, all Indian states will be in PISA, I am sure states like UP will come solidly in the African range,
ReplyDeleteUP is run by a Dalit woman whose main achievement is building thousands of statues of herself
Hey rec1man,
ReplyDeleteI would like your estimate of IQ for the following groups:
Tamil Brahmins
Jains
Marwaris
Parsis
Am I missing any extra special groups?
"Asians" constitute 20-21% of the Birmingham population, and further, the proportion of young people is higher in the Asian community, so the under-representation is even more extreme, and 7% for Asians is actually better as a ratio than the one for whites.
ReplyDeleteanon:
ReplyDelete"Simon is London said:
"Only the Germans (and to a lesser extent Scandinavians & Finns) are noticeably superior."
Superior in 'native smarts' or
their level of edumacation?"
In their level of education. Going by IQ data the Germans may have a small native smarts advantage over the rest of northern Europe, I don't think Finns or Scandinavians do.
Thanks Simon.
ReplyDeleteAre Gypsies genetically similar to South Asians? I mean, I know that they have SOME South Asian admixture, but I've read studies stating that a) they're mostly non-South Asian (extensive Eurasian admix), and b) they're descended from multiple founder populations. Using Gypsy IQ's to stand for those of, say, Gujaratis and Bengalis may not be the most correct thing to do?
ReplyDeleteI'm confused about one thing: Kazakhs and Kyrgyz (probably too Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Turkmen, etc.) have abysmal PISA scores, suggesting low IQ's (Lynn measured a Kyrgyz IQ~85). I've been to Kyrgyzstan, and noticed the awful quality of the education, and the crushing poverty. However, these countries are extremely cold, AND the people are largely of Mongol heritage, in the mold of Koreans and Japanese.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that people in these countries perform so mediocrely? Shouldn't the cold winters+Mongol heritage indicate high IQ's? Does it suggest that education and nutrition, in many countries, could be exerting as great an effect as genetics on PISA scores? Afghanistan and Tajikistan are hellishly cold countries, but I don't see any smart Tajiks and Afghans?
Children in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and possibly Guangdong ace these tests (and probably have high IQ's). Based on my Kyrgyzstan comment: Richard Lynn attributes a poor IQ score to Southeast Asian nations (Thailand-91, Indonesia-87, Malays-88, Vietnamese-low 90's, etc.), and test scores broadly show this pattern. However, Southern Chinese (Cantonese, Fujianese, Hokkien, Taiwanese) are, genetically, far more similar to Filipinos and Thais than they are to Koreans or Japanese. Does this also indicate that cultural factors, nutrition, and love of education can be as important in developing capital as genetic factors?
ReplyDeleteIt's not uncommon to see people who are genetically similar diverge so far in test scores. Albania, Moldova, and Bosnia would probably bomb the test, despite the fact that they're lilly-White, and probably genetically similar to most White Europeans?
I am very familiar with India. India has only progressed from the majority being illiterate just 40 years ago to a majority barely literate now. Similarly, India has only progressed from substantial-periodic-starvation to fairly-widespread-malnutrition-short-of-starvation now.
ReplyDeleteIn that environment, tests of achievement on a large scale mean very little. If you actually visit the public (i.e government) schools in India, as I have done extensively, you will know what I am talking about. Any education that happens in these places is purely incidental.It would be highly doubtful if most *teachers* in those schools can demonstrate proficiency in any of these tests.
A more accurate measurement would be to take a randomly selected assortment of kids, put them on a nutritional *and* educational special program for a year, and then test them.
My hypothesis is that you would find the average IQ to be about 90-95 in a state like Tamil Nadu. Nothing that 3 decades of Flynn Effect couldn't fix. Of course it is only a hypothesis (an informed one, not just random) and unless the experiment is performed, I couldn't be sure.
Albanians are not lilly white.
ReplyDeleteMoldovans though are.
The numbers from the Telegraph are for arrest records nationally, not in Birmingham.
ReplyDeleteHere are the national arrest averages for the recent riots across the UK (in about 57 cities):
Arrests:
46% black
42% white
7% South Asian
Now, here's the breakdown of the population:
93% white
2-3% black
2-3% South Asian
As you can see, whites are extremely underrepresented, and South Asians are extremely over-represented, and blacks even more over-represented than South Asians.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8846043/Rioters-were-poorer-younger-and-less-educated-than-average.html
As others here have pointed out, Indians in the UK aren't very much different from black people in IQ and behavior. Just Google "Hindu rap" or "Indian rap."
So what are you saying? That we should end H1B visas so American programmers don't have to compete with highish IQ immigrants (many of whom are smart despite malnutrition)? By insisting only Americans should get these jobs you are advocating affirmative action for Americans....
ReplyDeleteNo, he's opposing affirmative action for foreigners at the expense of native Americans. When the government allows H-1B's into the country, that is affirmative action.
"I mean come on, everyone knows if you are not a recent Nigerian immigrant, the chance that you win the sexiest and most talented Mr Ireland or Mr Norwegian of the Year is surely close to nil."
ReplyDeleteYou would score about a 3 on the PISA.
It's not uncommon to see people who are genetically similar diverge so far in test scores. Albania, Moldova, and Bosnia would probably bomb the test, despite the fact that they're lilly-White, and probably genetically similar to most White Europeans?
ReplyDelete* Polynesians arising from Indonesians
* Tamil Brahims arising out of India
* Ashkenazim arising from Mizrahiyim
* Parsis arising from Persians
The first two (Polynesians and Tamil Brahims) probably represent the farthest physical and intellectual divergences from their origin population.
Polynesians are the most overrepresented ethnic subgroup per capita in professional American football. The Indonesian national soccer team, arguably the most popular sport there, is ranked 144 of all 204 teams tracked by FIFA.
I've seen a national IQ of India around 77-81 while Tamil Brahim are probably similar to other high-IQ groups like Northern Europeans and the Ashkenazim resulting in an amazing 2-3SD higher IQ than their average fellow countrymen.
It would be interesting to see other marked HBD divergences between subgruops arising from a larger population.
Why is it that people in these countries perform so mediocrely? Shouldn't the cold winters+Mongol heritage indicate high IQ's? Does it suggest that education and nutrition, in many countries, could be exerting as great an effect as genetics on PISA scores? Afghanistan and Tajikistan are hellishly cold countries, but I don't see any smart Tajiks and Afghans?
ReplyDeleteAccording to Richard Lynn, there are two main factors that influence the evolution of IQ. One is climate, but the other is population size. A small population placed in a cold climate will be rigorously selected for IQ, but natural selection will have less genetic variation to select from. So they might be only as smart as a big population in a warm environment. Those who have both a big population and a cold climate (east Asians) will have both the genetic variety and the tough selection to evolve to the highest level.
An interesting example are arctic people. They are in a cold climate and you can tell they've been rigorously selected for IQ because their brains are so big. But because population is small, they were never lucky enough to produce other advantageous neurological mutations, so all natal selection could was make their brains bigger, but since there's more to intelligence than just brain size, there were limits to how smart they could get (and brain size can only improve so much before child birth becomes
impossible)
Of course this is just a theory and could be that arctic people are potentially brilliant, but are being suppressed by malnutrition, (fetal) alcoholism or culturally biased testing.
In their level of education. Going by IQ data the Germans may have a small native smarts advantage over the rest of northern Europe, I don't think Finns or Scandinavians do.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to wordsum, German Americans seem to have the lowest IQ amongst White ethnics in the USA according to this data.
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2007/08/immigrants-from-all-over-world-beat.html
Austrian 106.5
English 103.9
Danish 103.7
Yugoslav 103.1
Greek 101.3
German 100
I thought that was interesting given the German reputation in Europe.
But thinking about it, British (English surnamed at least) and Scando-Americans do seem like the most accomplished groups given their numbers, compared to the Chinese, so maybe the smart Germans stayed home (although I'm guessing the effect would be cultural rather than genetic)?
However, Southern Chinese (Cantonese, Fujianese, Hokkien, Taiwanese) are, genetically, far more similar to Filipinos and Thais than they are to Koreans or Japanese.
ReplyDeleteAnnoyingly, I don't know if I've ever seen this quantified.
However, in the HGDP data, the Northern Han sample seems to have the same FST with the Southern Chinese Dai sample (apparently closely related to the Thais) as they do with the Japanese in this FST table from a very recent paper - http://www.cell.com/AJHG/supplemental/S0002-9297(11)00488-5. And about the same as they do with the Mongol sample. And the relatedness of the Northern Chinese to the somewhat Indian mixed Cambodians is only very slightly lower. So I would not be surprised.
Incidentally this relatedness between Chinese and Southeast Asians is similar to Europeans and West Asian people, more or less. So in terms of relatedness the analogy between Chinese and Southeast Asians and Europeans and West Asians holds (if not historically).
Contrary to Lynn's weird attempts to bin Southeast Asians as closer to Papuans and Australians in order to justify a scheme in which low Southeast Asian achievement is somehow kept outside the East Asian grouping.
Big differences in achievement along small geographic boundaries are interesting.
One thing I specifically find interesting about the low achievement of Kazakhs and Mongols is that Asian achievement in maths and science is often attributed to their visual spatial IQ. Yet Mongols at least have higher raw visual-spatial scores than Chinese, but it doesn't seem likely to me that if there were 4,000,000 Mongol Americans that they'd achieve like the 4,000,000 Chinese Americans in this domain (it would be cool if they did, because the Mongols seem like a cool people, unlike the Chinese, and easier to be happy for).
Why is it that people in these countries perform so mediocrely? Shouldn't the cold winters+Mongol heritage indicate high IQ's? Does it suggest that education and nutrition, in many countries, could be exerting as great an effect as genetics on PISA scores?
ReplyDeleteI believe these places are Islamic. Perhaps Islam inhibits development of cognitive ability.
British Hindus, Sikhs, and even Muslims were underrepresented in the riots. Even less represented than whites. Hindus were almost invisibly. Check out the numbers below.
ReplyDeleteThe government has estimated that 46 percent of the arrested rioters were black, 42 percent were white, and 7 percent were "Asian" (ie Indian/Pakistani/Muslim).
Using the census data on the ethnic makeup of the impacted riot areas and weighting those areas by the number arrested, blacks seem to have been arrested at 6-6.5x the white rate. Asians were arrested at about 0.85x the white rate. One downside to using the government data, with respect to Asians, is that it doesn't differentiate between Middle Easterners (Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Turks) and South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankan Tamils).
I found a separate list of the names of the arrested rioters.
Looking through the names, I found that slightly under half of the Asian rioters were of Middle Easterners of non-South Asian origin (Morrocan, Egyptian, Arab, Persian, Turk). That's quite an overrepresentation when you consider that their numbers aren't especially large in the UK. Adjusting for their representation in the local population and making some reasonable estimates, it seems they were arrested at about 6x the white rate. This is a conservative estimate and the actual representation could be even higher.
For South Asians, I calculated estimates for three groups - Indian Hindus, Indian Sikhs, and South Asian Muslims (mainly Pakistani, some Bangladeshi, few Indian). Indian Hindus were arrested at 1/7th the white rate, Indian Sikhs were arrested at 1/2 the white rate, and South Asian Muslims were arrested at 0.8x the white rate.
Another source claims that the top nationalities of arrested rioters were Jamaicans, Somalis, and Poles.
None of these numbers are adjusted for age. The average rioter was 22 years of age and ethnic minorities tend to be younger than white British, so factor that in when looking at arrest rates.
Marutius is over 1/4 black , 2/3 Indian, and 5 percent white/Asian. Its PISA scores put its mean IQ at 90. With better nutrition and environment, plausibly the mean IQ could rise slightly. That would probably put the mean IQ of Indians in the low/mid 90s range.
ReplyDeleteCalifornia, Santa Clara County, Silicon valley, 7th grade STARS scores
ReplyDeletehttp://star.cde.ca.gov/star2011/SearchPanel.aspx?lstTestYear=2011&lstTestType=C&lstCounty=43&lstDistrict=&lstSchool=&lstGroup=5&lstSubGroup=1
--
2nd generation , after regression to mean
Black = English 357, Math 337
White = English 402, Math 396
Korean = English 422, Math 438
Indian = English 434, Math 448
Chinese = English 439. Math 457
Indians despite their lower than white IQ, have a lot of delayed time reward behaviors, more commonly associated with higher IQ, The Indian savings rate is 35% of Income and even lower class Indians are very thrifty.
ReplyDeleteSo you have a society with low violent crime ( Indian slum dwellers dont mug visitors ), low illegitimacy, and a high savings rate. That makes it easy to economically perform at a rate more typical of higher IQ societies.
35% savings rate guarantees 7 - 8% economic growth rate
Catperson:
ReplyDelete"though this research might be obsolete."
"I always thought of southeast Asians as a hybrid between Mongoloids and some australoid like people, much like some Indians are thought to be a mix of Caucasoid and australoids. Humans took the coastal route to Australia so a lot of australoid genes were left along the way."
I think it is basically obsolete. The number of markers in that study was very limited. Based on the FST table I posted a link to, based on a larger base of sequencing, relatedness between Chinese and South East Asian groups is about 16-22 times as close as South East Asian groups and Papuans, and 12-14 times closer than between Chinese and Europeans.
Crucially the South East Asians in the sample are at best only slightly more related to Papuans than mainland East Asians are.
There may be some part left of an ancestral South East Asian (Australoid) population prior to a Mongoloid expansion left in the genome of South East Asians, but if so it's barely sufficient to cause the level of differentiation that exists between French and Armenians or French and Georgians.
So not quite like Indians who seem to have quite a substantial contribution from the preceeding population and are least 5 times as distant from Europeans as South East Asians are from Chinese. If we're using Indians as the baseline, South East Asians would be comparable to Europeans with one Indian grandparent.
(Also, by the way, the idea of a Middle East-South Asian relatedness cluster, often also seen in Lynn, is incorrect. By relatedness, the clustering order for European to cluster with Middle Easterners before either of them do with South Asians).
Treating Southeast Asians as part of a genetic cluster with the Oceanian populations isn't really defensible any more, and I'm not sure it ever was, at least for the mainland poor performers and likely Malays and Indonesians with similar IQ and performance are not too different.
The Indian savings rate is 35% of Income and even lower class Indians are very thrifty.
ReplyDeleteIndians seem like the most anti-Keynesian people on earth (perhaps to use a slightly ill fitting understanding of the economic bottom line).
The whole concept of not making every transaction fraught with time wasting haggling and paying people a decent wage to incentivize them to continue with their job and not to reduce them to penury seems basically absent from the Indian approach to money.
Indian slum dwellers dont mug visitors
Yeah, I hear they try to pickpocket and bagsnatch and also try to con them instead.
Utterly idiotic to use asian % for england to do the riot figures when over 2/3rd of riots were in London, where 13% are asian.
ReplyDeleteThe next greatest center was Manchester where Asians = 6.5%, so not under/over represented.
Please post this comment:
ReplyDeleteWe Hindus may have Low IQ: but we also have less Blood on our Hands.
On Judgment Day: I pray to GOD, NOT to forgive us for our low IQ
Sikhs and especially Hindus were vastly underrepresented as rioters. Compared to whites, they were less likely to be arrested. Pakistanis and Bangaldeshis were slightly underrepresented in comparison to whites.
ReplyDeleteBlack Carribeans, Africans, and Middle Eastern Muslims were all vastly overrepresented.
Which is reality. Something some here are not acquainted with.
I'd probably substitute "much less aggressive" for "antisocial, misanthropic, low self esteem and obedient", but I don't think this comparison is necessarily incorrect.
ReplyDeleteIf you grew up surrounded by intellectual inferiors you'd be pretty misanthropic, too.
I think it is basically obsolete. The number of markers in that study was very limited. Based on the FST table I posted a link to, based on a larger base of sequencing, relatedness between Chinese and South East Asian groups is about 16-22 times as close as South East Asian groups and Papuans
I highly doubt this. All of the studies I've seen that show such results use unrepresentative samples. Keep in mind that many of these SE Asian nations have literally seen thousands of years of Sino-Tibetan migration. Even now 5-15% of their population outright declares Chinese ancestry despite centuries of pogroms and envy-motivated violence directed against the Chinese for their hard work and tight spending.
The other mistake they tend to make is picking Chinese in the deep south as being representative of China.
I'm shocked (not really) that whites are so terrified of examining the 'classic' Southerners (Zhejiang, Shanghai, Jiangsu, etc) and the North Chinese.
Shanghai's PISA is certainly not exceptional for the "core" of China and they did this well with 1/20th the spending of Euros and Americans/Australians.
Likewise, the fact that diabetes, short stature, and the stereotypical withdrawn nature are completely absent in the North Chinese - with no concomitant decrease in IQ - seems to rankle whites immensely.
If you grew up surrounded by intellectual inferiors you'd be pretty misanthropic, too.
ReplyDeleteI'd be willing to bet at least a small sum that the typical Good Will Hunting is not a misanthrop.
"Chinese and South East Asian groups is about 16-22 times as close as South East Asian groups and Papuans"
I highly doubt this.
What are you doubting? That Chinese and South East Asian groups are closer than SE Asians and Papuans? That the distance between Chinese and SE Asians is a 20th that than between SE Asians and Papuans?
The former is obviously insane. How anyone could think Thais and Mongolians look more dissimilar than Thais and Papuans is basically beyond me. Or even that there's any comparison.
The latter may be open to debate but seems basically plausible to me. Chinese and Thais basically don't look particularly more dissimilar than Europeans and Iraqis.
The other mistake they tend to make is picking Chinese in the deep south as being representative of China.
In the sample I cited, the Chinese were Beijing Chinese.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/poor-pisa-ranks-hrd-seeks-reason/896777/2
ReplyDeleteLate coverage by the Indian press seems to indicate that private schools were included.
IQ samples on India:-
ReplyDeleteIQ of Chennai, Tamil Nadu:-
Study 1:-
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3018494/
IQ of 107 as a community sample. 4 zones in Chennai and 12 schools were selected randomly. Sample size of 717. 606 children belonged to families with less than 6500 INR monthly income. And 130 had illiterate mothers. If anything, the selection bias towards socio-economic status is downward.
Study 2:-
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/oeh.2005.11.2.138
IQ of children was found to be 102. And 95 for those having high lead in blood level.
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IQ in Chandigarh, Punjab:-
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3767262/
Average IQ is 99. 5 private schools and 5 government schools were randomly selected out of 37 schools. And sample size is 2400.
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IQ in 2 rural and 2 urban areas of Punjab:-
http://www.ijres.org/papers/Volume%204/v4-i7/Version-2/G4724854.pdf
IQ in 2 rural areas is 96.2, 90.4. And 2 urban areas is 102, 106. IQ grades are available (0 to 10th percentile, etc.) and online statistical tool is required to read.
Rural areas are in Dera Bassi and Tehsil Kharar. Urban areas is in Fatehgarh Saheb. And Tehsil Kharar.
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IQ of Delhi:-
Study 1:-
http://heapol.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/4/420.full.pdf+html
IQ of kids of slum dwellers in New Delhi living in plot area is 92.4. And shanty houses/homeless is 89.4.
IQ of kids who have attended schools is 96.7 (plot area) and 93.2 (shady houses)
Study 2:-
http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/Kundu-2015.pdf
IQ of 76.2 in Najafgarh (rural area of Delhi) and 85.2 in Defense Colony (slightly urban area). Government school were selected in both areas.
76 IQ in high fluoride region and has to be taken with precaution.
Study 3:-
Cited by Lynn:-
https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/lynn-race-differences-in-intelligence.pdf
Page 60:-
Row 3 gives an IQ of 93 for 14-year-old students at St. Xavier's School in Delhi.
Study 4:-
http://www.ruralneuropractice.com/article.asp?issn=0976-3147&year=2016&volume=7&issue=2&spage=238&epage=243&aulast=Ranjan
In the above IQ sample, average full scale IQ was found to be 90.6.
However 36/50 were from rural areas and 14/50 from urban areas.
TBC in next comments
IQ in Uttar Pradesh:-
ReplyDeleteStudy 1 (rural):
http://www.jcdr.net/article_fulltext.asp?issn=0973-709x&year=2015&month=November&volume=9&issue=11&page=ZC10&id=6726
IQ of 110 in village Tiwariganj, Lucknow and 85–92 in village, Unnao district of UP.
85-92 is in high fluoride region.
Study 2(urban):
http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/44025
IQ of Muslims in Aligarh city, Uttar Pradesh (Average IQ of 107)
Source: “Badaruddoza. Inbreeding effects on metrical phenotypes among North Indian Children. Collegicum Antropologicum 28(Suppl. 2): 311-318. (ISSN No. 0350-6134.”
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IQ of Gujarat rural:-
http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/trivedi-20124.pdf
http://www.fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/trivedi-2007.pdf
IQ in 6 villages of Gujarat is 97 (optimum environment) and 92 (un-optimum conditions).
IQ of villages near Ahmedabad is 104.
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IQ in Maharashtra (Pune):-
http://www.indianpediatrics.net/feb2004/feb-121-128.htm
86.1 for low birth weight, 92.1 for medium birth weight and 97.2 for normal birth weight.
https://www.indianpediatrics.net/july1999/july-669-676.htm
IQ of control group was 101.38. And LBW was 94.
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Madhya Pradesh (rural):-
http://www.ruralneuropractice.com/article.asp?issn=0976-3147&year=2012&volume=3&issue=2&spage=144&epage=149&aulast=Saxena
IQ of villages near Bhopal is 98.5.
IQ of remaining 3 high fluoride villages in Madhya Pradesh is 83.6, 87 and 91.6.
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Rajasthan (rural):-
http://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/singh-2013.pdf
IQ of villages near Jaipur is 93.31 and near Dausa is 84.48.
Study 2 (Lynn's sample, Agartala and Sinha 1984):-
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01068128
IQ of Muslims in government schools near Jaipur is 81 (non-inbred).
Lynn cited this as average IQ of 78. A combination of inbred and outbred Muslims.
Muslims not practicing inbreeding show 81 IQ.
Both these samples, one fluoride sample and another government school sample are done on identical population with similar economic status.
It serves as a clear proof that from 1984 to 2013, average IQ in Rajasthan has increased by 8 points.