It's the Stupid, Economy!

Image, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, shows average IQs of various countries. Blue spectrum shows higher intelligence, increasing with darkness. Red spectrum shows low intelligence, increasing with darkness.



James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's structure, took a lot of humiliation in the press, and lost his job, for suggesting that some African nations were poor because their inhabitants had lower IQs. To be clear, his offending statement, verbatum, was:

“...all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing [IQ and Standarized testing] says not really.”

In response, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute insisted such a view was “utterly unsupported by scientific evidence”; and, presumably seeking to limit the damage to his own career, Watson himself issued an apology in which he insisted that “there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

But of course, as I pointed out in this blog at the time, there is. There was nothing inaccurate in what Watson originally said. It was a no-brainer, scientifically speaking. He said this in 2007. In 2002, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, both professors emeritus at reputable universities (Universities of Ulster and Tampere, Finland, respectively), published IQ and the Wealth of Nations. In it, the two estimated the average IQ of 81 nations, compared it to their GDP per capita, and found a correlation of 0.82—extremely high, for the social sciences.

You can find their ranking of national IQs on Wikipedia, here.

Of course, the fact that GDP corresponds to IQ does not say anything about what is cause, and what is effect. It may well be that IQ has a lot to do with good nutrition, for example.

But that has nothing to do with what Watson said. He made no guesses as to why the IQs of poor Africans are lower than those of Americans. He only noted that they were, and that this had to be taken into account.

For example, countries where the GDP currently lags what might be predicted based on average IQ seem to be very good bets for future development. On the other hand, in a country with low IQ, there is every reason to believe that significant improvement will, at best, take more than a generation. No matter how much aid money is thrown at them.

It also indicates that “affirmative action” programs cannot work. Pure merit, and colourblind selection, is the only equitable and workable approach.