West Virgina at IQ 96. Life just below the breaking point.
It’s a well-known fact that intelligence corresponds to various kinds of life outcomes at the individual level, such as income, education, drug abuse, criminality etc. A little less known is the fact that national average IQs correspond to similar outcomes on the national level. This has been shown by among others psychologists Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, who have found staggering correlations between national IQ and things like health, education, income, crime, corruption, democracy. To give you a rough idea, here are some of the findings,
Educational measures like TIMSS and PISA correlate 0.79-0.92
Number of scientists and engineers correlate 0.61
Measures of per capita national income (GDP, GNP, GNI) correlate 0.51-0.89
Poverty and unemployment: -0.63 and -0.76 respectively
Crime in the form of homicide, assault and rape: -0.21 to -0.82 with distinctly higher correlations for the more accurate measure of homicide
Corruption: -0.27 to -0.68, all but one study above -0.54
Democracy: 20 of 22 measures show correlations around 0.60
Life expectancy: 0.51-0.82, expect for one study that found a negative correlation (possibly a typo)
Anyway, you get the picture. All the basic requirements for modern civilization – democracy, education, wealth, health and (lack of) crime and corruption – are strongly related to national IQs.
IQ 97: The Breaking Point
Seeing these correlations, it’s easy to assume that national IQ averages would correspond to specific degrees of development – that South Korea with an IQ of 107 would be much more civilized than Australia at 98, which in turn would be fairly similar to Russia or some other country at 97. But looking at the stats this is far from the case. Instead it seems like there is a point, somewhere around 97, above which a modern civilization can be maintained and below which things abruptly begin to fall apart. To illustrate this I’ll review some of the correlations mentioned above.
GDP (PPP) Per Capita
You can’t have civilization without money. It pays for education, healthcare, police etc. If we use the national IQs from Photius.com, who appear to have the updated version of Lynn and Vanhanen’s data set (correct me if I’m wrong), and compare them with the GDP/PPP that takes local purchase power into account, we find clear support for the idea of a breaking point at 97 or thereabout. If we exclude oil nations, the top 20 with populations over one million, according to Wikipedia/IMF are,
Singapore, Hong Kong, USA, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Austria, Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Taiwan, Belgium, Denmark, UK, Finland, Japan, France, Israel and South Korea.
In these top 20, there are nine nations in the 98-99 range, but only two countries below 98 – Israel and Ireland. Both can be partly explained by the fact that they receive plenty of financial aid from USA and the EU respectively. And it’s unlikely that Ireland will stay in the top 20 given its huge public debt and very high unemployment.
And if we look at more “normal” countries with IQs below 98, those without oil or rich friends, we find Slovenia with an IQ of 96 at 24th place, then Cyprus with an IQ of 91 at 26th, and Greece with an IQ of 92 at 27th. And Greece may well have lost this spot as I write this. So at 98 there are plenty of wealthy countries, but at 97 it suddenly seems to evaporate. And this isn’t just about money; if we turn to corruption we find a very similar picture.
Corruption
According to the Corruptions Perceptions Index (CPI), the top 20 countries (again with a population of over one million) most free of corruption are,
Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Hong Kong, Belgium, Japan, UK, US, Chile, Uruguay, France, Austria and Ireland.
Strictly speaking this is 21 nations since Austria and Ireland share the 20th spot and it seemed a bit random to exclude the one or the other. Anyway, we find 10 countries in the 98-99 range – including the top 4 and 6 in the top 10. The only three countries below 98 are Ireland (see above), Chile with an IQ of 90 and Uruguay with an IQ of 96. Again we see how everything is fine at 98, but at 97 and below things go south.
Crime
Turning to crime, so to speak, we find the top 20 countries with the lowest homicide rates (and more than one million inhabitants) according to Wikipedia/UNODC are,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Bahrain, Norway, Austria, Oman, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Germany, Qatar, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, China, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Australia.
This clearly breaks the pattern since we have five nations in the 98-99 range and just as many low-IQ nations, all from the Arab world. However, if we are looking for a point at which modern civilization begins to crumble, then we shouldn’t look at dictatorships at all. They can keep the murder rate low with social control and oppression, but at in doing so they disqualify themselves as candidates for civilized societies. So if we limit our sample to at least somewhat civilized countries we get a different picture. This is of course a rather subjective method but I think we can all agree that the countries above can’t be a part of it. I have included Hong Kong but excluded China so that’s where I draw the admittedly somewhat arbitrary line. The top 20 at least moderately civilized countries with the lowest homicide rates then become,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Poland, France, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, Portugal and Serbia (IQ 89).
Again, this became 21 countries because the two last share the 20th place. We find nine nations in the range 98-99 and four countries below that. The anomaly here is Slovenia at 6th place, a country that was also a mild anomaly with 24th on the GDP per capita list. But overall, this confirms the previous findings in that there are plenty nations in the 98-99 range but at 97 or less they are few and nowhere near the top of the list.
Indeed looking at where the sub-98 countries are on these lists we find that they made places 9 and 18 on the GDP list; 17, 18 and 20 on the corruption list and 6, 18, 20, 20 on the homicide list. So they are not only few but mainly at the bottom.
Democracy
Finally, let’s have a look at the Economist Democracy Index for 2012. The top 20 nations with more than a million people are as follows,
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Germany, UK, Czech Republic, Uruguay, Mauritius, South Korea, USA, Costa Rica and Japan.
As you might expect by now, around half of these, nine, are in the 98-99 range whereas only four are below that. Again, Ireland is breaking the pattern, as are Uruguay, Mauritius and Costa Rica with IQs of 90 and 89 respectively. We also find that four of the top five have 98 IQs whereas those below this level are at 11, 15, 16 and 19.
An Index of Civilization
So what happens if we add these measures up? I did this by scoring point in reversed rank order starting from 100 for each measure to create an civilization index. A statistician can probably come up with something better, but it will give a rough idea of the overall picture. The chart below shows the result,
As expected, there is a general pattern of higher degrees of civilization as intelligence increases. But the most civilized countries are all in a cluster with IQs between 98 and 101. Below 98 the level drops dramatically as can be seen by the lack of dots in the upper left part of the chart. The only distinct anomaly left is Ireland which scores 360 points for the 12th spot and, less striking, Slovenia at 20th with 335. Or, given what I’ve mentioned about the Irish economy, it may be Slovenia that is the more genuine anomaly here – clearly not as horrible as it’s portrayed in the Hostel movies. At any rate, combining these factors eliminates anomalies and further strengthens the support for an idea of a breaking point at approximately 97.
America
I haven’t found any official statistics for state-level IQs in America. There are however some estimates made by the Audacious Epigone, based on the NAEP scores, and educational measures are strongly correlated with IQs. He has also set the American average at 98 which matches the figures I’ve used above. If we exclude District of Columbia, which is common in these cases since it’s full of government money and temporary inhabitants, the top 20 GDP per capita (I haven’t found any PPP numbers), are as follows,
Delaware, Alaska, Connecticut, Wyoming, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, Colorado, California, Maryland, Minnesota, Illinois, South Dakota, Nebraska, Hawaii, Iowa, North Dakota and Louisiana.
As in all the previous calculations, we find that states in the 98-99 make up roughly half of the sample, once more dominating the top positions – 1, 2, 4, 6, 8. Below this level we find only three states, California with an IQ of 95 at 11th position and Hawaii with an IQ of 96 at 17th and Louisiana with an IQ of 96 at 20th place. There may be some explanations for these anomalies although I’m not that familiar with American politics. But it seems clear that California is in at least as much trouble as Ireland.
Conclusions and Implications
I’m not going to say that every conceivable measure on every conceivable level will show this pattern, but overall I think we have to conclude the existence of an IQ breaking point somewhere close to 97, at which we see drastically different outcomes depending on whether a country is above or below this level. A country can of course still fail above this point, like Italy and most likely North Korea. But a national IQ above 97 represent a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for success.
One implication, if this turns out to be true, is that immigration could pose a serious threat to the West, especially those countries and regions that are closest to the breaking point. The sad part is that since everything is going so well at 98 they may dismiss this risk. This is especially true for those countries and states who are right at 98 and whose immigrants have the lowest IQs, for instance France or Texas. As for California that state has now clearly passed the breaking point, it will be interesting to see if they will break the pattern. I suspect they won’t, given that the few countries that do fairly well below 98 (Ireland, Slovenia, Uruguay etc) are all small and lacking in diversity, which is the opposite of California.
It’s fully possible that someone else already has noted this breaking point, but since I hadn’t heard of it before and it didn’t seem like common knowledge, I figured it was worth sharing. I have no idea why 97 would be a magic number; maybe it’s just something in the human condition. I’ll be updating this article whenever I find any relevant information on this.
Staffan's Personality Blog 
I’ve said that things go south fast in terms of a country’s development when the average IQ goes below around 92.
In any case, that there would be “breaking points”, whatever that level actually be, would follow because the average greatly affects the fraction of individuals in that country above some IQ cutoff – La Griffe du Lion’s “Smart Fraction” theory:
The Smart Fraction Theory of IQ and the Wealth of Nations
Smart Fraction Theory II: Why Asians Lag
Which are on my HBD Fundamentals page, by the way… 😉
I can’t say I see that much happening at 92, at least with my measure ; ) We have Greece at 92 scoring 319 and then Cyprus at 91 scoring 318. After that there is a drop of 14 point to Chile at 90 and 304. But 98 means you can be at the very top like Denmark at 380 (and not an outlier) – but 97 or less and you are down 45 points to Slovenia, with the exception of the outlier Ireland. That discontinuity seems to be on a different scale.
It’s an interesting theory about smart fractions, although I would expect that fraction level to vary between nations. Yes, there is globalization but we are at different places all the same. A lot of manual work will still increase productivity in poor countries.
China would be a *huge* exception by these criteria (IQ ~103-105), though eminently explainable by the Maoist legacy.
There are different estimates of Irish IQ. The PISA 2009 derived estimate is 100, making it exactly equal to France and the UK. This is not too surprising, as the Irish are genetically indistinct from mainland Britons. (I posited elsewhere that the reason measured Irish IQ tended to be low in the past was that they suffered from more or less continuous brain drain from c.1840-1990).
China would be an outlier on the chart, but it wouldn’t contradict the idea of 98 as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the highest degree of civilization. The big problem in that regard is Ireland but hopefully that PISA estimate you mention is more accurate. I’ve always been suspicious of an IQ of 92, it’s just too low.
@AK:
“This is not too surprising, as the Irish are genetically indistinct from mainland Britons”
That’s actually not true.
“There are different estimates of Irish IQ. The PISA 2009 derived estimate is 100, making it exactly equal to France and the UK.”
The higher Irish IQ estimates come from younger cohort samples. Ireland appears to be the recipient of high-IQ immigration. It could be that this is boosting the average IQ of these samples.
Whoops, didn’t close my tags properly. Staffan, could you fix that? 🙂
I don’t think there’s really an anomaly here in terms of the IQ correlation, it’s just that the Asians tend be less democratic and uncorrupt than would be predicted from IQ. I think you might get more out of a general Asian effect which reduces the level of your “civilization” variable net of IQ.
Jayman – The higher Irish IQ estimates come from younger cohort samples. Ireland appears to be the recipient of high-IQ immigration. It could be that this is boosting the average IQ of these samples.
The PISA scores are available disaggregated between natives and migrants (google immigrants natives pisa and check out the results). Not the case from that evidence, where the Irish native-British native (both neither 1st nor 2nd genration migrants) gap looks to be about a quarter as large as the native British-German gap or the native Swedish-German (Germans better in both cases) gap.
@Matt:
“The PISA scores are available disaggregated between natives and migrants (google immigrants natives pisa and check out the results). Not the case from that evidence, where the Irish native-British native (both neither 1st nor 2nd genration migrants) gap looks to be about a quarter as large as the native British-German gap or the native Swedish-German (Germans better in both cases) gap.”
The links I found were these:
Berlin Gets Bad News From PISA | Anatoly Karlin
The Effect of Immigration on the School Performance of Natives: Cross Country Evidence Using PISA Test Scores – dp5479.pdf
How are school systems adapting to increasing numbers of immigrant students? (pdf)
None seem to discuss 2nd generation immigrants, who would be of most interest.
More interestingly, the results go in the wrong direction: immigrant children seem to score lower in Ireland…
Thanks for the correction, Jayman, and the links later.
Re-Ireland – the younger cohorts are not only the ones with immigrants bolstering scores (though as you noticed later that isn’t actually happening), but is also a cohort that has has been the least impacted by brain drain. I don’t think the fact that millions of the brighter (on average) Irish were leaving Ireland until 1990 should be underestimated.
None seem to discuss 2nd generation immigrants, who would be of most interest.
I had thought Karlin’s (i.e. AK’s) link above showed 2nd Generation immigrant scores, but having read his article again, 2nd Generation seems to indicate the children of foreign born (confusingly there are two different definitions of immigrant generation in play).
Those figures are still seem valid for comparing natives to natives though(?) which is the real meat we’re interested in.
Not too surprised about the immigrant scores in Ireland – I haven’t really ever read much to the effect that the “Celtic Tiger” effect was the product of brain drain and skilled migration (whatever the truth of that economic story).
@AK:
Here’s that link:
Genetic map of Europe; genes vary as a function of distance – Gene Expression
Irish are genetically distinct from British, even if there is overlap.
A key thing to consider is that “genetic distance” shouldn’t be equated to “phenotypic similarity”. Small differences in the genome can lead to large differences in visible traits.
Staffan says:
If we use the national IQs from Photius.com, who appear to have the updated version of Lynn and Vanhanen’s data set (correct me if I’m wrong)
Lynn & Vanhanen have updated their national IQ data a couple of times. By the looks of it the Photius numbers are from IQ and Global Inequality. The latest L&V estimates are in Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences. Here they are:
http://imgur.com/UxuGn
Thanks,
I notice that Ireland has been raised from 92 to 95 and Italy down from 102 to 96 – that is a lot. Slovenia up from 96 to 97.6. They’ve actually lowered both Denmark and Norway to 97.2 which messes a little with my hypothesis, but no biggie, although I might just update this article with the new data.
Both Denmark and Norway have had a massive influx of muzzies over the last two decades. That may account for the reduction in IQ points. The IQs of the ethnic Danes and Norwegians probably haven’t gone down at all.
That’s my bet too. Here in Sweden schoolchildren in the south, where Muslims are 10 percent of the population, struggle the most. The authorities are now investigating every aspect of what could have gone wrong in the Pisa survey – with the exception of immigration. They assume that can’t be the problem, as if just entering the country would raise your IQ with 15 points.
Nowdays, more then 20% of italian school boy and girls are arabs or africans – foreigners or by origin. I think/hope the italian IQ is still below the 100 points (because that data has a lot of “strange results”), but i bet our median IQ is getting lower and lower. Italians, as all the other Europeans, are aging and people from third world is coming every day with their families. I bet we will go down the 90 pt red-line very soon.
Sadly, Sweden is also dumbed down by immigration. Back in 1980 we scored at around 104, like Northern Italy or China, but thanks to the blessed multiculturalism are now down to around 98-99. You have to wonder if at some point white Europeans will leave for places like Australia or New Zealand.
There’s a definite correlation, but I don’t see any breaking points, if by that you mean average IQs at which behaviour suddenly changes. I wouldn’t read too much into clustering of “civilized” countries in the 98-102 range. With so few data points, random patterns (“faces in the clouds”) are likely to emerge.
That’s not exactly what I mean. I mean that it seems like there is a point, around 98 which represents a necessary but not sufficient condition for being among the most highly developed countries. You have that and you can make it. But below that they are all second rate. The updated data provided by BB seeem to shift this to 97 but the pattern is still there.
Smart Fraction may indeed be important, though hard to see, as few nations have distinct groups that actually have been measured separately. We can make some guesses in the multiethnic nations.
I think this is an excellent first cut, but things get more complicated rapidly. It may be that an intelligent cohort can maintain the institutions necessary for civilisation even if some subpopulation is dragging things down. That was the theory behind the British Empire, which can be said to have worked quite well by some measures.
Also, homogeneous nations may get some benefit in lower crime and greater social capital, which may skew the numbers. For the record, I am also deeply suspicious of all numbers from China. The Chinese abroad are from a few coastal areas, and that is also most of what we get for national data these days. We don’t really know what’s up inland in terms of IQ, crime, education – anything.
Any explanation would probably involve plenty of causes. But I suspect that one major is just simply having enough intelligence to do everyday things efficiently.
I once had the chance to work with a group of men who seemed to be just under average intelligence. They could all read and write and seemed perfectly normal. Had I been with them for just one day I wouldn’t have noticed anything or written off any incidents as anomalies. But over time they consistently had conflicts with their superiors and others because they didn’t understand or pay attention; there was one major traffic incidence and a couple of other pretty serious accidents. They would suggest things that were illegal, seemingly unaware of this, and so on.
I’m thinking that in a country with an average around 96-97 those guys would be normal, they would set the tone. As social psychology has shown so many times, people mimic those around them.
The breaking point would be something in analogy with the speed at which a bicycle can stay upright.
We don’t really know what’s up inland in terms of IQ, crime, education – anything.
But we do.
Also a lot of Chinese immigrants are from places like Fujian and from the poorer classes (because toiling away at railroads in the American West wouldn’t have appealed to richer Chinese in the late 19th century). The ones left behind (in terms of average IQ genetic ceilings) are probably slightly brighter, in fact.
AK, although I know you’re not speaking just of Asians in the US, but Chinese in the US are largely of mid to late twentieth century migrant origin and also have a widened distribution of educational qualifications, overrepresented at the low (which may not be genetic) and the high end (which probably has a genetic component).
That is there’s a larger number of master’s degree (and other degree) holders among foreign born Chinese, than you would expect from the kind of IQ bumps typical for developed East Asian nations (e.g. Taiwan), and a large number of folk who did not complete high school.
This can be seen at the Census pages for the USA on the foreign born, foreign born Asians and educational qualifications.
This probably doesn’t change the average too much (Chinese seem likely to have more genetic cognitive efficiency at IQ test like abilities than Europeans), but I think it certainly does make estimating Chinese “genetic IQ potential” compared to Europeans by taking their top end representation (e.g. mathematics prizes), assuming similar SD and working backwards… not work very well. And makes talking about the ones left behind being brighter or less bright not exactly work either (because they are both, but mainly just more average, which is also probably true for education correlated personality traits).
I’d wonder if mean intelligence would matter as much in a society stratified by intelligence, and where selective breeding is practiced, whereby the smart marry the smart. Such is the case here — the population isn’t going to become universally mediocre, as people usually marry and breed with those who have similar levels of academic achievement, if not earning power. While fertility rates may or or may not be negatively correlated with intelligence or earning power (I’ve recently come across evidence that the dysgenic trend is reversing), how many children are actually needed to run an increasingly automated economy?
I’m not sure. It seems like most countries are performing more or less according to their mean IQs. I imagine stratified societies become economically unequal, something that appears to correlate with poverty,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
We keep being told that the U.S. is terribly unequal among advanced industrial societies. What’s the Gini coefficient for the non-hispanic whites of the U.S. ? I’d be willing to bet it’s closer to European norms (though not Northern European norms).
Incidentally, I really dislike the idea of using current GDP per capita as a measure of economic performance, because there is a lot of path dependence. I’d prefer looking at increase in GDP or GDP per capita (or even better, GDP per working-age adult) over 10 years or more (to damp out business cycles), assuming no major civil conflict or war. The results should be similar, but more meaningful. The biggest economic laggard among the smart nations might be Japan, but if you normalize for working-age population, it might not be so bad.
It may be that the nations with an average IQ are in the perfect position to make a civilization, the higher the intelligence, supposedly would best qualities of life and especially the civilized behavior.
I read some place that there is a negative relationship between IQ and high consciousness.
http://anepigone.blogspot.com.br/2009/11/high-conscientiousness-predicts-poor.html
The famous Joey average could be like worker ants, has intelligence enough to fight for positions of higher status and income, but are good to adapt to the dominant culture and work to maintain a” super-extructure”.
These people make up the majority of the middle class and are largely responsible for maintaining civilization, not by doing them.
Another explanation is the sub racial composition of those nations, as well as other factors such as patterns of marriage, and genetic variation.
The median IQ, as I said, in large numbers, resulting in a civilized society, highly technological, because this population is not only the keeper of the inventions of the cognitive elite, as well as its consumer market. Personality traits such as high consciousness creates the bond of community is reinforced by lower genetic variation, this seems to be the case in Scandinavia. Centuries of endogamous marriages, selecting certain altruistic personality traits and increase iq less intense compared to Asians may contribute to this. Another explanation may be added is that the largest variation intelligence in other countries, such as England, favoring the maintenance of a high-civilization, anyway, the whole machine needs all parts the most important to the least important, to function fully and Western countries have all the ingredients for it.
Not to mention the higher incidence of creative geniuses among the” western” which seems to make half the difference. The most important is that, the” Western” has great density of, average iq with high awareness. Asians have passed the sweet spot of civilization full, first because they cut out, a good part of the creative geniuses with intense selection for high IQ and reduced genetic diversity due to polygamous marriages of rich men, reducing them as homogeneous varabilidade phenotypic . Second, because different combinations of selected personality, which resulted in precisely those nations that they have today.
A lot of people conformists, educated and high-consciousness, creates the perfect environment for the full civilization, inaugurated by Europeans. These people keep the bridges of civilization, while the cognitive elites keeps culture and technological innovation.
Group comparisons of conscientiousness have proven to be very difficult since they are affected by social desirability. The Japanese claim to have less of this trait than people in sub-Saharan Africa. This to me suggests that the Japanese are in fact more conscientious, since this trait appears linked to self-criticism and humility. Although I’m not sure why this effect doesn’t appear on the individual level, at which this trait has decent validity.
Race could be part of it. It’s clear that Whites and East Asians are doing better than the rest. In Latin America we find that the most European countries, Uruguay and Chile are doing best. But at the same time we see countries like Russia struggling. Some would say this needs to be adjusted for communism, but I say they created communism and weren’t doing well before that either. We can’t adjust for their entire history. So just being White is clearly not enough, or even necessary for that matter.
Creativity is definitely a factor to be considered, which may be a matter of outbreeding, as hbd* chick has suggested. Although I don’t have any good data on that.
The Communists killed most of the Russian upper classes. There was a dreadful dysgenic bleeding this nation. It’s amazing how we can still see great geniuses Russian born, after all that barbarism sponsored by foreigners.
As I believe that for logical reasons as well, the more intelligent tend to become less tribalist, it is likely that the next generation of high iq Russians could have gradually diminished the social gap that existed between the elite and the peasantry, as in England, from the population increase of higher intelligence.
The only proven recipe to end or dramatically reduce social inequalities is called Eugenia.
Creativity is very strongly related to mental disorders, you saw the research there in your country, with over one million people as a sample, which proved that? Since the Greeks, already noted the relationship between creativity and madness.
For the record, Chile is significantly less European than Argentina. The majority of Chileans have around 35-40% Amerindian ancestry.
Yet, bizarrely enough, it outcompetes Argentina on just about every measure: GDP per capita, PISA scores, low corruption, standard of living, etc. Chile is basically a lower tier First-World country. Not quite as spotless as Switzerland, but the average European could adjust to life there rather easily.
You HBDers might want to actually look at the data rigorously rather than manipulate it to fit your preconceived views of the world.
George,
You’re missing the point here which was to describe a discontinuity at a national average IQ of approximately 96.
As for Chile, I was merely pointing out that it falls into a pattern of White and East Asian countries outperforming the rest – and Chile is some 64 percent White it seems, at least according to one study on this published in the Journal of Medical Genetics.
But in the same comment I also said, “just being White is clearly not enough, or even necessary for that matter.” I mentioned Russia as an example. So your sarcasm about how bizarre the failure of Argentina is feels a bit like a straw man.
So what exactly is my preconceived view? Let’s spell things out so that we can have a proper discussion.
@George S.:
Source please?
First of all, even if so, it’s not like this one point negates the all the other examples of a racial connection to economic performance.
And even if it does hold up, it’s not the degree of continental admixture is the be all, end all of the topic. The question becomes which Whites and which Amerindians are the ancestors of modern Chileans?
Good point. Just browsing some Wiki-pages it does seem like Chile has had a more northern influx from Britain, Germany and Switzerland whereas Argentina is more exclusively Spanish and Italian.
He is the most popular Chilean Youtuber, aside of his very light skin, he don’t look White at all, he looks pretty Mestizo.
“Some would say this needs to be adjusted for communism, but I say they created communism and weren’t doing well before that either. We can’t adjust for their entire history. So just being White is clearly not enough, or even necessary for that matter.”
In other words, we can’t adjust for their entire history, therefore, we can’t adjust for some major aspect of it. And they didn’t invent communism, by the way.
And Greece’s IQ is not 92: https://web.archive.org/web/20080805140647/http://www.geocities.com/dienekesp2/greekiq/index.html
No, it means that they have always been moderately successful and that this no doubt reflects moderate IQ levels. They didn’t invent communism but they clearly pushed for it. It’s not some force majeur that they couldn’t possibly have avoided.
The culture fair test you refer to is basically the same argument – we need to adjust for something that is their own doing. I rather think their own doing is part of what gives IQ tests their validity. The national scores correlate some 0.9 to educational achievements, 0.7 to GDP measures and 0.5 to growth measures – and the latter could actually be adjusted for natural resources because oil under the ground where you happen to live is not your doing.
You give a rather simplistic outline of Russian history. They haven’t always been “moderately successful”, Russia (and slavic nations in general) have a lengthy history of strong scientific and cultural achievement, even if they’ve been socially backwards compared to much the rest of Europe. And it’s a little simplistic, I think, to say “this no doubt reflects moderate IQ levels.” Now, I won’t dispute that in eastern europe and the balkans, there are dysfunctional, sociopathic elements in their societies rooted in large part in biology due to the past several hundred years, but to pin this down so much to IQ is a little spurious, even assuming their IQ’s are low. I would also really hesitate to say they “clearly pushed for it” and that there was no way they could have avoided it, and guess what? Communism didn’t work out for them in the long run, and even then, they made some remarkable accomplishments under it.
As for the Greece IQ, you flat out say that whatever social failings that could account for this low IQ score, it ultimately comes back to them, and therefore, it’s actually all reflective of IQ, so this score is perfectly valid. Certainly a nation’s performance and behavior is ultimately tied to who they are, but guess what? Nations are very complex and don’t follow a linear path of behavior or accomplishment so tightly tied to their IQ levels and such. And to begin with, Lynn wrongfully lowered the score from Buj to 97 from 99, and the other was of children from 1961. Children from rural areas which lacked universal education, which, compared to urban children, the IQ was reduced to 4 points from 12 points from 1979-1997 (this being after Buj’s study from 1981), and whatever educational system existed was damaged by two balkan wars, the world wars, a civil war and a war with turkey (who I should add conquered and exploited Greece for centuries), but with your fixation on the centrality of a nation’s character, since it always comes back to them, none of this really matters, because since it happened to them anyway, it’s their fault in an ultimate sense because, well, they’re dumb.
@63erertert:
Whenever people nitpick about the average IQs or accomplishments of different societies, 8 of 10 times complete nonsense ensues, in my experience.
Eastern Europe lagged behind Western Europe in development. See:
“core europe” and human accomplish-ment | hbd* chick
This is a fact. This does not mean that Eastern Europe and Russia in particular didn’t achieve significant accomplishments.
As for the low average IQ of Southern European countries, something that, for some reason, drive some people batty, look, regardless of what the precise average IQ scores are (which are difficult to establish), that they are overall lower than in the North is corroborated by multiple data sets, and jives with the economic performance of theses countries. These are facts. There may be room to argue here, but it’s not the argument you’re making.
I agree, and I personally think you’re guilty of it in that sense as well, like your “debates” with Italianthro. I likewise didn’t deny that eastern europe has lagged behind western europe- note how I said “even if they’ve been socially backwards compared to much the rest of Europe.” Staffan’s treatment is just questionable.
It’s true that claiming southern europe has lower IQ “drives some people batty”, but there’s a pretty good reason for this- the vast majority of people who argue for this, or yawning behavioral gaps between between n and s euros in general, are overwhelmingly nordicists, who are a very extreme, insane bunch, who often don’t even believe s euros are even white, so there’s by and large an extreme nationalist element behind it. There’s technically nothing wrong with speculating about differences between european populations, but as it stands, there is verifiably not such a gap between n and s euros that is often promoted by them, like Sicily having an IQ of 89, or s euros have such heavy non-white admixture (and, for the record, Lynn has extended this to the balkans region in general).
I agree there probably is an IQ gap between n and s europe, but that’s a different topic that I’m not up to getting into. And as for Italianthro, you really handed it to him back in late 2013 with the behavioral genetics data, he’s largely clueless in that regard- I have no idea how he came to be an environmentalist when he’s been quite different in the past. But in particular, the reason your post about the Italian cruise disaster drove Italianthro “batty” was probably because your post was batty, and followed in the tradition of what nordicists have advocated.
That’s all in the past, though, but my reason for bringing up Greece was because of Staffan’s focus on it, so southern europe beyond this is tangential.
@63erertert:
Starting off by invoking “Italianthro/Racial Reality” (and not having “is full of it” in there) is never a good way to impress me.
Using the word “nordicist” is a surefire way to impress me even less.
Yes, there are a lot of kooks that fly under the banner of “HBD”. I have written about that before. My whole operation is to flesh out the truth over and above all the nonsense that comes from both sides.
My post about the cruise ship wasn’t meant to serve as conclusive evidence of anything. It was a case study. Nothing more.
I’m glad that you accept the existence a gap in average IQ between Northern and Southern Europe. I will say those who argue against it tend to reject much HBD in general. The reality is that the evidence for average IQ across Southern Europe is as good as (or in some cases better) than evidence for average IQ across the developing world. If we accept a “racial” IQ gap, between Africans and Europeans, for example, we should accept an IQ gap between Northern and Southern Europeans.
As well, there are biologically-based differences between many nationalities, ethnicities, and regional groups. This is NOT confined to the continental races. History can be understood to be a product of evolution as much a cause. This is fairly straightforward, but I don’t see why so many seem to have a hard time understanding it.
Well, I did say he’s largely clueless on the behavioral genetics data and that you really humiliated in those regards, but I do think he did quite well in response to you (originally) waving around the cruise ship disaster as a shining example of italian incompetence, among other things. You just call it a case study, but as it stands, it was a very poor one. And why do you balk at the term nordicist? People like them have long been among the principal leaders in discussing differences among northern euros vs. other euros, and you did a very poor job at differentiating yourselves from them with digs about italian incompetence, southern italy being africa’s last colony in europe, beguiling snark like “those italians” and how much you really did love them (also similar with your post about Portugal), so bringing up nordicism isn’t out of bounds.
I didn’t accept their was an n-s europe IQ gap, by the way, I just said there probably is, and to specify, I think it is possible southern Italy and Portugal are lower than northern europe, and personally, no more than a few points. I don’t see much evidence to suggest the same for places like Greece and Spain though, and my opinion is that european IQ is quite homogenous. Aside from occasional outlier groups like the irish travellers, I don’t see european IQ on an ethnic and national basis varying more than several points at their greatest most of the time, and the highest IQ’s (ones above 100) probably belong almost entirely to city-states like Luxembourg and Lichtenstein. I think the lowest IQ in europe is undoubtedly Romania, but that’s perhaps almost entirely due to it’s large roma population.
You actually consider those who deny/dispute an IQ gap among europeans on that level? Really? The fact remains that european ethnic groups are far more similar to eachother on a cultural and behavior basis than they are compared to much of the rest of the world, and while these can be relatively large as in the case of northern vs. eastern europeans, it is not on the level of a general recognition of group differences, such as between major races, that often underlies HBD belief. You’d be hard pressed to find belief in such large differences among europeans among many HBD believers, even those who aren’t nationalists (who, in spite of nordicist sentiments being so common among them, do often try to downplay differences among europeans for nationalist purposes). Your emphasis of the differences among europeans is worthwhile from an objective standpoint, and at the same time to emphasize that recognition of group differences must extend to even within race, but I find your approach rather strange with your fixation on how seemingly intense these differences and how good of evidence there is, when one of the biggest promoters in academia recently has been Lynn, who’s done an incredibly shoddy, embarrassing job at it.
@63erertert says:
A case study is a case study is a case study. How silly is that? It is generally impossible to infer much about groups from single examples.
You know, with all due respect, I don’t really care what you think. I only care what the evidence shows. And here the evidence is clear.
Too bad the evidence clearly contradicts you, especially since you’re just making things up now.
Boy, do you not know who you’re talking to.
That’s because many of them don’t know what the f— they’re talking about.
That’s good, because I thought so.
See point 2.
I think we’re done here. Staffan might continue to entertain you should he so choose, but your discussion is pretty vapid, it’s not worth my precious time.
I was going to type out a longer reply, but I thankfully realized how futile it was ultimately going to be. I didn’t expect you to reply to my comment here after you locked me out of commenting on your blog, but it happened anyway. Regardless, I do know who you are- I’ve read a fair amount of your blog and I’ve come across some solid insight, but you ultimately strike me an HBD obsessive (or, to be blunt, a sort of autist) with a considerable lack of nuance with understanding social evolution and societal development, even when properly considering genetic factors. What I really see much of a breathless enthusiasm at fitting as much as possible into modern “HBD” theories of social development because of how lacking the modern social sciences have been for so long, regardless of whether much of this stuff is truly sound. And no, it’s not just the figures trotted out from Lynn and co and the religious fixation on their “scientific achievement tests” as perfectly, indisputably good measures of IQ, but that’s one of the most apparent problems, despite your emphasis that you don’t take them as the final word and merely regard them as being “close to correct”, but are so vehement against discussing or examining the finer points of the scores. I’d suggest you atleast do so on a personal level, since, going back to the case of Thailand, you think it’s a certainty that their IQ couldn’t be that high (despite being indicated as such by real IQ tests) because of “what we know”, but seem unaware of countries like Iran and Armenia, who’s diaspora populations and recent historical achievements point overwhelmingly to high IQ’s, despite the very backwards nature of their countries in modern times, and this especially so for Armenia. Maybe some kind of reevaluation is in order?
But hey, what do I know- I just don’t know who I’m talking to, because you, unlike so many others, actually know what the f**k you’re talking about, and to top it off, you only care what the evidence shows, because the evidence is clear.
Which are sentiments that have been echoed by incalculable numbers of people in these debates going back centuries, and from just about everything I’ve seen, it almost never means a damn thing.
The problem you fail to address is that Lynn’s stats have great validity in terms of educational and scientific achievements, as well as economic wealth and growth – even when not adjusted for natural resources like oil. I’m not claiming IQ is everything – North Korea isn’t doing great, to put it mildly, and Ireland is doing fairly well, with a little help from their friends. But look at the overall picture. The correlations are very high and add to those the correlations of personality scores to these outcomes.
You argue against this evidence with personal opinion and speculations about your opponent’s character. Anyone can do that and if you keep that up I will delete further comments. The closest to a real argument you provide is the performance of exile populations, but it relies on the assumption that they are representative of their home countries, and there is research on personality and immigration that suggest they are not.
“I’m not claiming IQ is everything”
Most of the time, whenever I find people make this kind of clarification, it’s a feeble cover to the fact they believe it’s near everything. You mention Ireland- “fairly well?” Ireland has some of the highest living standards in the world and one of the world’s strongest economies. I think it’s much more than just those micks getting a little help from the Brits. Nevermind the huge number of white americans with Irish ancestry- why doesn’t that reflect the Irish supposedly having an IQ below 100? Or was that all just brain drain? You find an IQ in the low 90’s suspiciously low- why not just simply write it off altogether?
The previous commenter brought up Armenians, and you say expat populations aren’t necessarily representative- true, but the Armenian diaspora is equal or greater than in size to home population itself. Is that also all just brain drain that left their home country with an IQ of 94?
But Ireland isn’t really the best example of your “I don’t think IQ is everything” cover- you said this about Albania: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/predictions-on-the-worldwide-distribution-of-personality/
“In Albania, people often go from A to B by way of horse and carriage. Electricity comes and goes erratically. Clan feuds are common. Sounds like IQ 80 to me.”
You actually think there’s a european majority country that could have an IQ of 80. I think it would be really glaringly obvious from common association with Armenians and many other things other than their present living standards (and I guess those “scientific achievement tests”) they’re dramatically less intelligent than neatly every single other European ethnic group (and even less intelligent than african-americans). Maybe genetic evidence, that they’ve been incredibly isolated? Lynn has argued their IQ’s (and other balkan countries) are depressed solely due to admixture with near-easterners, like Turks. Yet Albania is much lower than even Turkey- I guess Albania was a dumping ground for the bottom of their society or something?
But nevermind all that, Richard Lynn said so, and hey, those achievement tests, which he’s been heavily behind in the fixation on correlating them perfectly with IQ’s, are totally reliable, in large part because Lynn is just a really credible researcher. Nevermind this is the guy who in 2012 published a paper on a hoax dataset on penis size in “Personality and Individual Differences”, which has still never been retracted: http://humanvarieties.org/2014/07/16/hvgiq-thailand/#comment-445
Or that he praised the psychopathic book “Erectus Walks Amongst Us.” Or that he based Equatorial Guinea’s IQ of 59 based on a score from developmentally disabled spanish children, and mixed it up with a group of tribal africans that had no score (but man, that country is so poor, how can the people NOT be retarded?). And his long-time research partner (who also partnered heavily with Jensen) eventually embraced Arthur Kemp’s work and the idea Ancient Egypt was a “nordic desert empire”: http://www.arthurkemp.com/2011/12/magnificent-very-convincing-professor-j.html
Seems like you have a habit of swallowing close to any figure Lynn and his associates trot out no matter how fundamentally insane it is (and not knowing the full nature of the men who produce this research) and try to pigeonhole it with any other indicator, no matter how faint it is, or that these figures are often cooked and cherry picked, and those various scientific achievement tests aren’t as consistent or reliable as you’d like to believe. That all isn’t terribly uncommon though.
“West Virginia’s IQ is prime example of life below this threshold of functioning with IQ- just look at this one photo a town of less than 1,500 people.”
When implying that I think it’s all about IQ you miss an important point of the post: 97 isn’t just a breaking point because above 97 you have diminishing returns, as can be seen in East Asian countries. To quote myself, “the most civilized countries are all in a cluster with IQs between 98 and 101.” If you’ve followed HBD you will also have noted that clannishness is a thing that doesn’t fully correlate with IQ and yet means a lot to the state of a nation. There is a pretty strong consensus on that in the HBD sphere so insisting we are all about IQ only shows you’re not paying attention.
As for immigrant populations, they may or may not be representative. There is nothing to say Irish Americans aren’t an elite. But even if they’re not an IQ of 95 wouldn’t necessarily make a huge impact on the American average of 97.5. I wouldn’t rule out 80 for Albania, perhaps due to it being the most inbred country in Europe. Economically, they too benefit from their geographic location.
But you can always find anomalies and outliers. You can look at NBA players and say, “wait a minute, that guy there isn’t very tall.” Or you can look at the bigger picture as seen in numerous socio-economic correlates, some listed in the post.
(You may also try a less hostile tone. Normally, I give angry people one chance but then ignore them. It’s just pouring energy down a rathole.)
@Reendric says:
Staffan will do with you as he likes. But in my experience, whenever I see comments fueled by Richard Lynn hate, I shut them down.
I think average IQs from across the world as of Lynn & Vanhanen’s latest are fairly accurate. Sure, there are places where it’s wrong, but getting accurate average IQs across the world should always be regarded as a work in progress.
It’s hard to tell exactly how many were killed – and what their IQs were. Thing is, revolutions are often a reaction to the fact that the ruling elite has lost its intelligence due to nepotism.
Eugenics is one way but outbreeding is probably sufficient. For all the talk of the UK being so class divided it seems like they along with most rich countries are the most equal.
I’m familiar with the study, but I’m unaware of any form of creativity being measured.
The way the study assessed creativity was based on the types of jobs of analyzed people. It is clearly a form with a few fails, by limited analytical subjectivity between those topics, however, is much better than the ”tests of creativity”. In my opinion, these tests are only variants of IQ tests, they continue analyzing the ability of people in accordance with the assumptions of the test creator. Therefore, measuring the level of creativity according to the criteria of the board of psychologists who created the test. A probable and speculative serious flaw exists in these tests is the example of the child or adult who takes the highest score for creativity by giving the answer most unlikely. Creativity is not just divergence, but also quality.
I do not share the same faith with you and Hbd chick have regarding this correlation, outbreeding and intelligence, since there are several factors that alter this picture. The example of Ashkenazi Jews in terms of intelligence shouts to all of us that there is only this factor (outbreeding) that may explain the intelligence and in this case, the great and singular intelligence in this population. You also can not do without it for most of its history, China has maintained the standard of endogamous marriage, probably at a level similar to some Muslim nations of today. Do not just stop endogamous marriages that intelligence will increase. By the looks of this tax over the centuries, but can result in highly functional societies, such as those of northwestern Europe, but not necessarily a high intelligence.
Besides aristocracide, a series of impositions possibly disgenics the medium and long term, such as regularization of abortion and subsequent slaughter the revolution of the dissenting voices (we know that most people who are against the totalitarian regimes tend to be the most intelligent, for reasons obvious) may have contributed to lower the average intelligence of the Russians in the last century.
And as I read the book by George Orwell, the types most insignificant and cowards are those who survive longer in totalitarian societies.
I’m not sure I understand you but to give a short version of my own position. Outbreeding will most likely increase creativity because it reduces the social pressure to conform. It may not be a huge IQ booster. Inbreeding may increase mental illness but given the lack of creativity in those cultures that are inbred it would seem it’s the wrong kind of mental illness.
We have already discussed the Askenazim in this regard. I don’t think of savviness as creative but look for achievements of lasting importance. For that reason I can’t see them as strikingly creative, maybe no more or less than most Westerners.
The Russian revolution was bad and perhaps disgenic as you say. But how about Tsarist Russia? Sweden was practically a modern society by 1917 while they were almost medieval. And before that we used to keep people from Eastern Europe as slaves. Like I said earlier, we can’t adjust for their entire history.
”I’m not sure I understand you but to give a short version of my own position. Outbreeding will most likely increase creativity because it reduces the social pressure to conform”
You’ve got it wrong. Creativity is like intelligence, is predominantly hereditary. So it is not 100% correct to say that the change of the environment will increase creativity, because you need the genetic ingredient.
There should be two phenotypes of” mental disorders”, one that is caused by inbreeding and that it is caused by outbreeding. I agree that exogamy may have a greater tendency to an increase in creativity, which is closely related to mental disorders and also the eccentricity (would be a variant of positive mental disorders, causing no serious problems).
I agree that nations inbred, often have low creativity, epigenetic reasons. I consider myself a very creative person and I think I could prove more than once that by daring to suggest new correlations. Yes, a big chance they are wrong or pseudo-right, but is the risk you run.
I just now read the second part of your comment, yes, what you said was what I suggested soon after, lol. Exactly. But the environmental issue here is much more irrelevant then. The most important here is a genetic component.
Again, I like a creative person (and nothing humble) believe that creative people rarely get carried away by social conformity. There is something in us that makes us (perhaps a parasite contributed…) always fight against any form of oppression of individuality. Therefore, if there are many creative people in East Asia for example, then they would have already migrated from their countries or at least produced creative culture within their societies. I just can not see it. Do not disdain the milenar oriental culture, by contrast, but in relation to constantly changing her, I really can not see. Now they copy everything from the West, it is not creative.
Click to access French%20%20socio-econom.pdf
http://www.academia.edu/2043979/Handedness_and_socioeconomic_status_in_an_urban_population_in_Uzbekistan
http://www.academia.edu/784109/Handedness_The_Inter-relationship_of_Inheritance_Pattern_and_Self-reported_Talent_among_Medical_Students_at_the_University_of_Lagos_Nigeria
If Ashkenazim are as creative as the” Western” then this in itself is revealing, because no there another population more creative than European Caucasians.
I’ll keep hitting the same key. Ashkenazi Jews have been throughout its history a population with endogamous marriage patterns. However, by the large amount of genetic autoimmune diseases, high incidence of autism, out-of-box behavior (they are over-represented in all of them) and a high incidence of mental disorders, it is clear to me that they have some great neurological and cognitive advantage compared to most other populations and suggest that it is the large incidence of left-handed people among them.
These links, especially speaking of left-handedness and income in France, seems to show that there are some major advantages compared to left-handed people and not speak higher iq, because it seems they fare worse than righties (lefties who will not well at iq precisely because they are the” opposite” right-handed?).
There is an organic and” environmental” between creativity and left-handedness. The explanation” environmental” most obvious is that they, being a minority in the world population, by itself, already have an advantage surprise, either in intellectual or physical combat. Just like the Ashkenazim, I see lefties also tend to think outside the box, much more than most people right-handed. Simply think of a different way than most and this is already an important component to creativity.
A likely explanation and despised, for the intellectual talent of Ashkenazim may be the selection for left-handedness in primitive societies and more violent (more competition) are more selected. Centuries of conflict with the host societies may have contributed to this.
They only not selected more lefties but selected a one specific lefthanded phenotypes. Is very interesting that like ashkenazim, many aspie people exhibit very high verbal iq and low average spatial iq.
I’m not saying that I know that creativity is just a matter of inbreeding/outbreeding. It may well be other components too. But Ashkenazi Jews may well be just intelligent because of selective pressures in their history and this intelligence would perhaps be even larger if they outbred more.
At any rate, I think their Western-level creativity can be explained by their European ancestry, which according to this study is between 35 and 55 percent of their genome,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100826141331.htm
It’s certainly interesting to compare Jews with Aspies; I too have noticed this similarity. Although also a big difference. It’s my experience that Jews, like clannish people in general, are more manipulative while Aspies tend to be principled and sometimes naively trusting of others.
[…] The IQ Breaking Point – How Civilized Society is Maintained or Lost – “[I]t seems like there is a point, somewhere around 97, above which a modern civilization can be maintained and below which things abruptly begin to fall apart.” – from staffan! […]
Ashkenazim people are singularly intelligent. It is a proven fact by any sort of data, you know. Even though they are a minority, were able to appropriate much of the Western world.
Yes, of course I also notice that while the Ashkenazim are very good manipulators, the aspergers are the opposite. But all indicators of medical traits of the Ashkenazim Jews suggests a high incidence of left-handedness among them. It seems that there are several phenotypes stubs from the most verbally manipulative, even more non-verbal.
As I said, the simple fact of having more lefties among them, make them more creative. It seems that the standard left-handedness, mental disorders and creativity is not only a reality in the Western world, but it is universal. intelligence relates well with the cognitive style, which is the relationship of intelligence with personality.
Cognitive style would be a scientific way to determine the average thinking (built by intelligence and personality)
As far as IQ goes, I and everyone with half a brain agree that they are smart people. But I have to say though, I don’t see this creativity among them. It is of course hard to measure creativity. It may be that some types of lefties are more creative – I sure hope so being one : ) – but I don’t see it. Financial success among certain populations is not a good indicator of creativity.
I do not agree with you. To succeed financially is also necessary to be creative, especially in complex societies, as we live. And in capitalist societies, creativity is further required. Of course, the most creative, are probably in some gutter lamenting the wider society in which they live or painting artworks at some madhouse, but overall, it is a fact that many of these creative, better fitted, can climb positions quickly.
The creativity of them is really high, does not reach the maximum level reached by Europeans, but it sure is a very high level. It’s just you watch all the matches of verbal manipulation they created in the last century. If this is not be creative, do not know what else it could be.
Are you left handed?
What this is, is a mafia?
I like the “smart fraction” theory, but there is an addendum: the “dumb fraction” and “parasite load” theories. The modern, western society cannot afford too many parasites (criminals, asocial people) and too many dumbs (people, who cannot contribute much, but require a lot of care and contribution)
I will have to look more closely at it. Although just what I’ve seen so far it doesn’t take creativity or entrepreneurship into account. It seems obvious that wealth is built on ideas and the application of ideas, and most smart people just want a well-paid and secure job, like tenure.
It’s more likely that a simpler model focusing on intelligence will work better at the other end because people with IQ at 95-97 just can’t do much even if they are creative doers. To quote La Griffe,
“It seems there is an IQ threshold to be reached before a country can get off the ground economically.”
I’d say there is a similar threshold for what we recognize as modern civilized societies.
Gottlieb,
Doctors, real estate agents, college professors are financially successful, but rarely creative. We may have different definitions of creativity. To me, it’s coming up with new stuff that has lasting importance. Being savvy or persuasive is certainly not creative in my view since there is nothing new about it.
I’m left-handed but there is no mafia – I have no left-handed relatives that I know of : )
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/zig-zag/201303/raise-your-left-hand-greater-creativity
Who else among HBDS bloggers are left handed?
Should be full of lefties and Ashkenazim Jews within the community hbd.
I see a lot of them, between the forum” bit popular”. I have done some amateur research on this, and I have always found an over representation of us (oops) among the people of these communities from the blogosphere.
Ok, I agree with you about it, but in the world we live in, it becomes increasingly important to use creative solutions to solve problems, whether personal or community. Surely exitem other ingredients which may explain the success Ashkenazim, but creativity should not be discarded. Freud for example, was a creative genius, but he should have been a science fiction writer.
My Older brother is left handed. My parents are right handed.
Even found an over-representation of left-handers in a community of Mormons. It is true that the number of people was not large enough to have a real view of this phenomenon, but it is still interesting to note that in all communities out-lier or non-mainstream, have more left-handed and ambidextrous.
Maybe you should make a poll. Just keep in mind that right-handed people may be less prone to report their handedness since it’s common and perceived as less interesting.
(To me, Freud (and Marx) would be more a case of persuasion
than creativity.)
Aaawn, no, no, i’m shy!!! Yes, is probably but not enough to explain all of this ”coincidences”.
Yeaaah, persuasion of them like more blackmail, specially now with the left-zombies terrorizing scientists.
Anthony, you wrote,
“We keep being told that the U.S. is terribly unequal among advanced industrial societies. What’s the Gini coefficient for the non-hispanic whites of the U.S. ? I’d be willing to bet it’s closer to European norms (though not Northern European norms).
Incidentally, I really dislike the idea of using current GDP per capita as a measure of economic performance, because there is a lot of path dependence. I’d prefer looking at increase in GDP or GDP per capita (or even better, GDP per working-age adult) over 10 years or more (to damp out business cycles), assuming no major civil conflict or war. The results should be similar, but more meaningful. The biggest economic laggard among the smart nations might be Japan, but if you normalize for working-age population, it might not be so bad.”
It’s possible that Whites are more equal, but I’m not sure what the implication is. The other groups are Americans too. Race can hardly explain this breaking point if that’s what you imply since the European countries are all White.
I’m sure there are better measures, but they all seem to follow the same pattern. What it boils down to is that most people would be ok with living in many of the countries at IQ 98-99, but I don’t think anyone reading this would want to live in a 96-97 country. I’d consider living in Slovenia but that’s about it.
Two new observations about the ashkenazim behavior
First, asperger and jews, you already to observe the body movements of jews during your prayers?? Very similar to asperger stereotypized body movement
and second, tribalistic ashkenazim behavior should be caused by laterality pattern, left handed people tend to be better observer in find other people also are left handed, pseudo-tribalism. But, little genetic variability and handedness, brain lateralization pattern among the ashkenazim increase your tribalism.
Left handed people tend to be more ”weird” people in behavior.
Ashkenazim are more tribalistic because your little genetic variability
and more pseudo-liberal or inconsistent liberal behavior (with lack of non-tribalistic empathy) caused by your handedness, lateralization pattern.
I highly enjoyed reading through this post, thanks for sharing it! It is my impression that recently bankrupt Detroit city has fell in a pitfall of diminishing average IQ among city residents, dramatic decline of this city is documented on http://www.detroiturbex.com/. Car industry can’t persist in such conditions by definition, most regrettably without clear prospectives for the future. There is a strong evidence for high heritability of IQ, as high as 75%, according to the Minnesota reared MZ twins study. For that reason, time-separated MZ twinning strategy guided by IQ of grown up co-twins can provide IQ estimates of an unborn child significantly more accurate than these based on yet to be developed genetic test panel(s) (possibility of building of one of these is currently explored by BIG http://www.genomeweb.com/blog/not-so-smart). With this method traits like height could be trivially predicted with high accuracy based on heritability of 87%-93%, far surpassing the available genetic height tests. For more information on the potential benefits associated with this method (such as theoretical capacity to prevent 90% of autism cases) please visit http://prevmed.big.ac.cn.
Yes, Detroit is not an exception to this pattern – and neither will California that is now patiently waiting for the recession to be over.
Intelligence is at least 75 percent heritable since shared environment is not separated from measurement error.
Thanks for the links. Although if you prevent autism with eugenics you may lose neurodiversity. I hope that’s not what you’re saying.
Diversity needs to be preserved by all means, I absolutely agree on that. Ideally, prospective parents should decide which way they want to go, have their own child or go through IVF with multiple choices to consider.
[…] of Eastern Europe vis-a-vis Northwestern Europe by the former’s history of communism. But, as Staffan put it (emphasis […]
[…] successfully overturn the established order. This is the essence of HBD Chick’s ideas, and Staffan’s remark on needing to “account” for the “history of communism” when looking at the […]
Jayman is threatening to ban me if I continue the argument, so I post my response here :
Are people with the same IQ the same on all the behavioral traits? Nope. Are nations with the same average IQ the same on their societal characteristics? Nope. See also: http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/intelligence-and-corruption/
But I already agreed with that.
Simple evolutionary theory helps us get around the oversimplification you’re making. Each behavioral trait evolves as a response to specific evolutionary problem. These aren’t even easily assessed by broad personality dimensions. The same selective pressures that select for these also often select for IQ, but each is independent. Want proof? Go along northern Europe, even northern Eurasia. Average IQ stays roughly constant (~100). Behavioral traits, not so much.
In northern Europe the “corruption cline” is East-West over a distance of 4000km.
Korean peninsula : ~1000km from top to bottom. The actual high-population-density areas are considerably shorter, probably around 500km.
There’s not much you can say about the “corruption cline” in East Asia at IQ=~100 from cross-national data. Certainly no statistically significant information about what the sort of distance across the Korean Peninsula might predict about corruption between north and south.
So why would the cross-country corruption data be informative about the Korean peninsula again ? Usually, the smaller the variation the more data we need to tease out the associations. Maybe there are no associations to speak of in the case of the Korean peninsula. You can’t just linearly extrapolate from the big-range data when the data set just aren’t that fine.
Maybe this is more to the point. 1500km for the combined breadth of Germany and Poland. But the above chart was constructed with the transition to the Hajnal line in mind. Is there some north-south difference in marital practises on the Korean peninsula ?
Hi,
I’m to exhausted by the heat here to make any sense of your conflict (anything beyond 20C is hard for me and it’s been around 30C). You both seem reasonable to me so perhaps it’s a matter of miscommunication.
Well, the heatwave is persisting here, but I’ll try to make some sense (I have deleted you other comments as you requested).
I think this conflict is about different intuitions in face of a scarcity of robust evidence. However, Jayman’s explicit position is agnostic and regardless of what we may suspect his intuitions to be, that seems like a reasonable position to me. Especially given that we see populations of all species constantly differentatiating with relatively small environmental differences. And there are environmental differences to consider here, like for instance the climate.
But again, I’m not arguing the case for distinctiveness, only for agnosticism. I did comment in a way that implied that the current situation could be explained without genetic distinctiveness. But that was pure speculation.
I took the comments here :
http://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/05/20/north-korea-asteroids/comment-page-1/#comment-83
my position is also formally agnostic, but I don’t think Europe’s 4-quadrant divide is very informative about the Korean Peninsula. also addressed the climate by arguing that population is concentrated in a relatively small part of the peninsula. all the same I think the demographic effects since 1950 are probably bigger than any potential selected regional differences from before the division of the peninsula.
It’s fully possible. I don’t know that much about Korean history, and even less about prehistoric conditions.
You need to take into account national temperament (which might have to do with race) the Irish work hard and tend to get on with it and take hardships in there stride.
It’s probably a matter of personality as well, I just found it interesting how sharp the difference is between below 97 and above 98. Ireland is an anomaly for sure, even with the financial support the country has received they seem like they are achieving above their average IQ. It could well be a matter of personality traits as you say or how intelligence is distributed, elites etc.
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I believe the marxists in the EU and UN who set this Muslim migration in motion knew full well the destruction it would cause to Western countries. They’ve been trying to bring down the West for 100 years.
Some no doubt feel that the Western culture is inherently capitalist (and this is probably true) so they want to root it out rather than reform it.
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3rd world countries which are ruled by an iron hand, are not a valid indicator for criminality since the people there are restricted in their criminal intent. When these same people are in a free democracy, their criminal behavior is expressed, unlike what happens in their countries where they will get their hand chopped off for stealing a loaf of bread.
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