First off, you can take a baby from any race and stick them in the best schools in the world and they will be capable of doing just fine. I have no doubt that there are African scientists and mathematicians out there who would blow the average American out of the water on any quantifiable intelligence test. Lots of 'em. Is there a difference out to some decimal point? Maybe, probably, hell, I don’t know. Everybody’s different. But the practical difference in intelligence between races has got to be nil.
Secondly, and far more insidiously, is that it assumes intelligence = Living Like We Do, and those who do not Live Like We Do are unintelligent. Of course whoever writes the rules is going to win the game. Duh.
It’s not coincidence who comes out on top in these studies. I’m sure plenty of North Korean scientists have “proven” that Kim Jong Il is the smartest man on the planet.
This is true, there are scientists from all groups but we are talking about population differences. The difference in group average is around 2 standard deviations. Say an engineer would have an iq of 115 or over. This is about 1 std dev above the european mean, so about 16% of the population, but it is over 2 std deviation above the African mean. So you only have about 2.3% of the population in that threshold (or lower if you take Lynn’s average figures).
Of course it is context specific, but if you’re talking about things like building bridges or multi-level buildings that don’t collapse, sewage systems, basic infrastructure, then IQ as measured here matters.
Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (those of Chinese, Japanese & Korean ancestry) have the highest averages. They didn’t design the tests either.
This is just silly. The portion of the U.S. that is desert is relatively small and poverty is pretty much a standard there except for the odd case of Las Vegas where modern technology has brought in substantial water and electricity. Similarly, the wealth in Australia is limited pretty much to the arable tracts along the coast, not the central desert. The Gobi is not noted for its wealth. The wealth of Chile is not in the Atacama. Saudi Arabia was never wealthy until the discovery of oil. The deserts in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan have never been wealthy–at the time that the various empires occupied that region, much of it was the Fertile Crescent, now desert due to saline poisoning from riparian irrigation. The wealth of Egypt was directly limited to the Nile valley.
So your argument is that countries are poor because they contain a lot of desert, except in those cases where countries with a lot of desert are rich, and then the desert isn’t an issue at all because it is supported by a rich country. Except in cases like Botswana, which is relatively poor, yet is probably the best performing of all African nations and also one of the driest.
The deserts of Australia, and I suspect the US, are massive revenue earners. They aren’t liabilities they are assets. Nobody spends millions pumping water and food into those regions just for fun. They do that because the returns on those investments are massive.
The problem at this point is that you have a theory that explains everything, and hence nothing. If a nation is poor then it can be explained way because of the desert. If it has a desert and it’s rich then being rich is the reason why the desert isn’t a hinderance. No matter what the observation, your theory explains it away.
Yet despite this the most productive farmland sin the world, from China to New Guinea, were cleared form rainforest.
Cite please. Repeating the same assertion isn’t evidence.
I probably should have worded that differently. I meant that the disparities you see may be in part due to the fact that different groups had to handle different selection pressures. That seems to be the thesis of Greg Clark in ‘A Farewell to Alms’ above - and in ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’, that with agriculture and population increases you had genetic changes (some innocuous like lactose tolerance), but also you could have selection for other traits that are conducive to modern economies.
Clark discusses that in the second link I provided:
Yes and, as your own reference says, it then spread into Africa. All the evidence I’ve seen says that it spread into Africa before spreading into Europe, which makes sense given that it’s climatically identical and accessible via a direct land route rather than the circuitous land or sea route into Europe.
But let’s not quibble. Even according to your own reference, at the very least Africans have been practising agriculture at least as long as Europeans. So once again I ask: In light of this fact, how does the theory you posted above explain anything?
Other regions and countries have suffered far worse and worse much more recently than the Colonisation. And have surged ahead to prosperity despite that. Other nations have been created with awkward borders. Most learn to either live with it (Belgium, Spain) or come to some other arrangement (Czechoslovakia, Denmark/Germany). The worst thing Africa can do is to blame their condition on some outside force. The first and most important step in altering your situation is taking responsibility for your own mess. The problems besetting Africa is due to decisions made by Africans and predominantly hinges on defective culture.
Huge swats of Scandinavia are arctic deserts where it is extremely difficult to live. Same goes for Canada. How is that even a problem? It just means that fewer people live there. The problem only occurs when the people living in those areas engage in unsupportable and irresponsible population increase, to enlarge the population to a number that the area cannot support.
You have a continent. Some of it is good rich farming land. Some of it is desert. Some of it is rain forest. In it, you have a variety of separate populations that are well adapted to their environments. Some are hunter-gatherers. Some are pastoral nomads. Some are farmers. Each occupies their area and for the most part stuff works out. People have their own political systems. Sure there are border skirmishes and even full on wars, but there is enough stability that atrocities are relatively rare.
Now, draw random lines all over that area, lumping together bits and pieces of different people and habitats. Suddenly, your nomads don’t have access to their dry season pasture land so they start moving into the fertile farmland. Meanwhile, the farmers, who are cut off from the hills they would normally expand into, are trying to expand into nomadic lands and cutting down rain forest. The hunter gatherers retreat deeper into the forest, into even more difficult terrain. Because farmers are going into marginal lands, erosion on all sides is causing famine among the farmers. These tensions start erupting on a grander scale as each separate group seeks to control the government and ensure some stability for their way of life.
Wow. Just wow. What, exactly, do you know about African cultures (you recognize that Africa is a huge continent with many diverse cultures, right)? And where, pray tell, did you learn this?
Looking around the world, does it look as though the former colonies of the British are in quite good shape, the former colonies of Spain and Portugal are not bad, but that the former colonies of the French suck majorly?
That’s just an impression, I make no claim to have looked into the subject seriously.
Well, Quebec (French) isn’t doing too bad; neither is French Guiana (never yet decolonized, still a department of France); while Mozambique (Portuguese) sucks ditchwater and the less said of Spanish Sahara the better. As for Pakistan . . .
Actually, the Belgian Congo was a huge swath of central Africal that rivaled Europe at the height of Nazi power for sheer nightmarishness. King Leopold ruled it as his personal rubber-factory and outlet for the inferiority complex that being a constituional monarch gave him.
Actually, the lesson here is that you can retain relatively high levels of development after disastrous wars if the winners of those wars came out without a scratch, and are willing to help you. Western Europe recovered after WW2 largely because the United States was incredibly wealthy after the war - it had a massive industrial base that hadn’t even been touched by the Axis powers, and it was willing to use that wealth to rebuild allies and former enemies alike. See: The Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union didn’t have the same level of wealth (or forgiveness), and lo and behold, East Germany didn’t recover to nearly the same levels as its Western counterpart.
As for the American South - are you kidding me? By the 1870s, Reconstruction was over and the government of the Union was as dedicated to developing the South as to any of the Northern states.
Your first link sounds like a Russian mourning the death of Communism. The second is pointless.
I lived in Leopoldville just over a year after independence. Yes, we had telephones that didn’t work, and running water which had to be boiled. Why was that? It was because the Belgians never bothered to train the Congolese had to maintain this stuff. As I mentioned, they had just started letting the Congolese in to the very modern university just outside of Leopoldville.
Political pressures at the time meant that the colonial powers left relatively suddenly, with varying amounts of preparation, and almost no training in how to run a democracy. The Congo, with very little infrastructure, would have been a tough place to administer in the best of times and with the most trained leaders. But they made the entire college class minister level, since they were the best educated people in the place. How do you think you would have done, right out of college, trying to run a country as big as the US?
Who colonized the place made a lot of difference. At the time we’d cross the river to Brazzavile in the Congo Republic (French Congo) to pick up rare things like ketchup. They had a strong currency, and were fairly stable. I don’t think Ethiopia was rich back then, but under the monarchy it was in good shape, and it sent a contingent of troops to the UN.
Yes, a lot of countries turned into dictatorships, but Europe was hardly immune from that disease. Think of how the US would have turned out if the Founding Fathers had not experience in their state legislatures and a long tradition of democracy.
Colonialism isn’t 100% of the problem, but it was pretty major.