Turning a developing country into a developed one.

Ooh another thread on the bell curve but this time trying to explain the failure of development in sub-saharan Africa as opposed to the inner city.

One thing that Central Africa and the inner city have in common is that there is a level of violence that you don’t normally find in other neighborhoods. Just keeping your head down in these places is not enough to avoid trouble.

Peace is a prerequisite for development. Violence and chaos just isn’t conducive for development. After that a trade surplus with the US seems to help a lot.

Once you develop that favorable relationship with some industrialized nation, you can catch a draft and catch up quite a bit by ignoring intellectual property rights of developed nations when you have educated your population enough to be able to utilize that stolen intellectual property.

Then you host the Olympics in your capital.

So let me make sure I’m understanding you here. You’re saying that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites or Asians? It’s not a social or cultural thing; they’re genetically less smart. Is this your position?

I was wondering how long we could have a nice rational discussion about development before the “black people are dumb” crew came. These guys show up in every even vaguely relevant thread, turning each and every one into a place to spew their theories. In my opinion, the only reasonable thing to do is ignore them.



…He kinda has a point. When I read his post, I went back over all the countries in the world that I know of, and not one of them is an example of people of Sub-Saharan African heritage doing well - even African countries that weren’t colonised are still pretty crappy.

If things like skin colour, facial features, height, diseases etc can be markedly different between races, why is it so impossible that there are general racial differences on the grounds of temperament or intelligence?

The belief that the differences would be severe enough to damage the development of a populace does not necessarily mean that one believes that every individual black person is less intelligent than each individual white person - the two are completely separate.

If you don’t believe him, or his theory, show how it doesn’t hold true.

Yes.

Among the differences among populations are innate differences in IQ.
Our genes determine our potential for many things, and our genes vary by population.

The populations being discussed are very loose and very broad categories. The evidence to date is that, as a group average, their intelligences differ. This has a profound consequential effect on the economic successes societies which they are able to form in the modern world.

Unfortunately, spewing theories about how to develop populations without taking into account their innate capabilities being developed is rather akin to creating grand plans to turn the Mbuti into the next crop of NBA stars.

Well-meaning, very nice, very sweet and very sincere folks have spent billions having nice rational discussions about development for sub-saharan Africa without much to show for it. An accusation which distills my position into “black people are dumb” speaks of a mindset willing to simply cover one’s ears and say “burble burble burble” instead of simply presenting evidence that my position is incorrect.

“Burble burble burble” is hardly likely to change Mother Nature’s genetic distribution scheme. On the other hand, if we are all equal genetically, all that is required for proof of that is to extend educational opportunity to people of sub-saharan African descent and show they compete with equal competence. To date, and despite enormous investment in the US (as an example), this has not happened. Nor has it happened anywhere else in the world. Nor has it happened within Africa. Nor have there been any pockets of success in innovation or science/math/engineering pursuits on par with, say, India and China, as a demonstration that such a talent pool exists.

Development requires local innovation, skilled high-cognitively-functioning leadership and a large pool of participants at the mid-functioning level in order to turn over dependency from the donor nation to the local communities. If the talent pool is absent, no effort will have ongoing success and the nation will remain permanently a beggar nation.

While proof cases that we are innately differently-enabled abound, I’d encourage you to look beyond what you think should be Mother Nature’s construct and simply present proof cases for your position that we are not, if that is your position.

As an example from an educational perspective: When we began to really open higher education for blacks here in the US 40 years ago, we achieved moderate success in finding PhD candidates for various social sciences and other soft disciplines. For quantitatively-evaluable disciplines such as Science/Technology/Engineering and Math, the number of successful black PhD candidates has barely budged. I submit that a look into the infrastructure of successful nations will reveal an enormous dependency on STEM skillsets.

I hope you are right and I am wrong. Hope, unfortunately, is not a mechanism by which change comes.

None of what I am arguing is a reason to defer development efforts or extend a helping hand. If anything, it’s a reason to extend even more resources. There is no particular credit due those born tall, or fast, or smart, but there is a moral obligation, in my opinion, for the lucky to contribute of themselves and their wealth to the unlucky.

The implicit assumption I’m seeing here, which hasn’t been backed up, is that IQ correlates to economic success. Is that, in fact, the case?

Inevitably, there are criticisms of the statistics (it’s right there in the wiki article) but all the flaws mentioned focus on the measurement of IQ itself and does not dispute the correlation between average IQ and economic rankings. Now, we all know that correlation does not equal causation but it does seem obvious that there’s a baseline of cognitive ability required to participate in the modern global economy.

If the estimated IQ scores of Congo, Zimbabwe, Nigeria in the 60s are to be believed, building a bunch of schools there is not going to magically enable them to compete with Finland, Japan, and the USA.

If one believes that biology more than social structures drive IQ, you’re probably better off spending money on remaking the poor countries’ food supply (better proteins, vitamins, minerals, etc). That way, the mothers today have a healthy diet, which means their babies are healthier (and potentially higher IQ). Those babies then grow up on the healther diet and have children of their own. The 3rd generation then has a higher average IQ. I have no evidence that such a plan will actually raise IQ scores but it seems more plausible than just building a bunch of schools. Schools don’t raise IQ.

That doesn’t answer my question, which was more general than national statistics. Is there,* in general*, a correlation between IQ and economic success - e.g. is there generally a stronger trend to high IQ in , oh, stockbrokers vs. schoolteachers, all else being equal?

Especially since that cite is a piss-poor study, full of holes big enough to drive a truck through.

Are you looking for information similar to this?

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx

The idea that Nigerians are as unintelligent as an American with an IQ in the 60s is laughable. From my experience, most people in those regions can speak at least four or five languages, often easily picking up new languages even in adulthood.

They have huge amounts of practical knowledge- at times in Cameroon, I felt like an idiot because it seemed like everyone could do stuff like build a house, cook for a few dozen people, sew clothes that fit perfectly without patterns or even measurements, predict the weather with startling accuracy, identify the medicinal uses of nearly every plant around them, etc. People could recite their family’s oral history often going back as far as seven generations. I was constantly amazed at how much raw information people had- I could ask about a city two day’s travel away, and it seemed like even the poorest farmer could give detailed information about it. Perhaps more tellingly than anything, people were funny. Cameroonians have a creative and sophisticated sense of humor, not the sort of thing you’d find among a nation of dummies.

That said, I can see how they would perform badly on an IQ test. They are an oral culture, not a written one. As late as the 1980s, anthropologists report knowing people who could not make sense of a photograph because they have so little experience with abstract representations of things. Most of my students had trouble making sense of maps, because they simply don’t use them. Chances are the IQ test was the first time many of these people were asked to do these sorts of tasks, as opposed to people in other cultures who are groomed to do these kinds of tasks throughout their life.

This whole apologia about all the impressive “facts” and multi-languages that Cameroonian people know is irrelevant to the measurement of IQ.

One could memorize the entire Oxford Dictionary as Dustin Hoffman’s fictional Rain Man might be able to do but still fail an IQ test.

That’s really a very true statement. A theoretical rich person can influence a society (especially over a long length of time), but no one can create a new, whole-sale, self-functioning society in their own image (Communists tried with millions dead as their reward). People and cultures are not lumps of clay to be molded. Real life is complex and messy, things need to develop with time. Wealth is accumulated by a nation through the work of a populous. This wealth is then used by the government in ways to give the next generation of people better education, better health, better work opportunities, while enabling the country, itself, to run more efficiently. It’s a natural process of selection, not something to be intelligently designed.

Please tell me what exactly is it then that is being measured? What, exactly, is relevant?

Racists just tell enough lies and “God-like proclamations” that you can quote their words right back at them and expose their faulty, racist logic.

It’s really just like talking to creationists, however it’s also just as tiresome.

Yeah, I should know better, huh?

It’s just so frustrating, because this is my interest and current area of expertise, but every single thread without exception gets hijacked as a sounding board for the same tired old BS. It’s like we can’t even talk about Africa because it’s just going to turn into the same thing.

Sigh.

Well by that reasoning (and assuming that the Bell curve is correct) the highest productivity/capita, wealth/capita, GDP/capita, or SOMETHING/capita should be higher in places like Japan, Taiwan, China, Mongolia, Kamchatka, Korea, Singapore than in places like America.

I bet there are other factors.

Is there a chance that the problem might be with the test?

Well if this is your area of expertise, can you please explain to me why everything about the notion of intelligence being heritable makes sense to me? If intelligence is heritable then

I do have trouble believing that blacks on average are as monumentally stupid relative to whites as the Bell Curve implies and that this is the reason for the huge disparity in socio-economic outcomes we see today.

Could that not be done by building the factory, and including as part of the facility a school and daycare for the kids so the mothers could work and not worry about the kids running around in the streets getting into trouble, and if it offered a midday meal to the kids. Sort of like bootstrapping the family into education through daycare/school and a meal program. So instead of those damned christian childrens organizations where they essentially remove the kids from the families and christianize them, you do something for the whole family - work and nonsectarian educations, perhaps a small clinic as well to take care of the employees instead of health insurance.

And before you get on me about my intense dislike of forcibly christianizing the children, my aunt founded a christian childrens organization and I have an intense dislike of telling people that their religion isn’t good enough and they need to change to get the benefit of food/medical care/whatever.