Re: mesmartyoudumb & “I’m not a troll or a racist, i’m a texan”
I just want to say that we’ve tried ceding Dallas to Oklahoma, but Oklahoma won’t take it.
I doubt that the rule exists in the way that you have claimed (and I really doubt that it is limited to only “Negroes”).
I’m kinda surprised that the IQ for Israel is 90 on that chart.
Anyway, IMHO, the notion that lower average intelligence/IQ plays a role in the economic and political problems in Sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t seem that outrageous of an hypothesis to me. Yes it’s offensive, but it’s not implausible.
Ah, but Africa has and has had a great number of societies, which interacted and competed. Nor were they any more alike than the nations of Europe.
*Originally posted by lucwarm *
Well, to be fair, I don’t think it’s entirely impossible to discount, at least if one were to understand the data in the context of history and other socio-political and economic factors.
One might be able to look at it from this perspective: 500-600 years ago, Europe was an intellectual backwater compared to other regions (China, Ottoman Empire, etc.). Likewise, their level of economic development was marginal relative to other regions. One could therefore surmise that the reason for Europe’s lack of development correlated with their level of intelligence. However, over the next 500-600 years, Europe became by far and away the most economically advanced region of the world (likewise the US as an outgrowth of this European advance). So, what happened? Did the populations of China, Ottoman Empire, etc. get “dumber”? Or did the Europeans get “smarter”? We can ask similar types of questions in regards to the rise and fall of various ancient civilizations (Rome, Egypt, etc.). That is, why/how did they rise to prominence and how/why did they decline?
I think similar types of questions can be asked for Sub-Saharan Africa. The people living there aren’t necessarily any “dumber” than in other places. The socio-political and economic conditions necessary for economic growth and development have been hindered by various factors - physical geography, legacy of Atlantic slave trade and Euopean colonialism, failed economic development policies, corruption, ethnic/tribal rivalry and political instability, economic dependence on developed world, lack of well developed transportation/communications infrastructure, high mortaility rates, etc.
Sure, I’ll concede that there is some kind of positive correlation between IQ and GDP/Capita (or some other measure of wealth). What I don’t buy outright that one can infer that because IQ levels are low, then GDP/Capita (or level of economic development) are low. In other words, people are poor because they are stupid. One could make the counter claim that because GDP/Capita is low, then IQ levels are low. That is, people are stupid because they are poor. I would find it much more plausible to focus on socio-political or economic reasons as causal factors in understanding/explaining low IQ levels. At least at the societal level (I’m well aware that one reason some people are poor is because they are stupid. But not all poor people are poor because they are stupid).
Similarly, one could address cultural factors that can play a role. Maybe one element in understanding the strong correlation between IQ and economic development might be that certain cultures promote certain activities that lend itself towards economic development. Or at least certain activities in certain contexts (e.g capitalistic economic system). Max Weber posited just such a hypothesis in trying to understand/explain why Capitalism (and later the Industrial Revolution) emerged in Europe and not in other places (I understand that Weber identified additional factors other than cultural ones).
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jarrod Diamond has been mentioned numerous times in other threads, and I think that some of his arguments have merit. In particular, his emphasis on elements of the physical environment affecting human behavior (the physical enviroment “sets the stage”, so to speak, for activities - particularly agriculture, for example - in which humans can engage). But I don’t think there is “one” thing that people can look for and categorically state, “yup, here’s the reason why Sub-Saharan Africa is in such a mess.” And I definitely don’t think it’s because the vast majority of people living in those countries are intellectual inferior in some innate way.
Who knows? But it’s certainly not outrageous to hypothesize that intelligence (along with other factors) played a role. Or that the rise of Europe was occasioned by some other factor than what is holding Africa back.
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Maybe and maybe not. It’s offensive, but not implausible.
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Sure, and we can speculate about how much of an impact these factors have and have had in the same way that we can speculate about intelligence as a factor.
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Agree. I’m certainly not taking the position you seem to be disagreeing with here.
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This too, is not an outrageous hypothesis.
I thought the list bore repeating. 
To all that, I’ll add that desertification isn’t making things any easier.
lucwarm,
Sorry - I didn’t mean to imply that you were in agreement with the position (low IQ’s in and of itself implies low economic development). I think we can agree that it (intelligence) is a possible factor (among many) to consider in understanding conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa.
I guess I was trying to put forth my viewpoint (to others, not necessarily to you) that while a possible factor, I would probably look at other things first as primary causal factors. You (and others) may disagree - but that’s what Geat Debates is for
How much of the problem, do you think, is due to lack of effective birth control and resulting overpopulation? If there is no possible way an economy can grow enough to keep up with its population growth, then poverty and all the evils that follow it will keep getting worse.
And, too, I’m surprised that AIDS hasn’t come up in this thread. From all we read and hear in the West, something like a third of sub-Saharan adults (highly variable by country) (anyone with better info, please chime in) have it or soon will, and there is no effective treatment that can be afforded. If entire generations are decimated, and the following generations are orphaned, then we’re soon talking more about rescue and salvage than development, and that may not help much either. Whatever is being done that amounts to much is coming from relief organizations, not Western governments.
Yes, I know that’s just handwringing, but we’re short of good ideas.
And yes, I also know I just suggested that AIDS will take care of the overpopulation problem. That wasn’t a prescription, just a sad prediction. Europe took centuries to recover from the Black Plague, for comparison’s sake.
This is possibly only worth one cent, not two:
I have a friend who did Peace Corps time in Tanzania. I got the impression from him that most of the problems in his area stemmed from:
- The loyalty to family and clan ahead of nation and others, as stated above: If you have something, like a job, you are obligated to help out family, no matter what. Your brother has no idea how to do the job you got? Immaterial. You must help him also get hired. This is way more important than not interfering with the job getting done by hiring incompetence.
You have a fish farm that you’ve been cultivating and investing in? Bad move. You’re not sharing. You run a high risk of having the pond poisoned as a lesson in sharing. Now, go and lose that entrepreneurial spirit.
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Belief in the hexes of the local shaman: You really will get sick or suffer something else if you don’t shape up and do things like share. White people don’t believe in the hexes and seem unaffected? It only stands to reason. Their ancestors are very powerful, and protect them. Native people on the other hand are very vulnerable. Yes, even the Christian ones, with Jesus to protect them.
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Lack of a cultural vision for the future: There’s never been much practice in delayed gratification. We’re not the type of society that planted one fall, waited through the winter, and then reaped in mid-summer the next year. If you have a bunch of concrete sitting around waiting for the building project, it’s just as decent an idea to sell the concrete so you can get beer. Screw the project. Were you ever personally going to benefit? Probably not.
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Lack of urgency to solve any problem. We don’t run by clocks around here. Wasting time? Doing what? Why are you so uptight? Even you do-gooder types who come over here and think you’re so in tune with multi-cultural experiences are such pains in the butt about time. Whatever doesn’t get done now can get done later. Tomorrow sounds good.
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Coddling of outside help. The irrigation ditch running into the village gets blocked with mud and weeds? Well, we could get some of the younger guys to hoe the thing out every couple weeks, but an even easier way would be for the American to provide the concrete to pave the entire length of the ditch. Stop saying that you don’t have any money for that, and that you stated that at the beginning of the whole discussion, weeks ago. You’re rich. We all know it. Your country is rich. The Americans and Europeans have come in here for a long time, and we know how rich they are. Step up with the thousands of pounds of concrete to pave the miles of ditch.
(This actually happened to my friend, even though the village leaders had picked the ditch as the biggest community problem, and he had told them to start with that all he could offer was some organizing help in addressing whatever problem they chose.)
Just in case anyone wants to take this as a sweeping generalization in some gory way, please re-read the second paragraph carefully.
Not exactly. The Black Plague actually wound up with Europe not recovering, but being knocked out of one path and sent shooting into another. “Recovery” implies a return to pre-plague circumstances. But then, maybe you were talking about population and I’m making a fool of myself.
It is not just Africa which has problems, but I agree that it is fair to say that Africa is the continent which is, almost to a country, “in shit” (although much of the Sahel would cry out for such nitrate-rich fertiliser).
3 biggest problems: Debt, guns, corruption.
Many African countries spend more on debt repayment than on health, education, policing and social security combined. If most African countries were individuals, their debts would be written off as bad debt and they would be declared bankrupt. The World Bank and IMF are, I think gradually coming round to the idea that debt relief should be about letting a country provide food for itself, not coffee for us northeners, but the pace of change is glacially slow.
One may argue that they were the silly ones for getting into debt in the first place, buying all those weapons and such. Well, these countries were, and still are, political children struggling to adapt to democracy. We were the arms dealers who gave the children weapons to play with. If you have a spare 10 minutes, I heartily recommend this article from Scientific American:
http://www.amacad.org/news/scourge.htm
Arguably the greatest obstacle to getting aid to people who need it is not natural disasters or lack of money or poor organization, it’s corruption. A country whose government, army and police force are corrupt will always be poorer in real terms than its economic situation suggests. Its most dangerous and demoralising effect is to simply swallow up any aid or debt relief without any real benefit to those in need. Using part of the debt-relief/aid money as an anti-corruption bonus for those doing an honest job (with extra bonuses for those who anonymously expose anyone who isn’t) might be one way to tackle this, but there really is no substitute for a committed, elected leader who loves their country. (Would you offer up anyone who you think fulfils this recently, minega? I have heard that Mali developed promisingly under President Konare, in spite of the violence during elections).
What Africa needs, by hook or by crook, is clinics, sewers, wells, roads, schools, bridges, that kind of thing: infrastructure (you know, like we’ve got), all done using local labour and in the process training local civil engineers, doctors and teachers.
How do they get this? Well, I admit that the rest of the world should help out far more given the extent to which they rely on African resources. But Africans themselves must also be prepared to look forward rather than back, to set aside tribal conflicts where they might develop into wars, to leave behind traditional beliefs where they might hamper efforts to contain the spread of HIV, to become proud of themselves and their culture despite the difficult hand dealt to them by history.
If you want to understand Africa’a predicament. Basically, Africa 9Sun-Sahara) is goinfg to take decades, if not centuries, to get out of the hole the’ve dug for themselves. Yes, colonialism played a part in it…but that was going on 40 years ago. The recent destruction of the Ivory Coast shows how unstable most of these “nations” really are.
What strikes me, is the attitude of the elits in these countries…the objective of most of these people is to move to the USA or Europe-almost none of them see any future in developing their OWN COUNTRIES!
For example, a young man from the Congo has been eductaed in Paris, at the the Polytechnic. His desire…to be an engineer in France. He has no loyalty or allegiance of any kind to Africa…and therein lies most of the problems of that benighted continent!
Good points, but also we need to bear in mind that Super-power Cold War rivalry, the funding of terrorists by the USA and USSR to overthrow govts on the “wrong” side, went on a lot more recently that the colonial era and is probably still going on in the covert shadows.
AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS
we no longer have the luxury of thinking of SSA’s problems without thinking of HIV/AIDS. How can you feed people if your agricultural workers are either dead/dying or nursing people who are dead/dying? How can you build an education/health/government system if all your teachers and nurses and civil servants are doing likewise? Answer: you CAN’T. Of course the debt and corruption and the legacy of colonialism and the World Bank and the IMF and the bad weather are causing misery, famine etc, in interactions too complex to understand. But the fact is that right now, in places like Zimbabwe, nothing of import can be accomplished because all your PEOPLE, the resource that Africa has most plentifully, are dying. The fact that they are being oppressed politically, and starving at the same time, does not bode well either for them or for the people who have to nurse them in their sickness.
We in North America are privileged to not know tragedy in the same sense that they do: it is tragic, for us, when a shuttle explodes and seven people are killed. We have absolutely no sense of what it’s like to see your entire village ravaged, half of them dead, the other half bearing the psychological burden of having half their friends and family dead. How can anything else matter? How can we sit and talk about it in such a detatched way? How can we blame them for wanting to move away and never come back, move somewhere where they can date people and not fear AIDS, where they can make friends who won’t be dead in the next few years, where communities aren’t filled with orphans, and families led by teenagers or by aging grandmothers, and where there are healthy and functioning adults. Imaging thinking about your friends from high school and realizing that half of them are dead. This is the REALITY for many Africans.
Africa has many, many problems, it’s true. I agree with much of what has been said here. But again, none of it matters when HIV/AIDS is rampaging the countryside and the rest of the world turns a blind eye.
(An aside re: the rest of the world turning a blind eye.
In the 1960s every UN country agreed to give 0.7% of its GDP as foreign aid. That’s not a whole hell of a lot, considering the massive amounts that ‘we’ (ie developed countries) collect in debt servicing and tariffs from Africa: in total, substantially more money flows OUT of Africa than INTO it. Perhaps they can’t build themselves a sustainable infrastructure because all the surplus they have, plus surplus they don’t have, goes straight out West. Anyway, today in 2003 how many countries actually donate the 0.7% they agreed to ? … answer, none. What would happen if they did?
/aside)
I recommend that everyone who is interested in the subject read
Stephen Lewis’s comments, he is the UN special envoy to Africa for HIV/AIDS and he is very committed and impassioned, I have never seen a diplomat become so emotional while speaking. He is coming out with a new report soon.
He suggests that it would take $27 billion to ‘solve’ the health crisis (no cite, I’m afraid, he said it at a speaking event). I don’t know where he gets the number from, or what is involved in ‘solving’ it. But that’s not such a big number, we could come up with it easily if we lived up to our 0.7% commitment, but the rest of us can’t seem to cough it up. We’d rather collect on our debts.
His main point:
‘the interlocking HIV/AIDS and hunger crises are causing a breakdown not only in agriculture, but throughout all sectors.’
I did a little study last summer regarding the relative wealth of tropical countries with respect to temparate ones that I presented in this thread
I just emailed you this article, because I don’t know if you can get to the link if you don’t subscribe. You may also benefit from reading Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. You may also find Dasgupta’s An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution.
I guess I would tend to agree that political instability and poorly allocated property rights are a big problem. I have no reference for this, but I’ve been led to believe that many African countries practice poor economic policies, such as being protectionist.
I would bet that if African nations were to put into place property laws that match the de facto property allocation, good contract laws, and political stability, then good things could begin to happen. With formal ownership, entrepeneurs will have something to borrow against, hence capital markets can begin to bloom. With those, I’m sure markets for risk could grow as well. With well defined property rights and contract law, along with political stability, it would pay for one to take risks, inasmuch as success won’t be arbitrarily taken away. Africa would become more attractive to foreign investment as well.
That’s my guess.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. SSA had problems before AIDS even existed as a human disease. Solving the AIDS problem won’t provide economic or political stability and growth. If you solve AIDS without tackling the other problems, and you’ll just have HIV free people living in poverty and political instability. But economic growth and political stability might help to solve the AIDS problem.
js_africanus, you’re right, of course, Africa had problems well before it had AIDS. But my point is that NOW, in today’s context, to think about solving these problems without also thinking of the complex ways in which AIDS exacerbates/is exacerbated by these problems, is irresponsible and cannot succeed.
I suggest, for example, that ‘economic growth and political stability’ are not possible without also simultaneously addressing the AIDS problem (for example, because it is hard to build an economy when you have no workers).