The US does not score that well as a total average population, actually, although certainly our population of immigrants from South Korea, Taiwan and Japan score considerably above average, as do the populations from which they derived.
An IQ test is not “an assessment of what kind of things the person has been taught to do.”
One might consider the technology referenced in the OP to be a reasonable IQ proxy for a certain type of intelligence, for instance. If you are not enamored with standardized IQ tests you might consider things such as self-sufficiency, the ability to create wealth and compete economically independent of the sale of natural resources, generation of patents, architecture, scientific and engineering feats, assorted infrastructures, educational achievements of emigrants–in short dozens of reasonable proxies for ascertaining national IQ. An underlying “national intelligence” is requisite–though not sufficient–for entire nations to excel on the world stage.
In addition to what’s been said, when Joseph Dodge was hired by the US to advise on economic policy in postwar Japan and Germany, he recommended building an export-based economy; build neat stuff, sell it to other people. In addition to cheap manufacturing prices (Dodge set the yen at 360 yen - 1 US dollar), certain sectors of Japan’s industry benefited immensely when the US essentially gave away patents in several rather significant areas for free. Offhand, I recall that iron smelting, transistors, and radar technology were three of the biggest areas that Japan recieved patents in. They took the patents and ran with them, quickly building up industries to produce and market commonplace, but essential technology. For a decent amount of time following Japan’s return to sovereignty, the government also granted massive tax breaks to new industries. Essentially, if you were to build a factory or the like and pursue what the government recognized as a new or emerging area of technology, you were allowed to operate for between five and ten years before the government began to collect income tax.
Pure business aside, the formation of MITI (the Ministry of International Trade and Industry) allowed Japanese businesses to coordinate R&D and avoid internal competition when possible.
Finally, and probably most important in the short term, with the exception of weapon and munitions production Japan managed to secure almost every major US manufacturing contract during the Korean war. They were producing bandages, stretchers, aluminium and iron sheets, and a host of other basic necessities for conducting war. This was a major source of early income, and when the Vietnam war picked up, they did the same thing again.
Cites are from Wikipedia, but they are backed by sources in the article.
Environmental factors would indeed appear to influence a population’s average intelligence, but I guess stating as much is still too much of a live wire in debates like these.
If we count the Dear Leader’s measured IQ of roughly one and a half million, which is my own estimate based on articles in the North Korean press, then I think the mean IQ of North Korea must be the highest in the world, famine or no.
WHAT?? There are people that are actually naive enough to try to come up with corellations between “IQ” and “wealth of nations”? That’s ridiculous.
Measuring “IQ” of just one person is so fraught with mistakes – reification of statistical artifacts, etc. etc., (see Stephen Jay Gould’s book “The Mismeasure of Man”)… but to compound the error by trying to generalize across entire nation-states – and then to compound THAT error by inferring causation from a corellation with “wealth” (however defined)… it’s mind-boggling. I haven’t looked at the Wikipedia article, but I hope that either: 1. it’s a joke, or 2. its title completely misrepresents its content.
Probably. Due to socialism, people in the USSR tended to slack on their job, lie about what was happening to their superiors, and generally be run by incompetents and crooks. So to accomplish anything, the government had to micromanage things through, making sure that everyone was actually doing their job. Which meant that generally they could only work on a few things at a time. So instead of their being regular shipments of food all operating on their own, it tended to go that they would work on getting a single shipment of bananas through to Moscow, then they would work to get a single shipment of chicken through to Moscow, then…
So even if the Russians/East Germans had sufficient quantity to feed themselves, it wasn’t generally a well-rounded diet.
(I happened to visit St. Petersburg just after a shipment of bananas had been bullied through to town, and the place was strewn with peels everywhere.)
Very interesting. It would be interesting to compare the average IQ’s of people in the former East Germany with those of the former West Germany. My guess is that there won’t be much difference.
I have heard the same argument from people from Hong Kong. Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim nations were lacking in infrastructure until recently.
For one example, cell phone technologies were commonly acepted in Asia long before they were promoted in America. The people were more likely to get cellular phones with advanced features when a twisted pair network was never in place to begin with and the service providers weren’t competing against the local telco.
Count me as one who is unembarrasedly (gasp!) “naive enough” to make correlations between average IQ and all sorts of successes, including economic competitiveness and technological innovation and use. I am well aware of the assorted criticisms you mention, but I am also a geezer so I’ve had the chance to personally observe thousands of people and make my own correlations between facility with technology and innovation, and intelligence. There are many folk who talk comfortably about intelligence differences in populations of dogs, but who are very uncomfortable seeing humans as just another animal.
It is interesting to watch folks come up with every explanation except intelligence to explain the sorts of observations noted in the OP.
Fair enough…I’m open to trying to grasp whatever evidence is out there. However, I would caution you against automatically equating “IQ” and “intelligence”, as you seem to do in the post quoted above. I can think of certain definitions of “intelligence” which would encompass some of the reasons I suspect are behind certain nations doing better financially, on average, at certain times, than others, but I wouldn’t use the word “IQ” for this – that word refers to a number which results when some person takes one of a specific group of tests.
But the problem is that there is little to no evidence out there. Did you even read the book or the Wiki article? The “evidence” they have in their book is laughably unconvincing, even if the conclusions they’ve drawn are correct. For example:
This is a joke. And it gets even better. They estimate that seven countries have a national IQ of less than 70. According to the (DSM-IV) an IQ between 55 and 70 is classified as mild mental retardation. Do you really think the national average for a country is at a level that indicates many of its citizens are mildly retarded? Does that even pass the laugh test for you?
Wow, thanks – I’m relieved that it is BS, as I’d assumed! It sounds like a digital-age update of the kind of claptrap Gould wrote about – things like early-20th-century scholars trying to guess the IQ of historical figures, based on the flimsiest of “evidence”, much of it circular and all of it pointless.
Also, I think the service providers in other countries use the same mobile phone technology, so you don’t have one carrier building a GSM network and another building a CDMA network.
As for North Korea, I remember an article in the New York Times about the extremely high quality counterfeit US currency being produced in the country, along with high quality methamphetamines and counterfeit Viagra. So the country is capable of producing quality goods when it wants.
There are many ways to define “intelligence”. A few of these ways are concrete enough to have some possibility of being measurable. Pick one, and let’s see if we can’t come up with some way to measure it. The problem is, the more concrete (and therefore measrurable) a definition you come up with, the less it will encompass the kind of general, culture-free idea you are probably interested in measuring. Which means we may be wasting our time, insisting on reifying (by giving it a name) something which may be a rather meaningless hodgepodge of different skills or abilities – hard enough to measure in a person, and absolutely silly when applied to a group of individuals defined by their belonging to a group as defined by happening to be born on one side of an arbitrary nation-state boundary or the other.
Look at the issue the other way around. Take the countries with “little to no evidence” that their IQ measurements are correctly high. How have they done on the world stage? Technology? Arts? Science? Cool buildings? Fancy military weapons? That’s not evidence?
What about the countries with “little to no evidence” that their IQ measurements are correctly low. How are they doing on things that would seem to require intelligence? Their overall paltry state may have an assortment of putative explanations, but certainly it is not unreasonable to suppose that a low national average IQ is among the possibilities, as evidenced by a low national accomplishment list.
It’s easy to abstractly criticize the idea that there is any decent way to come up with average national IQ’s. It’s quite another to make the statement that there is “little to no evidence” when there are such remarkable correlations between the countries with high national IQ averages and external manifestations of same, and countries with low national IQ averages and absence of accomplishments.
