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Well, I can’t really say. Malaysia, China, India, and Vietnam all look to have the potential of significant economic growth. All of these countries have undertaken signficant economic reforms, they have stable governments, and the likelihood of war is low.
But who knows? There’s a huge monkey wrench floating out there in the AIDS crisis. AIDS has already contributed to severe economic dislocation in a number of African countries, and it could do the same in Asia. Some people think China might dissolve into civil war–which would contract economic growth. I think the likelihood of this is remote, but it could happen. Maybe Cambodia’s peace accord will collapse into civil war again. There’s any number of things that could happen that would disrupt economic growth.
Here’s the thing. If we’re going to go with innate intelligence as the reason for wealth, then someone is going to have to explain to me how the Europeans suddenly got stupid during the Middle Ages, and how they managed to get smart again after the 1500s. Someone is going to have to explain how the Chinese and the Indians were the smartest people on the planet, only to suddenly get less smart around the 1800s. You simply can’t explain wealth from a historical perspective by using innate intelligence. If the Chinese are the wealthiest people on the planet in 50 years (and they very well could be), does that mean they suddenly got smarter than everyone else? Were the Spanish smarter than the rest of the Europeans during their colonial heydey, only to get dumber than them up until 20 years ago? This is silly.
I should also point out that there is no viable genetic theory, that I’ve heard, that would explain how sharp differences in intelligence could spring up between all these populations. There has been consistent genetic intermingling pretty much between all humans up until relatively short times in the past (in terms of genetics).
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The discussion around how much of intelligence is “innate,” and whether national intelligence correlates with wealth moves off the question of the OP. The short answer is that it is necessary but not sufficient; as I mentioned in an earlier post, those who hold that all populations are more or less equal in intelligence can take solace in the fact that this means the world will be flat for everyone; not just Western and Asian countries.
Leaving that alone for now, let me return to the OP’s question of technological innovation and implementation.
I hold that technological innovation does require intelligence and that a profusion of innovation which requires a depth of highly trained personnel to execute it is a marker–a reasonable proxy–suggesting that a population possesses a certain level of intelligence. You may need only a single genius to invent the airplance but you need a host of highly intelligent people to develop (and build) all of its subcomponents into the modern airframe.
If the application of these developed technologies requires intelligent users, a further marker is found if the technologies are widely implemented. Absent a broad market, a cool but complicated consumer good will not achieve wide adoption–i.e. it must either be simple enough to achieve wide adoption or the market must contain enough folks who possess enough intelligence to use whatever gadget is being marketed. I can use a calculator and a cell phone, for instance, but my use of many of the intricacies of my smartphone is limited because the learning curve is too steep for me to make it worthwhile at my capacity for absorbing new information. For a smarter person, a few minutes with the smartphone and they are good to go; they’ll be facile quickly enough to make it worth their while, and so that particular gadget is going find a market in such a population even though its use is complicated enough to require a population of more intelligent users.
This is a very crude marker. I am not suggesting we should rank national intelligence by invention and penetration of complicated gadgets into their marketplace. What I am suggesting is that intelligence is a necessary–not sufficient–condition to create the tehnological environment referenced in the OP. Summarizing it simply: East Asia is so advanced because the are smart(er). It’s the (er) that is such a hotbutton, I realize.
This suggestion is consistent with what national IQ data is available. Were the situation reversed, and nations which score in the lower IQ percentiles leaders in innovation and highly advanced in technology, I am confident that data would be used to refute my position.