Those nations with high-IQ, educated populations tend to have higher levels of economic development. Although rich countries tend to have good political institutions and policies that are not completely crazy, the direction of causation is population to institutions. If you have the “right” people in a nation, decent political frameworks tend to follow.
You can read my cross-country study, which supports Jason’s view. The appendix is where I introduce an IQ variable, which is very powerful. If you don’t like my dependent variable, which is an index of economic freedom, you could redo the analysis using the United Nations human development index and get very similar results.
It’s mean reverting. High IQ nations have low birthrates since women marry later and have children later. There are exceptions, but it’s mostly slash and burning the gene pool… assuming you believe in this stuff.
While it’s true intelligence is hereditary, it’s from thousands of genes that each play a very small roles. It’s not something that can easily be “bred”, and the “best” genes for IQ are probably in undeveloped remote areas that have been suppressed by environmental factors. What we’re measuring is probably a proxy for kinds of personalities that are properly disposed for early 21st century life. We should be humble towards that, since, the kind of personalities that produce highly successful people today, might have produced average people a hundred years ago, and mediocre people a hundred before that. How important is genetically predisposed towards excellent financial analysis to an illiterate serf? A hundred years from now their descendants could suffer from severe mental problems – ‘crazies’ who constantly feel the need to ‘work’, ‘impress others’ or ‘push their intelligence’ in a world that severely devalues human work and human intelligence.
Yes, but one must take care to remind the hedgehogs that this finding is conditional on some even more important things being approximately equal.
I suggest that the distinction between high-trust and low-trust is one such “more important” factor. A society may be more likely to be high-trust if its population has high median IQ, but there is an obvious recent example of an trust-degrading ideology which was put into practice in several high-population-IQ countries, and this consistently led to low-quality institutions over time. IQ leaps more clearly out of the data today because there’s now less global variance in non-IQ causal factors.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that, when IQ matters, it is almost always “necessary but not sufficient”. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen debates on the subject where both sides were obviously wrong, because one side took the “unnecessary” position and the other took the “necessary and sufficient” position.
If the “high IQ causes economic development argument” were true, that would have negative implications for an open borders policy in the US.
No kidding.
So I guess we’ll be told that it can’t possibly be true.
So how did Barbados do it?
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/07/peter_henry_on.html