Национальный интеллект и его экономический и социальный эффект

There are large national differences in intelligence and these contribute to differences in educational and intellectual achievement, per capita income, health, longevity, and religious belief. The European and the North East Asian peoples have the highest IQs and have made most of the advances in civilization during the last 2,500 years. They are also the most prosperous, technologically advanced, have the best health, and are the least religious. These national diffe-rences in intelligence evolved during the last ice age, when only the more intelligent could survive in the northern hemisphere. Today the numbers of these two peoples are declining because of low birth rates. This is a serious problem for the future of these two peoples.

Our theory that national differences in intelligence might explain a number of social and economic phenomena was not a wholly new hypothesis. In the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the Europeans (and perhaps Chinese) are more intelligent than other peoples and this explains why Europeans and (and Chinese) have built superior civilizations. This was asser-ted in 1853 by the Comte Arthur de Gobineau in France, in 1869 by Francis Galton in England. These ideas persisted into the early twentieth century when they were advanced in France in 1910 by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who contrasted the thinking abilities of Europeans and Africans: “the European makes use of abstract thought and his language has made simple logical processes so easy that they entail no effort. With primitives both language and thought are almost exclusively concrete” (p.433). He describes their thinking as “pre-logical” (p.422). It is remarkable that he used the same terminology of concrete and pre-logical that was later used by Piaget to describe the thought processes of European children between the ages of around 8 to 11 years, and which are superseded by logical or “formal” thinking that European children develop at around the age of 12 years. Similar conclusions were reached by Luria in his 1930 study of the thinking abilities of Uzbeks compared with those of |Europeans. Similar views were advanced in 1912 by Gustav Kossinna in Germany and in 1916 by Maddison Grant in the United States. Both Kossinna and Grant believed that it was the Northern Europeans (Nordics, including Germans, Scandinavians, British, Russians and Poles) who are the most intelligent and have contributed most to civilization.

These ideas began to be rejected from around 1930 and from 1950 were only rarely advanced. By the end of the twentieth century most social scientists in the west (as in Russia) maintained that there are no racial or national differences in intelligence. Our hypothesis that there are national differences in intelligence and that these may explain many national differences in economic and social phenomena was therefore a revival and extension of the view widely held in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, we were able to examine this hypothesis more precisely because during the twentieth century intelligence tests were administered in many countries. The first step of our work was to collect all these studies and calculate IQs for as many nations as possible.

We published our first results in 2002 in IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Here we presented measured IQs for 81 nations and examined the relation between national IQs and per capita income. We found that these were correlated at 0,73 with per capita income measured as Real GDP (Gross Domestic Product, 1998). This showed that 53 per cent of the variance in the per capita income can be explained by differences in intelligence (,73 squared = 53). We recognise, of course, that other factors affect national per capita income in addition to IQs. We consider that the two most important of these other factors are natural resources such as oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds, etc.; and the existence of a market economy. For example, South Korea has a higher per capita than North Korea because it has a market economy.

In 2006 we published a sequel in IQ and Global Inequality. Here we presented measured IQs for 112 nations and we estimated IQs for an additional 81 nations on the basis of the measured IQs of similar neighboring nations. We believe this is justified, because neighboring nations generally have very similar IQs. This gives a total of 193 nations, which are all the nations of the world with populations above 40,000 (I have recently produced measured IQs for another 17 nations (Lynn, 2009). A complete list of national IQs is given in the appendix at the end of this paper).

We then examined the relation between national IQs for all countries in the world and a number of social and economic phenomena. We found that national IQs were correlated with the following: per capita income (r=0,60), percentage adult literacy (r=0,65), percentage enrollment in tertiary education (r=0,74), life expectancy (r=0,75), amount of democracy (r=0,53). We also found that in 37 countries national IQs are correlated with educational achievement in mathematics and science (r=0,84), and in 149 nations (fewer nations because data are not available for all nations)

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