Re: Bell-curve racism for nations

Of course these studies have been proven problematic over and over again.
As such I sometimes think they just keep publishing this junk so that the
rest of us have extremist views to cite in our writing and teaching.  But
then I actually had an occasion to witness Jared Taylor, another likeminded
extremist such as Rushton (who has published with Rushton), at a conference
recently and he seemed to be the real McCoy - he lived and breathed his
belief of biological 'race' inequities - eerily so I might add.  What I have
found in my own research on the right-wing is that these people do have
considerable followings, including a lot of people who have never donned a
white robe and hood, or burned a cross, etc., nor would they dream of doing
so.  For example, in my interviews with anti-immigrant organizers, several
cited Charles Murray's work.  Those I interviewed often seemed to have read
themselves into a corner of right-wing extremist literature and had zero
knowledge of, or tolerance for anything to the contrary.  Taylor & I believe
Rushton's arguments are that they aren't "white" supremacist at all, that if
anything they are "Asian" supremacist.  Great....

Sigh, 

**************************************
Carina A. Bandhauer, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Social Sciences
Western Connecticut State University
181 White Street
Danbury, CT  06810
**************************************



on 3/7/02 9:25 AM, Louis Proyect at lnp3@panix.com wrote:

> (I received this from John Landon, a Marxism list subscriber who ran into
> it on the evo-psych mailing list, an influential forum with thousands of
> subscribers. Phillipe Rushton is a well-known racist who has appeared on
> platforms with the ultra right-wing National Party in Great Britain. What's
> next? Academic articles and books arguing for eugenics?)
> 
> The Intelligence Of Nations
> 
> A review 
> By Philippe Rushton
> 
> IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Westport, CT:
> Praeger (2002), 256 pp., U.S. $64.95 (Hdbk.) ISBN 0-275-97510-X (Available
> from amazon.com)
> 
> IQ and the Wealth of Nations. is a brilliantly-conceived, superbly-written,
> path-breaking book that does for the global study of economic prosperity
> what The Bell Curve did for the USA. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen examine
> IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 countries. They document that
> national differences in wealth are explained most importantly by the
> intelligence levels of the populations. They calculate that mean national
> IQ correlates powerfully--more than 0.7--with per capita Gross Domestic
> Product (GDP). National IQs predict both long-term and short term economic
> growth rates. Second in importance is whether the countries have market or
> socialist economies. Only third is the widely-credited factor of natural
> resources, like oil.
> 
> One arresting fact emerges: the average national IQ of the world is only
> 90. Fewer than one in five countries have IQs equal or near the British
> average of 100. Almost half have IQs of 90 or less. This poses a serious
> problem if the book's conclusion that IQ = 90 forms the threshold for a
> technological economy is correct.
> 
> Lynn and Vanhanen review the theories advanced over the last 250 years to
> explain why some countries are rich while others are poor. These include:
> climate theories (temperate zones are said to be best); geographic theories
> (an East-West Axis is said to be best); modernization theories
> (urbanization and division of labor are said to be good); dependency
> theories (exploitation and peripheralization of poor nations are said to be
> bad); neoliberal theories (market economies are said to be good);
> psychological theories (cultural values like thriftiness, the Protestant
> Ethic, and motivation for achievement are said to be good). Some of these
> factors no doubt play a role. But it turns out that IQ that does the heavy
> lifting.
> 
> Next, Lynn and Vanhanen review the scientific literature and find that IQ
> is an important determinant of educational attainment, earnings, economic
> success, etc. In the United States and Britain, the correlation between IQ
> and earnings for individuals is approximately 0.35. (That is, cleverness is
> a fairly loose guarantee of economic success for an individual, but is
> significant across an entire population. If you bet on it at a gaming table
> you wouldn't win on every throw, but you would make a lot of money over an
> evening.) Of course, it makes sense that intelligence determines earnings.
> More intelligent people learn more quickly, solve problems more
> effectively, can be trained to acquire more complex skills, and work more
> productively and efficiently.
> 
> Nations whose people have high IQ levels also have high educational
> attainment and large numbers of individuals who make significant
> contributions to national life. On the flipside, nations with low levels of
> intelligence have low levels of educational attainment and few individuals
> who make significant contributions. Low intelligence leads to unfavorable
> social outcomes like crime, unemployment, welfare dependency, and single
> motherhood.
> 
> Lynn and Vanhanen prove that the widespread though rarely stated assumption
> of economists and political scientists--that all peoples and nations have
> the same average IQ--is wildly wrong. Their evidence documents substantial
> national differences in average intelligence. The highest average IQs are
> found among the Oriental countries of North East Asia (average IQ = 104),
> followed by the European nations (average IQ = 98), and the mainly White
> populations of North America and Australasia (average IQ = 98). Further
> behind are the countries of South and Southwest Asia, from the Middle East
> through Turkey to India and Malaysia (average IQ = 87), as are the
> countries of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands (average IQ = 86), and
> Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85). Lowest are the countries of
> Africa (average IQ = 70).
> 
> Lynn and Vanhanen find that some countries do have higher or lower per
> capita incomes than their national IQ averages would predict. This is where
> having a market or socialist economy or sitting atop a sea of crude oil
> comes in.
> 
> Some of the countries with a higher per capita income than would be
> predicted from their average IQs are Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium,
> Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa,
> Switzerland, and the U.S. Except for Qatar, South Africa, and Barbados, all
> of these are technologically highly developed market economies. Qatar's
> exceptionally high per capita income comes from oil exporting, which is
> actually managed and controlled by corporations and people from European
> and North American countries. South Africa's much higher than expected per
> capita income derives from the high performance of the industries
> established and managed by the country's European minority. Similarly,
> Barbados's above average wealth comes from its well-established tourist
> industry and financial services, which are owned, controlled and managed by
> American and European countries.
> 
> Some of the countries with lower per capita income than would be predicted
> from their average IQ: Bulgaria, China, Hungary, Iraq, South Korea, the
> Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and Uruguay. Most of these
> are present or former socialist countries. Iraq has suffered from losing
> the Gulf War and a decade of UN trade sanctions. The large amount of ethnic
> conflict in the Philippines decreased growth.
> 
> Lynn and Vanhanen provide a detailed examination how well IQ theory stacks
> up against its competitors. For example, two significant exceptions to the
> view that a tropical climate is detrimental to wealth are Singapore and
> Hong Kong, which lie in the tropical zone but are rich. Conversely, Lesotho
> and Swaziland are temperate, lying slightly south of the Tropic of
> Capricorn, but poor. These differences, however, can be explained in terms
> of intelligence theory. The people of Singapore and Hong Kong belong to the
> ethnic group with the highest average IQs; the people of Lesotho and
> Swaziland belong to the ethnic group with the lowest.
> 
> Modernization theories, according to which all economies would evolve from
> subsistence agriculture through to various stages of urbanization and
> industrialization, have worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim but
> have failed for the four remaining groups of nations (South Asia, the
> Pacific Islands, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa). IQ and the Wealth
> of Nations proposes that modernization theories describe Western Europe and
> the Pacific Rim because these countries have appreciably the same or
> somewhat higher IQs than in the United States. But they did not work for
> the other four groups of countries because average IQs are below the
> technological threshold.
> 
> But why did the peoples of East Asia, with their high IQs, lag behind the
> European peoples until the second half of the 20th Century? Well, China's
> science and technology were generally more advanced than Europe's for
> around two thousand years, from about 500 B.C. up to around 1500 A.D. But
> in the 15th century, Chinese inventiveness came to an end and from that
> time on virtually all the important advances were made by Europeans, first
> in Europe and later in the U.S. The explanation may be that Europeans
> developed the market economy, while China stagnated through authoritarian
> bureaucracy and central planning.
> 
> The failure of Japan to develop economically until the late 19th century is
> largely attributed to a regulated economy and isolation from the rest of
> the world. By 1867-68 a revolution occurred and the new rulers embarked on
> a program to modernize Japan by adopting Western education and technology,
> and by freeing up the economy by transforming state monopolies into private
> corporations. Much of the Japanese economic success in the 20th century was
> built by adopting inventions made in the West, improving them, and selling
> them more competitively in world markets. Japan thereby built up its
> motorcycle, automobile, shipbuilding, and electronics industries. Although
> it is sometimes asserted that the Japanese have not made any significant
> scientific and technological innovations of their own, this underestimates
> their technological achievements: the fiber-tipped pen (1960), bullet
> trains traveling at 210 km per hour, much faster than any Western trains
> (1964), laser radar (1966), quartz watches (1967), VHS video home systems
> (1976), flat screen televisions using liquid crystal display (1979), video
> discs (1980), CD-ROM (read only memory) disks (1985), digital audio tape
> (1987), and digital networks for sending signals along coaxial cables and
> optical fibers (1988).
> 
> African countries are at the opposite pole from China and Japan in national
> IQ. This may explain why they are such a major anomaly for modernization
> theory. The low rate of economic growth of African countries following
> their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s is one of the major
> problems in developmental economics. During the years 1976-98, the average
> rate of economic growth per capita GNP of the 41 countries of sub-Saharan
> Africa for which data are available is much lower than in the rest of the
> world. Many of the African countries actually suffered negative per capita
> growth rate. Economists have quantified all possible factors, such as
> climate, ethnic diversity, geography, mismanagement, unemployment and the
> like, and compared the situation to elsewhere in the world, especially
> Asia. They concluded that these factors do not provide a complete
> explanation and that there is some "missing element." Some have suggested
> the low level of "social capital," i.e., the widespread corruption and lack
> of trust in commercial relationships, poor roads and railways, unreliable
> telephones and electricity supplies, and the prevalence of tropical
> diseases such as malaria.
> 
> IQ and the Wealth of Nations identifies IQ as the missing link. Some of
> these "social capital" are actually manifestations of a low level of
> intelligence in the populations. Poor telephone services and electricity
> supplies, low agricultural yields, and the poor advice given by government
> advisory boards reflect low average IQ. With a mean IQ of 70, the
> populations of Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic
> growth achieved elsewhere in the world.
> 
> Finally, Lynn and Vanhanen peer into the future. They predict future growth
> is most likely in countries with high national IQ scores but currently bad
> economic systems. The countries of the former Communist Bloc--Russia,
> Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the People's Republic of China, and
> Vietnam--are good bets.
> 
> What else can be done? Lynn and Vanhanen also list some of the factors,
> some environmental and some genetic, that might raise IQ scores and
> somewhat alleviate the disparities in national average IQ. These include:
> better nutrition, education and health; and ending the dysgenic fertility
> trends where the lowest IQ people produce the most children. (Obviously,
> immigration policy has a role to play too.)
> 
> The take-home message of IQ and the Wealth of Nations: national differences
> in IQ are here to stay and so is the gap between the rich and the poor
> countries. Political promises that the gap is temporary, and will be
> remedied by aid from rich countries to poor countries, or even by poor
> countries adopting appropriate institutions, will not be fulfilled. Such
> promises assume that all human populations have equal mental abilities to
> adopt modern technologies and to achieve equal levels of economic
> development. They do not. The authors sound a clarion call for the
> recognition of national and race differences in intelligence.
> 
> Adapted from:
> 
> The Bigger Bell Curve: Intelligence, National Achievement, and The Global
> Economy, 22 October 2001, (PDF version) in Elsevier Science journal
> Personality and Individual Differences)
> 
> Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University of Western
> Ontario and the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History
> Perspective
> 
> 
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
> 
>