Race, IQ, And Wealth

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Race, IQ, and WealthPosted By Ron Unz On July 18, 2012 @ 12:00 am In | 105 Comments

At the end of April, Charles Kenny, a former World Bank economist specializing in international

development, published a blistering attack in Foreign Policy entitled “Dumb and Dumber [1],” with

the accusatory subtitle “Are development experts becoming racists?” Kenny charged that a

growing number of development economists were turning towards genetic and other intrinsic

human traits as a central explanation of national economic progress, often elevating these above

the investment and regulatory issues that have long been the focus of international agencies.

Although Kenny suggested that many of his targets had been circumspect in how they raised

these highly controversial ideas, he singled out IQ and the Wealth of Nations, published in 2001

by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as a particularly extreme and hateful example of this trend.

These authors explicitly argue that IQ scores for different populations are largely fixed and

hereditary, and that these—rather than economic or governmental structures—tend to determine

the long-term wealth of a given country.

Kenny claimed that such IQ theories were not merely racist and deeply offensive but had also

long been debunked by scientific experts—notably the prominent biologist Stephen Jay Gould in

his 1980 book The Mismeasure of Man.

As Kenny soon discovered from the responses to his online article, he had seriously erred in

quoting the authority of Gould, whose fraud on race and brain-size issues, presumably in service

to his self-proclaimed Marxist beliefs, last year received further coverage in the New York Times

[2]. Science largely runs on the honor system, and once simple statements of fact—in Gould’s

case, the physical volume of human skulls—are found to be false, we cannot trust more complex

claims made by the particular scholar.

Despite Kenny’s obvious lack of familiarity with the technical questions he raised, these issues

remain important ones to explore, given today’s globalized world. After all, it is generally

acknowledged that some people are smarter than other people, and this almost syllogistically

raises the possibility that some peoples may be smarter than other peoples.

Most nations prefer material wealth to poverty, and it seems plausible that smarter people might

be better at generating the productivity needed to achieve this goal. We should hardly be

surprised that this possible factor behind economic advancement has attracted the interest of the

development experts criticized by Kenny, and just as he alleges, IQ and the Wealth of Nations

ranks as perhaps the most extreme academic example of this analysis.

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Although “intelligence” may be difficult to define precisely, most people have accepted that IQ

scores seem to constitute a rough and measurable proxy for this trait, so Lynn and Vanhanen

have collected a vast number of national IQ scores from the last 50 or 60 years and compared

these to income levels and economic growth rates. Since experts have discovered that nominal IQ

scores over the last century or so have tended to rise at a seemingly constant rate—the so-called

“Flynn Effect”—the authors adjusted their raw scores accordingly. Having done so, they found a

strong correlation of around 0.50–0.75 between the Flynn-adjusted IQ of a nation’s population

and its real per capita GDP over the last few decades, seemingly indicating that smarter peoples

tend to be wealthier and more successful.

From this statistical fact, Lynn and Vanhanen draw the conclusion that intelligence leads to

economic success and—since they argue that intelligence itself is largely innate and genetic—that

the relative development ranking of the long list of nations they analyze is unlikely to change

much over time, nor will the economic standing of the various groups within ethnically mixed

countries, including the United States.

Now this hypothesis might indeed be correct, but it is not necessarily warranted by the empirical

data that Lynn and Vanhanen have gathered. After all, if high national IQ scores are correlated

with economic success, perhaps the high IQs cause the success, but it seems just as possible that

the success might be driving the high IQs, or that both might be due to some third factor.

Correlation does not imply causality, let alone the particular direction of the causal arrow. A

traditional liberal model positing that socio-economic factors strongly influence performance on

academic ability tests would predict exactly the same distribution of international results found by

Lynn and Vanhanen.

Fortunately, a careful examination of the wealth of empirical data they have gathered provides

some important evidence on the relative plausibility of these conflicting hypotheses, allowing us

to draw useful conclusions in this extremely taboo subject.

The Distribution of European Intelligence

Critics have often suggested, not without some plausibility, that when Western-designed IQ tests

are applied to Third World peoples, the results may be distorted by hidden cultural bias. There is

also the possible impact of malnutrition and other forms of extreme deprivation, or even practical

difficulties in administering tests in desperately impoverished nations, as Kenny emphasized in his

critique.

In order to minimize these extraneous factors, let us restrict our initial examination to the 60-odd

IQ datapoints Lynn and Vanhanen obtained from European countries and their overseas offshoots

over the last half-century. Obviously, some of these countries have at times been far poorer than

others, but almost none have suffered the extreme poverty found in much of the Third World.


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What we immediately notice is a long list of enormous variations in the tested IQs of genetically

indistinguishable European peoples across temporal, geographical, and political lines, variations

so large as to raise severe doubts about the strongly genetic-deterministic model of IQ favored by

Lynn and Vanhanen and perhaps also quietly held by many others. (Unless otherwise indicated,

all the IQ data that follow are drawn from their work and incorporate their Flynn adjustments.)

Consider, for example, the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn

and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable,

which indicate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end

of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90,

while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 97–99, much closer to the West

German numbers.

These results seem anomalous from the perspective of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a

very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically indistinguishable, and

an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, while the recorded

rise in East German scores of 7–9 points in just half a generation seems even more difficult to

explain.

The dreary communist regime of East Germany was certainly far poorer than its western

counterpart and its population may indeed have been “culturally deprived” in some sense, but

East Germans hardly suffered from severe dietary deficiencies during the 1960s or late 1950s

when the group of especially low-scoring children were born and raised. The huge apparent

testing gap between the wealthy West and the dingy East raises serious questions about the strict

genetic interpretation favored by Lynn and Vanhanen.

Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in 1961

and a score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full points in the Flynn-adjusted IQ of

Greeks over just 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspective, especially since the earlier

set represented children and the latter adults, so the two groups might even be the same

individuals tested at different times. Both sample sizes are in the hundreds, not statistically

insignificant, and while it is impossible to rule out other factors behind such a large discrepancy in

a single country, it is interesting to note that Greek affluence had grown very rapidly during that

same period, with the real per capita GDP rising by 170 percent.

Furthermore, although Greeks and Turks have a bitter history of ethnic and political conflict,

modern studies have found them to be genetically almost indistinguishable, and a very large 1992

study of Turkish schoolchildren put their mean IQ at 90, lending plausibility to the low Greek

figure. We also discover rather low IQ scores in all the reported samples of Greece’s

impoverished Balkan neighbors in the Eastern Bloc taken before the collapse of Communism.

Croatians scored 90 in 1952, two separate tests of Bulgarians in 1979–1982 put their IQs at

91–94, and Romanians scored 94 in 1972. While the low scores of the Croatian children might be


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partly explained by malnutrition and other physical hardships experienced during the difficult

years of World War II, such an excuse seems less plausible for other Balkan populations tested

decades after the war, all of which seem to score in the same range.

Two samples of Poles from 1979 and 1989 provided widely divergent mean IQs of 106 and 92,

with the low Polish figure of 92 coming from a huge sample of over 4000 children tested with

“Progressive Matrices,” supposedly one of the most culturally-independent methods. On the other

hand, more economically advanced Communist countries in Central Europe often had considerably

higher scores, with the Slovaks testing at 96 in 1983, the Czechs scoring 96–98 in 1979–1983,

and the Hungarians reaching 99 in 1979.

All of these Southern or Eastern European IQ scores follow the per capita GDP of their countries, a

correspondence that supports either the IQ-makes-wealth hypothesis of Lynn and Vanhanen, or

the contrary wealth-makes-IQ hypothesis of traditional liberals.

During this same period, the far richer non-Communist nations of Europe—such as Austria,

Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and West Germany—all tended to score at or

somewhat above 100. The wide IQ gaps between these European peoples and the previous group

seem unlikely to have a heavily innate basis, given the considerable genetic and phenotypic

similarity across these populations. For example, the borders of Austria and Croatia are just a

couple of dozen miles apart, both are Catholic countries that spent centuries as part of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it is quite difficult to distinguish Austrians from Croatians either by

appearance or by genetic testing. Yet the gap between their reported IQ scores—12 points—is

nearly as wide as that separating American blacks and whites.

It seems more plausible that most of the large and consistent IQ gaps between Western

Europeans and their Balkan cousins are less a cause than a consequence of differences in

development and affluence during the era in which these IQs were tested. For example, Austria

had many times Croatia’s per capita GDP during the period in question. One of the few European

nations to exhibit a sharp decline in tested IQ, Poland—whose score fell from 106 in 1979 to 92 in

1989—did so amid the economic turmoil of the 1980s, when its per capita GDP also substantially

declined according to some measures, even while Western Europe was growing richer.

If these differences of perhaps 10 or even 15 IQ points between impoverished Balkan Europeans

and wealthy Western ones reflected deeply hereditary rather than transitory environmental

influences, they surely would have maintained themselves when these groups immigrated to the

United States. But there is no evidence of this. As it happens, Americans of Greek and South Slav

origins are considerably above most other American whites in both family income and educational

level. Since the overwhelming majority of the latter trace their ancestry to Britain and other high

IQ countries of Western Europe, this would seem a strange result if the Balkan peoples truly did

suffer from an innate ability deficit approaching a full standard deviation.


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Similar sharp differences occur in the case of Italian populations separated historically and

geographically. Today, Italian-Americans are very close to the national white average in income

and education, and the limited data we have seem to put their IQ close to this average as well.

This would appear consistent with the IQ figures reported for Italy by Lynn and Vanhanen, which

are based on large samples and come in at just above 100. However, there is a notoriously wide

economic gap between northern Italy and the south, including Sicily. The overwhelming majority

of Italian-Americans trace their ancestry to the latter, quite impoverished regions, and in 2010

Lynn reported new research indicating that the present-day IQ of Italians living in those areas

was as low as 89, a figure that places them almost a full standard deviation below either their

Northern Italian compatriots or their separated American cousins. Although Lynn attributed this

large deficit in Southern Italian IQ to substantial North African or Near Eastern genetic admixture,

poverty and cultural deprivation seem more likely explanations.

The Lynn/Vanhanen data on Jews also provide some suspicious IQ disparities. American Jews

have among the highest tested IQs, with means being usually reported in the 110–115 range. Yet

Lynn and Vanhanen report that Israeli Jews have strikingly low IQs by comparison. One large

sample from 1989 put the figure at 90, while a far smaller sample from 1975 indicated an IQ of

97, with both results drawn from Israel’s large Jewish majority rather than its small Arab minority.

The IQ gaps with American Jews are enormous, perhaps as large as 25 points, and difficult to

explain by genetic factors, since a majority of Israel’s Jewish population in that period consisted

of ethnic Askhenazi (European) Jews, just like those in America. The huge economic gulf between

Israeli Jews, who then had less than half the average American per capita GDP, and American

Jews, who were far above average in American income, would seem to be the most plausible

explanation.

Similarly, a large 1990 test of South African whites placed their IQ at 94, considerably below that

of the Dutch or English peoples from whom they derive, and again this may be connected to their

lower level of national income and technological advancement.

Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting this cultural rather than genetic hypothesis comes

from the northwestern corner of Europe, namely Celtic Ireland. When the early waves of Catholic

Irish immigrants reached America near the middle of the 19th century, they were widely seen as

particularly ignorant and uncouth and aroused much hostility from commentators of the era, some

of whom suggested that they might be innately deficient in both character and intelligence. But

they advanced economically at a reasonable pace, and within less than a century had become

wealthier and better educated than the average white American, including those of “old stock”

ancestry. The evidence today is that the tested IQ of the typical Irish-American—to the extent it

can be distinguished—is somewhat above the national white American average of around 100 and

also above that of most German-Americans, who arrived around the same time.


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Meanwhile, Ireland itself remained largely rural and economically backward and during the 1970s

and 1980s still possessed a real per capita GDP less than half that of the United States. Perhaps

we should not be too surprised to discover that Lynn and Vanhanen list the Irish IQ at just 93

based on two samples taken during the 1970s, a figure far below that of their Irish-American

cousins.

Even this rather low Irish IQ figure is quite misleading, since it was derived by averaging two

separately reported Irish samples. The earlier of these, taken in 1972, involved nearly 3,500 Irish

schoolchildren and is one of the largest European samples found anywhere in Lynn/Vanhanen,

while the other, taken in 1979, involved just 75 Irish adults and is one of the smallest. The mean

IQ of the large group was 87, while that of the tiny group was 98, and the Lynn/Vanhanen figure

was obtained by combining these results through straight, unweighted averaging, which seems a

doubtful approach. Indeed, a sample of 75 adults is so small it perhaps should simply be excluded

on statistical grounds, given the high likelihood that it was drawn from a single location and is

therefore unrepresentative of its nation as a whole.

So we are left with strong evidence that in the early 1970s, the Irish IQ averaged 87, the lowest

figure anywhere in Europe and a full standard deviation below than that of Irish-Americans, a

value which would seem to place a substantial fraction of Ireland’s population on the edge of

clinical mental retardation.

Lynn seems to have accepted this conclusion. The current issue of the academic journal

Personality and Individual Differences is organized as a tribute to Lynn and contains a lengthy

interview [3] in which he describes the turning points of his career, beginning with his

appointment as a research professor in Dublin. His official responsibility was to investigate the

social and economic problems of Ireland, and he soon concluded that the nation’s backwardness

was largely due to the low IQ of its people, with the only obvious solution being a strong eugenics

program, presumably including sterilization of a substantial fraction of the population. But given

the dominant influence of conservative Catholicism in Ireland, he doubted the government would

consider such suggestions, which would probably just get him “accused of being a Nazi,” so he

“chickened out” and chose to suppress his findings. A few years later, he relocated to

Protestant-run Ulster, where he felt his racial ideas might find a more receptive audience, and he

eventually became interested in whether the poverty of other countries might be due to the same

low IQ causal factor which he believed explained Ireland’s problems. This led him to the research

that culminated in the publication of IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

But Lynn’s late-1960s views regarding the mostly genetic cause of low Irish IQ seem

unwarranted. Ireland was then overwhelmingly rural and poor, with a low per capita GDP, while

Irish Americans tended to be an urban population and a reasonably affluent one, and this sharp

difference in external material conditions seems the most logical explanation for the wide

disparity in IQ results. In further support of this environmental hypothesis, we should note that it

has been estimated that nearly one-third of Australia’s population is wholly or substantially Irish


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in ancestry, with the balance mostly British, while the IQ results Lynn and Vanhanen report for

Australia are all very close to the British average of 100.

The gathering of social science data, including national IQs, is fraught with difficulty, notably due

to sampling problems, and two or three anomalous results might be explained away for those

reasons. But the large number of examples cited above in which genetically indistinguishable

European-ancestry populations show enormous variations in tested IQ seems to indicate a much

broader difficulty. Not only are the results too numerous to be ascribed to chance error, but they

follow a consistent pattern of their own, with European-ancestry groups living in affluent,

well-developed countries almost invariably having IQ scores of around 100 or above, while their

close kinsmen in much poorer regions have far lower scores. Indeed, in several of these cases,

the countries and peoples are identical, being merely separated by a generation or less of local

economic development.

To a small extent, Lynn and Vanhanen acknowledge the possible importance of non-genetic

factors, and they devote a few pages to a discussion of the impact of health, nutrition, and

education on IQ scores. But they never provide any clear estimate for the magnitude of these

influences and claim that a number of twin or adoption studies have determined that IQ is 80

percent or more heritable. Their text seems to assume that genetics is the overwhelmingly

dominant factor behind the national IQ disparities which they catalogue.


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All IQ data was drawn from Lynn/Vanhanen. The per capita

GDP figures are obtained from the World Bank and adjusted

for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) if available;

otherwise being marked with an asterisk. Much of this

economic data, especially for non-convertible East Bloc

currencies before 1989, is somewhat uncertain and should

be used only for rough comparative purposes.

Questioning the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”

The central thesis of Lynn and Vanhanen’s work might be called the “Strong IQ Hypothesis,”

namely that IQ accurately reflects intelligence, that IQ is overwhelmingly determined by genetics,

and that IQ is subject to little or no significant cultural or economic influence after we adjust for

the universal Flynn Effect. Since the IQ disparities discussed above seem to provide a powerful

challenge to this theory, their validity has sometimes been disputed on the grounds that the

populations being compared might actually be more dissimilar than we realize due to the impact

of selective migration.

For example, one might speculate that the smarter Irish immigrated to America, while their

dimmer relatives remained at home, and the same was also true for the smarter Southern

Italians, Greeks, or other Balkan Europeans. Similarly, perhaps the smarter European Jews

crossed the oceans to New York Harbor in the years before World War I, while their dimmer

relatives stayed behind and later moved to Israel after World War II.

These explanations seem quite unlikely. The intra-ethnic IQ gaps being discussed are absolutely

enormous—often approaching a full standard deviation or more—and that would imply a similarly

enormous gap between the portions of the population that stayed and those that emigrated, with

no contemporaneous source seeming to provide any indication of this. Indeed, during the period

when these immigrant flows were occurring, most American observers emphasized the

remarkable backwardness of the new arrivals and often speculated that they were intrinsically

defective and might constitute a permanent burden to society. If anything, it was sometimes

suggested that they were less intelligent than their stay-at-home co-ethnics and had come to

America because they were unable to compete at home, hence their description as the so-called

“wretched refuse from a teeming shore.”

The limited ethnic IQ data we have from that period support this impression. In his 1978 book

American Ethnic Groups, Thomas Sowell included a chapter that summarized the 1920s data on

the average IQ scores of various Eastern and Southern European immigrant groups and showed

that these were generally quite low, with Slovaks at 85.6, Greeks at 83, Poles at 85, Spaniards at

78, and Italians ranging between 78 and 85 in different studies. A separate analysis of the


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aptitude scores of World War I draftees published in 1923 came to similar conclusions. These

published IQ studies by prominent academics led to widespread belief that the more recent

European immigrant groups were much less intelligent than earlier ones and might drag down the

national average, a belief that may have contributed to passage of the highly restrictive 1924

Immigration Act.

Even if we ignore all contemporaneous evidence and argue that 19th century European

immigrants to America and elsewhere somehow constituted the IQ elite of their originating

countries, the theory of selective migration still remains implausible. It has long been established

on both theoretical and empirical grounds that IQ scores generally follow a mean-reversion

pattern, in which the children of outlying individuals tend to regress toward the typical levels of

their larger population or ethnic group. So even if we hypothesize that the Irish, South Italians,

Jews, and Greeks who immigrated to America constituted the smartest small slice of their

generation—rather than, as seems more likely, often the poorer and most miserable—roughly half

their relative IQ advantage would have dissipated after a single generation. Thus, the apparent

one standard deviation gap between American Irish and Ireland Irish a few decades ago would

have required an initial gap of something closer to two standard deviations at the time the

immigration occurred, a difference so large as to be totally implausible.

Furthermore, the most recent 2009 PISA international student academic tests sponsored by the

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provide us with results that raise

further doubts about the correctness of the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ scores from a wide range of

European countries. For example, although Croatia and Austria are geographically quite close,

Croatians had IQs 12 points lower when their country was desperately poor just after World War

II; yet today their overall PISA scores are not enormously lower, and are actually higher in

reading, even though Croatia’s average income is still lower by a factor of two. During the early

1970s, a huge national sample had placed the Ireland IQ at 87, the lowest in all of Europe, but

today Ireland’s PISA scores are about average for the continent and roughly the same as those for

France and Britain, while Irish per capita incomes have pulled a little ahead.

The subject of race and IQ is an extremely contentious one, and over the years there have

sometimes been conflicting accusations that data presented by various academics and other

experts were more or less fraudulent, fabricated for ideological reasons. This does appear to be

true in the case of Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most widely quoted figures on the subject of IQ.

Therefore, if the often anomalous IQ figures discussed above had been provided by any strong

critic of IQ as an innate measure of intellectual ability, I would be extremely cautious in accepting

them without exhaustive verification of the underlying sources.

But our situation is different. Lynn and Vanhanen rank among the most prominent academic

advocates of a strongly genetic basis for IQ scores, and this indeed represents the summary


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conclusion that they draw from the vast amount of national IQ data they have collected and

presented. They are unlikely to have skewed the data against their own ideological beliefs and

theoretical hypothesis.

Yet an objective review of the Lynn/Vanhanen data almost completely discredits the

Lynn/Vanhanen “Strong IQ Hypothesis.” If so many genetically-indistinguishable European

populations—of roughly similar cultural and historical background and without severe nutritional

difficulties—can display such huge variances in tested IQ across different decades and locations,

we should be extremely cautious about assuming that other ethnic IQ differences are innate

rather than environmental, especially since these may involve populations separated by far wider

cultural or nutritional gaps.

We cannot rule out the possibility that different European peoples might have relatively small

differences in innate intelligence or IQ—after all, these populations often differ in height and

numerous other phenotypic traits. But this residual genetic element would explain merely a small

fraction of the huge 10–15 point IQ disparities discussed above. Such a view might be

characterized as the “Weak IQ Hypothesis”: huge IQ differences between large populations may

be overwhelmingly due to cultural or socio-economic factors, but a residual component might

indeed be genetic in origin.

We are now faced with a mystery arguably greater than that of IQ itself. Given the powerful

ammunition that Lynn and Vanhanen have provided to those opposing their own “Strong IQ

Hypothesis,” we must wonder why this has never attracted the attention of either of the warring

camps in the endless, bitter IQ dispute, despite their alleged familiarity with the work of these two

prominent scholars. In effect, I would suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn and

Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither

of the competing ideological teams ever noticed.

Presumably, human psychology is the underlying explanation for this mysterious and even

amusing silence. Given that Lynn and Vanhanen rank as titans of the racial-difference camp,

perhaps their ideological opponents, who often come from less quantitative backgrounds, are

reluctant even to open the pages of their books, fearful lest the vast quantity of data within prove

that the racialist analysis is factually correct after all. Meanwhile, the pro-racialist elements may

simply skim over the hundreds of pages of dry and detailed quantitative evidence and skip to the

summary text, which claims that the data demonstrate IQ is genetically fixed and determines

which nations will be rich and which will be poor.

Implications for the American Immigration Debate

This lack of attention to the actual data provided by Lynn and Vanhanen has seriously impaired

many important public-policy discussions. The widespread belief in the innate mental inferiority of


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Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups may have played a significant role in the 1920s

immigration debate, and it seems plausible that similar perspectives might be at work today. For

example, sharp critics of our heavy recent immigration from Mexico sometimes claim—or at least

hint—that the intellectual weakness of these millions of newcomers may constitute a disastrous

long-term burden to American society. On anonymous Internet forums such voices are often more

explicit and directly cite Lynn and Vanhanen in placing the Mexican IQ at just 87, far below the

white American average, and a worrisome indicator given that as much as one-quarter of all

Americans may be of Mexican ancestry by around the middle of this century.

The IQ figure of 87 that they quote from Lynn/Vanhanen is correct, though admittedly based on a

single 1961 study of Mexican schoolchildren in the most impoverished southern part of that

country. But such critics always fail to notice that a much larger and more recent study of Irish

schoolchildren revealed precisely the same mean IQ of 87. So the most accurate representation

of the facts presented in IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that Mexicans and Irish seem to have

approximately the same intellectual ability, and since Irish have generally done well in American

society, there seems no particular reason to assume that Mexicans will not.

But is this apparent equality of Mexican and Irish IQs several decades ago anything more than a

statistical anomaly due to insufficiently thorough testing? Despite its recent economic problems,

over the last couple of decades Ireland has become one of the best educated countries in Europe,

with solid international PISA scores, and it seems almost certain that Irish IQs have rapidly

converged toward the European mean. Indeed, two additional studies provided by Lynn and

Vanhanen in their 2006 sequel, IQ and Global Inequality, seem to indicate that by 1993 the

average Irish IQ had already risen to 92.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of Mexican-Americans have lived in the United States with its far

higher standard of living for decades, and we must wonder whether they have demonstrated any

similar rise in IQ. Lynn and Vanhanen provide some early 1970s studies for Mexican-American

children living in Texas and California and the IQ scores were generally quite dismal, similar to

those from Mexico itself. Surely, if Mexican-Americans had subsequently demonstrated a large

rise in tested intelligence, the American media and ethnic-advocacy groups would have widely

trumpeted such a fact.

Strangely enough, strong evidence of such an IQ rise does exist, but it has been ignored by our

often oblivious national media. Among the most useful sources of detailed quantitative data in

America is the General Social Survey (GSS), a huge sociological survey conducted every other

year, in which tens of thousands of Americans have been subjected to a wide range of detailed

questions and their responses made publicly available over the Internet. One regular item in the

survey is the simple “Wordsum” vocabulary identification test, which, although quite crude, turns

out to be heavily g-loaded, correlating 0.71 with the results of standard IQ tests. Such a

correlation is at least as good as many other measures used to estimate population-wide

intelligence, and probably superior to grades or graduation rates, while the vast GSS sample size


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provides a statistically valid means of discerning American trends and patterns in population

segments too narrow for other sources.

Analyzing this GSS data set in a variety of different ways has become a favored activity of a

blogger named Ron Guhname, who styles himself “The Inductivist” and every couple of days

publishes a new finding on his website. In 2008, he decided to explore the Wordsum-implied IQ of

American-born Mexican-Americans and discovered a remarkable result [4]. These IQs were quite

low, 84–85, in the 1970s and 1980s, a result consistent with the IQ samples reported by

Lynn/Vanhanen for that era. But the Mexican-American IQ then jumped 7 points by the 1990s and

an additional 3 points by the 2000s, a rise of 10 full points in just 20 years, while the Wordsum-

implied IQ values for white Americans rose merely 2 points during that same period, presumably

as an aspect of the regular Flynn Effect.

In actual values, the Mexican-American Wordsum-IQ increased from 84.4 in the 1980s to 95.1 in

the 2000s, while the rise for American whites was from 99.2 to 101.3. In addition, the late 1990s

IQ of U.S.-born Mexican-Americans has been separately estimated at 92.4 from the large data

set contained in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), a figure consistent with

these Wordsum-IQ findings.

Thus, almost two-thirds of the IQ gap between American-born Mexican-Americans and whites

disappeared in two decades, with these results being based on nationally-representative

American samples of statistically significant size. Since Guhname is a right-wing blogger quite

hostile to Hispanic immigration, it is to his credit that he published this result without hesitation,

and to the embarrassment of America’s vast multicultural academic and media establishment that

they had never independently discovered these important findings, nor indeed even noticed them

once they appeared. In any event, it appears that Mexican-American IQs in America have been

rising about as rapidly as Irish IQs seem to have risen in Europe.

But does this make any sense? During the 25 years between 1982 and 2007 the real per capita

Irish GDP more than tripled, passing that of Britain, Germany, and France, while during this same

period our national media have tended to emphasize the terrible economic difficulties endured by

Mexican-Americans, rarely providing any indications of a major economic boom in that

population. If Mexican-Americans—now numbering almost 35 million and well on their way to

eventually surpassing Anglo-Saxons in number—had actually experienced rapid economic gains,

surely our media would not have ignored such an important story?

I read several major newspapers closely each morning and am particularly interested in

immigration-related news items, but on October 1, 2007, I was stunned to read a short New York

Times opinion column by Douglas Besharov [5], a social scientist at the University of Maryland,

which provided exactly such evidence. His U.S. Census-CPS numbers were based on Hispanics as

a whole, but Mexicans and closely related Meso-American immigrant groups from Central America

account for the vast majority of this population, so his results should mostly be applicable.


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Besharov noted that in just the 12 years from 1994 to 2006, the poverty rate among Hispanics

had dropped by fully one-third, plummeting from 30.7 percent to 20.6 percent, while the

percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue-collar jobs had more than doubled, rising from 11

percent to 25 percent. Meanwhile, median Hispanic real household income rose by 20 percent and

individual real income by 30 percent. Education advancement was also significant, with the

percentage of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanics without high-school diplomas or G.E.D.s falling from

44 percent to 34 percent, while college enrollment rose from 19 percent to 25 percent. All these

latter numbers are still considerably below those of the comparable white population, but they do

indicate remarkable economic and social advancement in just a dozen years.

Furthermore, they certainly understate the real rate of such progress, perhaps by a very

substantial factor. The years 1994–2006 represented a period of peak immigration levels from

Latin America—with most of this flow being illegal and low-skilled—a wave contributing nearly half

the growth of the Hispanic population, which rose from 25 million to almost 45 million. Although

the Census data do not allow us to disentangle the economic performance of these new arrivals

from the previously established or American-born Hispanic segment, it is certain that the socio-

economic advancement figures cited by Besharov would have been enormously better if not for

the inclusion of so many additional millions of initially-impoverished newcomers, often with weak

language skills and almost always concentrated near the bottom of the labor market. So

Besharov’s extremely encouraging picture must underestimate the actual performance of

American-born Hispanics.

The severe recession of the last few years has seen the average American family lose 40 percent

of its net worth, and Hispanics have similarly lost a portion of their previous economic gains, but

meanwhile their rapid educational advances have continued and even accelerated. An indicator of

this sense of progress is revealed in an April survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, which found that

75 percent of Hispanics believe that they can get ahead if they work hard, a figure far above the

58 percent average for the general American public.

America’s socio-economic landscape has been reshaped dramatically over the last century or

more due to technological and social changes, reducing some opportunities while increasing

others, so direct historical comparisons can be misleading. Furthermore, detailed economic

stratification data along ethnic lines from a hundred years ago is not easily available. But based

on the raw numerical data we do possess, it seems likely that the tens of millions of Hispanics

living in America in the early 1990s probably advanced more rapidly in economic and educational

terms than had any of America’s large European immigrant groups of the past, such as the Irish,

the Italians, the Jews, or the Slavs. Such real-world gains seem quite consistent with the very

rapid rise in apparent IQ discussed above, which occurred during this same time period.

Given the existence of large and influential Hispanic-friendly institutions such as the Ford

Foundation and the New York Times, it seems almost inexplicable that such dramatically positive

developments received virtually no media attention. This silence has surely led much of the


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national electorate incorrectly to assume that little if any Hispanic progress was occurring,

sometimes with unfortunate political consequences.

IQ Puzzles and a Super-Flynn Effect?

This strong empirical evidence of the apparent malleability of IQ scores raises interesting

questions about the possible mechanism involved. For example, during the 1960s and 1970s there

was a great deal of excitement in elite circles about the role of Head Start-type enrichment

programs in dramatically raising the academic performance and the IQ scores of impoverished

groups; but the overall evidence seems to be that these failed over the long run, with students

regressing to their previous ability levels just a few years after leaving the program.

Similarly, much of the evidence accumulated by the leading advocates of the innateness of IQ,

such as the Pioneer Fund, comes from twin adoption studies, which seem to show that individuals’

IQ and personality traits are far closer to those of their fraternal or (especially) identical twins

raised apart than to unrelated foster siblings or parents, and this pattern of similarity grows

steadily stronger over time. Not unreasonably, many psychometric experts have argued that

these results prove that IQ is largely determined by genetic factors and cannot be changed via

environmental influences within any normal range. Lynn and Vanhanen cite several of these

studies to argue that IQ is at least 80 percent hereditary.

These individual results, usually based on relatively small statistical samples of adopted twins or

siblings, seemingly demonstrate the extreme rigidity of IQ—the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”—while we

have also seen the numerous examples above of large populations whose IQs have drastically

shifted over relatively short periods of time. How can these contradictory findings be squared? I

do not have the solution, but it would seem a very worthwhile subject for further research, on

both theoretical and practical grounds.

This scientific puzzle probably has a close connection to the well-known Flynn Effect, first widely

publicized by Lynn, which describes the consistent, regular rise in nominal IQs for populations

almost everywhere in the world: Englishmen or Frenchmen today do far better on IQ tests than

did their parents or grandparents, although we have no reason to believe they are much

“smarter” in any meaningful sense. There has been considerable speculation that this general rise

in IQ-test performance is based on the increasingly complex and technological environment

surrounding us, whose intricacies constantly train all of us in the sort of mental abstractions found

in most IQ tests, thereby gradually raising our test scores without necessarily raising our

intelligence. In effect, life in modern urban societies has become a daily cram-course for IQ tests.

Many pre-modern cultures similarly required individuals to undertake considerable feats of

memory, so people back then might have excelled on memory-based tests compared to their

counterparts today, who do not have the same benefits of daily practice.

If we consider the low scoring Balkan and Eastern European populations listed in the table above,


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most of them seem to live in countries which were far more rural and agricultural than their

higher-scoring counterparts. This was certainly also true of Ireland 40 years ago, when its scores

were quite low, and this situation would tend to apply as well to Mexican-Americans, who were a

much more heavily rural population prior to the 1970s.

Some support for a significant rural/urban factor behind IQ scores may be seen in the curiously

inverted pattern of apparent ethnic success between Europe and America. In the recent past the

highest European IQ scores were generally found in northern countries such as Britain, Germany,

and the Netherlands, while the lowest ones occurred in Ireland, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Southern

Italy, and during the early 20th century this pattern was replicated among those same immigrant

ethnic groups in America. Yet strangely enough, if we stratify the recent American GSS results by

primary European ethnic origin, we find nearly the opposite result for Wordsum-IQ, years of

education, and family income. Among the higher performing white American groups are the Irish,

the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, and the Italians, while Americans of Dutch extraction are near the

bottom for whites, as are oldstock Americans who no longer identify with any European country

but are presumably British in main ancestry. Meanwhile, German-Americans are generally at or

slightly below the white American average.

This pattern of apparently inverted white ethnic achievement in Europe and America becomes less

mysterious when we discover it tracks quite well with the rural vs. urban divide. Two of the most

heavily rural, least urbanized groups are the Dutch-Americans and Old Stock whites, which

perform the worst, while the high-performing Italians, Greeks, and Yugoslavs are among the most

heavily urbanized. German-Americans are slightly less urbanized than the average white and also

tend to perform slightly below average. In fact, across all non-Hispanic American whites, the

Wordsum-IQ gap between those who grew up on farms and those who grew up in cities or

suburbs is nearly as large as the gap separating American blacks and whites, and even larger with

regard to total years of education.

[6]The origin of this inversion of ethnic hierarchies may be quite

simple. When desperately poor immigrant groups such as the Irish,

Italians, or Greeks arrived on our shores, they were unable to afford

farmland, and therefore permanently remained in their East Coast

cities of landing, while less-poor Germans might move to the Midwest

and become farmers, following the agricultural choice made by many

of the earliest frontier settlers derived from the British and the Dutch.

So the more rural populations from Europe often became the more

urban ones in America, leading to a gradual inversion of their relative

IQ rankings.

If we combine this apparent rural/urban achievement pattern with the

evidence of the Flynn Effect, we might speculate that scoring well on

an IQ test tends to require a certain amount of “mental priming” or complex stimulation while


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Sidebar

The East Asian Exception to

Socio-Economic IQ Influences

[7]

growing up and that in the past such stimulation tended to be lacking in poor rural areas

compared with more urban, affluent, or industrial ones. Obviously, working on a farm in a less

developed country carries its own complexity, but it could be that the mental skills exercised are

far less applicable to the strongly abstract and analytical thinking required on an IQ test.

This might help to explain the enormous variance in test scores recorded in individual European

countries better than the chance possibility that large tested samples overwhelmingly consisted of

especially bright or especially dim individuals. Based on this data, the hypothesized

developmental impact of a lack of sufficient mental stimulation might be to reduce tested IQs by

as much as 10–15 points. And once this socio-cultural environment substantially changes—as in

the case of the Irish or Mexican-Americans—what might be called a “Super-Flynn Effect” can

occur, involving a very rapid rise in nominal IQs. Obviously, all of this is quite speculative and

warrants further investigation.

Interestingly enough, these rapid rises in IQ due to

changes in the general socio-economic environment

appear completely absent when we examine the

international or domestic IQ data for East Asian

populations [7], for whom even tenfold differences in real

per capita GDP seem to have little or no impact on IQ.

Missing this unexpected contrast between the impact of socio-economic factors on Europeans and

on East Asians may have been a major reason that Lynn and Vanhanen failed to notice the serious

flaws in their “Strong IQ Hypothesis.”

None of these findings would have been possible without the great scholarly effort Richard Lynn

and Tatu Vanhanen put into locating and properly presenting an enormous quantity of

international IQ data in their books and research papers, as well as their courage in focusing

attention on such highly controversial topics. Although I would argue that a close examination of

the Lynn/Vanhanen data tend to convincingly refute their own “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” I would be

the first to acknowledge my gratitude to the scholars whose efforts made my own analysis

possible. Meanwhile, individuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, who commit outright academic fraud

in support of their ideological positions, do enormous damage to the credibility of their own camp.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org [8].

105 Comments To "Race, IQ, and Wealth"

#1 Comment By reflectionephemeral On July 17, 2012 @ 9:54 am

It seems more plausible that most of the large and consistent IQ gaps between WesternEuropeans and their Balkan cousins are less a cause than a consequence of differences indevelopment and affluence during the era in which these IQs were tested.

Along with this come changes in cultural practices. I probably do a whole lot better on


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standardized tests than my Irish great great grandfathers would have done. But I grew up in ahome filled with books, went to public schools with kids whose parents were also well-educatedprofessionals. So those exams test for stuff that I’m primed & wired to understand. Identifyingweaknesses in the author’s argument in a passage was probably a less important & culturallyvalued skill in rural 1830s County Cork. IQ is shaped by individuals’ experiences in a culturalcontext. When we shift the context, we shift how individuals grow.

huge IQ differences between large populations may be overwhelmingly due to cultural or socio-economic factors, but a residual component might indeed be genetic in origin.

Maybe. And it’s great to learn more about that for knowledge’s sake. But given that we know howmalleable IQ is, I’m not sure there could be much policy use to that information. Other than“economic development is good”, but I think we’re on that anyway.

#2 Comment By cw On July 18, 2012 @ 1:57 am

There are all kinds of factors that might affect how groups of people perform on IQ tests. Somehave to do with brain development such as nutrition, the amount of positive speech directed atthe young child, and the amount of positive touch. We know for sure that mental growth can beenormously stunted due to extreme malnutrition and extreme isolation of the infant (such assometimes happens in large orphanges). It is reasonable to think that less extreme deficits alsohave an effect. It is also easy to identify populations that are less well nourished and have lessnuturing parenting styles.

There are also factors affecting older children and adults that could lower group IQ. Attitudestowards academics, for instance. If you come from a culture that doesn’t value academics itseems less likely that you would try hard on an IQ test. Stress is another factor. If you are underenvironmental stress–your family is broke, you parents abuse drugs or alcohol, yourneighborhood is unsafe, your home is unsafe, etc–it also seems less likely that you would caremuch about an IQ test. THese are just a few examples.

Again it is easy to identify groups that as a whole value education less and experience morestress than other groups.

#3 Comment By Gian On July 18, 2012 @ 5:09 am

“they found a strong correlation of around 0.50–0.75 between the Flynn-adjusted IQ of a nation’spopulation and its real per capita GDP”

One thing I never found addressed is whether the correlation was adjusted for the nationalpopulation?. Did they accord the same weight to 1.2 Billion plus India and 1.3 Billion plus China asthey accorded to 0.1 million Iceland?

#4 Comment By Mohammadreza On July 18, 2012 @ 5:16 am

Thanks for this very informative article. I always wondered about this excessive obsession withnumbers, especially when they are used to measure un-measurable things like intelligence. IQshould have been discredited and abandoned many years ago.

#5 Comment By NGPM On July 18, 2012 @ 6:56 am

A very interesting, well-conceived and well-written piece of work in general.

However, I think it is rigged just a bit against the biological side of IQ. This is understandable as itis a swing the other way against the work of people who seem predisposed to biologicaldeterminism, but I’d like to add some firsthand insight that might help us swing back to a happyequilibrium. For a living, I coach people trying to improve their GMAT or SAT scores, both of whichare highly correlated (though not perfectly) with IQ. Most of my clients have been from fairlyupscale families or skilled professions, and while most of them have been from Europe (where I


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live), I have coached people from all six inhabited continents and over 30 different countries. So Ihave worked on the higher half of the IQ spectrum and probably 95 percent of my clients havehad IQs of 110 or higher.

My experience is that achieving the highest scores possible on these tests (the kind that the IvyLeague and company like to see) is possible for some and not for others. Offhand I’d say IQthreshold seems to be somewhere between 120 and 130 (the tests aren’t always as precise assome people like to think, but they are nevertheless more consistent and more useful than otherscontend) as to whether a given candidate is capable of achieving a Harvard-worthy score. I cantell you that while educational and environmental factors play a huge role in mediating where ageneral populace will play out within one standard deviation of the median (i.e., between 85 and115), biology matters A LOT when it comes to numbers above or below that range.

In other words, there seems to be a biological element to whether a person will be retarded(below 70), non-very-bright (below 85), ‘normal’ (between 85 and 115) giftedness/genius (115 to145 and above). These definitions are not to be taken as strict precisions, but let’s work withthem for now. The main point is that biology does seem to determine what IQ range a person iscapable of achieving (short a serious trauma or miracle) within a 15-point margin of error that isdetermined by environment and education.

Is this important? Highly. The architects of high culture and civilization historically have almostinvariably come from the specific echelons of the population (i.e., the nobility or the hautebourgeoisie, who together represented and still represent the top 1 to 2 percent of theirrespective societies). It is notable that the analyses of IQ in question concern only the impact withregards to nationalities and not to social classes or, as we call them in France, estates. It wouldbe interesting to see such a comparison at work. However, my personal experience is that peopleof noble or high bourgeois stock in French society (I do pay attention to this) are generally thoughnot exclusively (despite all having uniform educational levels in similar institutions) the quickerand more easily adaptable thinkers. This means that cultural creativity potential IS in factcorrelated with biological factors that contribute to IQ potential.

So this begs the question: how much have the Irish contributed to American high culture? Whatare the proportion of Irish surnames, of English surnames, of German surnames, of Italiansurnames, of French surnames in the great works of American literature? Idem for the Mexicans.After all, the Irish, Italians and Mexicans who came to the U.S. tended to hail from the poorestsectors of their respective society. Idem for the Québécois, although the founding upper classes inAmerica did count considerable French stock among them. Yes, there is variation in all populationgroups, so in a band of simple peasants or proletariats you will occasionally find a genius or afamily of geniuses (one of my brightest students has been a practicing Muslim female fromSénégal), but if they do not dissipate in the “regression towards the mean” they often moveupward in society.

My insinuation is that while Mexican-American IQ may rise over time and help them to integrate,it is still questionable whether they will make positive contributions to American culture if theylack the substance material to produce geniuses. As for assimilating the positive culture ofsuperiors, they do much better in Mexico than they do in the U.S., not the least because of theirphenotypes. The Irish, of course, are more difficult to tell apart from the Anglo-Saxons and areeasier to absorb into the masses.

#6 Comment By MG On July 18, 2012 @ 8:12 am

The notion that Culture determines IQ is absurd! How do I know this? From my personalexperience and observation. I was born in Poland in a very conservativeenvironment(home/school/city/country) in Poland everything is conservative btw. however my‘fault’ was I thought for my self and asked inconvenient questions at home at school etc. so I wasostracized not for being bad just for asking questions I rebelled and left Poland(as soon as Icould) disowned my family and everybody I knew. I Choose my culture and people around me,this has also been the case with many other emigrants(from different countries and backgrounds)


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I have met. So No, Culture does not determine your IQ it’s the other way around, high IQ andpersonality(which you are born with) determine who you are not the geographic location youwhere born at.

As the old saying goes ‘You cannot fix stupid’ and stupid is mostly determined at birth.

#7 Comment By Peter Schaeffer On July 18, 2012 @ 8:48 am

The discussion of IQ and the mutability of IQ is, at best, a distraction. The practical questionfacing the United States is achievement. In other words, how well will the children andgrandchildren of today’s low-skill immigrants perform in America’s society. We have lots ofevidence on this point and it’s anything but positive. From

“The Congealing Pot – Today’s immigrants are different from waves past”

“They’re not just like the Irish — or the Italians or the Poles, for that matter. The large influx ofHispanic immigrants after 1965 represents a unique assimilation challenge for the United States.Many optimistic observers have assumed — incorrectly, it turns out — that Hispanic immigrantswill follow the same economic trajectory European immigrants did in the early part of the lastcentury. Many of those Europeans came to America with no money and few skills, but their statussteadily improved. Their children outperformed them, and their children’s children were oftenindistinguishable from the “founding stock.” The speed of economic assimilation varied somewhatby ethnic group, but three generations were typically enough to turn “ethnics” into plain oldAmericans.

This would be the preferred outcome for the tens of millions of Hispanic Americans, who aresignificantly poorer and less educated on average than native whites. When immigration skepticsquestion the wisdom of importing so many unskilled people into our nation at one time, the mostcommon response cites the remarkable progress of Europeans a century ago. “People used to saythe Irish or the Poles would always be poor, but look at them today!” For Hispanics, we are led tobelieve, the same thing will happen.

But that claim isn’t true. Though about three-quarters of Hispanics living in the U.S. today areeither immigrants or the children of immigrants, a significant number have roots here going backmany generations. We have several ways to measure their intergenerational progress, and theresults leave little room for optimism about their prospects for assimilation.”

“The children of Hispanic immigrants (the second generation) actually stay in school much longerand earn a considerably higher wage than their parents. In fact, the Hispanic rate of assimilationfrom the first to the second generation is only slightly lower than the assimilation rate of moresuccessful groups of immigrants. Most second-generation Hispanics make up nearly as muchground as the children of European immigrants would if they grew up in the same disadvantagedsituation.

But the good news ends there, and two problems arise. First, the second generation still does notcome close to matching the socioeconomic status of white natives. Even if Hispanics were to keepclimbing the ladder each generation, their assimilation would be markedly slower than that ofother groups. But even that view is overly optimistic, because of the second, larger problem withHispanic assimilation: It appears to stall after the second generation. We see little further ladder-climbing from the grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants. They do not rise out of the lower class.”


Mohammedreza’s comment, like the words of Charles Kenny, betrays an “obvious lack offamiliarity with the technical questions” at hand. Naturally the Philistines who make such blanketstatements as “IQ should have been discredited and abandoned many years ago” know next tonothing about psychometrics, certainly not any more (and in many cases a great deal less) thanrace-baiting biological determinists.


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IQ is not everything, but it is not nothing, either, unless you want to argue that humanobservation is incapable of hierarchizing human intelligence. I don’t think there is any grounds forbelieving that is the case. A genius, a reasonably intelligent fellow, an average fellow, a cretinand a retard all have obvious distinctions from one to the other.

Otherwise, logically, there would be absolutely no grounds for universities rejecting applicationseven on the basis of low G.P.A.s, which reflect both work ethic and test scores. (And while I amdefinitely among those who believes the core populace to be drastically over-schooled, highereducation has a definite place in society and the people who accede to such institutions should bethe exceptionally intellectually talented or cultured.)

Trained psychometricians know that raw IQ as a number has its limitations and its imprecisionsand they are rarely biological determinists. Nevertheless, its strong positive correlative propertyto many other salutary aspects of human life is certainly evidence in its favor.

It is good to wonder. Wonder and search. Keep wondering, keep searching, and keep refining.Otherwise, it is dangerous to make ex cathedra pronunciations on the assumption that one articlein one periodical, however meritous it might be – and this article certainly has merit – has the lastword.

#9 Comment By JL On July 18, 2012 @ 9:06 am

It is not a worthwhile exercise to single out individual samples for any nation from Lynn andVanhanen’s data. They report aggregated results from many studies precisely to decreasemeasurement error. Unz thinks that he can refute Lynn and Vanhanen by demonstrating that thenational IQ for the same nation varies considerably when looking at data from different years butwhat this exercise actually demonstrates is that when you add measurement error, i.e., noise, todata, the results become less reliable.

Lynn and Vanhanen would be the first to admit that their data contain lots of noise. The data theyuse are based on a wide range of different tests and sampling strategies, while the Flynn effectadjustments they make are by necessity very rough, sometimes in fact leading to less accurateestimates than those that would have been obtained without adjustment. By aggregating severalsamples for each country, Lynn and Vanhanen make their IQ estimates much more reliable thanthe individual studies they use are. This is based on the psychometric true score theory; it would

useful for Unz to read [9] by Rushton et al. on the principle of aggregation.

One interesting fact is that because of the noisiness of Lynn and Vanhanen’s data, the correlationsthey report between national IQs and economic and social outcomes are systematicallyunderestimated. If they had more reliable data, the correlations would be even higher.

While the reported IQ differences between European nations are small and generally notstatistically significant, Ireland and the Balkan region tend to score lower than the rest of Europe.This is apparent in the PISA results, too, and it would be even more salient if we controlled for thesizable low-IQ non-white populations that many Western Europeans countries have.

#10 Comment By Peter Schaeffer On July 18, 2012 @ 9:37 am

An important and related point is that prior waves of immigrants were able to successfullyassimilate for any number of reasons. By far the most important, is the most obvious.

The United States ended mass immigration with restrictive laws (1917, 1921, 1924) around WWI.

Any serious effort to assimilate the current wave of immigrants has to start with the same policy.Mass immigration has to end to enable the existing immigrants to integrate (if they can).

Of course, historically America was able to assimilate immigrants for other reasons as well. Thelist includes no welfare state, strong job markets, middle class unions, disciplined education, highdemand for unskilled labor in manufacturing, intense nativist pressure to assimilate, unquestioned


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English language dominance, intact families, no multiculturalism, no bilingualism, no victimizationideology.

All of those conditions are gone…


Contra Unz, it is simply untrue that, over generations, Mexican Americans tend to converge to the

white mean in income, education, etc. Steve Sailer [10] studies that show this lack ofconvergence. Mexicans are thus clearly different from European ethnics in this respect. Similarly,while native-born Hispanics show a smaller cognitive test gap than first generation Hispanics, thisis simply due to them speaking English rather than Spanish; there are no signs of the white-Hispanic gap going away.

I also seriously doubt that the correlation between the WORDSUM and full-scale IQ scores is 0.71.That figure is apparently based on some decades-old report. Even if it was true then, rising levelsof education have probably changed it. The WORDSUM has a very low ceiling, and it useless fortesting, say, college graduates.

#12 Comment By Richard On July 18, 2012 @ 10:25 am

“The discussion of IQ and the mutability of IQ is, at best, a distraction. The practical questionfacing the United States is achievement. In other words, how well will the children andgrandchildren of today’s low-skill immigrants perform in America’s society. ”

The point is that IQ is the best predictor of achievement.

#13 Comment By Matt On July 18, 2012 @ 10:50 am

I always found the biological determinist thesis of Lynn and Vanhanen to be a little too pat. Thereal world is not so simple as to allow boiling down a complex phenomenon like development intoa single number.

That said, if all we had were nation-states with homogenous populations, it would be one thing.Unz focuses on Mexicans, but America has another disparate population element that has beenaround for much longer and still scores consistently lower on IQ tests–and not because they grewup on farms either. It’s not just the US though; Look at the Algerians in France, the Turks inGermany, the Moroccans in Holland…we have any number of disparate populations inhabiting thesame environment to examine to see if the weak-IQ hypothesis is true.

One last point–the wordsum test is a vocabulary test, and I’m skeptical of results from apopulation notorious for not speaking English. I would expect the results of non-English speakersto be thrown out–what use would they be?


“Of course, historically America was able to assimilate immigrants for other reasons as well. Thelist includes no welfare state, strong job markets, middle class unions, disciplined education, highdemand for unskilled labor in manufacturing, intense nativist pressure to assimilate, unquestionedEnglish language dominance, intact families, no multiculturalism, no bilingualism, no victimizationideology.”

You forgot the fact that nearly all pre-1960s immigrants were of Christian/European culturalheritage and European phenotype. It’s not politically correct to say so, but that is definitely one ofthe most important factors. People who stand out in obvious ways will be looked at differently andwill feel different no matter how much pressure there is to “act” a certain way.



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“But even that view is overly optimistic, because of the second, larger problem with Hispanicassimilation: It appears to stall after the second generation. We see little further ladder-climbingfrom the grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants. They do not rise out of the lower class.”

Indeed, thank you for this. It complements what I have personally observed, that there is a “glassceiling” conferred by genetics in terms of intellectual abilities. A good education can helpmaximize one’s own potential, but not increase it.


These individual results, usually based on relatively small statistical samples of adopted twins orsiblings, seemingly demonstrate the extreme rigidity of IQ—the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”—while wehave also seen the numerous examples above of large populations whose IQs have drasticallyshifted over relatively short periods of time. How can these contradictory findings be squared?

The finding that IQ is highly heritable is not based on small samples. For example, a recent studyaffirming this high heritability had a sample of about 11,000 twin pairs from four differentcountries.

High heritability and rising scores across generations are not incompatible findings. Both can betrue. This is because heritability is a population statistic that indicates the relative importance ofgenetic and non-genetic influences in causing differences between people across a certain rangeof environments. When the range of environments changes, the phenotypic values (e.g., IQscores) may change, but the relative importance of genes and the environment across the newrange of environments may not change at all, i.e., everybody may have higher scores thanearlier, but there’s still as much variation among people as before and genes are still asimportant as ever in causing that variation. However, in the case of IQ, much of the rise in scoresmay be artefactual and not real gains in intelligence.

#17 Comment By Tom On July 18, 2012 @ 1:50 pm

If economic success is not determined by higher IQ than what is the determinant. No matter thechoice you have to ask why wasone group intelligent enough to choose and others not intelligent enough to choose it.

#18 Comment By Aaron On July 18, 2012 @ 3:38 pm

Is there really even an apparent contradiction between the stability of IQ correlations within apopulation and the fact that population means are “drastically shifted over relatively short periodsof time”? Those are two different phenomena, and the cross-correlations among siblings, etc. areof course standardized by the mean at each snapshot in time. The fact that the correlations arestable doesn’t suggest that the means are stable.

Also, to answer Gian’s question above, correlations (in this case between wealth and IQ) do notdepend on population size, so adjusting to that would be meaningless. Even if you’re just talkingabout the measurement error, population size is still irrelevant. What’s relevant to measurementerror is the sample size, not the population size, assuming that the population is much larger thanthe sample (which it is).

#19 Comment By Libertarian Realist On July 18, 2012 @ 3:41 pm

IQ is as much as 80% heritable within countries. When comparing people from different countriesto each other, there will be more variability. But the racial orderings are essentially the samewithin all countries, and that pattern of consistency can only be explained by reference toinnate differences that aren’t culturally mutable.

#20 Comment By Commenter On July 18, 2012 @ 3:51 pm

In short, the Irish are European; most Mexicans are not.


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From list:

“According to the CIA World Fact Book, Mexico is:

60% mestizo30% AmerindianLess than 10% European (mostly Spaniard)

And what is the ancestry of mestizos? Examining genetic ancestral markers, Rubén Lisker hasfound lower-income mestizos in Mexico City to be:

59% Amerindian34% European [mostly Spaniard]and 6% black”

#21 Comment By Rebecca Trotter On July 18, 2012 @ 6:23 pm

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this analysis. It has always seemed absurd to me that thereare people who want to turn to genetics as an explanation for IQ disparities without evenconsidering obvious issues of economic and culture. It is nice to see someone (particularly aconservative someone) pointing out the strong correlation between economics and IQ in the samepopulations. In light of such a strong, documented correlation between economic and IQ growth,so called “race-realists” have only their own wishful thinking to hang onto.

It occurs to me that although “race-realists” are often accused of bigotry, there is probably aslightly different motivation at work. If IQ is related to economics and opportunity, and thereexists large disparities between race groups, then the similarly large disparities in economicwell-being and opportunities becomes the main suspect. Then we might actually be morallycompelled to take these disparities seriously and work to address them. Which upsets theapplecart a lot. I think it is attachment to the idea that our current system is fair and workingpretty well that drives many people’s attachment to the “Strong IQ Theory” rather than actualbigotry.

#22 Comment By JonF On July 18, 2012 @ 6:35 pm

Re: most people have accepted that IQ scores seem to constitute a rough and measurable proxyfor this trait,

Really. I am not aware if any such agreement. In fact it’s usually agreed that a single score on asingle test is a very poor way of measuring a complex, multi-dimensional trait.I’m a bit sympathetic to arguments about intelligence, but whenever IQ rears its head I concludethat I am hearing arguments by people who scored well on that test and are royally peeved thatvast riches and overweening power have not fallen into their laps as a result.

#23 Comment By JonF On July 18, 2012 @ 6:37 pm

Re: IQ is as much as 80% heritable within countries.

IQ scores have one steadily up for all groups since the test was first introduced. Unless you thinkevolution has gone into hyper-drive that right there disproves its hereditability.

#24 Comment By NGPM On July 18, 2012 @ 6:38 pm

“It has always seemed absurd to me that there are people who want to turn to genetics as anexplanation for IQ disparities without even considering obvious issues of economic and culture.”

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

If you take the two-week-old child of a Third World couple in which both partners rank “mentally


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retarded” (but have never been brain damaged) and adopt him out him to a wealthy First Worldcouple in which both partners I.Q.s of more than 130, do you honestly believe that the child willgrow up to be anything more than a cretin?

“I think it is attachment to the idea that our current system is fair and working pretty well thatdrives many people’s attachment to the “Strong IQ Theory” rather than actual bigotry.”

Making observations about the way things are is not tantamount to LIKING such things, and evenprejudice is not the same as bigotry.

#25 Comment By TGGP On July 18, 2012 @ 6:54 pm

I would have liked to see a mention of a longitudinal study like “Generations of Exclusion”, orgenome wide assocation studies like Ian Deary’s.

#26 Comment By TGGP On July 18, 2012 @ 6:56 pm

I was going to say your discussion was still much better than average for the media, but I have toecho criticisms of your claim that the heritability studies have small samples. Sample size is notthe issue, although unrepresentative foster families may be (Turkheimer finds more of a shared-environment effect under the French adoption system).

#27 Comment By H. Dibadj On July 18, 2012 @ 8:14 pm

High IQ=Corporate/bureaucracy slaveSuccessful business owner and happy fulfilled artisans=not even interested in taking the test

Does this observation tell you anything about the artificiality of this number and the absurdity ofmeasuring humans??

#28 Comment By Andrew On July 18, 2012 @ 9:42 pm

I am wondering,so how do we explain now the obvious economic “success” of Saudi Arabia?(smirk, smirk).

@NGPM You forgot the fact that nearly all pre-1960s immigrants were of Christian/Europeancultural heritage and European phenotype. It’s not politically correct to say so, but that isdefinitely one of the most important factors.

I would add–the MOST important one.

#29 Comment By expeedee On July 18, 2012 @ 9:49 pm

Where are all the footnotes? One has to independently look at the data to confirm the facts, andthis article lacks any references to support a challenge to Lynn. This is more anecdotal and lacksacademic rigor.

#30 Comment By RT On July 18, 2012 @ 10:29 pm

JL’s comments, particularly re aggregation are spot on. Some of Lynn and Vanhanen’s datasetsare not the greatest and it is questionable whether they are representative of the populations inquestion. For instance, a fair number of their data points for European populations come from a1981 study by Buj. This study reports scores obtained from samples in the respective nations’capital cities (e.g., the score for Poland is for Warsaw, not the country as a whole; the score for“Germany” is actually for Bonn, etc.). Note that the reported scores for the Buj study tend to behigher than those from other datasets available for the countries in question. Another study theycite of questionable representativenvess is the lone data point for Italy, a study from the 1960s byTesi and Young which found an average IQ of 102 for a sample from the city of Florence, whichLynn and Vanhanen extrapolate to the entire country. Within Lynn’s European datasets, the


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norming studies by Raven and Court for their progressive matrices are probably morerepresentative than most.

The German psychologist Heiner Rindermann has demonstrated that international academicassessment tests like PISA are highly correlated with the g-factor (which is what IQ tests aremeant to measure) about as strongly as most IQ tests and are, in effect, de facto IQ tests. Hisresults from such tests are probably more representative of the countries in question than Lynnand Vanhanen’s data, though the two data sets agree closely.

Also, if my memory is correct, the IQ data for early 20th century immigrants to the US fromsouthern and eastern Europe that Unz cites from Sowell was taken from a study by H. Goddard. Ibelieve Sowell got them indirectly (maybe from Leon Kamin’s 1974 or Gould’s 1980misrepresentation of Goddard’s study). In any case, Goddard gave IQ tests to immigrants hesuspected of being retarded and found that the tests identified which ones were retarded. The lowIQs obtained by the subject groups were not intended to be representative of their populationsgenerally.

#31 Comment By Ryan On July 19, 2012 @ 4:42 am

So though there are a few outliers, all the test results of European iqs show that they all clusteraround the same area (the same is true of other races), and Mexican kids, once having thebenefit of being raised in the U.S., register scores around the bottom of the white range. I thinkthat’s about what most of us in the hbd crowd expected.

Where did you get this data on a European inversion in the U.S.?

Also, it’s simply not true that Irish-Americans earn more than the general white population.According to the 2010 Census, they earn the least of the big five (English, Irish, Italian, Polish,and German). And are the most likely to be on welfare. Their incomes are not much better thanthe Irish, likely due to geography, but on all other social indicators, English-Americans score thebest of these five, and the Irish the worst. My guess is that this (pretty small) difference probablydoes not have much to do with the difference between Anglo and Celtic genetics. Instead, I thinkits that downscale Anglos tend to record their ethnicity as American, and low-class whites of allkinds like to call themselves Irish.

#32 Comment By RLD On July 19, 2012 @ 7:36 am

Gould was not a Marxist. And to suggest that if his calculations on skull size were wrong (since henever was given access to the collection) means that his theoretical and mathematical objectionsto certain applications of IQ are therefore incorrect simply shows a childish bias on the part of theauthor.

#33 Comment By Sean Gillhoolley On July 19, 2012 @ 8:41 am

There is no correlation between IQ and success, so I think we need to stop refering to IQ. It is auseless metric.

#34 Comment By Bill On July 19, 2012 @ 9:19 am

I’m skeptical of Unz’s dependence on Wordsum scores when comparing European ethnic groups inthe US, as well as his dependence on the Urban-Rural divide to explain IQ gaps.

Wordsum is basically a vocabulary test. And while, overall, vocabulary correlates withintelligence, it’s easy to see how it could distort results, overstating or understating differences,when comparing subsets of the population. Ironically, it is probably far easier to distort throughenvironment/culture than standard IQ.

As for the urban-rural explanation, it pretty much provides zero explanation for the White-BlackIQ gap, which seems to be the at the center of the most vexing social issues in the US. After all,


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blacks are more likely to live in urban areas than whites, yet have a significantly lower IQ.

Turning to the issue of Hispanic immigration, the culture/genetics dichotomy matters little if thereis little pressure to assimilate. To be fair, I would probably say that the biggest cultural problemHispanics have is on the Spanish side of their heritage (look at Spain today). This cultureencourages corruption and irresponsibility, and has contributed to poverty wherever it has beenprevalent. That crime rates actually rise among second-generation Hispanics does speak well forthe “Assimilation conquers all” hypothesis.

If the US government safety net, by shielding people from the worst consequences of a franklyinferior (at least in terms of producing a healthy civil society) culture, effectively rewards thatculture, what incentive exists to assimilate to the far less fun Northern European/Puritan culturethat has influenced most non-Hispanic Whites? In addition, there is a reward (in the form ofaffirmative action) for accentuating one’s Hispanicness, providing a positive disincentive toassimilate. In the current conditions, there is practically no reason to expect that Hispanics willassimilate to non-Hispanic white norms.

And of course, if culture can change quickly for the better, it can also change quickly for theworse, as David Starkey pointed out when he said that many white British youth had “becomeblack” culturally. If the clannishness and irresponsibility of lower-class Latino culture in the US isrewarded, is it not possible that non-Hispanic whites might adopt these behaviors, effectivelymagnifying their effect?

#35 Comment By Neil Craig On July 19, 2012 @ 9:47 am

To enhance the argument that wealth causes growth rather than vice cersa note that amongthose poorer countries that grew to wealth (Ireland, Greece) the growth started while the earliermeasurements were being taken. being wealthy is no achievement but becoming wealthy is yetthis was achieved by the allegedly stupider generation. This strongly suggests wealth is theleading factor (or perhaps education or cultural stimulation) & IQ the following one.

On the other hand the author does not realise that Israel’s population is made up of oriental Hewsas much as European and that the former have never shown their western cousin’s high IQs. Infact if you look at Israeli scientific and technical achievements they are consistent withoverlapping normal curves of 2 groups and most of the best scientists being drawn from the farend of the normal curve of an Ashkenazi normal curve.

Also the author here is dealing with about as genetically similar and culturally different populationgroup as possible – Europeans. This may have less relevance for seriously unrelated populations.

#36 Comment By Jennifer On July 19, 2012 @ 9:57 am

You cannot use second-generation achievement to argue for racial equality, because Hispanicsget a huge boost from affirmative action that is not justified by their intelligence. In the long term,this will have devastating consequences for national efficiency.

Unz cannot rebut the evidence from twin and adoption studies. Moreover, he does not evenmention “regression to the mean.” We know that black IQ regresses to a mean of 85 while whiteIQ regresses to a mean of 100. That means that black couples will have less intelligent childrenthan white couples at the same combined IQ level. This explains why even low income whitechildren do better than well-to-do black children. I don’t know if any research has been done onregression to the mean among hispanics. If hispanic IQ does indeed regress to a lower mean,then we have permanently downgraded the intellectual capital of the country. You cannot have afirst-world standard of living with a largely third-world population.

Unz, your superficial analysis will further set us back in having an honest conversation about theconsequences of immigration. At best, you have shown that it is possible that Lynn is wrong. Youdon’t bet the future of the country on possibilities no matter how good they make you feel.


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#37 Comment By Toddy Cat On July 19, 2012 @ 10:00 am

Is anyone surprised that the takeaway from this article is “People are fungible. A Mexican is aBelgian is a German is an American. And oh, yeah, Hispanic immigration is good, and we needmore of it”.

I have no idea if Unz or Lynn is right, but the word for Mr. Unz’s article is “tendentious”, as indeedis Lynn. We need light on this subject, not heat, and Mr. Unz’s ongoing love letter to Hispanicsisn’t helping matters any.

#38 Comment By Jennifer On July 19, 2012 @ 10:17 am

“There is no correlation between IQ and success, so I think we need to stop refering to IQ. It is auseless metric.”

This is a patent falsehood. It is well-known that IQ is an excellent predictor of educational andoccupational success for all races. The APA admitted this in the aftermath of publication of the BellCurve and has never reversed its position.

This country is finished if we do not get over our equality fetish.

#39 Comment By Stilicho On July 19, 2012 @ 10:32 am

@ NGPM Thank you for the thoughtful and insightful commentary. The point you make aboutculture or economic status affecting where a particular member of a group will score withing agiven range for that group is logical, matches my experience, and is supported by the 80%heritability theory. Education can certainly help an individual reach his maximum score on an I.Q.test, but it does not increase intelligence. Rather, it gives an individual training and tools to morefully utilize that intelligence. There is no reason to think that this does not hold true for groups aswell.

#40 Comment By Severn On July 19, 2012 @ 10:38 am

>”the IQ disparities discussed above seem to provide a powerful challenge to [the Strong IQHypothesis]”

That is a ridiculous and tendentious conclusion. The logical response to the inconsistencies inLynn’s data is to accept that his data is of low quality and dubious reliability. Instead youacknowledge the defects in his data – and then proceed to construct your entire intellectualedifice on what you have already admitted is quicksand.

You are reputed to be extremely intelligent. If this is true then none of your intelligence makes itinto your writings on immigration and human differences.


When the early waves of Catholic Irish immigrants reached America near the middle of the 19thcentury, they were widely seen as particularly ignorant and uncouth ..

What they were “widely seen” as is utterly irrelevant. What matters is what they were. And whatthey were was the equal in IQ of other European peoples in the US, as evidenced by their rapidclimb up the socioeconomic ladder.


Gould was not a Marxist.

Well, that depends on what one means by Marxist. Certainly his scientific views were [11]. He wasa red-diaper baby who said that he “learned his Marxism, literally at my daddy’s knee”, although


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he rejected his father’s Stalinist views.

And to suggest that if his calculations on skull size were wrong (since he never was given accessto the collection) means that his theoretical and mathematical objections to certain applications ofIQ are therefore incorrect simply shows a childish bias on the part of the author.

No one refused Gould access to Morton’s collection. He simply never wanted to remeasure theskulls. He also ignored several contemporary studies of brain size that confirmed Morton’s ideas.

Gould’s criticisms of IQ are without merit not only because his strong biases andmisrepresentations but because he simply did not understand factor analysis and other relevantmethodological and theoretical issues.

There is no correlation between IQ and success, so I think we need to stop refering to IQ. It is auseless metric.

You could not be more wrong. The predictive validity of IQ is the strongest and most universal ofall social science variables.


This strong empirical evidence of the apparent malleability of IQ scores …

This may comes as news to you, but the US has been conducting a very large and very expensivefifty year experiment into whether or not the IQ of groups of people is malleable or not.

I’m referring of course to our efforts to raise the IQ/intellectual/academic performance of blacksto the white level.

The evidence from this experiment, perhaps the largest such experiment in world history, is thatIQ is not malleable.


“@ NGPM Thank you for the thoughtful and insightful commentary. The point you make aboutculture or economic status affecting where a particular member of a group will score withing agiven range for that group is logical, matches my experience, and is supported by the 80%heritability theory. Education can certainly help an individual reach his maximum score on an I.Q.test, but it does not increase intelligence. Rather, it gives an individual training and tools to morefully utilize that intelligence. There is no reason to think that this does not hold true for groups aswell.”

Thank you for your contributions, as well. Looking back, I would just caution that terms such as“80% heritability” and my own assertion that “biology does seem to determine what IQ range aperson is capable of achieving within a 15-point margin of error that is determined byenvironment and education” could give the impression of a clear-cut distinction between heredityand environment that biologists tend not to see. For one thing, even a highly genetically loadedtrait such as eye color still assumes certain biochemical inputs for expression, and congenitalabnormalities can produce results completely unanticipated by the genome alone.

Of course, those are extreme cases. More to the point, though, the human brain is a highly plasticorgan and while we have devised IQ tests that, in my opinion, do a good job of measuringcognitive ability at a present moment, we still haven’t mapped out the genetic aspects ofcognition. So it is also possible that some people might be more flexible than others if a certaineducational intervention takes place at the right moment.

THAT SAID… for demographic and statistical purposes, psychometrics tests are far more useful,far more accurate and far more telling across broad populations than within individuals. And whenit comes to the demographics of the United States, there can be no gainsaying what we are in


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store for. It’s not just in the numbers: drive down the streets on the other side of the Hadrian’sWalls that segregate the major urban centers in the U.S. and you can see it for yourself.

#45 Comment By Brian On July 19, 2012 @ 12:32 pm

Unz appears to have missed that there is at most a weak correlation between social factors andadult IQ.

[12]

And that the only environmental factors that have been shown to affect IQ are those that arechemical or biological. A dreary country, under a dictatorship, will not depress IQ, unless thereare nutritional deficiencies or diseases associated with the environment.

#46 Comment By Simon Newman On July 19, 2012 @ 1:10 pm

The evidence suggests a strong environmental influence on IQ, and that the up to 15 point IQdifferences within European populations (ca 87-102) may be almost entirely environmental.

Likewise the large differences among African descended populations (ca 64-86) are likely to belargely environmental.

Unfortunately, normalising for national environment still leaves significant differences amongracial groups, indicating that these differences (eg the US black/white gap of 15-17 points) arelikely largely genetic.

#47 Comment By Hominid On July 19, 2012 @ 2:02 pm

This thread is another classic display of ignorance, misiformation, and emotion-based ideologycolliding with rigorous science.

#48 Comment By Michael O’Hearn On July 19, 2012 @ 2:05 pm

Intelligence testing was originally designed in France as a predictor of academic success inschool. A recent study in Scotland strongly suggests that the correlation between innate geneticsand IQ is somewhere less than .50. Your article corroborates this finding suggesting that IQ islargely a function of wealth level, and not vis versa.

The Asian anomaly may be due to their remoteness from Western cultural norms. People withinthe Western worldview will largely perform on IQ tests based upon subjective life expectations. Ifthey are not “cut out” to be academically oriented because of social, economic and upbringingfactors, they will score lower regardless of genetic endowment, hence the rural/urban dichotomy.In contrast, those in Japan, China and Korea, largely outside the Western, historically Christiansphere of influence, will learn Western academic skills as something extrinsic to their owncultures, and hence there is no dichotomy between rural and urban performance.

From a human perspective, only some economic goods are related to IQ. Some people will alwaysbe needed to metaphorically take out the trash, for example. This is where Ward Connerly’sinitiative comes into play.

Gender differences in IQ appear to be genetically caused. The only way to equalize IQ betweengirls and boys is to culturally deprive and dumb down boys, which is part of the liberal agenda.

It ultimately comes down to man’s role as creature. Whenever man opposes God, God alwayswins and man always loses. That is called reality.

#49 Comment By Silver On July 19, 2012 @ 2:43 pm

There is no correlation between IQ and success, so I think we need to stop refering to IQ. It is a


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useless metric.

It’s an extremely useful metric. It makes little sense to recommend we “stop” talking about itwhen we’ve barely just begun.

As for Unz’s article, there’s enough there to cast doubt on the “strong pessimist” interpretation ofIQ, wealth, race and immigration, but not nearly enough to rebut the general hbd view.

I was particularly disheartened by this passage

with the only obvious solution being a strong eugenics program, presumably including sterilizationof a substantial fraction of the population.

You presume far too much, Ron. There is not the slightest need to madly rush into a masssterilization program if one takes a favorable view of eugenic measures — a ‘eugenic outlook onlife,’ let’s call it. It’s about building for the future, not about senselessly lashing out at thevulnerable. The saddest thing is that in the privacy of your own thoughts you probably agree thatsome form of ‘neo-eugenics’ is the one great hope, so why you gratuitously poo-poo it yourselfwhen there are legions of marxoids only too willing to do it for you is something of a mystery.

#50 Comment By Silver On July 19, 2012 @ 2:54 pm

Slightly off-topic, while PPP conversions will always involve an element of ‘art’ (rather thanscience) some of those per capita GDP figures for earlier decades are simply ridiculous. TakePoland. Today Poland’s per capita GDP is around $20,000 2005 PPP dollars. Therefore to growfrom the state figure of $2,500 in 1989 would require a growth rate of some 10% per annum overthe last two decades, which is way beyond what the per capita GDP growth rate data we have forPoland in the post-communist period, about 3.5% per annum. The data for other formerlycommunist countries is similarly absurd.

#51 Comment By Enoch_Root On July 19, 2012 @ 2:56 pm

“For example, one might speculate that the smarter Irish immigrated to America, while theirdimmer relatives remained at home, and the same was also true for the smarter SouthernItalians, Greeks, or other Balkan Europeans. Similarly, perhaps the smarter European Jewscrossed the oceans to New York Harbor in the years before World War I, while their dimmerrelatives stayed behind and later moved to Israel after World War II.

These explanations seem quite unlikely. The intra-ethnic IQ gaps being discussed are absolutelyenormous—often approaching a full standard deviation or more—and that would imply a similarlyenormous gap between the portions of the population that stayed and those that emigrated, withno contemporaneous source seeming to provide any indication of this. Indeed, during the periodwhen these immigrant flows were occurring, most American observers emphasized theremarkable backwardness of the new arrivals and often speculated that they were intrinsicallydefective and might constitute a permanent burden to society.”

Is in my opinion the weakest part of your argument. Natives always find The Other odd andbackwards. Seems to me you need to work on this portion.

Personally, I believe there is a Native Intelligence hard wired into the individual. Much as eyecolor, hair color, etc. Then there are environmental factors that either improve or drag down thenative ability.

I would further argue that risk-takers (in terms of the Irish and Italians that came to the US, forexample, were likely the brightest of their respective families. Remeber, they were to sendmoney home once they got settled in the States. If a family could only “afford” to send oneperson, who would they send? These were not small considerations.

#52 Comment By Severn On July 19, 2012 @ 4:30 pm


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The evidence suggests a strong environmental influence on IQ, and that the up to 15 point IQdifferences within European populations (ca 87-102) may be almost entirely environmental.

The 87 IQ figure mentioned is statistical noise, as I pointed out to Unz a couple of years ago.

There IS a wide range of IQ variation in Europe though. Rindermann found an IQ of 81 forAlbania, and 102 for Holland.

This data does not support Unz’s theory – “the Irish were dumb and now they’re smart, so whosays that Latino’s can’t do the same?” – so he ignores it. Unz is cherry-picking numbers to suit hisagenda.

#53 Comment By JL On July 19, 2012 @ 4:49 pm

A recent study in Scotland strongly suggests that the correlation between innate genetics and IQis somewhere less than .50.

No such study from Scotland exists. There was a recent study by University of Edinburgh professorIan Deary and colleagues who found, using novel molecular genetic methods, that the heritabilityof IQ is at least 40 to 50 percent. In the abstract of the study, they say that “these estimatesprovide lower bounds for the narrow-sense heritability of the traits”. The method they use cannotcapture the full effect of genes, which they explicitly admit. However, studies using differentmethods (e.g., the classic twin design) can capture the full genetic effect, and such studies showthat the heritability of IQ is about 80 percent in adults.

#54 Comment By Eric Rasmusen On July 19, 2012 @ 8:06 pm

I commend you for wrestling with the data this way. A few comments, tho:

1. We would expect huge differences as a result of migration. The average IQs of Hindus in the USis a lot higher than of Hindues in India. We shouldn’t expect blacks in the US to be the same as inAfrica (even aside from the racial mixing here), or Irish in the US to be the same as in Ireland, orScotch Irish to be the same as Scots, or West Germans the same as East Germans. This last is apossibility because in 1945 anybody in East Germany who had any brains ran west to escape theRussian army (well, except for Hitler and Goebbels, and they didn’t successfully reproduce).

Similarly, Turkey of today is not what it was in 1900. The Greeks and Armenians were killed orexpelled, a lot of Turks moved to Germany, and I bet the fastest growing subpopulation wascountry folk Anatolians, not Istanbul sophisticates.

#55 Comment By Jonathan Gress-Wright On July 19, 2012 @ 10:23 pm

Unz is not disputing that there is a correlation between IQ and socioeconomic development. But alot of objections seem to ignore Unz’s main argument, which is that the data from LV is moreconsistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors determine IQ than that IQ determinessocioeconomic factors. How do the biological determinists account for the consistent rise of IQlevels across different ethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development?

That being said, I find it interesting that he rejects the notion that the brightest are the ones whoemigrate. That seems to be a cornerstone argument of open-borders advocates, like TheEconomist.

#56 Comment By VintageVNvet On July 19, 2012 @ 10:38 pm

As a Cal grad in Psych., ca 1970, w. Stanford-Binet IQ tested at various times at +4 to 6SD, Ihave been following this discussion in various media for over 40 years; this article and thecomments are mostly all very well put, but do not get “down” to the heart of the matter of “IQ,”nor “relative” correlations.


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First, commonality of twins may be subscribed simply to uterine environment, as it has beenshown to be, quite as clearly as any “social science” permits, of the mutability of “IQ” at that timedue to various influences. And, in that same vein, IMHO, all such “social science” must be takenwith a serious dose of salt.

Second, while the mutability of “IQ” due to post partum environmental influences may be worthyof continuing discussion, IMHO, there is little doubt of the influence of such on individual personalrelative “success,” no matter the “IQ” of that individual.

Third, no one has mentioned the work of Gardiner, et alia, re: various kinds of “intelligence,”which, again IMHO should be the focus of ALL such discussions, not to mention any and allguvmint programs intended to increase any nations development.

Fourth, within my own sibling group, there appears to be a difference of more than two SD,supporting both the interuterine and post partum environmental influences arguements, ( and Iam not at the top of this group.)

Fifth, most Psych. professionals with whom I have discussed the subject of “IQ” have agreed thatthe tests can only be taken as accurate at the time and with the specific group tested at that time,so the implication that that the numbers can be compared between groups and over long timesseems completely wrong.

Sixth, the most qualified psychometricians with whom I have discussed inter cultural validity of“IQ” test numbers have been unanimous in their opinion of clear cultural bias to any and all testsof this nature.

As such, it seems both premature and implicitly simplistic to use such tests as a sole basis for anykind of guvmint policy or opinion of the worth of any individual or group.

#57 Comment By Mitchell Young On July 20, 2012 @ 2:47 am

“while the percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue-collar jobs had more than doubled, risingfrom 11 percent to 25 percent.”

Uh, no. Here is what the Besherov article says

“Consider the Hispanic success in obtaining skilled, blue-collar jobs, as measured by the censuscategory for precision production, craft and repair occupations. From 1994 to 2006, as the totalnumber of these jobs grew, the percentage held by whites fell from 79 percent to 65 percent. Thepercentage held by blacks remained constant at about 8 percent, and the percentage held byHispanics more than doubled, rising to 25 percent from 11 percent. As whites left theserelatively well-paid jobs, Hispanics rather than blacks moved into them.”

So, not the percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue collar jobs, but the percentage of thosejobs held by Hispanics doubled.

Leaving aside the question of why this should be considered a good thing, Unz (or more likely hisresearch Razib Khan) makes a basic mistake in interpreting logic and statistics. It is likley thereare many more in this article, which will take time to be sussed out. But they will, just like JasonRichwine sussed out how Unz/Khan downplayed the incarceration rates of ‘Hispanics’.


“Unz is not disputing that there is a correlation between IQ and socioeconomic development.”

No, but Unz’s exposition, without qualification, gives the impression that IQ is primarily a productof living in wealthy nations, and that is simply false. If he is trying to get us to reassure ourselvesthat Hispanic immigrants will “normalize” like the Irish in the wake of his recent suggestion thatthe right wing resign itself to demographic subsumation, I have to say I am less than convinced.


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#59 Comment By Brian On July 20, 2012 @ 3:59 am

***hich is that the data from LV is more consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factorsdetermine IQ than that IQ determines socioeconomic factors. How do the biological deterministsaccount for the consistent rise of IQ levels across different ethnic groups in tandem withsocioeconomic development?***

As Unz notes though, that isn’t the case with East Asia. This point is noted by Garrett Jones & W.Joel Schneider in their paper “IQ in the Production Function” (easily downloadable on the web)Jones & Schneider also note:

Another place to look for massive IQ increases would be in a region of the world that experienceda dramatic increase in the price of its exports: The oil-rich countries ofthe Middle East. But a glance at that data, likewise, shows little evidence that being richer, perse, increases IQ within ten or twenty years:….If one uses 1973 as a breakpoint—since real oil prices increased fourfold between 1973 and 1986,before declining—then one would expect IQ scores to be higher in oil rich countries if simplereverse causality drove IQ scores. Casual inspection of the evidence doesn’t show such arelationship—indeed, Qatar and Kuwait, two low population, high-GDP-per-capita countries, failto stand out along the IQ dimension.

Further, after 1973, there is no clear difference between OPEC and non-OPEC countries, contraryto what one would expect if income caused IQ in an important way.

Finally, a simple difference-in-difference test shows that OPEC countries have a median IQ scorefalling 5.5 points lower compared to non-OPEC countries after 1973 (Given the small sample size,we will refrain from calculating standard errors—consider these results as suggestive).

All told, if one wants to use a reverse causation argument to explain the IQ-productivityrelationship, it will have to be more subtle than the simple tests of East and Southwest Asian IQ’spresented here.”

#60 Comment By German reader On July 20, 2012 @ 9:14 am

Eric Rasmusen wrote:“This last is a possibility because in 1945 anybody in East Germany who had any brains ran westto escape the Russian army (well, except for Hitler and Goebbels, and they didn’t successfullyreproduce). ”

Not just in 1945 – there was massive migration from the Soviet-occupied zone (later the GDR) tothe West until the early 1960s, especially of the most qualified (“the best and brightest”) sectionsof the East German population. That’s why the communists built the wall in 1961; otherwiseEastern Germany might have been bled dry by the on-going exodus. I too have wondered whetherthis large migration which especially affected those you’d exspect to score highly on IQ testsmight have something to do with the divergence between Eastern and Western Germany.


Unz is not disputing that there is a correlation between IQ and socioeconomic development. But alot of objections seem to ignore Unz’s main argument, which is that the data from LV is moreconsistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors determine IQ than that IQ determinessocioeconomic factors.

No, Lynn and Vanhanen’s data are not consistent with that. As I’ve noted above, it does not makesense to compare the individual studies whose results Lynn and Vanhanen averaged to calculatenational IQs. Equally absurd is to speculate about the underlying reasons for the supposed trendsbetween studies. Most of the variation between studies of the same country is simply randomerror.


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For example, Unz notes that a 1961 study reported that the Greek national IQ was 88, while a1979 study said it was 95. He suggests that this change was due to increasing affluence inGreece. However, we have very good reasons to suspect that the 1979 study is rubbish. It is astudy based on convenience samples in twenty-one European capital cities, conducted by theCroatian researcher Vinko Buj. The study has been criticized as practically worthless. Forexample, the correlations between Lynn and Vanhanen’s average national IQs and contemporarystudent assessment studies such the PISA are around 0.6-0.7, providing strong evidence of thevalidity of L & V’s data. In contrast, the correlations between Buj’s data and the same studentassessment studies are around zero, suggesting that Buj’s numbers are basically random noise.(There are also other discrepancies in Buj’s study, such as countries with standard deviations inexcess of 30 IQ points, which is impossible for representative samples.)

In “IQ and Global Inequality” (2006), L & V report three additional studies from Greece, withaverages of 97, 89, and 92. The five studies are consistent with the claim that Greek IQ is belowthe European average. This is also supported by the fact that Greece at the rock bottom ofEuropean PISA results even though the PISA assessments were conducted when Greece was atthe peak of its recent affluence.

Cherry-picking individual studies from L & V’s data is a pointless exercise. For example, Israel’sIQ was 97 in 1975 and 90 in 1989, a seven point decrease. Does Unz have a theory of why IQ wasdeclining over this period in Israel?


How do the biological determinists account for the consistent rise of IQ levels across differentethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development?

There is no evidence for any such rise.

#63 Comment By Chuck On July 21, 2012 @ 12:25 am

Unz: “To a very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are geneticallyindistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable,while the recorded rise in East German scores of 7–9 points in just half a generation seems evenmore difficult to explain.”JL’s comment above is spot on. Unz is comparing cherry picked data points to given theimpression that the IQ scores across nations are highly malleable. It’s clear that variance withincountries is due to measurement error. We can estimate this error by looking at the variance inscores within a country during the same year. From Unz’s chart, we have: Belgium (1950/1950) 4points, France(1962/1962) 6 points, and West Germany (1978/1978) 4 points. So our meanamount of error, which is reduced by aggregating data is 5 points. We can then compare this tothe average European intra-national variance, which is 5 points (rounding: Argentina 5, Australia1, Austria 2, Belgium 3, Bulgaria 3, Chech 2, Denmark 2, Finland 2, France 6, West Germany 5,Italy, New Zealand 2, Spain 2, Switzerland 2, Greece 7, Ireland 11, Isreal 7 points, Poland 14points, Sweden 7, Mean 5). To put this another way, the mean amount of intra-national varianceis no more than what we would expect, given the noise in the data.Now to verify JL’s point about measurement error, which predicts that intra-national data pointsvary randomly, we can compare the change in scores in countries to the two other variables thatUnz provides, year and GPD. In Unz’s list, there are 10 countries that show a positive correlationbetween change in IQ and GDP and 11 that show a negative correlation. Pure chance. We canrepeat the same exercise for year. Now compare this lack of relation within countries to theIQ-GDP relation been countries using averaged scores. Based on the above considerations we candismiss Unz’s exaggerated differences. He is correct, though, that the IQ of East and WestGermans varies more than we would predict from a genetic hypothesis i.e., by 8 points averagingdata points, as Lynn typically does, or by 5 using n-weighted values.Unz: “Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in1961 and a score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full points in the Flynn-adjusted IQof Greeks over just 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspective…it is interesting to note


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that Greek affluence had grown very rapidly during that same period, with the real per capita GDPrising by 170 percent.”The intra-national variance here is not much more than we would expect given our estimatederror (above). And in Lynn’s newest data set, as opposed to the decade old one which Rondecided to rely on for unspecified reasons, there is zero correlation between Greek IQ data pointsand GDP. (Lynn has collected 10 data points which average to 92.) As noted above there is only achance association between European intra-national IQ scores and GPD.Unz: “The wide IQ gaps between these European peoples and the previous group seem unlikely tohave a heavily innate basis, given the considerable genetic and phenotypic similarity across thesepopulations.”

For those interested, you can refer to some of L&V updated IQs here: [13] You will notice thatnational IQs are estimated from a much larger set of data points. When I get a chance, I will posta table of his 2012 data. Using the updated IQs, 3 researches recently determined that

haplogroups can explain 50% of the intra European+ IQ variance. Refer here: [14] This seeminglycontradicts Ron’s claim about European genetic variance and IQ variance. It’s notable Ronconsiders it to be plausible that European height differences could be genetically conditioned. Yet,the intra national European variance in height is, in standardized units, greater than thephenotypic variance in IQ. For example, the largest European IQ difference given by Lynn (2010)is 8 points. In the 2002 data which Ron decided to use, it’s 12 points. But the largest heightdifference is, in IQ metrics, around 15 points. Refer yourself to the means and standard deviation

here, along with the secular change: [15] Now height, like IQ, is a highly polygenic trait; and it’s atrait for which there is presumably less selection pressure for (i.e., height is less related to fitnessthan IQ is); if height can vary this much between genetically related European, surely IQ can.Unz: “To a small extent, Lynn and Vanhanen acknowledge the possible importance of non-geneticfactors, and they devote a few pages to a discussion of the impact of health, nutrition, andeducation on IQ scores. But they never provide any clear estimate for the magnitude of theseinfluences..”Lynn (2006) proposes that 50% of the national IQ variance is genetically conditioned. Nothingthat Ron has mentioned contradicts this figure. We can take his European immigrant examples asexamples. If the IQ of Sicily and Ireland is 90 and 93 respectively, and Italian and Irish Americansare genetically representative of the people of those regions, then the respective genotypic IQswould be 95 and 97. Which would be virtually undetectable given the crude proxy measures Ronuses (e.g., income and education). This is, of course, assuming that these populations areunadmixed with other European American ethnic groups. That assumption seems untenable. If thedifference, though, is so small, why mention it? Because, on the population level small IQdifferences can have large effects, as L & V and others have demonstrated. Additionally, thelargest differences are between, rather than within, races. If we grant Lynn’s phenotypic NationalIQs, N.E Asians and Africans would differ, genotypically, by 1.2 SD, which is a substantial amount.Unz: “It has long been established on both theoretical and empirical grounds that IQ scoresgenerally follow a mean-reversion pattern, in which the children of outlying individuals tend toregress toward the typical levels of their larger population or ethnic group”Refer to the comment above.Unz: “Furthermore, the most recent 2009 PISA international student academic tests sponsored bythe Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provide us with results that raisefurther doubts about the correctness of the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ scores from a wide range ofEuropean countries.”Surely if one is going to make this argument, one should use Lynn’s updated IQs. Readers cancompare the IQ and international test differences in the paper linked above. The only noticeablediscrepancy is with Ireland. There is no justification for citing L and V’s older estimates in critiqueof their current position.Unz: “We cannot rule out the possibility that different European peoples might have relativelysmall differences in innate intelligence or IQ—after all, these populations often differ in height andnumerous other phenotypic traits. But this residual genetic element would explain merely a smallfraction of the huge 10–15 point IQ disparities discussed above… We are now faced with amystery arguably greater than that of IQ itself. Given the powerful ammunition that Lynn andVanhanen have provided to those opposing their own “Strong IQ Hypothesis,”It’s rather important when discussing this issues to venture estimates. As noted, Lynn (2006) has


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offered the figure of 50%. Since the largest National IQ difference is about 10 points (12 points inLynn 2002; 8 points in Lynn 2010), the largest European genotypic difference would be 5 points.Is that a relatively small difference? It’s surely not a “small” fraction, as Ron states. . Hasanything Ron said contradicted this estimate? There are a few points not entirely consistent withit, but a larger body of data is in agreement. The most suggestive studies to date, mysteriouslygone unmentioned, are the ones which have used haplogroups and skin color as genetic markersand entered them into regression analyses alongside environmental factors. The varianceindependently explained by the genetic marker turns out to be Lynn’s 50%. See, for example:Rodriguez-Arana (2010). INTELLIGENCE AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS: GENETICS MATTER BUTTHERE IS STILL MUCHROOM TO REDUCE INEQUALITIES.Unz: “The IQ figure of 87 that they quote from Lynn/Vanhanen is correct, though admittedlybased on a single 1961 study of Mexican schoolchildren in the most impoverished southern part ofthat country.”That would be 88 based on 6 samples corroborated by data from 6 international tests in Lynn2010. Now, going with the point made above, the estimated Mexican genotypic IQ would then be6 points below the White IQ. That is, we might expect 2+ generation Mexicans reared in the US tohave IQ’s around 94.Unz: “But such critics always fail to notice that a much larger and more recent study of Irishschoolchildren revealed precisely the same mean IQ of 87If we average the 18 data points we are given for Ireland (10 from IQ tests and 8 frominternational tests) in Lynn 2010, we derive an IQ of 96, which is .5 SD above the MexicanNational IQ.“In actual values, the Mexican-American Wordsum-IQ increased from 84.4 in the 1980s to 95.1 inthe 2000s, while the rise for American whites was from 99.2 to 101.3. In addition, the late 1990sIQ of U.S.-born Mexican-Americans has been separately estimated at 92.4 from the large data setcontained in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), a figure consistent with theseWordsum-IQ findings.”The difference between Blacks and Whites on Wordsum dropped to below 0.6 SD by the end ofthe 90s, well below the difference found in other adult samples; this calls this index of IQ intoquestion. Murray (2007) noted:The GSS vocabulary test. GSS data are now available through the 2004 survey, 6 years longerthan the observation period available to Huang and Hauser (2001), and they show a continuingdecline in the B–W difference for persons born into the early 1980s (author’s analysis of the(GSS). But if the question is whether black performance on the vocabulary test has improved,there is no inconsistency with the Woodcock–Johnson results. The GSS has an absolute scale ofcorrect answers, from 0 to 10, and the vocabulary items have remained unchanged since theadvent of the GSS. The highest black mean score, whether measured in a single birth year or infive-year aggregations, occurred among blacks born in 1945 1949. The decline in theB–Wdifference in the GSS vocabulary test for persons born sincemid-century is entirelyattributable to a decline in white performance, not improvement in black performance.The same hold true in part for Mexicans. While the difference narrowed it did so partially becauseWhites have been performing worse, as opposed to Mexicans performing better. When doinglongitudinal studies, it’s preferable to compare comparables studies, when possible, for example,NLSY 79 and NLSY 97. In the former, according to Murray and Herrnstein (pg. 275), Mexicansscores 14 points below White. Based on Unz’s figures, they scores 10 points behind Whites in theNLSY97, as Whites scored about two points above the national mean. So there was a closing ofabout 4 points. There are other data points for Hispanics in general. Based on Roth et al.’s 2001meta-analysis, the Hispanic –White difference is .72 SD (N>5 million). Mexicans comprise 2/3rdsof the US Hispanic population and other large Hispanics groups such as Puerto Ricans don’t scoremuch worse than them, so this is probably a fair index of the Mexican IQ between 1970 and 2000.Also we can look at other data points for Mexican IQ specifically. Linda Gottfredson reports somein “Implications of Cognitive Differences for Schooling Within Diverse Societies.” We have: 0.63SD in 1974 from Jensen’s California school district study; 0.55 SD from GABT job applicationsfrom 1940 to 1970; and 0.65 from Coleman’s repot in the 1960s (see also Jensen 1973 for similarresults). . For a more recent sample we can look at the Nationally representative Add Health PVTdata (1994-1995), which can be analyzed online. The 2nd generation Mexican VIQ was 96.02compared to the non-Hispanics White VIQ of 105 (SD 12.57). That’s a .72 SD gap. We can look


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still elsewhere. Based on Jason Richwine’s analysis of the 2003 New Immigrant Survey (Richwine2009) – which was based on a nationally representative sample of immigrants –2nd generationMexicans performed a whopping 1.2 SD behind Whites on the very culturally reduced backwardsdigit span (which was given in Spanish for those wishing so).So the great Mexican convergence has turned out to be smoke and mirrors. As with nearly everyother point made by Ron, it’s been uncovered as a product of cherry picking. The Mexican IQ dataranges for 0.5 to 1.2 SD with no apparent trend of narrowing..If readers wish I could continue, but for now I will leave it at that. Whether intentional or not, Unzhas presented a extremely distorted of the facts on the ground. To paraphrase Unz, “Sciencelargely runs on the honor system, and once simple statements of fact are found to be grotesquelydistorted, we cannot trust more complex claims made by the particular scholar.”

#64 Comment By roy On July 21, 2012 @ 3:40 pm

“commonality of twins may be subscribed simply to uterine environment”.

Fraternal twins are no more alike than ordinary siblings. That clearly wouldn’t be the case if the“uterine environment” was an important variable.

#65 Comment By Brian On July 22, 2012 @ 2:21 am

Readers may be interested in Peter Frost’s comments on the published article.

[16]

#66 Comment By Amos Newcombe On July 22, 2012 @ 9:43 am

There is a simple explanation of these widely disparate results: whatever it is that IQ measureshas nothing to do with our intuitive idea of intelligence, and all of these studies are meaningless.It is the explanation favored by Occam’s razor, and by me.

Those who try to make a connection between genetics and our intuitive idea of race are going tohave a similar problem.

Until we have scientific definitions for “intelligence” and “race” — and I think we never will — thiswhole area of research is not about science at all, but about politics.

#67 Comment By Rob On July 22, 2012 @ 2:47 pm

How can these contradictory findings be squared?

The high correlation between the IQs of identical twins raised apart is not necessarily entirely dueto genetics. Both twins were in the womb at the same time and so subject to the sameenvironmental influences on their early development. These same environmental influences couldequally well affect the IQs of populations as a whole.

One such environmental influence already proven is DHA consumption by the mother during

pregnancy (ref: [17]). There are probably many more.

#68 Comment By RT On July 22, 2012 @ 10:50 pm

I found Unz’s sidebar musings about a possible biological resiliency in East Asian Mongoloids to bequite interesting. In noting their good average health and the apparent lack of malleability in theirpsychometric scores in response to different social and economic environments, I wonder whatconclusion he wants us to draw? Given that Mexican immigrants to the US are largely Amerindianor mestizo and knowing that Amerindian peoples have a close genetic affinitity to East AsianMongoloids (and further knowing that Unz seems to have a penchant for declaring populationsthat are relatively genetically similar by world standards to be “genetically indistinguishable”which, since he is aware of the work of Cochran and Harpending, of course means that selective


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forces could never have caused any socially significant genetic differences in populations thatotherwise display general genetic similarities and relatively recent common origins), perhaps Unzis implying that, although he has undoubtedly presented rock solid evidence that the IQ ofEuropean populations is quite malleable, we should expect the IQ of largely “mongoloid” Mexicanimmigrants to America to be more like East Asians in their response to changing environmentsand that the current IQ gap of about 0.7 SDs below the white American mean as reported by Rothand Bobko in their Meta-analysis of the IQs of over 5 million Hispanic American test-takers toremain fairly constant over time? Yup, that seems to be exactly what Ron is implying. What elsecould he be saying? This article was truly enlightening. It should stand the test as time with othergreat journalistic efforts like the Myth of Hispanic Crime.

#69 Comment By Sideways On July 22, 2012 @ 11:22 pm

Read three posts above yours, Rob. People have thought of this before, and it’s trivially disposedwith with by data already collected.

#70 Comment By John Ray On July 23, 2012 @ 9:02 am

An extended commentary by a psychometrician:

[18]


“There is a simple explanation of these widely disparate results: whatever it is that IQ measureshas nothing to do with our intuitive idea of intelligence, and all of these studies are meaningless.It is the explanation favored by Occam’s razor, and by me.”

Compare a babbling simp with an articulate medical doctor and I PROMISE you there will be acorrelation of g-levels (what IQ measures) with intelligence.

More to the point, compare a person who got a 2.0 average in college (did poorly on tests) and aperson who got a 4.0 average at the same college (did well on tests), in the same major. 8 timesout of 10, which one would you prefer to hire?

Test results have no correlation with mental capacity? Rubbish.

#72 Comment By Jim On July 23, 2012 @ 11:57 am

Wrestling with data with words is meaningless. Brain drain is part of the answer. Most intelligentpeople in the last three centuries from poor countries moved to rich countries. Another part of theanswer is that there is “locality” of intelligence. Some parts of a country have much higher IQthan others because of inheritance.

#73 Comment By Alfred Smith On July 23, 2012 @ 7:49 pm

A refutation of Unz’s argument: [19]

#74 Comment By Rebeca On July 24, 2012 @ 12:32 am

It is interesting that they would use SAT scores for the basis for their study. The SAT tests aretaken by people who are trying to get into college. Therefore the population studied does notinclude those people on the lower end of the spectrum who will forgo taking the SAT, eitherbecause they have no aspirations of college or their intelligence is lower and they are fine withbeing unskilled labor. The SAT has also changed their scoring over the years. So the scores arenow higher for everyone taking the test.



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Rebecca: SAT is strongly but not perfectly correlated with g (factor of 0.81 or something like that)and so it remains a good proxy rough estimate for IQ. Yes, scores have been adjusted, but it isalso true that more people are taking the SAT than before, so they need to keep adjusting scoresin order to ensure that the median population gets something near the middle-level number ofpoints on any given section. Otherwise the test would be more useful in measuring the top end ofthe spectrum and not at all good at estimating the level of the bottom half. (As it is, the SAT is notreally a reliable gauge of the extremities at either the top or the bottom for the simple reasonthat the test is either too easy or too hard for those kids.)

#76 Comment By John Ray On July 24, 2012 @ 9:34 am

A small note on immigrant crime

In response to my article “Race, IQ and wealth: A preliminary reply”, Ron Unz left a commentabout immigrant crime. He refers to an article and subsequent debate which points out the needto take into account the ages of criminals in assessing whether or not they commit more crimethan native born people. He shows that the Hispanic crime rate can even be particuarly low onceyou make that adjustment.

The article I quoted as a source of information shows that too. Foreign-born Mexican males, ages18 to 39 (presumably mostly illegals) have a crime-rate of less than 1% of their population. Andthat is data from the 2000 official U.S. census, which is about as good as we are going to get.

Unz seems to have missed my main point however: That the CHILDREN of Mexicans who aremales aged 18 to 39 are an entirely different kettle of fish, with a crime-rate of nearly 6% of theirpopulation. The figure for the total population is 3.04%

So the problem of crime from illegal Mexican immigration is there but not quite where it is usuallyplaced.

Given the apparent low overall crime rate among Hispanics, it is a considerable puzzle thatObama claims to deport 400,000 of them every year. And these, again according to Obama, areonly the SERIOUS criminals. Minor offenders are let go.

Say that Obama has deported 1,200,000 during his term of office and that there are 12 millionillegals in the USA. That means that 10% of the illegal population (not less than 1%) arecriminals, and serious criminals at that. Something doesn’t add up. Don’t ask me what.

#77 Comment By Ron Unz On July 24, 2012 @ 3:26 pm

FYI: [20]


Now in general, it seems very likely that students taking the SAT tend to be drawn from the mostable and best prepared slice of their ethnic group, so if the percentage of Hispanics taking thattest has doubled, tripled, or quadrupled since 1980, those students will tend to be drawn frommuch lower levels of the performance pool, and we would expect to see a sharp drop in mean testscores. Instead, the scores have remained roughly constant relative to the white average, almostcertainly implying a rapid rise in average Hispanic academic performance. Thus, instead ofcontradicting the Wordsum-IQ results, a more careful examination of the ethnic SAT data actuallytends to confirm them.

The problem is that it is not just the population of HISPANICS which is taking the SATs at a higherrate, but the population as a whole. This is a confirmed, decades-long trend. This is why theentire pool is getting lower and lower, and why the College Board has had to adjust the medianscore several times since the 1960’s.

We are still unsure of exactly what it was you were trying to accomplish by attempting to rebut


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the studies in question. If it was to argue that Mexican immigration is not something to fear interms of fundamentally altering the American cultural and socioeconomic landscape in a negativedirection, I have to say I remain less than convinced.


Unz knows nothing about data analysis. This problem last surfaced in his attempt to claim thatHispanics have a crime rate the same as that of whites.

The IQ data provided by Lynn is not of such quality that you can hang any theories on. It wasoffered by Lynn in an attempt to provide a crude estimate of IQ in different countries.

The studies in question were never intended to be used to provide a measure of national IQ.That’s not a criticism of Lynn – he did his best with the data available. But the studies offer only avery crude insight into the IQ of nations.

Lynn has two data points for Poland – a study in 1979, finding an IQ of 106, and a study in 1989,finding an IQ of 92. The Polish national IQ did NOT drop fourteen points in ten years. The fact isthat the data is poor.

Lynn has two data points for Uruguay, both from 1957. One found an IQ of 93, the other of 98.

Lynn shows one IQ test from France in 1962 showing a IQ of 106, and another from 1979 showingan IQ of 94.

How does Unz explain these remarkable discrepancies? He just ignores them.

In certain cases, where the data cited by Lynn shows a increase between one test and the next,Unz sizes on this as evidence that IQ is malleable and that it can easily be made to go up. Heignores the many instances where the sequence of data suggests that IQ has declined.

Worst of all, he ignores the fact that the data simply was never designed to show what he thinks itshows. The study of 50 13-to-16 year old white boys in Columbia was never supposed to providethe national IQ of Columbia, for instance.

Unz is reputedly a very bright man who made a lot of money in banking. But when he wandersinto fields he does not understand, as he is doing here, he’s a menace.


But a lot of objections seem to ignore Unz’s main argument, which is that the data from LV ismore consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors determine IQ than that IQdetermines socioeconomic factors. How do the biological determinists account for the consistentrise of IQ levels across different ethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development?

If you look at the data cited by Lynn, and not at the cherry picked subset of that data which Unzhas given you, you will find precious little evidence for a “consistent rise of IQ levels acrossdifferent ethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development”.

Then there is the other problem – as a casual inspection of the data used by Lynn will show, theIQ numbers are ball-park estimates at best and widely inaccurate at worst.


Another instance of the Unz hypothesis being shown wrong: Lynn has two IQ tests for Portugal –one in 1979 showing IQ 101, and one in 1987 showing IQ 88.

If the order in time was the other way around (low first, then high) Unz would cite this asevidence that IQ has gone up with socioeconomic development. Since it seems to show IQ


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declining sharply, he ignores it.

Of course IQ in Portugal did not really drop thirteen points in eight years. This is just one moreinstance of the data not being what its supposed to be. One, or both, of those IQ numbers is somedistance away from Portugal’s true national average IQ in the 1980’s.

#82 Comment By Yuri Nator On July 26, 2012 @ 10:04 am

“If one uses 1973 as a breakpoint—since real oil prices increased fourfold between 1973 and1986, before declining—then one would expect IQ scores to be higher in oil rich countries if simplereverse causality drove IQ scores. Casual inspection of the evidence doesn’t show such arelationship—indeed, Qatar and Kuwait, two low population, high-GDP-per-capita countries, failto stand out along the IQ dimension.”

That’s because all of the wealth in those countries was concentrated into the hands of a fewpeople and didn’t have a chance to trickle down to the masses.

#83 Comment By Bob On July 27, 2012 @ 2:28 am

I find this whole comparison of human beings genetics to unthinking fiat to be little more thancunninglingus of the cerebral cortex.

Why not compare what war over the last five thousand years has cost in lives and destruction tohuman intelligence and geographic location? We are surely genius in that respect, right?

#84 Comment By Mike Alexander On July 30, 2012 @ 2:31 pm

I find it strange that the data were “corrected” for the Flynn effect. For what purpose was thisdone. Its seems obvious that the simply passage of time cannot actually affect intelligence, if itactually did it would mean populations in few centuries ago were too stupid to function and noneof us would be here. Obviously this is the case so what gives? What would happen if average IQfrom people in high-IQ groups in the 1920’s were compared to average IQ from modernpopulations from societies having a similar per-capital GDP today as then. Would the scores becomparable, or whould the modern low IQ modern populaiton still be lower? I don’t know hasanyone done this?

#85 Comment By mplstim On July 30, 2012 @ 5:11 pm

I’m in no position to critique this here essay or what have you,, just dag-nabbed glad I’m in thatthere upper, top-like group there…

however, I do reflexively flinch whenever I see grandiose claims as in the subhead: ..what thefacts tell us…”facts are pretty ephemeral and can be and be used as lots of things, from about false to abouttrue….and their connection to truth is fuzzier than many will admit.and using the term in such a confident way makes me wonder about how reductionist the writermight be on a profoundly deep issue….how narrow-minded, shall we say, he might be.

whatever the upshot of running these tests and counting the numbers and what percent, whattotals, etc… we still are talking about human beings and nothing essential about a human beingcan be reduced to stuff expressed as “…4 percentage points above that of Mexicans,” and “… thenational average was 7 points above the Fynn-altered level ….blah blah..”as the scriptures say, fook that shat.such is the language of something hinting at the monstrousnot monstrance, which would be good..underlying the entire discussion is somehow the horrid little idea that the value of human beingsis intrinsically wrapped up in their intellectual ability.A stupid and evil idea.


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#86 Comment By Tom Gorman On August 3, 2012 @ 2:49 pm

Dear Commenters,

Please read Rchard Lynn and Helmuth Nygord on VDARE.com dated August 2nd where theydemolish Unz. That’s all you need to see.

#87 Comment By Ron Unz On August 7, 2012 @ 12:51 pm

My response to Lynn/Nyborg is here:

[21]

#88 Comment By E On August 9, 2012 @ 4:34 pm

but it seems just as possible that the success might be driving the high IQs

More possible than the reverse?

Ireland was then overwhelmingly rural and poor, with a low per capita GDP, while Irish Americanstended to be an urban population and a reasonably affluent one, and this sharp difference inexternal material conditions seems the most logical explanation for the wide disparity in IQresults.

The most logical explanation is that IQ is the cause of material conditions. People create theenvironment, not the other way around.

#89 Comment By Gerhard Meisenberg On September 5, 2012 @ 11:31 am

Lynn & Vanhanen don’t really claim that all IQ differences between countries are genetic. As faras I remember, they speculated that perhaps 40% is genetic and 60% environmental. ElsewhereLynn proposes a 50-50 split between genetic and environmental factors. This means that ifUS-style prosperity and education would suddenly break out in tropical Africa, the average IQthere would rise from about 70 today to something like 85 or even 90.We cannot understand all this without the historical context. In all likelihood, international IQdifferences became truly large only recently, as a result of rising secular trends (known as Flynneffect) in the more advanced countries. Today the Flynn effect seems to have ended in the mostadvanced countries, and small IQ declines have been reported for cohorts born after about 1980in places such as Denmark and Britain. Today we have substantial Flynn effects mainly in the lessdeveloped countries. This means, international IQ differences are getting smaller again. The mostlikely reason is that populations in the most advanced countries have near-optimal environmentsalready. They have reached a ceiling that is set by their genes. People in backward countries havenot yet reached their limits, but we don’t know where their limits are. It might be something likean IQ of 100 for Europeans, 105 for East Asians, and 90 for Africans.Things become even more interesting. In Europe, it seems that people slowly got brighter fromthe Dark Age to the 19th century. This can very well be the genetic result of differentiasl fertility,because in Europe, there has been a substantial positive relationship between wealth and fertilitythrough many centuries, which most likely selected for higher intelligence. Yes, we know thatnon-trivial genetic changes can take place on that time scale, provided there is consistentselection by differential fertility or mortality. Once people were bright enough, the IndustrialRevolution was the inevitable outcome, and with it came population growth, greater prosperity,mandatory schooling for everyone, and all the other trappings of an advanced technology-basedcivilization. These environmental improvements triggered a Flynn effect, which raised the IQ ofthe next generation even more. Higher IQ produced even more prosperity and even betterschools, which raised the population IQ even more… This virtuous cycle has maintained economicgrowth through the last 2 centuries. Without it, our turbo-charged civilization wouldn’t exist.Right now the Flynn effect has reached its limits, and further IQ trends in the advanced countrieswill be determined in large part genetically: by the effects of migration and differential fertility.


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#90 Comment By David Smith On November 3, 2012 @ 9:11 pm

“These individual results, usually based on relatively small statistical samples of adopted twins orsiblings, seemingly demonstrate the extreme rigidity of IQ—the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”—while wehave also seen the numerous examples above of large populations whose IQs have drasticallyshifted over relatively short periods of time. How can these contradictory findings be squared? Ido not have the solution, but it would seem a very worthwhile subject for further research, onboth theoretical and practical grounds.”

I’m no expert (!) , but it seems that heritability is a more complicated issue than is commonlyrecognised and that estimates of within-group heritability shouldn’t be extrapolated when makingbetween-group comparisons:

[22]

#91 Comment By Tainbo Cullinge On November 6, 2012 @ 8:37 am

This article is really very good, I commend you Mr Unz. But you miss the elephant in the room.

The attempt to compare IQ scores between nations is perhaps the most futile endeavour I canimagine. Standardisation is near impossible, and cultural factors are such an overwhelminginfluence on results that IQ testing is not really testing anything at all.

Let’s take African tests, most tests are administered to people who have spent less than fiveyears in a classroom, and are written in a language that is usually not that of the subject. And youcompare this to an American student who is specifically trained in how to complete IQ-test-likequestions for 10 years.

Most of what the test investigates is how much experience the subject has with the educationalculture of the test-setter.

The most damning inditement of IQ tests came from Binet, when asked “What is intelligence?” heanswered “What my test measures”.

#92 Comment By canadian reader On December 4, 2012 @ 9:57 am

I believe that objective studies of I.Q. and its racial consequences can and must be done withscientific neutrality even if it politically incorrect.The anomalies of the Irish and Greek Americans vesus their respective European counterparts,scoring so well above the American national average can be explained by a combination of dietand intellectual stimulation due to education.What is disturbing of course is Lynn’s documentation of older low Irish scores as normative. Thiscontrats with contemporary Ireland’s PISA scores placing extremely high in Europe. Whild manyfled Ireland during the famine period there was an additional 4.5 million emmigrants in the postfamine period up to the early 20th century. Virtually all who could leave did.There were huge Irish diaspora communities in every major British city, Canada, the USA,Australia as well as New Zealand. For many decades into the 2oth century their would have beenample evidence of the success of the Irish descanents in their new countries in geneticallyendogamous relationships. The Irish-Canadians are the same as that of the USA, exceeding thenational average in terms of education and employment. What is disturbing is that Lynn mustknow about the millions of Irish diaspora, and would have had ample evidence and opportunitiesto measure Irish intelligence in Britain as well as globally. Obviously he had an agenda in collatingolder Irish data.

#93 Comment By Jonathan Kaplan On April 26, 2013 @ 11:59 am

Ron —

I know I’m quite late to this party, but just in case you still check the comments, I wanted to ask


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you to rethink your condemnation of Gould.

You write that:“…whose fraud on race and brain-size issues, presumably in service to his self-proclaimed Marxistbeliefs, last year received further coverage in the New York Times. Science largely runs on thehonor system, and once simple statements of fact—in Gould’s case, the physical volume of humanskulls—are found to be false, we cannot trust more complex claims made by the particularscholar.”

This is, I think, a very distorted view of the Lewis et al article. It is worth noting that Lewis et althemselves do not accuse Gould of fraud (nor, and this is important, did Gould ever accuseMorton of fraud!). Rather, Lewis et al argue that Gould’s preferred statistical analysis of Morton’sdata was no better justified than Morton’s, and in some cases, seemed less well justified. That’snot “fraud” — that’s a disagreement about how best to interpret a particular data-set!

First, it is important to note that Gould never claimed to have actually measured any of Morton’sskulls, and explicitly stated that, after Morton had switched from using mustard seed to using leadshot, Morton’s results — the actual measurements of skull volumes — were likely accurate andreliable. Gould never claimed that, once Morton switched to using shot, Morton’s skullmeasurements themselves were wrong.

Gould in fact credited Morton with having recognized that his original method of measurementwas unreliable, and credited him with the integrity to switch to a better, much more reliablemethod, despite the fact that the new results Morton got when he switched were *less* in linewith what Gould presumed Morton’s assumptions were. (It is interesting that Gould’s review ofMorton’s work credits Morton with great personal and scientific integrity — Gould repeatedlystresses that Morton *tried* to avoid acting on his biases, and stresses that in leaving us all of hisoriginal data, as well as explaining, in his work, what choices he made and why, Morton wasacting just as a good scientist ought to act! Gould thought it was interesting and important that, inhis view, Morton still ended up coming to biased conclusions. Lewis et al think that in fact Mortondidn’t in fact come to biased conclusions, and that is where the argument really is…)

Lewis et al acknowledge a) that Gould never made any skull measurements himself, nor claimedto, and b) Gould explicitly stated that Morton’s shot-based measurements were likely perfectlyaccurate and reliable. (Now, why they felt it necessary, given that, to remeasure a bunch of skullsis a bit of a mystery — their stated reason, that they were searching for signs of bias on Morton’spart that even Gould explicitly stated he didn’t expect to be there, is at best odd.) So, here I justwant to say that, no, Gould never claimed that Morton’s actual measurements of individual skullswere inaccurate, did not remeasure any skulls himself, did not claim to do so, and hence couldnot himself be “wrong” about the skull measurements themselves.

As for whether Gould’s choices regarding his statistical analysis were better justified thenMorton’s, less-well justified then Morton’s, or just about as well justified as Morton’s, turns out tobe a tricky question to answer, trickier than Lewis et al’s analysis suggest. (So for example, atypical example from Lewis et al goes like this: Gould argues that following Morton’s reasoningabout what data to exclude in the case of population A, say, we ought to exclude similarlysituated data from population B; Lewis et al claim that the exclusion in the case of B is differentthan in the case of A, and that in any event, the better thing to do is to include the data in bothcases, not exclude it. You get different answers given those two ways of making things consistent;Lewis et al argue that Gould’s way is worse, and that if you take their way, the answer you get iscloser to Morton’s than to Gould’s…)

But in any event, once again, Gould was *explicit* about what decisions he was making regardingwhat data to include in his analysis, and what data to exclude, and gave reasons for thosedecisions. We might think, on reflection, that those reasons were poor ones, but he didn’t try tohide what he was doing, or lie about his analysis, or anything of the sort. So “fraud” hardly seemsto be a fair description.


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I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I think it is important not to overstate what Lewis et alactually showed. Gould may well have been wrong about Morton, but he wasn’t dishonest aboutit.

#94 Comment By Binky Bear On May 9, 2013 @ 7:11 pm

Leaving aside entirely the fact that people who make IQ tests and other such sorry instrumentsconstruct them for their own glorification and based on their own sense of inherent rightness andwarped values.This is conservative sickness at its worst-the abuse of scientific procedure to support religious andethnocentric notions of superiority founded in jingoism, racism, nationalism and ultimatelyegotism. The prostitution of reason to support malignancy.

#95 Comment By canadian reader On May 22, 2013 @ 12:32 am

it appears that the thorny issue of IQ just will not go away. Why? Because IQ is the objectivemeasure of an persons intelligence. It does not measure ethics or morality just intelligence.Science for those that are intellectually honest, informs us that a significant portion of thisintelligence is genetically determined. People are different. Different groups of people can beclassed as different. How can that be racism. Racism rather is asking millions of minorities tosucceed in a Eurocentric system where failure is the most likely outcome.

#96 Comment By Frank Lee On June 8, 2013 @ 3:27 pm

Heritability of IQ is not a stable constant, hence you can’t argue for any % to be so and not beautomatically incorrect. If black children in America raised their IQ scores in line with whitechildren over the proceeding decades they would only be the last in a long line of populations todo the same such raising. Individual countries have raised their IQ scores by more than thedifference seen between blacks and whites in America, and racially identical groups separated bypolitical borders have seen the same sized differences between each other. So why pretend thatwe need to expect this situation to prove any different than every one we’ve seen before?

It is of course quite possible overall populations do have stable IQ differences, eliminating allenvironmental factors (not technically possible, but stabilizing to a single arbitrary environmentand living with possibly unequal synergistic effects), but inherent to that, it’s pointless to try andknow them until one has eliminated obvious environmental factors. Something that has not beendone here.

#97 Comment By leonard waks On June 15, 2013 @ 5:43 pm

IQ has almost nothing to do with intelligence in the root sense, adaptiveness to life and itschallenges. Psychological traits such as perseverance, flexibility, tolerance of difference, andachievement motivation are more closely associated with intelligence than any putativelycognitive measures. IQ correlates well with school grades, and is a thus a fairly decent predictorof school success. But school success is only a small component of life success. People who takefailures in stride and learn from them, form clear goals and stick to them, gather the energy topursue their life goals, are far more likely to achieve them than those narrowly focused on schoollearning or grade competition.

The most dominant feature of 20th century life was the inexorable growth of academicattainment. Thus, at the beginning of the century very few aimed at high school, and very fewwere surrounded by high school graduates. As more effort and time were devoted to school work,IQ scores rose. As more and more people were surrounded by those with high school attainment,the traits needed for school performance, the same as needed for IQ, developed – hence theFlynn effect.

Our national goal should not be to increase IQ – or even pay any attention to it. It should be tofoster those traits, attitudes and capabilities that lead to practical intelligence and effective


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capability. Except at the extremes, these are independent of IQ.

#98 Comment By Ike On July 23, 2013 @ 6:35 pm

Culture or at least factors affecting performance on IQ tests, rather than purely hereditary factorsproduce the changes in test results. I say this because the striking results of Mexican immigrantpopulations into the U.S. suggest that is the case. Unlike prior immigrant groups, for a number ofreasons – partly the political organizations like “La Raza” and other irredentist groups and partybecause of the relatively large continuous immigration – Mexican immigrants do not appear toshow an increased in tested IQ after one or two generations in the U.S. Possible explanation isthat they do not assimilate and in fact actively resist and oppose assimilation to mainstream U.S.culture, unlike the previous immigrants from Italy, etc you refer to in your article.

#99 Comment By Marie On September 1, 2013 @ 9:06 pm

I want to add a comment on diet and environment. East Asians eat more unprocessed and healthyfood – and their bodies have access to more nutrients. Also children in these countries begintaking tests and having extra tuition at very young ages.It appears that people in the united states eat a lot of food from packets and tins that are lackingin nutrients. Especially those who are poor because fresh healthy food is more expensive.Brains do not work when fed crap like “tinned cheese product” in fact when you look at high IQworld wide there seems to be some correlation where people eat clean, unprocessed fresh food.My Austrian friend was very proud of the healthy fresh food they ate and said it was part of theirculture and my Mexican friend would prepare food from tins and tell me this is Mexican food.I’d like to see a study on unprocessed food and IQ.

#100 Comment By Jaime On January 27, 2014 @ 10:40 am

I’d like to see a more recent study of Askhenazi Jewish IQ. We have up to date IQ scores andmany other standardized scores on East Asians, and they have continually risen to 106.

However, we also see the lack of exceptional performance of the Jewish youth academically incomparison to the older generations. It has been a pretty significant drop.

This may point to the previous studies possibly been a skewed sampling, and that Jewish IQ isregressing to a lower mean.

#101 Comment By Ken On April 25, 2014 @ 8:19 am

From my reading and listening to the media “elite” I conclude that the establishment rich(establishment) desire to disregard intelligence in favor of maintaining their status.

In an ideal world individuals would be rewarded based upon their merit, not who their family was.The whole political system is skewed toward two extremes by design. The republicans aim is tokeep the establishment rich in power. To do this IQ must not exist because the rich are simply notintellectually exceptional.(THe Bell Curve)

The Democrats aim is to elevate the lowest performing Americans at the expense of the high IQperformers, This is evident in their push for income, educational, housing, career, etc. EQUALITY.By pushing the intelligent whites and Asians down the rich can maintain their perch over society.

It is time for the intelligent to come together and change the world to a more merit based society– if that includes elements of socialism, then so be it.

I was raised in the military. I am a veteran and now a civil servant. THe military is definitely amerit based socialist system. THere are still problems of officer elitism but the ability of talent torise has been improved since WWII.

Again the Intelligent (IQ>120) must unite to transform America to the shining beacon on the hill;


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the only functional way is a merit based social/economic structure. We are currently beyondbroken.

#102 Comment By James Graham On June 27, 2014 @ 10:52 am

Whenever Stephen Jay Gould and IQ are mentioned in the same context I recall what he wrote inthe March 29, 1984 issue of The New York Review of Books:

“I am hopeless at deductive sequencing…I never scored particularly well on so-called objectivetests of intelligence because they stress logical reasoning …”

The fact that he obviously thought putting that admission in print involved no risk to his reputationexplains much about the man.

#103 Comment By Benjamin David Steele On January 20, 2015 @ 11:25 am

Great article! It is nice to see a conservative willing to state the obvious about what the datashows. This is extremely inconvenient data for a particular kind of reactionary ideologue. Thatsaid, I have one minor quibble about Unz comments on Gould.

I don’t care too much about the issue of skull sizes. It largely seems irrelevant to any presentdebate about biological determinism. But I would point out that the critics of Gould express theirown bias and their crticisms should be taken with a grain of salt.

[23]

“Some caveats are in order here. First of all, Holloway and his colleagues analyzed fewer thanhalf of the skulls in Morton’s collection. Second, their analysis, far from being “straightforward,”was highly technical and based on many judgment calls, as were those of Gould and Morton. Thedivergent results depend in part on whether to include or exclude certain skulls that could undulyskew estimates of brain sizes. Third, neither Morton nor Holloway et al. corrected theirmeasurements for age, gender or stature, all of which are correlated with brain size.

“Finally, at least one of the PLoS authors, Holloway, is obviously biased against Gould. The Timesquoted Holloway saying: “I just didn’t trust Gould. I had the feeling that his ideological stance wassupreme.” Holloway faulted Gould because he “never even bothered to mention” a 1988 paper byJohn S. Michael that found Morton’s conclusions to be “reasonably accurate.” But Holloway andhis co-authors stated that the paper by Michael, written when he was an undergraduate at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, “has multiple significant flaws rendering it uninformative.””

#104 Comment By John Knight On November 1, 2015 @ 7:24 am

If Ireland has an IQ of 87 and ranks 7th on PISA, then where do you think that puts us at 35th onPISA?

ps–that’s a rhetorical question because most of the ROW knows the answer.

#105 Comment By John Knight On November 2, 2015 @ 6:30 am

This is a follow up on my own question which has not been posted yet, so i hope it’s not tooconfusung.

If Professor Lynn himself believes the IQ of Ireland is 87, and if Ireland ranks 7th on PISA inreading, and scores about 25 points ahead of us in science, math, AND reading, and if one IQpoint is 8 PISA points, isn’t he suggesting that our IQ is 84.

By way of background, I am of Irish descent and heard all the nasty stories about Ireland. Thefirst time I went there I was truly astounded by how different reality was from US media myth. Soit would not be that much of a shock to discover that this is his opinion.


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Article printed from The American Conservative: http://www.theamericanconservative.com

URL to article: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-wealth/

URLs in this post:

[1] Dumb and Dumber: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/30/dumb_and_dumber

[2] further coverage in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html

[3] lengthy interview: http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2012/05/helmuth-nyborg-interviews-richard-lynn.html

[4] discovered a remarkable result: http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2008/02/flynn-effect-among-mexican-americans.html

[5] opinion column by Douglas Besharov: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/opinion/01besharov.html

[6] Image: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/archive/august-2012/

[7] The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences:http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-east-asian-exception-to-socio-economic-iq-influences/

[8] Unz.org: http://unz.org/

[9] : http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/Behavioral%20Dev%20and%20Construct%20Validity%2083.pdf

[10] : http://www.vdare.com/articles/roll-over-michael-barone-even-fourth-generation-mexicans-are-failing

[11] : http://socialistworker.org/2002-1/410/410_08_StephenJayGould.shtml

[12] : http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2010/03/ses-and-iq.html

[13] : https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/national-iqs-calculated-and-validated.pdf

[14] : https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/haprinderm.pdf

[15] : http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/papers/downloads/1002.pdf

[16] : http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/ron-unz-on-race-iq-and-wealth.html

[17] : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12509593

[18] : http://pcwatch.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/race-iq-and-wealth-preliminary-reply-in.html

[19] : http://www.vdare.com/articles/has-ron-unz-refuted-hard-hereditarianism

[20] : http://www.ronunz.org/2012/07/24/unz-on-raceiq-rejecting-the-ostrich-response

[21] : http://www.theamericanconservative.com/unz-on-raceiq-response-to-lynn-and-nyborg/

[22] : http://bostonreview.net/BR20.6/block.html

[23] : http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2011/06/24/defending-stephen-jay-goulds-crusade-against-biological-determinism/

Copyright © 2011 The American Conservative. All rights reserved.


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Race, IQ, And Wealth

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