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IQ Hoax - from May 2004 Blog Archive

"States with higher IQ vote Democrat:" -- Many hundreds of blogs, and even the famous Economist of Britain, have fallen for the IQ by State hoax. If you want the real story, read below. This material is organized (or, you may argue, disorganized) blog style, in roughly reverse chronological order.

Farther down are honest tables showing smarts by state and by nation. Fascinating stuff.

The Economist issued a retraction on May 20, 2004:

Clueless in St James's

Last week we published a list that purported to show the IQs of states voting for George Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Alas, we were the victim of a hoax: no such data exists. By way of apology, here are two very crude ratings of states' intelligence—and how they voted. 

To give you a sense of why people familiar with IQ testing instantly scoffed at the validity of the hoax data claiming the average IQ in Connecticut was 113 and in Utah was 87, it's important to understand how IQ tests are scored. The mean is typically set at 100 and the standard deviation at 15. This means that Utah's average person would fall 1 and 11/15th standard deviations lower than the average person in Connecticut. Using the Normdist function in Excel, you can put this on a percentile basis. This hoax data therefore implies that a Utah resident of average intelligence would be only at the 4th percentile in Connecticut. The average person in Connecticut would suddenly be in the 96th percentile if they moved to Utah. Well, that's nonsense.

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[Update, 11/4/04: By the way, if you are interested in this topic, you are probably also interested in my big scoop story from October 2004 on how John Kerry and George W. Bush compare in IQ, as indicated by their scores on IQ-like military aptitude tests. The original story is here. A follow-up story putting the whole question of presidential IQ in historical perspective is here. You can read about the interview Tom Brokaw asked John Kerry about my article and what Kerry told Tom Brokaw off camera about why his score might have been worse than Bush's here.

My older articles on IQ are collected here.

If you want to know what single factor actually correlates extraordinarily well with the Red-Blue division, click here to read about the Baby Gap from the Dec. 20th edition of The American Conservative magazine.

Finally, I'm going to be adding material on IQ and the new 2004 elections on my blog at www.iSteve.com. So check in periodically.]

***

The American Conservative has published my article on the Bush-Kerry IQ whoop-tee-do: Bush's Brain:

For a moment, I thought Sen. John F. Kerry was the exception to the rule that all liberals are secretly obsessed—even though they tell each other they don’t believe in it—with IQ.

The Thursday before the election, Tom Brokaw interviewed Kerry on the “NBC Nightly News” and told him, “Someone has analyzed the president’s military aptitude tests and yours and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.”

Kerry instantly dismissed this news with admirable nonchalance, “That’s great. More power.”

I was especially interested in Kerry’s response because that “someone” who had estimated Kerry’s and Bush’s IQs was me.

I had long been struck by how so many liberals were convinced that Bush was an idiot compared to Kerry. For example, Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times, asked: “Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I’m sure the candidates’ SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.”

Yet the scarlet letters “IQ” had almost never appeared in Raines’s Times. Ten years ago, The Bell Curve proved an enormous bestseller, but the backlash against the book banished IQ from the media. Still, as politically incorrect as cognitive tests have become, colleges and the military have not dropped them. They are simply too useful in sorting large numbers of applicants.

Nor have people stopped talking privately about IQ—especially liberals, who seem to believe, with deepest sincerity, both that IQ is an utterly discredited concept and that liberals are better than conservatives because liberals have much higher IQs ...

When Kerry insouciantly replied to Brokaw as if he didn't care what he scored on a 90-minute exam 38 years ago, as if he believed that all that he had accomplished since then was the proper measure of the man, I was impressed.

But then, Kerry broke the spell by quibbling about my research, "I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from." Evidently, IQ mattered to Kerry, too. 

A few days later, Brokaw went on Don Imus' radio show and revealed just how much it bugged Kerry that I had said Bush probably had a slightly higher IQ. After the cameras had stopped rolling, Kerry had rationalized to Brokaw, "I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test."   [More...]

*

"The 2004 IQ Wars: So much for the candidates, what about the voters?" My new VDARE.com article is up. I publish, for perhaps the first time anywhere, a table of average IQs by states from a study of Vietnam Vets. It won't tell you anything about who deserved to win the election, but it is interesting.

***

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IQ by state hoax updates: Let's step back a bit and try to figure out how the original hoaxer created his table of IQ by State data supposedly showing that almost all the smartest states voted for Gore. 

What the guy did, I believe, was take average income by state and make up IQ scores off that. That gives a certain surface credibility to his made up numbers because, no doubt, there's some kind of positive correlation between IQ and income in reality. I plotted his data on a graph and it's just a straight line with minor random perturbations to make it look more authentic. There are no significant outliers like there are with real data. Moreover, his range of average state IQs is too big: from 85 in Mississippi to 113 in Connecticut. I'd bet the real range is about, say, 90 to 105. 

Also,  his method of faking the IQ scores off the income data badly underestimates the IQ of the big empty Republican states where the cost of living is much lower because there is so much land per person. That's how he got ridiculous numbers in the low 90s and even 80s for almost all-white states in the Great Plains and Great Basin, where people can enjoy a high standard of living on a lower income than on the two crowded coasts. In reality, those states are among the highest scorers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. But incomes are relatively low there because the cost of living is so low.

Finally, his argument is probably a little more accurate for the white populations -- there is probably a modest positive correlation between voting for Gore and higher IQ -- but just among whites. (In contrast, I would guess that higher IQ blacks and Hispanics vote a little more Republican than their lower IQ cousins.) Of course, Gore got over a quarter of his support from blacks and Hispanics. 

But. this scam fooled so many white liberals because white liberals don't really think much about nonwhites. They just think about all the ways they are superior to conservative whites!

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More hoax debunking: Some spreaders of the hoax data have attributed it to the The Testing Agency. I asked Wendy Lord, the firm's Chief Psychologist, about the data. She emailed me back:

Hi Steve,

Have tried to locate the source of this with no luck. I also contacted OPP who supply us with the [Ravens] test for distribution. They know nothing either. I guess it is either a hoax or a poorly conducted study - it would be prohibitively expensive to collect sample sizes large enough to be representative.

I do think representative data for at least larger states might be available -- the military spends a fortune getting a nationally representative sample of  over 10,000 civilians to validate its Armed Forces Qualification Test (the one used in The Bell Curve), so we could probably attain representative scores for bigger states and regions. But I haven't seen any of that data by state. If you know of any (from legitimate sources!), please email me.

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UPDATE: Some spreaders of the hoax data have attributed it to the The Testing Agency. I asked Wendy Lord, the firm's Chief Psychologist, about the data. She emailed me back:

Hi Steve,

Have tried to locate the source of this with no luck. I also contacted OPP who supply us with the [Ravens] test for distribution. They know nothing either. I guess it is either a hoax or a poorly conducted study - it would be prohibitively expensive to collect sample sizes large enough to be representative.

I do think representative data for at least larger states might be available -- the military spends a fortune getting a nationally representative sample of  over 10,000 civilians to validate its Armed Forces Qualification Test (the one used in The Bell Curve), so we could probably attain representative scores for bigger states and regions. But I haven't seen any of that data by state. If you know of any (from legitimate sources!), please email me.

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UPDATE: IQ by state hoax crumbling -- Under pressure from me, the American Dissembler (excuse me, the American Assembler blog) has constantly changed its story about the IQ by State table it has done so much to disseminate to liberal websites under the heading "States With Higher IQ Vote Democrat." Now (early Sunday morning), its latest ploy is to try to laugh the table off as a joke, which was hardly what it was saying before:

"This chart has some people up in arms

"Some folks have no sense of humor. We made it pretty clear that, even if these stats are for real, which, as we stated in English, we have no evidence that they are, we think this chart is a joke... All we can say is, lets face it, the last "tortuous" two weeks have been depressing. Everyone could stand some levity about now."

I'm kind of sorry I managed to puncture this nascent liberal urban myth so quickly. Nothing demonstrates the hypocrisy of Democrats on the topic of IQ than the enthusiasm with which so many leapt aboard this bandwagon as a way to prove they were mentally superior to Republicans, despite, in the near-decade since the publication of The Bell Curve, having constantly denounced IQ tests as meaningless, racist, and evil incarnate.

Anyway, lots more below on the fabrication, along with a lot of honest information about intelligence, by state and by nation.

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Hoax Update: The table of IQs by state spreading across liberal blogdom is purportedly based on the Ravens Advanced Progressive IQ Matrices test. Psychometrician Chris Brand tells me: "John Raven knows of no comprehensive State-by-State data for his test."

Case closed.

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The IQ by State hoax is spreading -- Lots of liberal blogs are posting it because it makes them feel superior to see scientific proof that Blue States are smarter than Red States. This is just like the Lovenstein Institute Hoax of a couple of years ago when a lot of Democrats fell for some jokers claiming to have proven that Jimmy Carter had a stratospheric 175 IQ while George H. W. Bush had only a 98 IQ (in reality, Bush the Elder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 2.5 years), and that Bill Clinton's IQ was an Isaac Newton-like 182, while George W. Bush's was 91.

What makes it so ironic is that liberals denounce IQ tests as the spawn of the devil, except when they are citing them to prove Republicans' inferiority. As I wrote in 2000: "Honest talk about IQ would expose some deeply personal inconsistencies among our most influential thinkers. Although the typical white liberal intellectual claims he wants to censor discussion of IQ to shield black self-esteem, his sometimes-berserk reactions reveal that he finds it a peril to his own. He considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] He constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; b] He has a high IQ, but they don't."

The original source for the IQ by State data, as far as I can tell, is somebody calling himself "Robert Calvert" who posted the table to a Mensa discussion group in November of 2002. A skeptical Mensa respondent pointed out:

What is even more surprising is the correlation between IQ and income - using Excel I get a correlation coefficient of 0.92, extremely high for this kind of data. The scatter plot is a textbook straight line. Every extra IQ point means another $400 per annum. There is no need to compute the regression line, you can read the result right off the graph. If I didn't know better I would think that the data had been cooked up to support the income-IQ relatedness theory. However, you appear to have a different motive: [to prove Democrats are smarter than Republicans.]

"Calvert" claims the IQ numbers are from the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices test, but that test is only for higher IQ individuals, such as applicants for executive jobs. Instead, the Standard Progressive Matrices are the correct test for determining the average population of a large region.

"Calvert's" numbers are clearly fallacious: for example, Utah, according to him, has an average IQ of 87, the second lowest in America. Yet, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement tests, its children score above the national average on Reading, Math, and Science, and Utah trails Connecticut (purported IQ of 113) by only small amounts on every subject except Writing, where Utah does oddly bad. And Utah is ahead of New York (purported 109) in several categories.

In terms of education and party voting, there existed in 2000 a U shaped pattern, with Gore doing best with the least and most educated. 

This comes from the Voter News Service exit poll of 13,000 voters. 

If you weight this data on a 1 to 5 scale, with the the high school dropouts as 1, then the two candidates are almost exactly equal, with Bush edging out Gore by the meaninglessly tiny margin of 3.29 to 3.28. This means the average Bush and Gore voters both fall between "Some College" (3.0) and "College Graduate (4.0).

A couple of caveats: First, people exaggerate their education. It's unlikely that 18% of voters actually had graduate degrees. Second, a large fraction of Gore's votes from Graduate Degree holders came from schoolteachers, and many don't consider Ed School masters and doctorates to be in the same class in terms of mental demands as other advanced degrees.

UPDATE: In the 2002 House races according to the long-delayed VNS exit poll data that was finally released in 2003, "Republicans won for the first time in decades among those claiming to have post-graduate degrees. They even captured a majority of women with college or post-graduate degrees."

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UPDATE: NOV. 4, 2004 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#votesmart

How smart are Bush and Kerry voters? I'm getting thousands of hits today because last May's IQ by state hoax is hot again as Kerry supporters try to console themselves by proving that they have higher IQs than Bush supporters. But what about 2004?

Probably the simplest and surest way to get actual data on this question is by looking at the education level demographics in the exit poll data. As I've mentioned, I'm cynical about the accuracy of Tuesday's monopoly exit poll, but it's probably as good we've got. So, let's put education credentials on a 1 to 5 scale with:

No high school degree = 1

High school degree, no college = 2

Some college, no degree = 3

College graduate = 4

"Postgrad study" = 5

In 2000, Bush's voters had almost higher levels of education, with an average of 3.29 to 3.28 for Gore voters. (A 3.29 means that the average Bush voter fell 29% of the way between Some College and College Graduate). Gore did best with high school dropouts and those with postgrad study, and Bush did best in-between.

In the 2002 midterms, GOP candidates for the House attracted a particularly brainy bunch of voters, garnering a 3.37 to the Democratic House candidates' voters' 3.21. GOP house candidates carried college graduates by a 58-40 margin, and even won a majority among those with post-graduate study. (Please note that the post-grad category gets inflated by Democratic-voting public school teachers with advanced degrees in Education.)

In 2004, however, Bush went slightly down-scale, with an average voter educational level of 3.24 to Kerry's 3.32. Bush did much better among high school dropouts in 2004, attracting 49% of their vote, compared to only 35% in 2000.

The gap was narrower among voters for the House candidates with Democratic supporters averaging 3.31 to Republicans 3.28. (This suggests that the small number of people who voted for a  Republican House candidate but not for Bush were particularly well-educated). In sum, these are not big differences. 

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#marquardt

More on IQ and Voting: Here's the education levels of voters in the 2002 Midterm elections broken out by race. This comes from the long-lost exit poll data that I bought and personally number-crunched. GOP candidates for the House of Representatives did exceptionally well with the well educated in 2002, especially compared to Bush's rather downscale re-election campaign in 2004.

As you can see, with each race, the GOP did the worst with high school dropouts. With whites and Hispanics it did the best with college grads, and among blacks, Republican candidates greatest appeal was to those who had done postgrad studies (not necessarily a postgrad degree -- and all this is self-reported so there is likely some exaggeration of credentials, although voters do tend to be better educated than nonvoters.)

So, overall, there was a positive correlation between educational level and Republicanism. Still, the fact that for whites, there was a drop-off between college grad and postgrad in support for the GOP indicates

For comparison, here are the GOP candidates for the House's share of whites in 2002 versus Bush's share of whites in 2004. The 2004 numbers come from a post-election phone poll of 1800 respondents conducted by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg's Democracy Corps (see p. 34 of this big PDF):

Republican House candidates in 2002 got 59% of the white and Bush in 2004 got 58%, so it's a clean comparison. Clearly, Bush's re-election campaign appealed to people farther down the educational ladder than the 2002 House candidates, although the difference is not huge.

*

Scott Marquardt graphs IQ, income, and voting by state. IQ comes out a wash but Kerry states tend to be richest, followed by very heavily Bush states, with moderately Bush states the poorest.

On an individual level, Bush did somewhat better with high income people, but something that jumps out from the county maps showing the vast, empty red counties and the small, crowded blue counties is that while liberals may not be particularly rich themselves, liberals like to live near rich people.

I'm actually quite serious about this. One of the big things going on in the country is that people with bigger families are moving to the emptier Red states where it's easier to afford a bigger family. People with no or few kids are moving to the more crowded Blue states, where cultural amenities are denser.

***

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Hoax Alert: Child prodigy blogger Matthew Yglesias linked to a table purporting to show IQs by state, with Democrats doing much better in the high IQ states.

I asked the college student who posted the table where he got the data and he replied:

The statistics are from the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations," by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen. See here for more info: http://allconsuming.net/item.cgi?isbn=027597510X

It turns out that this table is going around the liberal blogs, such as the Daily Kos. For example, the American Assembler claims: 

"This chart is derived from taking the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices of average IQ by state (Source:IQ and the Wealth of Nations)"

This same attribution pops up verbatim on other sites.

Well, it's a HOAX.

I own "IQ and the Wealth of Nations." I read it extremely carefully. I've written a lengthy review of the book: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/wealth_of_nations.htm. As the title suggests, it's about the average IQs of nations, not states. There's nothing in it about IQs by states.

Also, anyone familiar with the topic would quickly recognize the fallaciousness of the data. The 113 figure for Connecticut is way too high. That's about what Connecticut would be if it was all-Jewish. It's not. The 87 for Utah is a joke.

Somebody probably got the idea from Lynn & Vanhanen's book and made up some numbers by starting with the income table (that's why the correlation with IQ is so high). The goal, obviously, was to make Democrats feel superior.

The funny thing is that this hoax will be the first time that any liberals will have ever heard of IQ and the Wealth of Nations, which is probably the most important book published in this century.

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Honest data on smarts by state! In contrast to the bogus "IQ by State" hoax data going around on liberal sites like Daily Kos (see below), the invaluable Ken Hirsch has tabulated the latest state by state official National Assessment of Educational Progress scores against the 2000 election results:

Sorted by NAEP 8th Grade Math Public Schools Score (2003)

Math Averages (Means) (not weighted by population): 

Bush States: 276.5 

Gore States: 277.1

Sorted by NAEP 8th Grade Reading Public Schools Score (2003)

Reading Averages (Means) (not weighted by population): 

Bush States: 262.2

Gore States: 262.5

So, the Gore states scored a fraction of a point higher than the Bush states, but there was essentially no difference.

Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress
National Center for Education Statistics
U. S. Dept. of Education

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By the way, this page makes a good faith attempt to estimate average IQs by state from SAT and ACT scores. The methodology is far from bulletproof, but the author's results sound not too implausible: his estimates range from an average of 94 in Mississippi and South Carolina to 104 in New Hampshire. If you can think of a better way to do it, send the author an email.

As you may have noticed from eyeballing the data, the highest-scoring states don't have much in common except they tend to be quite ... well, northern (if you get my drift). In his obituary for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, George Will coyly wrote:

"The Senate's Sisyphus, Moynihan was forever pushing uphill a boulder of inconvenient data. A social scientist trained to distinguish correlation from causation, and a wit, Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. The barb in his jest was this: High cognitive outputs correlate not with high per-pupil expenditures but with a high percentage of two-parent families. For that, there was the rough geographical correlation that caused Moynihan to suggest that states trying to improve their students' test scores should move closer to Canada."

Sure, George and Dan, whatever you say! It must be playing hockey that makes you monogamous and thus smart.

Anyway, cutting through the euphemisms, here are the correlations between test scores and percent of a state's population that is non-Hispanic white:

0.70 Math (i.e., % of whites "explains" 49% of variation)

0.79 Reading (62%)

In the social sciences, correlations of 0.2 are considered "low," 0.4 are "moderate," and 0.6 are "high."

***

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Q. Do smart whites vote Democratic? 

A. Sort of. 

Contrary to the IQ hoax data, I've shown that there was no obvious difference between the Bush States and the Gore States in school achievement. But, if we look at the scores on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement tests for white 8th graders as a proxy for how smart the state's white people are, we see Gore carried the white voters in the five states with the highest achievement scores. On the other hand, Gore didn't carry the whites in any of the next 18 highest scorers, so the effect is not huge. It's much smaller than in the hoax IQ by state table.

But, this helps explain why so many white Democrats fell for the hoax. See, when white liberals say to themselves, "Democrats are smarter than Republicans," what they really mean is: "White Democrats are smarter than White Republicans." They are thinking in apartheid white-only terms, because they don't think of minorities as being real Democrats. Minority Democrats are just props to demonstrate the moral superiority of white Democrats.

(Technical note: I don't have actual scores, just the percentage who scored at the Proficient level or above, but that should be fairly similar to the average score. So, don't take these rankings as carved in stone. They are just indicative of general trends.)

A few comments: Massachusetts' white students continued their fine performance, which goes back to the 17th Century Puritans. New Jersey continues to outshine its outdated stereotypes. Minnesota's whites scored very well for a state without many Jews. Colorado was the highest scoring state that voted for Bush, and it's second to Massachusetts in highest percentage of adults with college degrees. Virginia and North Carolina score very well for Southern states. In fact, Virginia's whites outscored Maryland's whites, which is interesting because right of center people in the D.C. suburbs move to Virginia while left of center people move to Maryland.

California's whites scored well under the national average, which is pathetic for a state that has brain-drained the rest of the country for a century (e.g., Richard Feynman). That must say a lot about the quality of public schooling in California. Rhode Island's whites did much worse than their neighbors in MA and CN, but I'm not sure why. Hawaii's whites scored dreadfully. But West Virginia's whites (who voted for Bush by less than the national average) are in a class by themselves at the bottom of the chart.

Washington D.C. has by far the most liberal whites in the country (voting 67% for Gore, 20% for Bush, and 12% for Nader), but so few of these white liberals send their children to D.C.'s public schools that the NAEP didn't find enough white students in D.C. to report a statistically trustworthy score. 

(You can see the math and reading tables by state aggregating all races here.)

***

IQs by State, 1960 -- You probably remember the notorious "Democratic states have higher IQs" hoax from last May. Well, here, thanks to Prof. Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah anthropology dept., might be the closest thing to a national sample of IQ scores ever: the Project Talent database of 366,000 9th-12th grade students. Unfortunately, it is 44 years years old. Nonetheless, it correlates reasonably with 2003 NAEP 8th grade achievement test scores (here are the 2003 scores). As you can see, in this list of kids' IQs back in 1960, of the top 10 smartest states, in 2000, Bush and Gore each won five. So, we're back to my original conclusion: red states and blue states are similar in average IQ, as are, on average, Republican and Democratic voters. 

Some caveats: These IQ scores are set with the national mean of the 366,000 high school students equal to 100 and the standard deviation set to 15. But, keep in mind that we are only beginning to explore this huge database, so take everything with a grain of salt.

There weren't adequate sample sizes from Alaska, Washington DC, and South Carolina, and I excluded South Dakota because the result was too different from North Dakota. (I think something might be confused about both South Carolina and South Dakota -- I'll try to find out more.)

Harpending also looked at whites only data (unfortunately, the majority of participants doesn't have a race recorded) with the smartest whites (which I suspect is all that white liberals care about -- feeling smarter than white conservatives) were (in descending order): Connecticut, Montana, Nevada (I bet that's not true anymore!), Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Virginia. The dumbest whites were in (in descending order): Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky. All of these states voted for Bush in 2000. I suspect, however, that air conditioning and the abolition of the caste system have some good for the test scores of whites in the south, especially in North Carolina. Here, for purposes of comparison, is the 2003 NAEP public school achievement tests for white 8th graders.

***

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Honest Data: Average IQ by Nation: "Robert Calvert," the joker who apparently fabricated the data in the table that purports to show that smart states voted overwhelmingly for Gore in 2000, claims to have been inspired by the fascinating and important 2002 book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" by Richard Lynn (emeritus professor of psychology at the U. of Ulster) and Tatu Vanhanen (emeritus professor of political science at the Universities of Helsinki and Tampere and, interestingly, father of the prime minister of Finland.) As the title suggests, that book is about nations, not states. There is no table of data on IQ by state in it, as many have claimed.

On the other hand, it does contain a fascinating table listing average IQs for 81 nations, based on 168 national IQ studies, almost all of them published in refereed scientific journals. Lynn and Vanhanen then correlated IQ with per capita GDP and found a correlation of 0.73. 

I'm reproducing their table below, but please read my review of their book for important caveats and a discussion of which way the arrow of causality points: from IQ to income or vice-versa? I wrote recently about the United Nations report that confirmed Lynn & Vanhanen's argument that the best thing we can do to help the Third World overcome poverty is to help much of the Third World overcome IQ deficits caused by a lack of micronutrients such as iodine and iron. The U.N. summarized: "Few outside specialist circles are aware of the scale and severity of vitamin and mineral deficiency, or of what it means for individuals and for nations. It means the impairment of hundreds of millions of growing minds and the lowering of national IQs… And it means the large-scale loss of national energies, intellects, productivity, and growth."

When reading the chart below, don't assume small differences are meaningful. Lynn and Vanhanen's methodology is rather heroic in its assumptions, so differences of, say, less than five points are probably unreliable. Also, scores for individual countries are probably not too reliable, either. Regional patterns, such as the very high scores found in the five Northeast Asian countries (counting Chinese-settled Taiwan and Singapore as Northeast Asian), however, are of great importance in understanding the world we live in.

In this table, "fitted GDP" is a calculation of what per capita income would be expected to if all you knew about the country was its average IQ. For example, Hong Kong registers the highest average IQ (107 on a scale where the U.S. is 98). It would be expected, based on a simple regression model of these 81 countries to have a per capita GDP of $19,817, which is quite close to its actual GDP of $20,763. 

China, on the other hand, with an average IQ of 100, two points higher than the U.S., would be expected to have a per capita GDP of $16,183. Instead, it's per capita GDP is only $3,105 (presumably due to decades of Maoist insanity, among other problems). This massive gap between the high potential of Chinese workers and their low wages explain why so many hundreds of billions of dollars of overseas capital is being invested in that country.

If you invest in overseas stocks, you should buy IQ and the Wealth of Nations to help you find countries with high potential workforces who are currently earning less than they could if their economies were better ordered. It's analogous to Warren Buffett's value investing -- it's safe to assume that eventually the governments of China and Poland, say, will figure out how to make their constituents as prosperous as other high IQ countries.

Frighteningly, the U.S. looks rather overvalued. Of course, we make up for it by working longer hours than our European competitors. But the very long run future of our competitiveness versus smart and hardworking Northeast Asia does not look bright.

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From my www.VDARE.com article "Opening the Black Box of Lynn & Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations."

The heart of IQ And The Wealth Of Nations is its Appendix 1, which describes each of the 184 studies.

Lynn and Vanhanen's summary listing of mean IQ scores for the 81 countries has been available on the web for some time. (Here, on Lynn's website is his list. And here are other copies of the summary list: wordIQ, sq.4mg, Griffe, Nuenke.)

Unfortunately, everything on the web heretofore has made Lynn and Vanhanen's results look like a black box. This has had two bad effects.  

• First, the impenetrability of the numbers on the web make them easy to dismiss by those who want to reject the findings without due consideration. 

• Second (and opposite), some people take every estimate in the summary table too credulously.

If you've actually studied Appendix 1, and seen the methodological hurdles Lynn and Vanhanen have had to deal with, you're not likely to say things like, "L&V showed that Sweden's IQ is higher than Norway's." Sure, they came up with a 100 estimate for Sweden and a 98 estimate for Norway. But the reality that's apparent in Appendix 1 is that there's way too much noise in the data for fine distinctions like that to be trustworthy.

To open up the black box, I've created a table displaying virtually all the information Lynn and Vanhanen provide on each IQ study they used—not just the overall the national results you've seen so far. 

This should prove highly useful to future researchers.

Skeptics are likely to be surprised by how robust and consistent the findings tend to be.

The rest of my article is here.

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***

From my VDARE.com article in May 2004:

As the 10th anniversary of Richard Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's bestseller The Bell Curve approaches, the entire concept of IQ has become the great unmentionable in writing about education.  

On the other hand, secretly, IQ remains a vital subject in nice liberal neighborhoods, where upper middle class parents strive desperately to get their kids into public school gifted programs that have extremely exclusive IQ requirements (and thus few black or Hispanic students).

Four years ago, I wrote a five-part VDARE.COM series on how to help the left half of the IQ bell curve. In my first article, "IQ and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It," I noted:

"Honest talk about IQ would expose some deeply personal inconsistencies among our most influential thinkers. Although the typical white intellectual claims he wants to censor discussion of IQ to shield black self-esteem, his sometimes-berserk reactions reveal that he finds it a peril to his own self-image. The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: First, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't. Second, he has a high IQ, but they don't."

So, which is it, liberals?

A. IQ tests are meaningless, racist, and the spawn of the devil.

B. IQ tests prove that liberals are superior to conservatives.

Because IQ remains wildly popular among Democrats for the purpose of asserting mental superiority over Republicans. Look at this table headed "So Democrats really are smarter." The prestigious magazine The Economist (with which we’ve had to criticize before) picked it up from one of the hundreds of liberal blogs that gleefully circulated it earlier this month.

The Economist, May 15, 2004, p. 26

[The Economist retracted this in a subsequent issue.]

Among many ironies, The Economist falsely attributed this table to " IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (2002)." That landmark book, with its fascinating table of average IQs for 81 countries, is about nations, not states.

In March, J. Philippe Rushton, the Canadian social psychologist, wrote in VDARE.com:

"The book’s thesis—that a country’s prosperity is closely related to the average IQ of its population—should have made the cover of The Economist because of its devastatingly important implications. But, although some academics took notice, it was ignored by the mainstream media."

As far as I can tell, this phony table is the first time The Economist has deigned to mention Lynn and Vanhanen's two-year-old book.

But the table printed in The Economist is a HOAX.

The rest of the article is here.

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