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Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
Over the last few decades, economists and psychologists have quietly documented the many ways in which a person's IQ matters. But, research suggests that a nation's IQ matters so much more.
As Garett Jones argues in Hive Mind, modest differences in national IQ can explain most cross-country inequalities. Whereas IQ scores do a moderately good job of predicting individual wages, information processing power, and brain size, a country's average score is a much stronger bellwether of its overall prosperity.
As Garett Jones argues in Hive Mind, modest differences in national IQ can explain most cross-country inequalities. Whereas IQ scores do a moderately good job of predicting individual wages, information processing power, and brain size, a country's average score is a much stronger bellwether of its overall prosperity.
184 pages, Unknown Binding
First published November 1, 2015
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November 12, 2020
Moved to gwern.net.
January 8, 2020
I read this book because of the debate between Jones and Caplan about the concern that open borders could lower American welfare by lowering average IQ in the US. I didn't follow Jones' argument that this would matter, so I thought reading his book would help.
Having read it, I learned a lot of interesting facts about IQ and cooperation. In particular, IQ is much more robust a measure than I had thought, and there is reason to believe that the cultural influence on the test as currently administered is weak. IQ predicts many kinds of life outcomes, predicts improved performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks, and predicts greater cooperation and better outcomes on a range of collaborative tasks. IQ in general was pedagogically downplayed in my education (even though I am a cognitive psychology PhD!) and it was very useful to get a primer on what I was missing.
That said, I remain unconvinced about the direction of the causal arrow from IQ to positive outcomes. In short, national development as measured along several dimensions seems to correlate closely to average IQ. There is substantial micro level evidence that high IQ individuals cooperate more effectively and that their advantages are particularly pronounced when they associate with one another. At this point Jones makes a leap that he doesn't quite fill: Since national outcomes correlate with national IQ, and there is a plausible mechanism for high IQ to create good outcomes, that highly developed countries' outcomes are _caused_ by the high IQ of their citizens.
This could be true, but a) the argument as presented does not constitute conclusive evidence and b) does not address strong evidence to the contrary. For example, research suggests that IQ in Ireland has increased drastically since the 1980s, as has Irish GDP. While it is possible that Ireland's improved outcomes are a result of the massive (~10 point) increase in IQ, in the absence of a clear explanation of how that would have come about I find it easier to imagine that increased affluence created conditions where strong test performance and IQ-like reasoning became both a higher priority for students, and something they are now able to invest in developing. This is conjectural of course, but I was hoping for a much stronger effort to address the causal question.
Having read it, I learned a lot of interesting facts about IQ and cooperation. In particular, IQ is much more robust a measure than I had thought, and there is reason to believe that the cultural influence on the test as currently administered is weak. IQ predicts many kinds of life outcomes, predicts improved performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks, and predicts greater cooperation and better outcomes on a range of collaborative tasks. IQ in general was pedagogically downplayed in my education (even though I am a cognitive psychology PhD!) and it was very useful to get a primer on what I was missing.
That said, I remain unconvinced about the direction of the causal arrow from IQ to positive outcomes. In short, national development as measured along several dimensions seems to correlate closely to average IQ. There is substantial micro level evidence that high IQ individuals cooperate more effectively and that their advantages are particularly pronounced when they associate with one another. At this point Jones makes a leap that he doesn't quite fill: Since national outcomes correlate with national IQ, and there is a plausible mechanism for high IQ to create good outcomes, that highly developed countries' outcomes are _caused_ by the high IQ of their citizens.
This could be true, but a) the argument as presented does not constitute conclusive evidence and b) does not address strong evidence to the contrary. For example, research suggests that IQ in Ireland has increased drastically since the 1980s, as has Irish GDP. While it is possible that Ireland's improved outcomes are a result of the massive (~10 point) increase in IQ, in the absence of a clear explanation of how that would have come about I find it easier to imagine that increased affluence created conditions where strong test performance and IQ-like reasoning became both a higher priority for students, and something they are now able to invest in developing. This is conjectural of course, but I was hoping for a much stronger effort to address the causal question.
June 15, 2017
Politically correctly ignores genetics, but nevertheless an informative, and helpful (to nations and economists) book.
April 13, 2022
Garett Jones delivers a needed but occasionally puzzling take on the economic impact of IQ. To his credit, Jones is one of the few social scientists outside the narrow realm of psychometry who acknowledges IQ. I've often marveled at the yawning gap between what psychometrists (the people who study human intelligence) know, vs. what everybody else who writes about people knows. So I commend Jones for daring to be among the first to address that gap. His attempt to bridge economics and psychometry is pioneering to some degree, and that alone warrants my four star rating (in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king). But like version 1.0 of anything, the book needs some debugging.
The first head-scratcher is in the book's title: "How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own." On the one hand, your nation's per capita allotment of anything probably matters more in the big picture than your individual allotment of that thing. If you have an extra $1000, it doesn't matter as much as if 330 million of your fellow citizens each have an extra $1000. 330 billion dollars is bigger than one thousand dollars. Similarly if you have an army of one million soldiers, giving another bullet to each soldier matters more than giving a bullet to one soldier. Yet Jones seems to believe it's somehow a paradox that millions of units of a thing could matter more than one unit of that same thing.
On the other hand an extra $1000 in your pocket probably matters more to you than $1000 in any number of other people's pockets. So to make sense of the word "matters" we have to specify to whom.
Another puzzle follows from Jones' almost-sole focus on the nation as the population group. He largely ignores sub-national groups. Among other things, this leads him to claim incorrectly that East Asians are the smartest group on the planet. They aren't - Ashkenazi Jews are. But since no nation has a vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews (not even Israel, which also contains Sephardic Jews, Arabs, etc.), they don't show up in Jones' nation data. And since Jones ends his book with a call to make every country as smart as Singapore, one wonders why he stops there when the Askenazim are sitting a few points higher still at around 115. But why stop at all? Individual IQs range to over 160 among the 1 in 30,000 outliers in the famous Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. Had Jones read about that study, he'd know that a higher IQ never stops mattering. Even if you're already gifted with an IQ of 140, you'd still likely see substantial life benefits with a further bump up to 160.
Jones spends much of the book explaining how the average IQ of everyone around you matters more to you than your own IQ does. But he does this by implicity defining "matters" with a single metric: wages. It seems that a slight difference in average IQ between two nations predicts a much larger average wage difference between the two nations than the same IQ difference predicts for the wage difference between two individuals in the same nation. Even at this point I'm still not feeling stunned, since it seems fairly obvious that the same job in two different countries can earn different wages. That's the whole basis for globalization and outsourcing - corporations notice that a steelworker in Pittsburgh earns many times more than a steelworker in Vietnam, so they move the steel plant to the country where wages are lower (for now). It's interesting that the term "labor union" does not appear in the book. While unionization is not the sole reason why wages are higher in countries that industrialized earlier, it's one of the factors that created the outcome that Jones seems to find puzzling - namely that individual countries are not as internally unequal as they could possibly be. Extreme inequality itself seems to generate externalities - such as violent political revolutions - so rather than being puzzled as Jones is that we don't have the maximum possible wage inequality within a nation, perhaps we should be thankful.
Are wages sufficient to measure well-being? Even if we consider only economic well-being, there is also wealth. We know that income and wealth do not distribute equally. We also know that there is greater inequality of wealth than of wages. Most of the wealthiest people don't earn wages per se, but instead they collect dividends, royalties, rents, capital gains, etc. They stay wealthy and accumulate more wealth by consuming only a tiny percentage of their net worth each year (e.g. 3%). Jones does mention that IQ correlates with the savings rate, on a national level, and having the discipline to spend less than you earn is how the individual becomes wealthy. But Jones doesn't explore how that relates to individual well-being, beyond mentioning that a more intelligent person is likely to approach retirement age in better economic shape than a less intelligent person, all else being equal. Which might in turn suggest that two people can earn the same wage yet experience very different levels of economic well-being, even before we consider the non-economic impacts that IQ has on individual well-being.
Then there are those other forms of well-being. As an economist, Jones seems not to notice that not everything is fully monetized yet. As an unrelated example, take the attribute of physical beauty. A person's physical appearance profoundly affects the person's life, as other people react in drastically different ways to us depending on how we look. Some of that different treatment might manifest economically (as documented in Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful). However, many benefits of physical beauty don't monetize. If we adopted Jones' view that only wages matter, we would miss a lot of what being beautiful can do for a person, for example in the romantic relationship arena where beauty is the most valuable asset for both men and women. If we wanted a more complete economic valuation of beauty, we might ask people how much they would be willing to pay to become genuinely more beautiful (and no, cosmetic surgery doesn't quite do that yet, which is why we can't all look like supermodels).
A consequence of IQ to the individual that doesn't always impact on wages is health. Jones ignores the field of cognitive epidemiology. Especially in modern post-industrial societies, how long a person lives and in what state of health are to some degree functions of the individual's behavioral choices. We decide how much and what to eat, whether and how much to exercise, whether to indulge in recreational drugs, and so on. People with higher IQs are better able, on average, to sort through the barrage of health information and disinformation, and to act on the best of it. This has become readily apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which vaccination is for the most part voluntary, and vaccine refusal correlates inversely with IQ. For example among medical workers (who became eligible for vaccination first), the vast majority of physicians got vaccinated early, with only a tiny fraction (around 3% in one hospital system I read about) refusing. Among less-educated (and therefore, on average less intelligent) nurses, vaccine refusal was much higher, up to a third in that same hospital system. Many nurses chose to quit their jobs rather than submit to workplace vaccine mandates. Since the available COVID-19 vaccines are highly protective against the most severe outcomes of hospitalization and death, after the vaccine supply became abundant around April 2021, vaccine refusers dominated the casualty counts, with thousands dying per week. The pandemic largely became a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."
If we take the blinkered view of Jones, we might not see a wage effect of cognitive epidemiology. Once a person dies, they are no longer contributing earnings data. While the vaccine-denying nurse was alive, he or she might have earned about the same wage as a vaccine-accepting nurse. And when the vaccine denier dies, perhaps due to having a lower IQ that made him or her less able to recognize that Dr. Fauci knows more about medicine than Joe Rogan, nothing happens to the wage data. If people are dying because they lacked a few IQ points, I'd say that matters more to them than anything. The wage metric for well-being fails miserably here.
However, Jones wrote about the effects of IQ on wages - your own and your nation's. Jones tries to tabulate the externalities of intelligence (costs or benefits that we inadvertently generate for other people merely by being as dull or smart as we are). This is a worthwhile exercise, as Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement points out. Once it becomes possible for parents to choose the future IQs of their children (in whole or part), the externalities of IQ create an ethical obligation. For example, if giving your child a high IQ is as beneficial to your nation as Jones says it is (and I suspect it's even more important since a lot more than wages is at stake), then once the child's IQ becomes a choice for the parents, the nation has an interest in the parents making the best choice for the nation. Fortunately with respect to IQ, what's good for the nation also seems to be good for the child.
However, Jones ignores that impending ethical issue entirely, by taking a bafflingly anti-hereditarian stance throughout the book. He writes as if the genomics revolution is not occurring, which is about as crazy as pretending global warming is not occurring.
Instead Jones carries on as if the Flynn effect proves that a nation's average IQ can be dialed up or down by policy to any desired degree. Now, the Flynn effect is unquestionably real: there really has been a remarkable, secular rise in IQ test scores in many nations around the world, of around 3 IQ points per decade. (The Wikipedia article I linked is worth reading, as this is one of the greatest puzzles in psychometrics.) However, in terms of practical applications, the Flynn effect is more like cold fusion in physics - as in, there are none. There is no scientific consensus on what caused the Flynn effect in the past, nor even on the degree to which the IQ test score rise indicates real gains in intelligence. For example, the Flynn effect implies that IQ scores have risen by 30 points in the past century in the United States. That's two standard deviations, the difference between the average American and a Mensan. If the average American were really 30 points lower in intelligence a century ago, many Americans would have struggled to understand the rules of baseball. The cognitive capital of the United States in 1920 would have been equivalent to that of a sub-Saharan nation today. Similarly, the average American schoolchild today would be as smart as a gifted American child in 1920. Surely if students were showing such gains in intelligence over the span of a human life, schoolteachers might have noticed. But the Flynn effect had to be discovered from IQ testing because there haven't been corresponding intelligence increases that manifest in real life.
Another difficulty is that even if the Flynn effect means real intelligence increases are possible from environmental interventions, there is nothing to suggest we can equalize all the national test score differences. And Jones even mentions the analogy with increasing heights, without seeming to notice that an increase in the average height has no impact on the variation in height. People are on average taller today than their ancestors of a century ago, but the spread in heights is the same as it ever was. Some people are still a lot taller than other people. And the group differences remain as well: men are still on average taller than women, despite men and women both having increased in height over the past century. Thus if someone decided, for political reasons, that men and women must have the same average height, the secular increase in height over the past century provides zero basis for hope. And yet Jones writes as if he thinks the Flynn effect proves that those low-IQ sub-Saharan countries can catch up with the high-IQ Chinese, Japanese, and South Koreans. And speaking of Koreans, Jones mentions South Korea a few times but doesn't mention North Korea, perhaps because the Hermit Kingdom doesn't make it easy for psychometricians to test the IQs of North Koreans. But that would make an excellent real-world test of environmental influence on intelligence, given the meager North Korean diet compared to what their close genetic relatives in South Korea are eating.
The first head-scratcher is in the book's title: "How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own." On the one hand, your nation's per capita allotment of anything probably matters more in the big picture than your individual allotment of that thing. If you have an extra $1000, it doesn't matter as much as if 330 million of your fellow citizens each have an extra $1000. 330 billion dollars is bigger than one thousand dollars. Similarly if you have an army of one million soldiers, giving another bullet to each soldier matters more than giving a bullet to one soldier. Yet Jones seems to believe it's somehow a paradox that millions of units of a thing could matter more than one unit of that same thing.
On the other hand an extra $1000 in your pocket probably matters more to you than $1000 in any number of other people's pockets. So to make sense of the word "matters" we have to specify to whom.
Another puzzle follows from Jones' almost-sole focus on the nation as the population group. He largely ignores sub-national groups. Among other things, this leads him to claim incorrectly that East Asians are the smartest group on the planet. They aren't - Ashkenazi Jews are. But since no nation has a vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews (not even Israel, which also contains Sephardic Jews, Arabs, etc.), they don't show up in Jones' nation data. And since Jones ends his book with a call to make every country as smart as Singapore, one wonders why he stops there when the Askenazim are sitting a few points higher still at around 115. But why stop at all? Individual IQs range to over 160 among the 1 in 30,000 outliers in the famous Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. Had Jones read about that study, he'd know that a higher IQ never stops mattering. Even if you're already gifted with an IQ of 140, you'd still likely see substantial life benefits with a further bump up to 160.
Jones spends much of the book explaining how the average IQ of everyone around you matters more to you than your own IQ does. But he does this by implicity defining "matters" with a single metric: wages. It seems that a slight difference in average IQ between two nations predicts a much larger average wage difference between the two nations than the same IQ difference predicts for the wage difference between two individuals in the same nation. Even at this point I'm still not feeling stunned, since it seems fairly obvious that the same job in two different countries can earn different wages. That's the whole basis for globalization and outsourcing - corporations notice that a steelworker in Pittsburgh earns many times more than a steelworker in Vietnam, so they move the steel plant to the country where wages are lower (for now). It's interesting that the term "labor union" does not appear in the book. While unionization is not the sole reason why wages are higher in countries that industrialized earlier, it's one of the factors that created the outcome that Jones seems to find puzzling - namely that individual countries are not as internally unequal as they could possibly be. Extreme inequality itself seems to generate externalities - such as violent political revolutions - so rather than being puzzled as Jones is that we don't have the maximum possible wage inequality within a nation, perhaps we should be thankful.
Are wages sufficient to measure well-being? Even if we consider only economic well-being, there is also wealth. We know that income and wealth do not distribute equally. We also know that there is greater inequality of wealth than of wages. Most of the wealthiest people don't earn wages per se, but instead they collect dividends, royalties, rents, capital gains, etc. They stay wealthy and accumulate more wealth by consuming only a tiny percentage of their net worth each year (e.g. 3%). Jones does mention that IQ correlates with the savings rate, on a national level, and having the discipline to spend less than you earn is how the individual becomes wealthy. But Jones doesn't explore how that relates to individual well-being, beyond mentioning that a more intelligent person is likely to approach retirement age in better economic shape than a less intelligent person, all else being equal. Which might in turn suggest that two people can earn the same wage yet experience very different levels of economic well-being, even before we consider the non-economic impacts that IQ has on individual well-being.
Then there are those other forms of well-being. As an economist, Jones seems not to notice that not everything is fully monetized yet. As an unrelated example, take the attribute of physical beauty. A person's physical appearance profoundly affects the person's life, as other people react in drastically different ways to us depending on how we look. Some of that different treatment might manifest economically (as documented in Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful). However, many benefits of physical beauty don't monetize. If we adopted Jones' view that only wages matter, we would miss a lot of what being beautiful can do for a person, for example in the romantic relationship arena where beauty is the most valuable asset for both men and women. If we wanted a more complete economic valuation of beauty, we might ask people how much they would be willing to pay to become genuinely more beautiful (and no, cosmetic surgery doesn't quite do that yet, which is why we can't all look like supermodels).
A consequence of IQ to the individual that doesn't always impact on wages is health. Jones ignores the field of cognitive epidemiology. Especially in modern post-industrial societies, how long a person lives and in what state of health are to some degree functions of the individual's behavioral choices. We decide how much and what to eat, whether and how much to exercise, whether to indulge in recreational drugs, and so on. People with higher IQs are better able, on average, to sort through the barrage of health information and disinformation, and to act on the best of it. This has become readily apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which vaccination is for the most part voluntary, and vaccine refusal correlates inversely with IQ. For example among medical workers (who became eligible for vaccination first), the vast majority of physicians got vaccinated early, with only a tiny fraction (around 3% in one hospital system I read about) refusing. Among less-educated (and therefore, on average less intelligent) nurses, vaccine refusal was much higher, up to a third in that same hospital system. Many nurses chose to quit their jobs rather than submit to workplace vaccine mandates. Since the available COVID-19 vaccines are highly protective against the most severe outcomes of hospitalization and death, after the vaccine supply became abundant around April 2021, vaccine refusers dominated the casualty counts, with thousands dying per week. The pandemic largely became a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."
If we take the blinkered view of Jones, we might not see a wage effect of cognitive epidemiology. Once a person dies, they are no longer contributing earnings data. While the vaccine-denying nurse was alive, he or she might have earned about the same wage as a vaccine-accepting nurse. And when the vaccine denier dies, perhaps due to having a lower IQ that made him or her less able to recognize that Dr. Fauci knows more about medicine than Joe Rogan, nothing happens to the wage data. If people are dying because they lacked a few IQ points, I'd say that matters more to them than anything. The wage metric for well-being fails miserably here.
However, Jones wrote about the effects of IQ on wages - your own and your nation's. Jones tries to tabulate the externalities of intelligence (costs or benefits that we inadvertently generate for other people merely by being as dull or smart as we are). This is a worthwhile exercise, as Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement points out. Once it becomes possible for parents to choose the future IQs of their children (in whole or part), the externalities of IQ create an ethical obligation. For example, if giving your child a high IQ is as beneficial to your nation as Jones says it is (and I suspect it's even more important since a lot more than wages is at stake), then once the child's IQ becomes a choice for the parents, the nation has an interest in the parents making the best choice for the nation. Fortunately with respect to IQ, what's good for the nation also seems to be good for the child.
However, Jones ignores that impending ethical issue entirely, by taking a bafflingly anti-hereditarian stance throughout the book. He writes as if the genomics revolution is not occurring, which is about as crazy as pretending global warming is not occurring.
Instead Jones carries on as if the Flynn effect proves that a nation's average IQ can be dialed up or down by policy to any desired degree. Now, the Flynn effect is unquestionably real: there really has been a remarkable, secular rise in IQ test scores in many nations around the world, of around 3 IQ points per decade. (The Wikipedia article I linked is worth reading, as this is one of the greatest puzzles in psychometrics.) However, in terms of practical applications, the Flynn effect is more like cold fusion in physics - as in, there are none. There is no scientific consensus on what caused the Flynn effect in the past, nor even on the degree to which the IQ test score rise indicates real gains in intelligence. For example, the Flynn effect implies that IQ scores have risen by 30 points in the past century in the United States. That's two standard deviations, the difference between the average American and a Mensan. If the average American were really 30 points lower in intelligence a century ago, many Americans would have struggled to understand the rules of baseball. The cognitive capital of the United States in 1920 would have been equivalent to that of a sub-Saharan nation today. Similarly, the average American schoolchild today would be as smart as a gifted American child in 1920. Surely if students were showing such gains in intelligence over the span of a human life, schoolteachers might have noticed. But the Flynn effect had to be discovered from IQ testing because there haven't been corresponding intelligence increases that manifest in real life.
Another difficulty is that even if the Flynn effect means real intelligence increases are possible from environmental interventions, there is nothing to suggest we can equalize all the national test score differences. And Jones even mentions the analogy with increasing heights, without seeming to notice that an increase in the average height has no impact on the variation in height. People are on average taller today than their ancestors of a century ago, but the spread in heights is the same as it ever was. Some people are still a lot taller than other people. And the group differences remain as well: men are still on average taller than women, despite men and women both having increased in height over the past century. Thus if someone decided, for political reasons, that men and women must have the same average height, the secular increase in height over the past century provides zero basis for hope. And yet Jones writes as if he thinks the Flynn effect proves that those low-IQ sub-Saharan countries can catch up with the high-IQ Chinese, Japanese, and South Koreans. And speaking of Koreans, Jones mentions South Korea a few times but doesn't mention North Korea, perhaps because the Hermit Kingdom doesn't make it easy for psychometricians to test the IQs of North Koreans. But that would make an excellent real-world test of environmental influence on intelligence, given the meager North Korean diet compared to what their close genetic relatives in South Korea are eating.
April 20, 2016
This is a refreshing popular press entry for an economist. He focuses on evidence overlooked by many, yet he does not throw the profession under the bus to raise his own status (as seems to be the norm among pop press economist writings lately). Jones quietly builds an interdisciplinary case without bragging about being interdisciplinary. He is candid about the quality of the evidence he surveys, and he does not oversell the argument. He outlines the limits of knowledge. He does it all in a very readable way. In the George Mason tradition, Jones is widely read and fun to read.
I'm not sure what to make of chapter 7--it is not clear how it advances the case. I'm also not fully sure about the causal claims of the book generally, though he does make a reasonable argument. Ultimately it may be thought of as a calibration argument: without getting too far off track, we can think of him as providing a model of IQ transmission to other outcomes, which we can calibrate in the thought experiment.
It's a short read, highly recommended.
I'm not sure what to make of chapter 7--it is not clear how it advances the case. I'm also not fully sure about the causal claims of the book generally, though he does make a reasonable argument. Ultimately it may be thought of as a calibration argument: without getting too far off track, we can think of him as providing a model of IQ transmission to other outcomes, which we can calibrate in the thought experiment.
It's a short read, highly recommended.
April 16, 2018
Title: IQ matters. A lot. Both to you and your nation.
Let's just say it up front and get it out of the way: IQ matters. A lot. Both to you and your nation.
There's much to like about this book. Jones does a great job of stating the case for the validity and importance of measuring IQ (the intelligence quotient) and making correlations with a wide range of educational, occupational, economic, and behavioral variables. He does this in a clinical and dispassionate way, which is very helpful and refreshing, merely presenting findings from numerous studies over decades of time (from recent to 50 to nearly 100 years ago) from a range of sources (private and public military/government). The text is very plain and understandable, almost like an article in Scientific American or The Economist. He does address how to possibly increase IQ of nations over time (the Flynn effect) and why that's important. In other words, what state-level policies might be considered to improve quality of life for a country's citizens? It's a great question but he leaves others to answer because, as the book title says, he's merely making the claim that your nation's IQ matters more than your own IQ. In other words: Better to be a below-average IQ individual in a high-IQ nation than a high-IQ individual in a low-IQ nation.
This is a short book, at 168 pages, and Jones does a very nice job of going through the scientific literature to show how IQ correlates (predicts) a range of things, including brain size, education, job performance, memory, patience, creativity, cooperation, political attitudes, pro-market attitudes, handling complexity, and on and on.
For example, research shows that higher IQ people tend to be more:
o patient
o pro-market
o cooperative
o generous/pleasant
o center or center-right in their political attitudes
Just from these five factors alone you can see a pattern forming already about a society built on mutual cooperation for everyone's benefit. All in all, because of these traits (and many more), higher IQ nations tend to be richer nations. The reverse obviously holds true.
Fascinating stuff.
The Notes, Bibliography (ten pages!), and Index are all thorough and helpful, especially if you, like me, enjoy doing your own sleuthing research online. Really helpful are the detailed indexing for entries like "IQ tests" and "IQ test scores." Here you can quickly find text for cross-country comparisons and IQ and its relationship to the wide variety of topics he covers. (To find these for yourself online, just search "IQ of nations".)
The book did have its shortcomings, though. As I was reading I thought what Jones *didn't* include or talk about much or at all *just* as important and interesting. I found it odd that he would write a book about "IQ by countries" but not include much on very related (really, "intertwined") topics. Do your own sleuthing on such search terms like "IQ and race" (yes, there are differences; if race were merely a social construct, then why would race matter for stem cell or bone marrow transplants?) and "IQ and gender" (male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7 to 1) and "IQ and genetics" (yes, IQ is very heritable) and "IQ and crime" and "IQ and inbreeding," for example, and you'll be surprised by what you learn. (If you use Google Chrome, the peer-reviewed research articles appear atop your search results under Scholarly Articles.) Jones ignores or barely touches on these topics, perhaps because of where the data leads. If you want a real eye opener, cross check UN estimates for Africa's population growth to 2100 with African nation's average IQs and the world Fragile State and Corruption Indices. An unsettling picture quickly begins to form. Jones likely left all of this information out of his book for how some people would think of these topics. It's a real shame that we can't discuss scientific data in public, which would inform our public policy, but I'll leave it at that.
Like other reviewers, I find it very odd that Jones closes this book with a call for more immigration of low-skilled people into rich (high IQ) countries. I find his argument here to be the same "cheap, immigrant/migrant labor" argument that got us to this point in the U.S. (Maybe it's not so odd, though. Jones is a signatory to the 2005 Open Letter on Immigration.) During his research for this book Jones must have come across studies showing that a host of social pathologies (crime, drug abuse, illegitimacy, permanent welfare dependency) occur around/below the 75 IQ mark. He must know that. Anyone can find this information on the Internet from legitimate news and peer-reviewed scientific studies in less than 1 minute of searching. And, like most people, I define "public policy" as "policy" designed to help the "public"; specifically, the public of a community, state, nation. So why would a high-IQ country want to *import* low-IQ people when there are *plenty* of native low-IQ people to go around? And why focus on low-skilled workers, anyway? Why not try to bring in "the best and brightest"? Jones tries to explain it with his own theory that shows low-skilled immigration actually *helps* the rich (high IQ) nation. It's a little convoluted, he hems and haws a bit, and in the end it doesn't work for me. And I don't think it does for Jones, either. He's doing a delicate dance here, you can tell. Some reviewers have called Jones' concluding recommendation "counter-intuitive." I'll go ahead and just call it "dangerous" and "deceptive." I'm on board with rich (high-IQ) nations helping poor (low-IQ) nations, for moral and ethical reasons, but there are limited resources to go around; and, in the end, one of a nation's top priorities are to the safety and security of its own people. Just ask Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia, or China.
Still, all in all, this is an excellent book to get you started on the topic of IQ and why it matters so much in your own life, and in the lives of nations.
May 30, 2017 update: Researchers find a 4 point drop in IQ in France over 10-yr period. A negative Flynn Effect in France, 1999 to 2008–9. Dutton and Lynn. Intelligence, Volume 51, July–August 2015, Pages 67–70. Review of findings at "The puzzle of falling French intelligence," James Thompson, December 5, 2015, The Unz Review.
April 16, 2018 update: Sweden is learning a hard lesson about opening their borders to low-IQ legal immigrants (and illegal migrants), facing a rising number of Islamic state attacks, bombings, and grenade attacks. See Sweden's violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image, Politico, April 16, 2018.
Let's just say it up front and get it out of the way: IQ matters. A lot. Both to you and your nation.
There's much to like about this book. Jones does a great job of stating the case for the validity and importance of measuring IQ (the intelligence quotient) and making correlations with a wide range of educational, occupational, economic, and behavioral variables. He does this in a clinical and dispassionate way, which is very helpful and refreshing, merely presenting findings from numerous studies over decades of time (from recent to 50 to nearly 100 years ago) from a range of sources (private and public military/government). The text is very plain and understandable, almost like an article in Scientific American or The Economist. He does address how to possibly increase IQ of nations over time (the Flynn effect) and why that's important. In other words, what state-level policies might be considered to improve quality of life for a country's citizens? It's a great question but he leaves others to answer because, as the book title says, he's merely making the claim that your nation's IQ matters more than your own IQ. In other words: Better to be a below-average IQ individual in a high-IQ nation than a high-IQ individual in a low-IQ nation.
This is a short book, at 168 pages, and Jones does a very nice job of going through the scientific literature to show how IQ correlates (predicts) a range of things, including brain size, education, job performance, memory, patience, creativity, cooperation, political attitudes, pro-market attitudes, handling complexity, and on and on.
For example, research shows that higher IQ people tend to be more:
o patient
o pro-market
o cooperative
o generous/pleasant
o center or center-right in their political attitudes
Just from these five factors alone you can see a pattern forming already about a society built on mutual cooperation for everyone's benefit. All in all, because of these traits (and many more), higher IQ nations tend to be richer nations. The reverse obviously holds true.
Fascinating stuff.
The Notes, Bibliography (ten pages!), and Index are all thorough and helpful, especially if you, like me, enjoy doing your own sleuthing research online. Really helpful are the detailed indexing for entries like "IQ tests" and "IQ test scores." Here you can quickly find text for cross-country comparisons and IQ and its relationship to the wide variety of topics he covers. (To find these for yourself online, just search "IQ of nations".)
The book did have its shortcomings, though. As I was reading I thought what Jones *didn't* include or talk about much or at all *just* as important and interesting. I found it odd that he would write a book about "IQ by countries" but not include much on very related (really, "intertwined") topics. Do your own sleuthing on such search terms like "IQ and race" (yes, there are differences; if race were merely a social construct, then why would race matter for stem cell or bone marrow transplants?) and "IQ and gender" (male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7 to 1) and "IQ and genetics" (yes, IQ is very heritable) and "IQ and crime" and "IQ and inbreeding," for example, and you'll be surprised by what you learn. (If you use Google Chrome, the peer-reviewed research articles appear atop your search results under Scholarly Articles.) Jones ignores or barely touches on these topics, perhaps because of where the data leads. If you want a real eye opener, cross check UN estimates for Africa's population growth to 2100 with African nation's average IQs and the world Fragile State and Corruption Indices. An unsettling picture quickly begins to form. Jones likely left all of this information out of his book for how some people would think of these topics. It's a real shame that we can't discuss scientific data in public, which would inform our public policy, but I'll leave it at that.
Like other reviewers, I find it very odd that Jones closes this book with a call for more immigration of low-skilled people into rich (high IQ) countries. I find his argument here to be the same "cheap, immigrant/migrant labor" argument that got us to this point in the U.S. (Maybe it's not so odd, though. Jones is a signatory to the 2005 Open Letter on Immigration.) During his research for this book Jones must have come across studies showing that a host of social pathologies (crime, drug abuse, illegitimacy, permanent welfare dependency) occur around/below the 75 IQ mark. He must know that. Anyone can find this information on the Internet from legitimate news and peer-reviewed scientific studies in less than 1 minute of searching. And, like most people, I define "public policy" as "policy" designed to help the "public"; specifically, the public of a community, state, nation. So why would a high-IQ country want to *import* low-IQ people when there are *plenty* of native low-IQ people to go around? And why focus on low-skilled workers, anyway? Why not try to bring in "the best and brightest"? Jones tries to explain it with his own theory that shows low-skilled immigration actually *helps* the rich (high IQ) nation. It's a little convoluted, he hems and haws a bit, and in the end it doesn't work for me. And I don't think it does for Jones, either. He's doing a delicate dance here, you can tell. Some reviewers have called Jones' concluding recommendation "counter-intuitive." I'll go ahead and just call it "dangerous" and "deceptive." I'm on board with rich (high-IQ) nations helping poor (low-IQ) nations, for moral and ethical reasons, but there are limited resources to go around; and, in the end, one of a nation's top priorities are to the safety and security of its own people. Just ask Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia, or China.
Still, all in all, this is an excellent book to get you started on the topic of IQ and why it matters so much in your own life, and in the lives of nations.
May 30, 2017 update: Researchers find a 4 point drop in IQ in France over 10-yr period. A negative Flynn Effect in France, 1999 to 2008–9. Dutton and Lynn. Intelligence, Volume 51, July–August 2015, Pages 67–70. Review of findings at "The puzzle of falling French intelligence," James Thompson, December 5, 2015, The Unz Review.
April 16, 2018 update: Sweden is learning a hard lesson about opening their borders to low-IQ legal immigrants (and illegal migrants), facing a rising number of Islamic state attacks, bombings, and grenade attacks. See Sweden's violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image, Politico, April 16, 2018.
January 30, 2022
"A lot of nice things correlate with per capita GDP", once said my guru Lant Pritchett. Apparently, nation-level average IQ (here defined by scores in standardized testes) is one of them. Jones' puts a lot of effort to convince the reader that country IQ is one of the root causes of economic development, hence public policies to enhance test scores should be a cornerstone of any national development strategy. Since such policies (from improving child nutrition to corporative soft-skills training) are both normatively correct and likely to induce better economic outcomes, it's hard to oppose them, even if you suspect that the causal link may not be the one he defends. That said, Jones makes a lot of effort to translate dense academic literature to plain English, and I learned a lot about a corner of economic research that I've never been aware of.
December 27, 2015
More a question mark in prose form than anything else; but an intriguing question mark at that. The idea that "smart" societies achieve more seems straight-forward enough, but the general intelligence of a nation's population as well as its economy is a direct product of that nation's history. Raising average IQ in struggling nations (or our own) shouldn't require a monograph worth of convincing in order for us to adopt it as a valuable objective. But, as the author repeatedly points out, achieving change or diagnosing the complexity of international problems requires far more than working to collectively raise our scores on standardized batteries. It requires a deep engagement with and understanding of global history -- a factor completely neglected in this work.
May 14, 2017
a short intro to the importance of IQ on the personal and national scale-- hampered by it's relatively shallow or absent treatment of some of the important findings of IQ research: criminality and IQ (which seem clearly important for a book on national IQ and it's consequences), the importance of very high IQ in science and innovation (for more on this see: Roe's work on eminent scientists, the work on the SMPY cohort, etc.) and probably more stuff I'm not familiar with.
The O-ring 'channel' was an interesting argument and brought my score up from a 3 to a 4-- I hadn't heard or read it in such a clearly articulated form before.
The O-ring 'channel' was an interesting argument and brought my score up from a 3 to a 4-- I hadn't heard or read it in such a clearly articulated form before.
December 23, 2017
This is a short but interesting treatise on the effects of a nation's average intelligence on other national variables. The case made is largely very convincing even if I don't adhere to the author's apparently libertarian politics. Something unusual stood out to me though: Jones was willing to tackle controversial claims and yet made no mention of the notion of raising national IQ through direct intervention in citizens' biology before or after birth. This strikes me as a very major oversight.
June 24, 2019
Lot's of interesting studies presented, but written in a way that obscures uncertainty. These are trends that are seen in social science research and to discuss them as definite is misleading. Also, author slips into presenting intelligence as measured by IQ as a moral virtue, which is problematic. Also problematic the erasure of colonialism and exploitation of the global South and what benefit these resources might have played in creating the data trends seen today.
April 29, 2019
The book started a little slow, but as chapters went on, the author brings more and more extremely interesting insights that I had never thought about. Definitely changed the way I see IQ (didn’t “believe” in it before) and how it influences people, society and governments.
December 26, 2021
A must-read for macroeconomics enthusiasts!
January 5, 2020
This book is rather shallow and doesn't show you any evidence, but rather mentions it. I think it is better for people looking for something talking about economics without using numbers.
August 13, 2024
To be entirely honest I was expecting so much more - the topic described in the title is quite a significant statement and it needs a lot of evidence to prove. I think the author failed to do so. The first chapter intrigued me since it presented the average IQ in various countries and the correlation to the countries' level of development. I was expecting some deep analysis of this idea. Instead, I've got some rudimentary ideas about when it is good to be surrounded by smart people - they tend to be more patient (delaying immediate gratification - Zimbardo's candy experiment with kids was more compelling than the ideas presented in the book), they tend to cooperate more efficiently, they influence their peers with their behaviour, they tend to take sounder political decisions. It is a pity the book was not written after Trump's first mandate - it would make the author's arguments more convoluted. To prove its point, the book had to be 5 or 10 times more voluminous and detailed.
In its current form, it is a slight correlation analysis and nothing more. Too short for such a claim - "the IQ of a nation's people influences its success rate". It is rather obvious if you compare the quality of education around the world in various countries, but some people would say education does not equate to high IQ.
In its current form, it is a slight correlation analysis and nothing more. Too short for such a claim - "the IQ of a nation's people influences its success rate". It is rather obvious if you compare the quality of education around the world in various countries, but some people would say education does not equate to high IQ.
February 4, 2016
In his book Garett Jones sets out to explain what he calls "the paradox of IQ": differences in IQ test scores (and similar cognitive metrics) are a weak predictor of differences in individual performance, whereas the relationship between differences in countries' average test scores (relative to other countries) and cross-country economic inequalities is very strong. For this purpose, he begins with a comprehensive overview of the content and import of IQ scores and argues that they offer valid gauges of individuals' cognitive abilities. He then reviews the development of international IQ scores, most importantly based on the work of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen ("IQ and the Wealth of Nations") and Heiner Rindermann's work on the "da Vinci effect", wherein a country's strong cognitive performance in one area suggests an over-average cognitive performance in a different area. He then narrates the story of the Flynn effect (named after its discoverer, James Flynn), a stylized fact referring to the massive gains in IQ many countries experienced throughout the 20th century, and discusses different factors which may have caused the Flynn effect (education, nutrition, etc.). These three first chapters form the groundwork of Jones' book.
In the next six chapters he describes and elaborates five major channels which explain why IQ matters more for nations than for individuals:
(1) High-scoring people tend to save more, and some of those savings stay in their home country. Most savings are invested into productive capital, which helps augment the productivity of a country's overall workforce (and not single individuals). Cf. Frank Ramsey's "mathematical theory of saving".
(2) High-scoring groups tend to be more cooperative and since cooperation is a key ingredient for the development of high-quality governments and more productive businesses countries with higher average scores tend to be better governed and richer. Cf. Robert Axelrod's work on evolutionary cooperation.
(3) High-scoring groups are more probable to support market-oriented policies, which are generally associated with larger economic growth. High-scoring individuals also tend to have good memories and be informed voters, who in turn are important for holding governments accountable. Cf. Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter".
(4) High-scoring groups will tend to be more successful at using highly productive team-based technology. If team-based technologies are of the "weakest link" (O-ring) type, then workers with high, complementary skills are crucial. Cf. Michael Kremer's O-ring theory of economic development.
(5) High-scoring groups provide good role models whose behavior in terms of cooperation, patience, and information it is good to imitate. The human tendencies of conformity and peer imitation work through this channel. Cf. Solomon Asch's conformity experiments.
The book is very well-written and replete with examples from all walks of life, which help nicely getting the authors' points across. The chapters are not too long and well-structured and sustained by figures that illustrate clearly the authors' arguments. In particular, I am thankful for the author having kept his text concise and avoided the verbosity I have found so often in economic books. The book provides a large bibliography and uses endnotes whenever further elaboration would excessively disrupt the body of the text.
Overall, a good read which sparked my interest for this topic at the intersection between economics and psychology.
In the next six chapters he describes and elaborates five major channels which explain why IQ matters more for nations than for individuals:
(1) High-scoring people tend to save more, and some of those savings stay in their home country. Most savings are invested into productive capital, which helps augment the productivity of a country's overall workforce (and not single individuals). Cf. Frank Ramsey's "mathematical theory of saving".
(2) High-scoring groups tend to be more cooperative and since cooperation is a key ingredient for the development of high-quality governments and more productive businesses countries with higher average scores tend to be better governed and richer. Cf. Robert Axelrod's work on evolutionary cooperation.
(3) High-scoring groups are more probable to support market-oriented policies, which are generally associated with larger economic growth. High-scoring individuals also tend to have good memories and be informed voters, who in turn are important for holding governments accountable. Cf. Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter".
(4) High-scoring groups will tend to be more successful at using highly productive team-based technology. If team-based technologies are of the "weakest link" (O-ring) type, then workers with high, complementary skills are crucial. Cf. Michael Kremer's O-ring theory of economic development.
(5) High-scoring groups provide good role models whose behavior in terms of cooperation, patience, and information it is good to imitate. The human tendencies of conformity and peer imitation work through this channel. Cf. Solomon Asch's conformity experiments.
The book is very well-written and replete with examples from all walks of life, which help nicely getting the authors' points across. The chapters are not too long and well-structured and sustained by figures that illustrate clearly the authors' arguments. In particular, I am thankful for the author having kept his text concise and avoided the verbosity I have found so often in economic books. The book provides a large bibliography and uses endnotes whenever further elaboration would excessively disrupt the body of the text.
Overall, a good read which sparked my interest for this topic at the intersection between economics and psychology.
May 16, 2016
It is rather ironic that the book’s content is undermining its cover – contrary to the subtitle Jones demonstrates pretty convincingly that individual IQ does matter (excellent predictor of many life outcomes, highly heritable, stable, no longer culturally biased) and then he tries to build a case for why your country’s IQ matters even more. As an introduction to the field it is pretty pretty good (many myths shattered, a few seminal studies described and open questions/unknown areas acknowledged), but in my view he falls short of defending his national IQ thesis. Yes mutually beneficial cooperation, healthy time discounting and positive dynamics of O-ring theory do tend to result in more win-win scenarios for better IQ-endowed groups but causation can go in either direction. More importantly, as pointed out by Arnold Kling and Scott Alexander among others, the stronger success signal coming from higher IQ nations should fall out automatically from basic stats – as you increase the sample size the predictive effect of the normally distributed variable (in this case - IQ) should become clearer, essentially your signal-to-noise ratio increases with the sample size.
There is a separate almost a one-of chapter on immigration where Jones makes a rather esoteric argument that in the light of his IQ thesis and implications of the O-ring theory the countries should open up their borders for immigration of low-skilled workers as such move will push the citizens out into the highly productive O-ring driven sectors. There are many good arguments for more open borders but this is definitely not one of them.
Still, I enjoyed the book quite a bit – it is a brief, balanced and thorough review of the subject interleaved with a respectable number of intellectually stimulating tidbits that will keep you engaged all the way through.
There is a separate almost a one-of chapter on immigration where Jones makes a rather esoteric argument that in the light of his IQ thesis and implications of the O-ring theory the countries should open up their borders for immigration of low-skilled workers as such move will push the citizens out into the highly productive O-ring driven sectors. There are many good arguments for more open borders but this is definitely not one of them.
Still, I enjoyed the book quite a bit – it is a brief, balanced and thorough review of the subject interleaved with a respectable number of intellectually stimulating tidbits that will keep you engaged all the way through.
January 7, 2025
Overall I am mildly disappointed by this book. The primary reason is because I think it isn't dense enough, i.e. there is too much fluff. The entire middle section of the book, which is about 3 chapters, could have easily been shaved down about 75% without harming the overall thesis or content. The truth value of the content included is almost all positive (hence the 4 star rating) but there were some serious questions about the need to present it all here and with as many words as were used. That being said, getting into the content of the book there is much to approve of.
The start of the book is laying out the basic facts of intelligence research. This is fair in the context of this book, but not super helpful in my case. The middle section is surveying findings relating to how people with higher IQs are more likely to delay gratification, are more likely to invest or have savings accounts, and are more likely to save more generally. This explains part of the between country differences since a high savings rate means higher investment means high capital stock means more machines. Jones spends a bit of time trying to explain why this might be the case, though doesn't really nail down anything definitive. Maybe smarter people are just better able to imagine the future. Higher IQ people are also apparently more likely to cooperate with one another, at least in the context of repeated or iterated prisoner's dilemmas type interactions. Also, higher IQ people, and people with more education, are more likely to think like economists, which helps them to see the wisdom of certain economic policies over others. This is compounded by the fact that if you have a government of smarter people, the power of the state is more likely to be used in a patient, cooperative, market friendly way. This reminds a lot of the graph that appears in the early part of Robert Bates' book, When Things Fell Apart, which essentially shows that when expected returns are low enough, governments will have an incentive to just take a really high proportion of all existing wealth (up to all the wealth available to grab) for themselves, destroying societal trust, growth incentives, and private capital stock. Having a smarter, or really just a more patient, autocrat would do poorer countries well. This all helps to explain why average IQs are strong indicators of national wealth than of personal wealth.
The last bit is more interesting to me. There is a very brief, to the point of practically just mentioning the existence, of "epistocracy," the idea that those who know best, or enough, ought to govern. There is also the part discussing the so-called O-ring economy. The basic idea is that there are some production processes which are made up of several steps requiring multiple people to work on them. If a single step in this process is messed up, the whole product fails. The name comes from the Challenger shuttle disaster, where all the work and well-made complex technological equipment was sent to the bottom of the ocean in gnarled, heat-blasted pieces because a rubber O-ring was too cold to properly contain the rocket fuel. Jones points out that economies with higher average IQs will have a greater proportion of their populace in the O-ring sector of the economy, which faces little to no diminishing returns, and thus makes the whole economy more productive. This leads to greater competition amongst those in the O-ring sector, however, which drives down wages, explaining why within countries, IQ isn't that predictive of wages. The theory is nice enough, and fairly convincing overall.
But, ultimately, the most interesting idea in the whole book is given about 1.5 pages of space. I'm discussing here the so-called Smart Fraction Theory, which basically states that the percentage of the population above some IQ threshold are the ones most responsible for the level of wealth a nation does or does not enjoy. Countries with higher average IQs, and greater variance in their IQ distribution more broadly, will have a higher proportion of their population beyond the threshold, thus enjoying more wealth. The mathematics of IQ distributions are pretty much neat Gaussians, so actually finding the number or proportion of a given population beyond this threshold would be quite easy. This is especially true in developed countries where there are masses and masses of data on test scores available for analysis. This could rather easily give you the mean and the standard deviation. From here finding the "smart fraction" is just a matter of defining the minimum value constituting the IQ threshold and integrating to the upper limit of the intelligence distribution. Comparing the smart fractions could then be done on an absolute or population proportion basis, between populations that will have different means and variances. This works better than asking what is the contribution of the top 5 or 10% of the population, which could be dragged lower in the case of countries that already have low averages. Given the findings of studies like the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) that show that higher IQ just means greater chance of having patents, PhDs, tenure positions, published papers, etc. it seems like a rather fruitful area of study to explore. Given the important role of human capital in economic development, and the fact that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth is essentially the engine of long term per capita GDP growth, it seems like the activity of the smart fraction will have a substantial role in the wealth of a nation. This is especially true if we incorporate findings of elite theory into this picture, such that a society with higher IQ people will save more, cooperate more, innovate more, be more market friendly, etc. then every person in a given society has high stakes in having an elite that are competent and grounded in reality. This would also help explain why Mississippi has almost the exact same GDP per capita as Japan when there is a wide gulf in their average IQs.
The start of the book is laying out the basic facts of intelligence research. This is fair in the context of this book, but not super helpful in my case. The middle section is surveying findings relating to how people with higher IQs are more likely to delay gratification, are more likely to invest or have savings accounts, and are more likely to save more generally. This explains part of the between country differences since a high savings rate means higher investment means high capital stock means more machines. Jones spends a bit of time trying to explain why this might be the case, though doesn't really nail down anything definitive. Maybe smarter people are just better able to imagine the future. Higher IQ people are also apparently more likely to cooperate with one another, at least in the context of repeated or iterated prisoner's dilemmas type interactions. Also, higher IQ people, and people with more education, are more likely to think like economists, which helps them to see the wisdom of certain economic policies over others. This is compounded by the fact that if you have a government of smarter people, the power of the state is more likely to be used in a patient, cooperative, market friendly way. This reminds a lot of the graph that appears in the early part of Robert Bates' book, When Things Fell Apart, which essentially shows that when expected returns are low enough, governments will have an incentive to just take a really high proportion of all existing wealth (up to all the wealth available to grab) for themselves, destroying societal trust, growth incentives, and private capital stock. Having a smarter, or really just a more patient, autocrat would do poorer countries well. This all helps to explain why average IQs are strong indicators of national wealth than of personal wealth.
The last bit is more interesting to me. There is a very brief, to the point of practically just mentioning the existence, of "epistocracy," the idea that those who know best, or enough, ought to govern. There is also the part discussing the so-called O-ring economy. The basic idea is that there are some production processes which are made up of several steps requiring multiple people to work on them. If a single step in this process is messed up, the whole product fails. The name comes from the Challenger shuttle disaster, where all the work and well-made complex technological equipment was sent to the bottom of the ocean in gnarled, heat-blasted pieces because a rubber O-ring was too cold to properly contain the rocket fuel. Jones points out that economies with higher average IQs will have a greater proportion of their populace in the O-ring sector of the economy, which faces little to no diminishing returns, and thus makes the whole economy more productive. This leads to greater competition amongst those in the O-ring sector, however, which drives down wages, explaining why within countries, IQ isn't that predictive of wages. The theory is nice enough, and fairly convincing overall.
But, ultimately, the most interesting idea in the whole book is given about 1.5 pages of space. I'm discussing here the so-called Smart Fraction Theory, which basically states that the percentage of the population above some IQ threshold are the ones most responsible for the level of wealth a nation does or does not enjoy. Countries with higher average IQs, and greater variance in their IQ distribution more broadly, will have a higher proportion of their population beyond the threshold, thus enjoying more wealth. The mathematics of IQ distributions are pretty much neat Gaussians, so actually finding the number or proportion of a given population beyond this threshold would be quite easy. This is especially true in developed countries where there are masses and masses of data on test scores available for analysis. This could rather easily give you the mean and the standard deviation. From here finding the "smart fraction" is just a matter of defining the minimum value constituting the IQ threshold and integrating to the upper limit of the intelligence distribution. Comparing the smart fractions could then be done on an absolute or population proportion basis, between populations that will have different means and variances. This works better than asking what is the contribution of the top 5 or 10% of the population, which could be dragged lower in the case of countries that already have low averages. Given the findings of studies like the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) that show that higher IQ just means greater chance of having patents, PhDs, tenure positions, published papers, etc. it seems like a rather fruitful area of study to explore. Given the important role of human capital in economic development, and the fact that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth is essentially the engine of long term per capita GDP growth, it seems like the activity of the smart fraction will have a substantial role in the wealth of a nation. This is especially true if we incorporate findings of elite theory into this picture, such that a society with higher IQ people will save more, cooperate more, innovate more, be more market friendly, etc. then every person in a given society has high stakes in having an elite that are competent and grounded in reality. This would also help explain why Mississippi has almost the exact same GDP per capita as Japan when there is a wide gulf in their average IQs.
June 13, 2016
This book opens, rather than closes, the public discussion on national IQ. While Jones has some of the answers, he asks many more of the reader and his fellow researchers. How important is IQ to the economy? If so, the IQ of which portions of the population? How can IQ be increased? If so, what interventions are most effective?
A major take-away from the research is that IQ is mutable, at least on the generational level. Childhood nutrition and education can significantly increase standardized test scores, and offer great promise for breaking undeveloped nations out of vicious cycles of poverty. Even more conservative sorts such as myself should be interested in the possibility of one-time interventions permanently improving a society's lot.
Jones does struggle a bit at balancing the demands of writing for both professional and popular audiences. This is one of his first books, though, and I look forward to seeing where he goes in the future.
A major take-away from the research is that IQ is mutable, at least on the generational level. Childhood nutrition and education can significantly increase standardized test scores, and offer great promise for breaking undeveloped nations out of vicious cycles of poverty. Even more conservative sorts such as myself should be interested in the possibility of one-time interventions permanently improving a society's lot.
Jones does struggle a bit at balancing the demands of writing for both professional and popular audiences. This is one of his first books, though, and I look forward to seeing where he goes in the future.
November 20, 2015
This is how an academic book should be written. Concise, clear and persuasive.
I can't emphasize how much I appreciate the book being so short and digestible.
I view a lot of this book as intuitive, but I might be alone in that regard seeing as how nobody has published it before, so kudos to Garrett Jones.
My only complaint is that the chapter on low skilled immigration I think misses the importance of social capital and government expenditures. Jones cites Robert Frank earlier in the book, but fails to consider his research here when I think it would have been most relevant.
I can't emphasize how much I appreciate the book being so short and digestible.
I view a lot of this book as intuitive, but I might be alone in that regard seeing as how nobody has published it before, so kudos to Garrett Jones.
My only complaint is that the chapter on low skilled immigration I think misses the importance of social capital and government expenditures. Jones cites Robert Frank earlier in the book, but fails to consider his research here when I think it would have been most relevant.
April 22, 2019
Very useful book. Gave me a number of tools/heuristics to use in daily life. And I think this is a useful answer to Taleb's critiques of intelligence research. The book makes it clear that IQ is not a great measure of individual success but the average IQ of a nation is a good indicator of the likely income of individuals that live there as compared to other parts of the planet. I'd like to read more about which matters more -- the IQ of the top 5-10% of a given nation or simply the average. He touches on it at the tail end but damn it, I want data. Good read. Recommend.
May 27, 2020
This book should have never been published. I had to fight the urge to just get up and walk away from it after I had to write on most pages what an editor should have done. It's messy, outright lies, half-truths based on selection bias in the research selected. It never gets to the point and just lists sources, of which if you take the other half of sources you can make the exact opposite point. Most sources are not vetted and simple there because of publication pressure and massaging of the data set.
June 15, 2021
Meh. Not very engaging - and, while I did find many interesting (and probably true) results in the book, overall the perspective was based on the idea that if you have a high IQ, you do well in a job and make a lot of money.
To me, this reinforces my image of IQ as measuring obedience more than brilliance. In other words, how "intelligent" are you as it concerns the needs of a master?
I've often wondered, what does it mean to be intelligent in the context of self-actualization? This is not the book to answer that question.
To me, this reinforces my image of IQ as measuring obedience more than brilliance. In other words, how "intelligent" are you as it concerns the needs of a master?
I've often wondered, what does it mean to be intelligent in the context of self-actualization? This is not the book to answer that question.
November 25, 2016
Speaking of cognitive dissonance... He speaks quite clearly of the benefits of a higher-IQ population, even if only a few IQ points, and how important it therefore is to raise a nation's IQ. Then he proudly signs a letter encouraging large-scale immigration of lower-IQ emigrants. Then he worries about how these new immigrants, with low IQs and histories of voting for statist, low-IQ kleptocracies, might now vote. So the doctor says, "Stop hitting yourself in the head with the hammer."
January 30, 2016
Extremely clearly argued. Stuart Ritchie's review in Intelligence gives the critique I would give as well. Still it seems like there are some interventions that probably do raise IQ and are likely to have a large amount of "knock on" good effects in deficient nations. (Prenatal Iodine supplementation in particular seems very promising in large parts of the world)
January 5, 2019
Very accessible. Short and readable, no useless meandering and extra chapters to blow up the volume. So far overlooked aspect in economic research. Huge implications for the current migration debate.
"Your nations IQ matters six times more than your personal IQ" (for income, but also on other dimensions).
"Your nations IQ matters six times more than your personal IQ" (for income, but also on other dimensions).
October 28, 2020
Fairly weak book, with the typical conflation of correlation and causation that plagues so much of the IQ literature. Cite widely discredited work like S. Kanazawa's research.
The actual underlying thesis about influence of "skill clusters" only takes up the last 20 % of so of the book.
The actual underlying thesis about influence of "skill clusters" only takes up the last 20 % of so of the book.
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October 11, 2016Adam Feuerstein said it best:
"Would anyone be surprised if we find out there’s a freezer in some Chinese lab filled with CRISPR-made human-mutant corpses?"
"Would anyone be surprised if we find out there’s a freezer in some Chinese lab filled with CRISPR-made human-mutant corpses?"
February 14, 2019
Oddly unhelpful
October 15, 2022
There are wildly different average IQs in different countries; and it seems those are correlated with the success (for some reasonable definition) of a country; in fact, it's much stronger correlated than an individual's success with their IQ.
The discussion of IQ testing was interesting, and describes how the tests try to avoid being "learnable", a-cultural (as much as possible) how different parts correlate etc. It seems countries can achieve big improvements, starting with better nutrition and (perhaps) better schooling. It wasn't really too clear how to actually improve the average.
There are all kinds of controversial implications... but the writer makes sure to avoid those as much as possible.
The economics part wasn't very interesting.
Wasn't too convinced with the whole book, esp. the part about improving the national IQ. Interesting parts nevertheless; an article/blog post would probably be better than a book.
Slate Star Code
The discussion of IQ testing was interesting, and describes how the tests try to avoid being "learnable", a-cultural (as much as possible) how different parts correlate etc. It seems countries can achieve big improvements, starting with better nutrition and (perhaps) better schooling. It wasn't really too clear how to actually improve the average.
There are all kinds of controversial implications... but the writer makes sure to avoid those as much as possible.
The economics part wasn't very interesting.
Wasn't too convinced with the whole book, esp. the part about improving the national IQ. Interesting parts nevertheless; an article/blog post would probably be better than a book.
Slate Star Code
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