uosɯɐS ’s Reviews > Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own > Status Update

You swim a bit harder when the person in the next lane is swimming faster than you, whether you notice it consciously or not.

The only real way to check to see if one person can substantially influence your politics is to randomly change the people you talk to politics-or to randomly change what people talk to you about.

Voting is partly a trivia test (who's that person running for mayor again?), and people with higher IQ scores tend to do better on trivia tests.

Pande argues that informed voters can hold politicians accountable: they remember if the politician was corrupt, effective, scandalous, whatever.

Yes, you're more likely to see the light if it's light you want to see. But you're also more likely to see the light if you do better on a cognitive skills test.

"The Myth of the Rational Voter" argues that a major failing of modern democracies is that they do a pretty good job of responding to the outlandish preferences of voters. Politicians who don't give the voters what they want might be replaced by those that will.

One of the best insights from toxicology is that "the danger is in the dosage." Whether it's exposure to solar radiation or lead or Agent Orange, more is worse than less, and less is worse than none. Regular people tend to reject that idea: their intuition is that a little is basically as bad for you as a lot, that poison is bad, full stop. Experts disagree with the general public.

Personal morality might tell you that's not the way things should be-fisheries shouldn't have to pay cash for clean water-and maybe that isn't the way things should be, but an overarching theme of Coase's work with his theorem and in other writings, is an implicit call to dial down the moral outrage in order to get people thinking about what kinds of social systems achieve efficient, productive, fruitful outcomes.

The high-average-IQ countries hold more foreign investments: more foreign stocks, foreign bonds, and foreign cash. They just save more gloabl wealth.

[I'll bet they write more IQ tests too!]

...in the long run, there's only one possible outcome: the most patient owns everything. What happens all of the other countries? Eventually, they spend essentially all of their national income repaying debt. to the most patient country.
[Feel like the author should've read David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years", though chronologically it would have been impossible]