Sorry, I didn’t mean to express a wish that you or any other grass-roots conservative go to jail (of course I disagree with your ideology most profoundly); I meant the conservatives who until recently were in charge, that is the congresspeople, administration officials, and fixers who are currently the subjects of various corruption investigations; sometime soon I hope that some of them will also be prosecuted for war crimes and other abuses of power.

That gets right down to the chicken-egg issue.

Richardson is assuming prosperity is the cause of high IQ. This assumption is no better supported than that where high IQ is a cause of prosperity.

And there are enormous counterfactuals he has to explain away.

Which gets to my point – this is an interesting correlation that needs, no, cries out for exploration.

Why does IQ have to be a simple biometric trait ? That is an attack on a strawman it seems to me. Even Flynn would not argue like Richardson.

“Richardson’s argument is that IQ tests measure a nexus of sociocognitive-affective factors which are determined by social class rather than a simple biometric trait. ”

That means to my poor dull mind that you agree that he denies a biological component to differences in IQ.

Regardless, even if such national differences in average IQ are entirely an environmental/cultural effect, which is perfectly possible, it makes the data even more interesting. It means that somewhere in that mysterious phenomenon is the key that explains the states of mind that creates material success.

It is telling that you can much more effectively and simply explain the differences between Phillipine and South Korean growth rates, or Malay and Chinese prosperity in Malaysia, for a couple of examples, with this IQ metric than with anything else.

How about another one ? Why is Thailand richer than the Philippines ? Its in the data – Thailand has higher IQ, no doubt because, voila, Thailand has maybe 3X more Chinese.

I’m not there with Sailer et. al. on ubermenschen and untermenschen, being as I am after all one of the untermenschen, but it doesn’t seem like you can get away by waving the thing off as an effect of prosperity and not a cause. There are far too many counterfactuals here, where IQ has not followed prosperity but preceded it. One sees it happening right now in China.

Richardson’s argument is that IQ tests measure a nexus of sociocognitive-affective factors which are determined by social class rather than a simple biometric trait. Correlations within national measures of average IQ scores and levels of development would therefore be entirely to be expected but of no explanatory value, even if the study had been properly conducted, which it wasn’t. Thus your unsupported assertion that “the correlations are robust” misses his point.

Teh “Heredity” reviewer, come to think of it, has a rather non-mainstream point of view, in that –
“Good IQ scores thus simply reflect the educational aspirations and the cognitive, linguistic, and affective dispositions that go with middle class background.”

I.e., the man is a pure environmentalist, which seems an extreme position. The mainstream position is that measured IQ is the result of both heredity and environment, the recent consensus tending to weighting heredity. This does not necessarily require that group differences be rooted in biology.

He also misses the point that even if evaluated as a pure cultural artifact, IQ says a great deal about cultural preparation for success in the modern world, as it can be shown not only to accompany such success, but to predict it.

Thank you for your most kind sentiments.

Yes indeed, that is why these gentlemen, or someone else, should go off and make a similar study to check the mans facts.

As it happens, several have. The correlations are robust, even leaving out questionable data.

He draws conclusions from the data that may be entirely wrong. But yet this is a phenomenon that requires explanation, not arm-waving.

Thats true, and life is good.

I suppose all those mandatory beatings of liberals can get tiring, but a man needs his exercise after all.

That’s funny, Luis. So why do you think Barnett and Williams in their review for Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books describe it as “an edifice built on layer upon layer of arbitrary assumptions and selective data manipulation”? And why does Ken Richardson in Hereditary refer to it as “not so much science… as a social crusade”?

Wow. That would be some sort of morality that excludes mass killing, larceny, bribery and sex with under-age boys?