Race, IQ, and Wealth

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Race, IQ, and Wealth

Posted By Ron Unz On July 18, 2012 @ 12:00 am In | 105 Comments
At the end of April, Charles Kenny, a former World Bank economist specializing in international
development, published a blistering attack in Foreign Policy entitled Dumb and Dumber [1], with
the accusatory subtitle Are development experts becoming racists? Kenny charged that a
growing number of development economists were turning towards genetic and other intrinsic
human traits as a central explanation of national economic progress, often elevating these above
the investment and regulatory issues that have long been the focus of international agencies.
Although Kenny suggested that many of his targets had been circumspect in how they raised
these highly controversial ideas, he singled out IQ and the Wealth of Nations, published in 2001
by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as a particularly extreme and hateful example of this trend.
These authors explicitly argue that IQ scores for different populations are largely fixed and
hereditary, and that theserather than economic or governmental structurestend to determine
the long-term wealth of a given country.
Kenny claimed that such IQ theories were not merely racist and deeply offensive but had also
long been debunked by scientific expertsnotably the prominent biologist Stephen Jay Gould in
his 1980 book The Mismeasure of Man.
As Kenny soon discovered from the responses to his online article, he had seriously erred in
quoting the authority of Gould, whose fraud on race and brain-size issues, presumably in service
to his self-proclaimed Marxist beliefs, last year received further coverage in the New York Times
[2].
Science largely runs on the honor system, and once simple statements of factin Goulds
case, the physical volume of human skullsare found to be false, we cannot trust more complex
claims made by the particular scholar.
Despite Kennys obvious lack of familiarity with the technical questions he raised, these issues
remain important ones to explore, given todays globalized world. After all, it is generally
acknowledged that some people are smarter than other people, and this almost syllogistically
raises the possibility that some peoples may be smarter than other peoples.
Most nations prefer material wealth to poverty, and it seems plausible that smarter people might
be better at generating the productivity needed to achieve this goal. We should hardly be
surprised that this possible factor behind economic advancement has attracted the interest of the
development experts criticized by Kenny, and just as he alleges, IQ and the Wealth of Nations
ranks as perhaps the most extreme academic example of this analysis.
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Although intelligence may be difficult to define precisely, most people have accepted that IQ
scores seem to constitute a rough and measurable proxy for this trait, so Lynn and Vanhanen
have collected a vast number of national IQ scores from the last 50 or 60 years and compared
these to income levels and economic growth rates. Since experts have discovered that nominal IQ
scores over the last century or so have tended to rise at a seemingly constant ratethe so-called
Flynn Effectthe authors adjusted their raw scores accordingly. Having done so, they found a
strong correlation of around 0.500.75 between the Flynn-adjusted IQ of a nations population
and its real per capita GDP over the last few decades, seemingly indicating that smarter peoples
tend to be wealthier and more successful.
From this statistical fact, Lynn and Vanhanen draw the conclusion that intelligence leads to
economic success andsince they argue that intelligence itself is largely innate and geneticthat
the relative development ranking of the long list of nations they analyze is unlikely to change
much over time, nor will the economic standing of the various groups within ethnically mixed
countries, including the United States.
Now this hypothesis might indeed be correct, but it is not necessarily warranted by the empirical
data that Lynn and Vanhanen have gathered. After all, if high national IQ scores are correlated
with economic success, perhaps the high IQs cause the success, but it seems just as possible that
the success might be driving the high IQs, or that both might be due to some third factor.
Correlation does not imply causality, let alone the particular direction of the causal arrow. A
traditional liberal model positing that socio-economic factors strongly influence performance on
academic ability tests would predict exactly the same distribution of international results found by
Lynn and Vanhanen.
Fortunately, a careful examination of the wealth of empirical data they have gathered provides
some important evidence on the relative plausibility of these conflicting hypotheses, allowing us
to draw useful conclusions in this extremely taboo subject.
The Distribution of European Intelligence

Critics have often suggested, not without some plausibility, that when Western-designed IQ tests
are applied to Third World peoples, the results may be distorted by hidden cultural bias. There is
also the possible impact of malnutrition and other forms of extreme deprivation, or even practical
difficulties in administering tests in desperately impoverished nations, as Kenny emphasized in his
critique.
In order to minimize these extraneous factors, let us restrict our initial examination to the 60-odd
IQ datapoints Lynn and Vanhanen obtained from European countries and their overseas offshoots
over the last half-century. Obviously, some of these countries have at times been far poorer than
others, but almost none have suffered the extreme poverty found in much of the Third World.
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What we immediately notice is a long list of enormous variations in the tested IQs of genetically
indistinguishable European peoples across temporal, geographical, and political lines, variations
so large as to raise severe doubts about the strongly genetic-deterministic model of IQ favored by
Lynn and Vanhanen and perhaps also quietly held by many others. (Unless otherwise indicated,
all the IQ data that follow are drawn from their work and incorporate their Flynn adjustments.)
Consider, for example, the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn
and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable,
which indicate mean IQs in the range 99107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end
of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90,
while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 9799, much closer to the West
German numbers.
These results seem anomalous from the perspective of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a
very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically indistinguishable, and
an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, while the recorded
rise in East German scores of 79 points in just half a generation seems even more difficult to
explain.
The dreary communist regime of East Germany was certainly far poorer than its western
counterpart and its population may indeed have been culturally deprived in some sense, but
East Germans hardly suffered from severe dietary deficiencies during the 1960s or late 1950s
when the group of especially low-scoring children were born and raised. The huge apparent
testing gap between the wealthy West and the dingy East raises serious questions about the strict
genetic interpretation favored by Lynn and Vanhanen.
Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in 1961
and a score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full points in the Flynn-adjusted IQ of
Greeks over just 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspective, especially since the earlier
set represented children and the latter adults, so the two groups might even be the same
individuals tested at different times. Both sample sizes are in the hundreds, not statistically
insignificant, and while it is impossible to rule out other factors behind such a large discrepancy in
a single country, it is interesting to note that Greek affluence had grown very rapidly during that
same period, with the real per capita GDP rising by 170 percent.
Furthermore, although Greeks and Turks have a bitter history of ethnic and political conflict,
modern studies have found them to be genetically almost indistinguishable, and a very large 1992
study of Turkish schoolchildren put their mean IQ at 90, lending plausibility to the low Greek
figure. We also discover rather low IQ scores in all the reported samples of Greeces
impoverished Balkan neighbors in the Eastern Bloc taken before the collapse of Communism.
Croatians scored 90 in 1952, two separate tests of Bulgarians in 19791982 put their IQs at
9194, and Romanians scored 94 in 1972. While the low scores of the Croatian children might be
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partly explained by malnutrition and other physical hardships experienced during the difficult
years of World War II, such an excuse seems less plausible for other Balkan populations tested
decades after the war, all of which seem to score in the same range.
Two samples of Poles from 1979 and 1989 provided widely divergent mean IQs of 106 and 92,
with the low Polish figure of 92 coming from a huge sample of over 4000 children tested with
Progressive Matrices, supposedly one of the most culturally-independent methods. On the other
hand, more economically advanced Communist countries in Central Europe often had considerably
higher scores, with the Slovaks testing at 96 in 1983, the Czechs scoring 9698 in 19791983,
and the Hungarians reaching 99 in 1979.
All of these Southern or Eastern European IQ scores follow the per capita GDP of their countries, a
correspondence that supports either the IQ-makes-wealth hypothesis of Lynn and Vanhanen, or
the contrary wealth-makes-IQ hypothesis of traditional liberals.
During this same period, the far richer non-Communist nations of Europesuch as Austria,
Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and West Germanyall tended to score at or
somewhat above 100. The wide IQ gaps between these European peoples and the previous group
seem unlikely to have a heavily innate basis, given the considerable genetic and phenotypic
similarity across these populations. For example, the borders of Austria and Croatia are just a
couple of dozen miles apart, both are Catholic countries that spent centuries as part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it is quite difficult to distinguish Austrians from Croatians either by
appearance or by genetic testing. Yet the gap between their reported IQ scores12 pointsis
nearly as wide as that separating American blacks and whites.
It seems more plausible that most of the large and consistent IQ gaps between Western
Europeans and their Balkan cousins are less a cause than a consequence of differences in
development and affluence during the era in which these IQs were tested. For example, Austria
had many times Croatias per capita GDP during the period in question. One of the few European
nations to exhibit a sharp decline in tested IQ, Polandwhose score fell from 106 in 1979 to 92 in
1989did so amid the economic turmoil of the 1980s, when its per capita GDP also substantially
declined according to some measures, even while Western Europe was growing richer.
If these differences of perhaps 10 or even 15 IQ points between impoverished Balkan Europeans
and wealthy Western ones reflected deeply hereditary rather than transitory environmental
influences, they surely would have maintained themselves when these groups immigrated to the
United States. But there is no evidence of this. As it happens, Americans of Greek and South Slav
origins are considerably above most other American whites in both family income and educational
level. Since the overwhelming majority of the latter trace their ancestry to Britain and other high
IQ countries of Western Europe, this would seem a strange result if the Balkan peoples truly did
suffer from an innate ability deficit approaching a full standard deviation.
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Similar sharp differences occur in the case of Italian populations separated historically and
geographically. Today, Italian-Americans are very close to the national white average in income
and education, and the limited data we have seem to put their IQ close to this average as well.
This would appear consistent with the IQ figures reported for Italy by Lynn and Vanhanen, which
are based on large samples and come in at just above 100. However, there is a notoriously wide
economic gap between northern Italy and the south, including Sicily. The overwhelming majority
of Italian-Americans trace their ancestry to the latter, quite impoverished regions, and in 2010
Lynn reported new research indicating that the present-day IQ of Italians living in those areas
was as low as 89, a figure that places them almost a full standard deviation below either their
Northern Italian compatriots or their separated American cousins. Although Lynn attributed this
large deficit in Southern Italian IQ to substantial North African or Near Eastern genetic admixture,
poverty and cultural deprivation seem more likely explanations.
The Lynn/Vanhanen data on Jews also provide some suspicious IQ disparities. American Jews
have among the highest tested IQs, with means being usually reported in the 110115 range. Yet
Lynn and Vanhanen report that Israeli Jews have strikingly low IQs by comparison. One large
sample from 1989 put the figure at 90, while a far smaller sample from 1975 indicated an IQ of
97, with both results drawn from Israels large Jewish majority rather than its small Arab minority.
The IQ gaps with American Jews are enormous, perhaps as large as 25 points, and difficult to
explain by genetic factors, since a majority of Israels Jewish population in that period consisted
of ethnic Askhenazi (European) Jews, just like those in America. The huge economic gulf between
Israeli Jews, who then had less than half the average American per capita GDP, and American
Jews, who were far above average in American income, would seem to be the most plausible
explanation.
Similarly, a large 1990 test of South African whites placed their IQ at 94, considerably below that
of the Dutch or English peoples from whom they derive, and again this may be connected to their
lower level of national income and technological advancement.
Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting this cultural rather than genetic hypothesis comes
from the northwestern corner of Europe, namely Celtic Ireland. When the early waves of Catholic
Irish immigrants reached America near the middle of the 19th century, they were widely seen as
particularly ignorant and uncouth and aroused much hostility from commentators of the era, some
of whom suggested that they might be innately deficient in both character and intelligence. But
they advanced economically at a reasonable pace, and within less than a century had become
wealthier and better educated than the average white American, including those of old stock
ancestry. The evidence today is that the tested IQ of the typical Irish-Americanto the extent it
can be distinguishedis somewhat above the national white American average of around 100 and
also above that of most German-Americans, who arrived around the same time.
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Meanwhile, Ireland itself remained largely rural and economically backward and during the 1970s
and 1980s still possessed a real per capita GDP less than half that of the United States. Perhaps
we should not be too surprised to discover that Lynn and Vanhanen list the Irish IQ at just 93
based on two samples taken during the 1970s, a figure far below that of their Irish-American
cousins.
Even this rather low Irish IQ figure is quite misleading, since it was derived by averaging two
separately reported Irish samples. The earlier of these, taken in 1972, involved nearly 3,500 Irish
schoolchildren and is one of the largest European samples found anywhere in Lynn/Vanhanen,
while the other, taken in 1979, involved just 75 Irish adults and is one of the smallest. The mean
IQ of the large group was 87, while that of the tiny group was 98, and the Lynn/Vanhanen figure
was obtained by combining these results through straight, unweighted averaging, which seems a
doubtful approach. Indeed, a sample of 75 adults is so small it perhaps should simply be excluded
on statistical grounds, given the high likelihood that it was drawn from a single location and is
therefore unrepresentative of its nation as a whole.
So we are left with strong evidence that in the early 1970s, the Irish IQ averaged 87, the lowest
figure anywhere in Europe and a full standard deviation below than that of Irish-Americans, a
value which would seem to place a substantial fraction of Irelands population on the edge of
clinical mental retardation.
Lynn seems to have accepted this conclusion. The current issue of the academic journal
Personality and Individual Differences is organized as a tribute to Lynn and contains a lengthy
interview [3] in which he describes the turning points of his career, beginning with his
appointment as a research professor in Dublin. His official responsibility was to investigate the
social and economic problems of Ireland, and he soon concluded that the nations backwardness
was largely due to the low IQ of its people, with the only obvious solution being a strong eugenics
program, presumably including sterilization of a substantial fraction of the population. But given
the dominant influence of conservative Catholicism in Ireland, he doubted the government would
consider such suggestions, which would probably just get him accused of being a Nazi, so he
chickened out and chose to suppress his findings. A few years later, he relocated to
Protestant-run Ulster, where he felt his racial ideas might find a more receptive audience, and he
eventually became interested in whether the poverty of other countries might be due to the same
low IQ causal factor which he believed explained Irelands problems. This led him to the research
that culminated in the publication of IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
But Lynns late-1960s views regarding the mostly genetic cause of low Irish IQ seem
unwarranted. Ireland was then overwhelmingly rural and poor, with a low per capita GDP, while
Irish Americans tended to be an urban population and a reasonably affluent one, and this sharp
difference in external material conditions seems the most logical explanation for the wide
disparity in IQ results. In further support of this environmental hypothesis, we should note that it
has been estimated that nearly one-third of Australias population is wholly or substantially Irish
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in ancestry, with the balance mostly British, while the IQ results Lynn and Vanhanen report for
Australia are all very close to the British average of 100.
The gathering of social science data, including national IQs, is fraught with difficulty, notably due
to sampling problems, and two or three anomalous results might be explained away for those
reasons. But the large number of examples cited above in which genetically indistinguishable
European-ancestry populations show enormous variations in tested IQ seems to indicate a much
broader difficulty. Not only are the results too numerous to be ascribed to chance error, but they
follow a consistent pattern of their own, with European-ancestry groups living in affluent,
well-developed countries almost invariably having IQ scores of around 100 or above, while their
close kinsmen in much poorer regions have far lower scores. Indeed, in several of these cases,
the countries and peoples are identical, being merely separated by a generation or less of local
economic development.
To a small extent, Lynn and Vanhanen acknowledge the possible importance of non-genetic
factors, and they devote a few pages to a discussion of the impact of health, nutrition, and
education on IQ scores. But they never provide any clear estimate for the magnitude of these
influences and claim that a number of twin or adoption studies have determined that IQ is 80
percent or more heritable. Their text seems to assume that genetics is the overwhelmingly
dominant factor behind the national IQ disparities which they catalogue.
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All IQ data was drawn from Lynn/Vanhanen. The per capita

GDP figures are obtained from the World Bank and adjusted
for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) if available;
otherwise being marked with an asterisk. Much of this
economic data, especially for non-convertible East Bloc
currencies before 1989, is somewhat uncertain and should
be used only for rough comparative purposes.
Questioning the Strong IQ Hypothesis

The central thesis of Lynn and Vanhanens work might be called the Strong IQ Hypothesis,
namely that IQ accurately reflects intelligence, that IQ is overwhelmingly determined by genetics,
and that IQ is subject to little or no significant cultural or economic influence after we adjust for
the universal Flynn Effect. Since the IQ disparities discussed above seem to provide a powerful
challenge to this theory, their validity has sometimes been disputed on the grounds that the
populations being compared might actually be more dissimilar than we realize due to the impact
of selective migration.
For example, one might speculate that the smarter Irish immigrated to America, while their
dimmer relatives remained at home, and the same was also true for the smarter Southern
Italians, Greeks, or other Balkan Europeans. Similarly, perhaps the smarter European Jews
crossed the oceans to New York Harbor in the years before World War I, while their dimmer
relatives stayed behind and later moved to Israel after World War II.
These explanations seem quite unlikely. The intra-ethnic IQ gaps being discussed are absolutely
enormousoften approaching a full standard deviation or moreand that would imply a similarly
enormous gap between the portions of the population that stayed and those that emigrated, with
no contemporaneous source seeming to provide any indication of this. Indeed, during the period
when these immigrant flows were occurring, most American observers emphasized the
remarkable backwardness of the new arrivals and often speculated that they were intrinsically
defective and might constitute a permanent burden to society. If anything, it was sometimes
suggested that they were less intelligent than their stay-at-home co-ethnics and had come to
America because they were unable to compete at home, hence their description as the so-called
wretched refuse from a teeming shore.
The limited ethnic IQ data we have from that period support this impression. In his 1978 book
American Ethnic Groups, Thomas Sowell included a chapter that summarized the 1920s data on
the average IQ scores of various Eastern and Southern European immigrant groups and showed
that these were generally quite low, with Slovaks at 85.6, Greeks at 83, Poles at 85, Spaniards at
78, and Italians ranging between 78 and 85 in different studies. A separate analysis of the
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aptitude scores of World War I draftees published in 1923 came to similar conclusions. These
published IQ studies by prominent academics led to widespread belief that the more recent
European immigrant groups were much less intelligent than earlier ones and might drag down the
national average, a belief that may have contributed to passage of the highly restrictive 1924
Immigration Act.
Even if we ignore all contemporaneous evidence and argue that 19th century European
immigrants to America and elsewhere somehow constituted the IQ elite of their originating
countries, the theory of selective migration still remains implausible. It has long been established
on both theoretical and empirical grounds that IQ scores generally follow a mean-reversion
pattern, in which the children of outlying individuals tend to regress toward the typical levels of
their larger population or ethnic group. So even if we hypothesize that the Irish, South Italians,
Jews, and Greeks who immigrated to America constituted the smartest small slice of their
generationrather than, as seems more likely, often the poorer and most miserableroughly half
their relative IQ advantage would have dissipated after a single generation. Thus, the apparent
one standard deviation gap between American Irish and Ireland Irish a few decades ago would
have required an initial gap of something closer to two standard deviations at the time the
immigration occurred, a difference so large as to be totally implausible.
Furthermore, the most recent 2009 PISA international student academic tests sponsored by the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provide us with results that raise
further doubts about the correctness of the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ scores from a wide range of
European countries. For example, although Croatia and Austria are geographically quite close,
Croatians had IQs 12 points lower when their country was desperately poor just after World War
II; yet today their overall PISA scores are not enormously lower, and are actually higher in
reading, even though Croatias average income is still lower by a factor of two. During the early
1970s, a huge national sample had placed the Ireland IQ at 87, the lowest in all of Europe, but
today Irelands PISA scores are about average for the continent and roughly the same as those for
France and Britain, while Irish per capita incomes have pulled a little ahead.
The subject of race and IQ is an extremely contentious one, and over the years there have
sometimes been conflicting accusations that data presented by various academics and other
experts were more or less fraudulent, fabricated for ideological reasons. This does appear to be
true in the case of Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most widely quoted figures on the subject of IQ.
Therefore, if the often anomalous IQ figures discussed above had been provided by any strong
critic of IQ as an innate measure of intellectual ability, I would be extremely cautious in accepting
them without exhaustive verification of the underlying sources.
But our situation is different. Lynn and Vanhanen rank among the most prominent academic
advocates of a strongly genetic basis for IQ scores, and this indeed represents the summary
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conclusion that they draw from the vast amount of national IQ data they have collected and
presented. They are unlikely to have skewed the data against their own ideological beliefs and
theoretical hypothesis.
Yet an objective review of the Lynn/Vanhanen data almost completely discredits the
Lynn/Vanhanen Strong IQ Hypothesis. If so many genetically-indistinguishable European
populationsof roughly similar cultural and historical background and without severe nutritional
difficultiescan display such huge variances in tested IQ across different decades and locations,
we should be extremely cautious about assuming that other ethnic IQ differences are innate
rather than environmental, especially since these may involve populations separated by far wider
cultural or nutritional gaps.
We cannot rule out the possibility that different European peoples might have relatively small
differences in innate intelligence or IQafter all, these populations often differ in height and
numerous other phenotypic traits. But this residual genetic element would explain merely a small
fraction of the huge 1015 point IQ disparities discussed above. Such a view might be
characterized as the Weak IQ Hypothesis: huge IQ differences between large populations may
be overwhelmingly due to cultural or socio-economic factors, but a residual component might
indeed be genetic in origin.
We are now faced with a mystery arguably greater than that of IQ itself. Given the powerful
ammunition that Lynn and Vanhanen have provided to those opposing their own Strong IQ
Hypothesis, we must wonder why this has never attracted the attention of either of the warring
camps in the endless, bitter IQ dispute, despite their alleged familiarity with the work of these two
prominent scholars. In effect, I would suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn and
Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither
of the competing ideological teams ever noticed.
Presumably, human psychology is the underlying explanation for this mysterious and even
amusing silence. Given that Lynn and Vanhanen rank as titans of the racial-difference camp,
perhaps their ideological opponents, who often come from less quantitative backgrounds, are
reluctant even to open the pages of their books, fearful lest the vast quantity of data within prove
that the racialist analysis is factually correct after all. Meanwhile, the pro-racialist elements may
simply skim over the hundreds of pages of dry and detailed quantitative evidence and skip to the
summary text, which claims that the data demonstrate IQ is genetically fixed and determines
which nations will be rich and which will be poor.
Implications for the American Immigration Debate

This lack of attention to the actual data provided by Lynn and Vanhanen has seriously impaired
many important public-policy discussions. The widespread belief in the innate mental inferiority of
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Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups may have played a significant role in the 1920s
immigration debate, and it seems plausible that similar perspectives might be at work today. For
example, sharp critics of our heavy recent immigration from Mexico sometimes claimor at least
hintthat the intellectual weakness of these millions of newcomers may constitute a disastrous
long-term burden to American society. On anonymous Internet forums such voices are often more
explicit and directly cite Lynn and Vanhanen in placing the Mexican IQ at just 87, far below the
white American average, and a worrisome indicator given that as much as one-quarter of all
Americans may be of Mexican ancestry by around the middle of this century.
The IQ figure of 87 that they quote from Lynn/Vanhanen is correct, though admittedly based on a
single 1961 study of Mexican schoolchildren in the most impoverished southern part of that
country. But such critics always fail to notice that a much larger and more recent study of Irish
schoolchildren revealed precisely the same mean IQ of 87. So the most accurate representation
of the facts presented in IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that Mexicans and Irish seem to have
approximately the same intellectual ability, and since Irish have generally done well in American
society, there seems no particular reason to assume that Mexicans will not.
But is this apparent equality of Mexican and Irish IQs several decades ago anything more than a
statistical anomaly due to insufficiently thorough testing? Despite its recent economic problems,
over the last couple of decades Ireland has become one of the best educated countries in Europe,
with solid international PISA scores, and it seems almost certain that Irish IQs have rapidly
converged toward the European mean. Indeed, two additional studies provided by Lynn and
Vanhanen in their 2006 sequel, IQ and Global Inequality, seem to indicate that by 1993 the
average Irish IQ had already risen to 92.
Meanwhile, tens of millions of Mexican-Americans have lived in the United States with its far
higher standard of living for decades, and we must wonder whether they have demonstrated any
similar rise in IQ. Lynn and Vanhanen provide some early 1970s studies for Mexican-American
children living in Texas and California and the IQ scores were generally quite dismal, similar to
those from Mexico itself. Surely, if Mexican-Americans had subsequently demonstrated a large
rise in tested intelligence, the American media and ethnic-advocacy groups would have widely
trumpeted such a fact.
Strangely enough, strong evidence of such an IQ rise does exist, but it has been ignored by our
often oblivious national media. Among the most useful sources of detailed quantitative data in
America is the General Social Survey (GSS), a huge sociological survey conducted every other
year, in which tens of thousands of Americans have been subjected to a wide range of detailed
questions and their responses made publicly available over the Internet. One regular item in the
survey is the simple Wordsum vocabulary identification test, which, although quite crude, turns
out to be heavily g-loaded, correlating 0.71 with the results of standard IQ tests. Such a
correlation is at least as good as many other measures used to estimate population-wide
intelligence, and probably superior to grades or graduation rates, while the vast GSS sample size
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provides a statistically valid means of discerning American trends and patterns in population
segments too narrow for other sources.
Analyzing this GSS data set in a variety of different ways has become a favored activity of a
blogger named Ron Guhname, who styles himself The Inductivist and every couple of days
publishes a new finding on his website. In 2008, he decided to explore the Wordsum-implied IQ of
American-born Mexican-Americans and discovered a remarkable result [4]. These IQs were quite
low, 8485, in the 1970s and 1980s, a result consistent with the IQ samples reported by
Lynn/Vanhanen for that era. But the Mexican-American IQ then jumped 7 points by the 1990s and
an additional 3 points by the 2000s, a rise of 10 full points in just 20 years, while the Wordsumimplied IQ values for white Americans rose merely 2 points during that same period, presumably
as an aspect of the regular Flynn Effect.
In actual values, the Mexican-American Wordsum-IQ increased from 84.4 in the 1980s to 95.1 in
the 2000s, while the rise for American whites was from 99.2 to 101.3. In addition, the late 1990s
IQ of U.S.-born Mexican-Americans has been separately estimated at 92.4 from the large data
set contained in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), a figure consistent with
these Wordsum-IQ findings.
Thus, almost two-thirds of the IQ gap between American-born Mexican-Americans and whites
disappeared in two decades, with these results being based on nationally-representative
American samples of statistically significant size. Since Guhname is a right-wing blogger quite
hostile to Hispanic immigration, it is to his credit that he published this result without hesitation,
and to the embarrassment of Americas vast multicultural academic and media establishment that
they had never independently discovered these important findings, nor indeed even noticed them
once they appeared. In any event, it appears that Mexican-American IQs in America have been
rising about as rapidly as Irish IQs seem to have risen in Europe.
But does this make any sense? During the 25 years between 1982 and 2007 the real per capita
Irish GDP more than tripled, passing that of Britain, Germany, and France, while during this same
period our national media have tended to emphasize the terrible economic difficulties endured by
Mexican-Americans, rarely providing any indications of a major economic boom in that
population. If Mexican-Americansnow numbering almost 35 million and well on their way to
eventually surpassing Anglo-Saxons in numberhad actually experienced rapid economic gains,
surely our media would not have ignored such an important story?
I read several major newspapers closely each morning and am particularly interested in
immigration-related news items, but on October 1, 2007, I was stunned to read a short New York
Times opinion column by Douglas Besharov [5], a social scientist at the University of Maryland,
which provided exactly such evidence. His U.S. Census-CPS numbers were based on Hispanics as
a whole, but Mexicans and closely related Meso-American immigrant groups from Central America
account for the vast majority of this population, so his results should mostly be applicable.
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Besharov noted that in just the 12 years from 1994 to 2006, the poverty rate among Hispanics
had dropped by fully one-third, plummeting from 30.7 percent to 20.6 percent, while the
percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue-collar jobs had more than doubled, rising from 11
percent to 25 percent. Meanwhile, median Hispanic real household income rose by 20 percent and
individual real income by 30 percent. Education advancement was also significant, with the
percentage of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanics without high-school diplomas or G.E.D.s falling from
44 percent to 34 percent, while college enrollment rose from 19 percent to 25 percent. All these
latter numbers are still considerably below those of the comparable white population, but they do
indicate remarkable economic and social advancement in just a dozen years.
Furthermore, they certainly understate the real rate of such progress, perhaps by a very
substantial factor. The years 19942006 represented a period of peak immigration levels from
Latin Americawith most of this flow being illegal and low-skilleda wave contributing nearly half
the growth of the Hispanic population, which rose from 25 million to almost 45 million. Although
the Census data do not allow us to disentangle the economic performance of these new arrivals
from the previously established or American-born Hispanic segment, it is certain that the socioeconomic advancement figures cited by Besharov would have been enormously better if not for
the inclusion of so many additional millions of initially-impoverished newcomers, often with weak
language skills and almost always concentrated near the bottom of the labor market. So
Besharovs extremely encouraging picture must underestimate the actual performance of
American-born Hispanics.
The severe recession of the last few years has seen the average American family lose 40 percent
of its net worth, and Hispanics have similarly lost a portion of their previous economic gains, but
meanwhile their rapid educational advances have continued and even accelerated. An indicator of
this sense of progress is revealed in an April survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, which found that
75 percent of Hispanics believe that they can get ahead if they work hard, a figure far above the
58 percent average for the general American public.
Americas socio-economic landscape has been reshaped dramatically over the last century or
more due to technological and social changes, reducing some opportunities while increasing
others, so direct historical comparisons can be misleading. Furthermore, detailed economic
stratification data along ethnic lines from a hundred years ago is not easily available. But based
on the raw numerical data we do possess, it seems likely that the tens of millions of Hispanics
living in America in the early 1990s probably advanced more rapidly in economic and educational
terms than had any of Americas large European immigrant groups of the past, such as the Irish,
the Italians, the Jews, or the Slavs. Such real-world gains seem quite consistent with the very
rapid rise in apparent IQ discussed above, which occurred during this same time period.
Given the existence of large and influential Hispanic-friendly institutions such as the Ford
Foundation and the New York Times, it seems almost inexplicable that such dramatically positive
developments received virtually no media attention. This silence has surely led much of the
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national electorate incorrectly to assume that little if any Hispanic progress was occurring,
sometimes with unfortunate political consequences.
IQ Puzzles and a Super-Flynn Effect?
This strong empirical evidence of the apparent malleability of IQ scores raises interesting
questions about the possible mechanism involved. For example, during the 1960s and 1970s there
was a great deal of excitement in elite circles about the role of Head Start-type enrichment
programs in dramatically raising the academic performance and the IQ scores of impoverished
groups; but the overall evidence seems to be that these failed over the long run, with students
regressing to their previous ability levels just a few years after leaving the program.
Similarly, much of the evidence accumulated by the leading advocates of the innateness of IQ,
such as the Pioneer Fund, comes from twin adoption studies, which seem to show that individuals
IQ and personality traits are far closer to those of their fraternal or (especially) identical twins
raised apart than to unrelated foster siblings or parents, and this pattern of similarity grows
steadily stronger over time. Not unreasonably, many psychometric experts have argued that
these results prove that IQ is largely determined by genetic factors and cannot be changed via
environmental influences within any normal range. Lynn and Vanhanen cite several of these
studies to argue that IQ is at least 80 percent hereditary.
These individual results, usually based on relatively small statistical samples of adopted twins or
siblings, seemingly demonstrate the extreme rigidity of IQthe Strong IQ Hypothesiswhile we
have also seen the numerous examples above of large populations whose IQs have drastically
shifted over relatively short periods of time. How can these contradictory findings be squared? I
do not have the solution, but it would seem a very worthwhile subject for further research, on
both theoretical and practical grounds.
This scientific puzzle probably has a close connection to the well-known Flynn Effect, first widely
publicized by Lynn, which describes the consistent, regular rise in nominal IQs for populations
almost everywhere in the world: Englishmen or Frenchmen today do far better on IQ tests than
did their parents or grandparents, although we have no reason to believe they are much
smarter in any meaningful sense. There has been considerable speculation that this general rise
in IQ-test performance is based on the increasingly complex and technological environment
surrounding us, whose intricacies constantly train all of us in the sort of mental abstractions found
in most IQ tests, thereby gradually raising our test scores without necessarily raising our
intelligence. In effect, life in modern urban societies has become a daily cram-course for IQ tests.
Many pre-modern cultures similarly required individuals to undertake considerable feats of
memory, so people back then might have excelled on memory-based tests compared to their
counterparts today, who do not have the same benefits of daily practice.
If we consider the low scoring Balkan and Eastern European populations listed in the table above,
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most of them seem to live in countries which were far more rural and agricultural than their
higher-scoring counterparts. This was certainly also true of Ireland 40 years ago, when its scores
were quite low, and this situation would tend to apply as well to Mexican-Americans, who were a
much more heavily rural population prior to the 1970s.
Some support for a significant rural/urban factor behind IQ scores may be seen in the curiously
inverted pattern of apparent ethnic success between Europe and America. In the recent past the
highest European IQ scores were generally found in northern countries such as Britain, Germany,
and the Netherlands, while the lowest ones occurred in Ireland, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Southern
Italy, and during the early 20th century this pattern was replicated among those same immigrant
ethnic groups in America. Yet strangely enough, if we stratify the recent American GSS results by
primary European ethnic origin, we find nearly the opposite result for Wordsum-IQ, years of
education, and family income. Among the higher performing white American groups are the Irish,
the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, and the Italians, while Americans of Dutch extraction are near the
bottom for whites, as are oldstock Americans who no longer identify with any European country
but are presumably British in main ancestry. Meanwhile, German-Americans are generally at or
slightly below the white American average.
This pattern of apparently inverted white ethnic achievement in Europe and America becomes less
mysterious when we discover it tracks quite well with the rural vs. urban divide. Two of the most
heavily rural, least urbanized groups are the Dutch-Americans and Old Stock whites, which
perform the worst, while the high-performing Italians, Greeks, and Yugoslavs are among the most
heavily urbanized. German-Americans are slightly less urbanized than the average white and also
tend to perform slightly below average. In fact, across all non-Hispanic American whites, the
Wordsum-IQ gap between those who grew up on farms and those who grew up in cities or
suburbs is nearly as large as the gap separating American blacks and whites, and even larger with
regard to total years of education.
[6]The
origin of this inversion of ethnic hierarchies may be quite
simple. When desperately poor immigrant groups such as the Irish,

Italians, or Greeks arrived on our shores, they were unable to afford
farmland, and therefore permanently remained in their East Coast
cities of landing, while less-poor Germans might move to the Midwest
and become farmers, following the agricultural choice made by many
of the earliest frontier settlers derived from the British and the Dutch.
So the more rural populations from Europe often became the more
urban ones in America, leading to a gradual inversion of their relative
IQ rankings.
If we combine this apparent rural/urban achievement pattern with the
evidence of the Flynn Effect, we might speculate that scoring well on
an IQ test tends to require a certain amount of mental priming or complex stimulation while
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growing up and that in the past such stimulation tended to be lacking in poor rural areas
compared with more urban, affluent, or industrial ones. Obviously, working on a farm in a less
developed country carries its own complexity, but it could be that the mental skills exercised are
far less applicable to the strongly abstract and analytical thinking required on an IQ test.
This might help to explain the enormous variance in test scores recorded in individual European
countries better than the chance possibility that large tested samples overwhelmingly consisted of
especially bright or especially dim individuals. Based on this data, the hypothesized
developmental impact of a lack of sufficient mental stimulation might be to reduce tested IQs by
as much as 1015 points. And once this socio-cultural environment substantially changesas in
the case of the Irish or Mexican-Americanswhat might be called a Super-Flynn Effect can
occur, involving a very rapid rise in nominal IQs. Obviously, all of this is quite speculative and
warrants further investigation.
Interestingly enough, these rapid rises in IQ due to
changes in the general socio-economic environment
Sidebar
appear completely absent when we examine the
The East Asian Exception to
international or domestic IQ data for East Asian
Socio-Economic IQ Influences
populations [7], for whom even tenfold differences in real
[7]
per capita GDP seem to have little or no impact on IQ.

Missing this unexpected contrast between the impact of socio-economic factors on Europeans and
on East Asians may have been a major reason that Lynn and Vanhanen failed to notice the serious
flaws in their Strong IQ Hypothesis.
None of these findings would have been possible without the great scholarly effort Richard Lynn
and Tatu Vanhanen put into locating and properly presenting an enormous quantity of
international IQ data in their books and research papers, as well as their courage in focusing
attention on such highly controversial topics. Although I would argue that a close examination of
the Lynn/Vanhanen data tend to convincingly refute their own Strong IQ Hypothesis, I would be
the first to acknowledge my gratitude to the scholars whose efforts made my own analysis
possible. Meanwhile, individuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, who commit outright academic fraud
in support of their ideological positions, do enormous damage to the credibility of their own camp.
Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org [8].
105 Comments To "Race, IQ, and Wealth"

#1 Comment By reflectionephemeral On July 17, 2012 @ 9:54 am
It seems more plausible that most of the large and consistent IQ gaps between Western
Europeans and their Balkan cousins are less a cause than a consequence of differences in
development and affluence during the era in which these IQs were tested.
Along with this come changes in cultural practices. I probably do a whole lot better on
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standardized tests than my Irish great great grandfathers would have done. But I grew up in a
home filled with books, went to public schools with kids whose parents were also well-educated
professionals. So those exams test for stuff that Im primed & wired to understand. Identifying
weaknesses in the authors argument in a passage was probably a less important & culturally
valued skill in rural 1830s County Cork. IQ is shaped by individuals experiences in a cultural
context. When we shift the context, we shift how individuals grow.
huge IQ differences between large populations may be overwhelmingly due to cultural or socioeconomic factors, but a residual component might indeed be genetic in origin.
Maybe. And its great to learn more about that for knowledges sake. But given that we know how
malleable IQ is, Im not sure there could be much policy use to that information. Other than
economic development is good, but I think were on that anyway.
#2 Comment By cw On July 18, 2012 @ 1:57 am
There are all kinds of factors that might affect how groups of people perform on IQ tests. Some
have to do with brain development such as nutrition, the amount of positive speech directed at
the young child, and the amount of positive touch. We know for sure that mental growth can be
enormously stunted due to extreme malnutrition and extreme isolation of the infant (such as
sometimes happens in large orphanges). It is reasonable to think that less extreme deficits also
have an effect. It is also easy to identify populations that are less well nourished and have less
nuturing parenting styles.
There are also factors affecting older children and adults that could lower group IQ. Attitudes
towards academics, for instance. If you come from a culture that doesnt value academics it
seems less likely that you would try hard on an IQ test. Stress is another factor. If you are under
environmental stressyour family is broke, you parents abuse drugs or alcohol, your
neighborhood is unsafe, your home is unsafe, etcit also seems less likely that you would care
much about an IQ test. THese are just a few examples.
Again it is easy to identify groups that as a whole value education less and experience more
stress than other groups.
#3 Comment By Gian On July 18, 2012 @ 5:09 am
they found a strong correlation of around 0.500.75 between the Flynn-adjusted IQ of a nations
population and its real per capita GDP
One thing I never found addressed is whether the correlation was adjusted for the national
population?. Did they accord the same weight to 1.2 Billion plus India and 1.3 Billion plus China as
they accorded to 0.1 million Iceland?
#4 Comment By Mohammadreza On July 18, 2012 @ 5:16 am
Thanks for this very informative article. I always wondered about this excessive obsession with
numbers, especially when they are used to measure un-measurable things like intelligence. IQ
should have been discredited and abandoned many years ago.
#5 Comment By NGPM On July 18, 2012 @ 6:56 am
A very interesting, well-conceived and well-written piece of work in general.
However, I think it is rigged just a bit against the biological side of IQ. This is understandable as it
is a swing the other way against the work of people who seem predisposed to biological
determinism, but Id like to add some firsthand insight that might help us swing back to a happy
equilibrium. For a living, I coach people trying to improve their GMAT or SAT scores, both of which
are highly correlated (though not perfectly) with IQ. Most of my clients have been from fairly
upscale families or skilled professions, and while most of them have been from Europe (where I
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live), I have coached people from all six inhabited continents and over 30 different countries. So I
have worked on the higher half of the IQ spectrum and probably 95 percent of my clients have
had IQs of 110 or higher.
My experience is that achieving the highest scores possible on these tests (the kind that the Ivy
League and company like to see) is possible for some and not for others. Offhand Id say IQ
threshold seems to be somewhere between 120 and 130 (the tests arent always as precise as
some people like to think, but they are nevertheless more consistent and more useful than others
contend) as to whether a given candidate is capable of achieving a Harvard-worthy score. I can
tell you that while educational and environmental factors play a huge role in mediating where a
general populace will play out within one standard deviation of the median (i.e., between 85 and
115), biology matters A LOT when it comes to numbers above or below that range.
In other words, there seems to be a biological element to whether a person will be retarded
(below 70), non-very-bright (below 85), normal (between 85 and 115) giftedness/genius (115 to
145 and above). These definitions are not to be taken as strict precisions, but lets work with
them for now. The main point is that biology does seem to determine what IQ range a person is
capable of achieving (short a serious trauma or miracle) within a 15-point margin of error that is
determined by environment and education.
Is this important? Highly. The architects of high culture and civilization historically have almost
invariably come from the specific echelons of the population (i.e., the nobility or the haute
bourgeoisie, who together represented and still represent the top 1 to 2 percent of their
respective societies). It is notable that the analyses of IQ in question concern only the impact with
regards to nationalities and not to social classes or, as we call them in France, estates. It would
be interesting to see such a comparison at work. However, my personal experience is that people
of noble or high bourgeois stock in French society (I do pay attention to this) are generally though
not exclusively (despite all having uniform educational levels in similar institutions) the quicker
and more easily adaptable thinkers. This means that cultural creativity potential IS in fact
correlated with biological factors that contribute to IQ potential.
So this begs the question: how much have the Irish contributed to American high culture? What
are the proportion of Irish surnames, of English surnames, of German surnames, of Italian
surnames, of French surnames in the great works of American literature? Idem for the Mexicans.
After all, the Irish, Italians and Mexicans who came to the U.S. tended to hail from the poorest
sectors of their respective society. Idem for the Qubcois, although the founding upper classes in
America did count considerable French stock among them. Yes, there is variation in all population
groups, so in a band of simple peasants or proletariats you will occasionally find a genius or a
family of geniuses (one of my brightest students has been a practicing Muslim female from
Sngal), but if they do not dissipate in the regression towards the mean they often move
upward in society.
My insinuation is that while Mexican-American IQ may rise over time and help them to integrate,
it is still questionable whether they will make positive contributions to American culture if they
lack the substance material to produce geniuses. As for assimilating the positive culture of
superiors, they do much better in Mexico than they do in the U.S., not the least because of their
phenotypes. The Irish, of course, are more difficult to tell apart from the Anglo-Saxons and are
easier to absorb into the masses.
#6 Comment By MG On July 18, 2012 @ 8:12 am
The notion that Culture determines IQ is absurd! How do I know this? From my personal
experience and observation. I was born in Poland in a very conservative
environment(home/school/city/country) in Poland everything is conservative btw. however my
fault was I thought for my self and asked inconvenient questions at home at school etc. so I was
ostracized not for being bad just for asking questions I rebelled and left Poland(as soon as I
could) disowned my family and everybody I knew. I Choose my culture and people around me,
this has also been the case with many other emigrants(from different countries and backgrounds)
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I have met. So No, Culture does not determine your IQ its the other way around, high IQ and
personality(which you are born with) determine who you are not the geographic location you
where born at.
As the old saying goes You cannot fix stupid and stupid is mostly determined at birth.
#7 Comment By Peter Schaeffer On July 18, 2012 @ 8:48 am
The discussion of IQ and the mutability of IQ is, at best, a distraction. The practical question
facing the United States is achievement. In other words, how well will the children and
grandchildren of todays low-skill immigrants perform in Americas society. We have lots of
evidence on this point and its anything but positive. From
The Congealing Pot Todays immigrants are different from waves past
Theyre not just like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, for that matter. The large influx of
Hispanic immigrants after 1965 represents a unique assimilation challenge for the United States.
Many optimistic observers have assumed incorrectly, it turns out that Hispanic immigrants
will follow the same economic trajectory European immigrants did in the early part of the last
century. Many of those Europeans came to America with no money and few skills, but their status
steadily improved. Their children outperformed them, and their childrens children were often
indistinguishable from the founding stock. The speed of economic assimilation varied somewhat
by ethnic group, but three generations were typically enough to turn ethnics into plain old
Americans.
This would be the preferred outcome for the tens of millions of Hispanic Americans, who are
significantly poorer and less educated on average than native whites. When immigration skeptics
question the wisdom of importing so many unskilled people into our nation at one time, the most
common response cites the remarkable progress of Europeans a century ago. People used to say
the Irish or the Poles would always be poor, but look at them today! For Hispanics, we are led to
believe, the same thing will happen.
But that claim isnt true. Though about three-quarters of Hispanics living in the U.S. today are
either immigrants or the children of immigrants, a significant number have roots here going back
many generations. We have several ways to measure their intergenerational progress, and the
results leave little room for optimism about their prospects for assimilation.
The children of Hispanic immigrants (the second generation) actually stay in school much longer
and earn a considerably higher wage than their parents. In fact, the Hispanic rate of assimilation
from the first to the second generation is only slightly lower than the assimilation rate of more
successful groups of immigrants. Most second-generation Hispanics make up nearly as much
ground as the children of European immigrants would if they grew up in the same disadvantaged
situation.
But the good news ends there, and two problems arise. First, the second generation still does not
come close to matching the socioeconomic status of white natives. Even if Hispanics were to keep
climbing the ladder each generation, their assimilation would be markedly slower than that of
other groups. But even that view is overly optimistic, because of the second, larger problem with
Hispanic assimilation: It appears to stall after the second generation. We see little further ladderclimbing from the grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants. They do not rise out of the lower class.
Mohammedrezas comment, like the words of Charles Kenny, betrays an obvious lack of
familiarity with the technical questions at hand. Naturally the Philistines who make such blanket
statements as IQ should have been discredited and abandoned many years ago know next to
nothing about psychometrics, certainly not any more (and in many cases a great deal less) than
race-baiting biological determinists.
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IQ is not everything, but it is not nothing, either, unless you want to argue that human
observation is incapable of hierarchizing human intelligence. I dont think there is any grounds for
believing that is the case. A genius, a reasonably intelligent fellow, an average fellow, a cretin
and a retard all have obvious distinctions from one to the other.
Otherwise, logically, there would be absolutely no grounds for universities rejecting applications
even on the basis of low G.P.A.s, which reflect both work ethic and test scores. (And while I am
definitely among those who believes the core populace to be drastically over-schooled, higher
education has a definite place in society and the people who accede to such institutions should be
the exceptionally intellectually talented or cultured.)
Trained psychometricians know that raw IQ as a number has its limitations and its imprecisions
and they are rarely biological determinists. Nevertheless, its strong positive correlative property
to many other salutary aspects of human life is certainly evidence in its favor.
It is good to wonder. Wonder and search. Keep wondering, keep searching, and keep refining.
Otherwise, it is dangerous to make ex cathedra pronunciations on the assumption that one article
in one periodical, however meritous it might be and this article certainly has merit has the last
word.
#9 Comment By JL On July 18, 2012 @ 9:06 am
It is not a worthwhile exercise to single out individual samples for any nation from Lynn and
Vanhanens data. They report aggregated results from many studies precisely to decrease
measurement error. Unz thinks that he can refute Lynn and Vanhanen by demonstrating that the
national IQ for the same nation varies considerably when looking at data from different years but
what this exercise actually demonstrates is that when you add measurement error, i.e., noise, to
data, the results become less reliable.
Lynn and Vanhanen would be the first to admit that their data contain lots of noise. The data they
use are based on a wide range of different tests and sampling strategies, while the Flynn effect
adjustments they make are by necessity very rough, sometimes in fact leading to less accurate
estimates than those that would have been obtained without adjustment. By aggregating several
samples for each country, Lynn and Vanhanen make their IQ estimates much more reliable than
the individual studies they use are. This is based on the psychometric true score theory; it would
useful for Unz to read [9] by Rushton et al. on the principle of aggregation.
One interesting fact is that because of the noisiness of Lynn and Vanhanens data, the correlations
they report between national IQs and economic and social outcomes are systematically
underestimated. If they had more reliable data, the correlations would be even higher.
While the reported IQ differences between European nations are small and generally not
statistically significant, Ireland and the Balkan region tend to score lower than the rest of Europe.
This is apparent in the PISA results, too, and it would be even more salient if we controlled for the
sizable low-IQ non-white populations that many Western Europeans countries have.
#10 Comment By Peter Schaeffer On July 18, 2012 @ 9:37 am
An important and related point is that prior waves of immigrants were able to successfully
assimilate for any number of reasons. By far the most important, is the most obvious.
The United States ended mass immigration with restrictive laws (1917, 1921, 1924) around WWI.
Any serious effort to assimilate the current wave of immigrants has to start with the same policy.
Mass immigration has to end to enable the existing immigrants to integrate (if they can).
Of course, historically America was able to assimilate immigrants for other reasons as well. The
list includes no welfare state, strong job markets, middle class unions, disciplined education, high
demand for unskilled labor in manufacturing, intense nativist pressure to assimilate, unquestioned
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English language dominance, intact families, no multiculturalism, no bilingualism, no victimization

ideology.
All of those conditions are gone
Contra Unz, it is simply untrue that, over generations, Mexican Americans tend to converge to the
white mean in income, education, etc. Steve Sailer [10] studies that show this lack of
convergence. Mexicans are thus clearly different from European ethnics in this respect. Similarly,
while native-born Hispanics show a smaller cognitive test gap than first generation Hispanics, this
is simply due to them speaking English rather than Spanish; there are no signs of the whiteHispanic gap going away.
I also seriously doubt that the correlation between the WORDSUM and full-scale IQ scores is 0.71.
That figure is apparently based on some decades-old report. Even if it was true then, rising levels
of education have probably changed it. The WORDSUM has a very low ceiling, and it useless for
testing, say, college graduates.
#12 Comment By Richard On July 18, 2012 @ 10:25 am
The discussion of IQ and the mutability of IQ is, at best, a distraction. The practical question
facing the United States is achievement. In other words, how well will the children and
grandchildren of todays low-skill immigrants perform in Americas society.
The point is that IQ is the best predictor of achievement.
#13 Comment By Matt On July 18, 2012 @ 10:50 am
I always found the biological determinist thesis of Lynn and Vanhanen to be a little too pat. The
real world is not so simple as to allow boiling down a complex phenomenon like development into
a single number.
That said, if all we had were nation-states with homogenous populations, it would be one thing.
Unz focuses on Mexicans, but America has another disparate population element that has been
around for much longer and still scores consistently lower on IQ testsand not because they grew
up on farms either. Its not just the US though; Look at the Algerians in France, the Turks in
Germany, the Moroccans in Hollandwe have any number of disparate populations inhabiting the
same environment to examine to see if the weak-IQ hypothesis is true.
One last pointthe wordsum test is a vocabulary test, and Im skeptical of results from a
population notorious for not speaking English. I would expect the results of non-English speakers
to be thrown outwhat use would they be?
Of course, historically America was able to assimilate immigrants for other reasons as well. The
list includes no welfare state, strong job markets, middle class unions, disciplined education, high
demand for unskilled labor in manufacturing, intense nativist pressure to assimilate, unquestioned
English language dominance, intact families, no multiculturalism, no bilingualism, no victimization
ideology.
You forgot the fact that nearly all pre-1960s immigrants were of Christian/European cultural
heritage and European phenotype. Its not politically correct to say so, but that is definitely one of
the most important factors. People who stand out in obvious ways will be looked at differently and
will feel different no matter how much pressure there is to act a certain way.
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But even that view is overly optimistic, because of the second, larger problem with Hispanic
assimilation: It appears to stall after the second generation. We see little further ladder-climbing
from the grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants. They do not rise out of the lower class.
Indeed, thank you for this. It complements what I have personally observed, that there is a glass
ceiling conferred by genetics in terms of intellectual abilities. A good education can help
maximize ones own potential, but not increase it.
shifted over relatively short periods of time. How can these contradictory findings be squared?
The finding that IQ is highly heritable is not based on small samples. For example, a recent study
affirming this high heritability had a sample of about 11,000 twin pairs from four different
countries.
High heritability and rising scores across generations are not incompatible findings. Both can be
true. This is because heritability is a population statistic that indicates the relative importance of
genetic and non-genetic influences in causing differences between people across a certain range
of environments. When the range of environments changes, the phenotypic values (e.g., IQ
scores) may change, but the relative importance of genes and the environment across the new
range of environments may not change at all, i.e., everybody may have higher scores than
earlier, but theres still as much variation among people as before and genes are still as
important as ever in causing that variation. However, in the case of IQ, much of the rise in scores
may be artefactual and not real gains in intelligence.
#17 Comment By Tom On July 18, 2012 @ 1:50 pm
If economic success is not determined by higher IQ than what is the determinant. No matter the
choice you have to ask why was
one group intelligent enough to choose and others not intelligent enough to choose it.
#18 Comment By Aaron On July 18, 2012 @ 3:38 pm
Is there really even an apparent contradiction between the stability of IQ correlations within a
population and the fact that population means are drastically shifted over relatively short periods
of time? Those are two different phenomena, and the cross-correlations among siblings, etc. are
of course standardized by the mean at each snapshot in time. The fact that the correlations are
stable doesnt suggest that the means are stable.
Also, to answer Gians question above, correlations (in this case between wealth and IQ) do not
depend on population size, so adjusting to that would be meaningless. Even if youre just talking
about the measurement error, population size is still irrelevant. Whats relevant to measurement
error is the sample size, not the population size, assuming that the population is much larger than
the sample (which it is).
#19 Comment By Libertarian Realist On July 18, 2012 @ 3:41 pm
IQ is as much as 80% heritable within countries. When comparing people from different countries
to each other, there will be more variability. But the racial orderings are essentially the same
within all countries, and that pattern of consistency can only be explained by reference to
innate differences that arent culturally mutable.
#20 Comment By Commenter On July 18, 2012 @ 3:51 pm
In short, the Irish are European; most Mexicans are not.
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From list:
According to the CIA World Fact Book, Mexico is:
60% mestizo
30% Amerindian
Less than 10% European (mostly Spaniard)
And what is the ancestry of mestizos? Examining genetic ancestral markers, Rubn Lisker has
found lower-income mestizos in Mexico City to be:
59% Amerindian
34% European [mostly Spaniard]
and 6% black
#21 Comment By Rebecca Trotter On July 18, 2012 @ 6:23 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this analysis. It has always seemed absurd to me that there
are people who want to turn to genetics as an explanation for IQ disparities without even
considering obvious issues of economic and culture. It is nice to see someone (particularly a
conservative someone) pointing out the strong correlation between economics and IQ in the same
populations. In light of such a strong, documented correlation between economic and IQ growth,
so called race-realists have only their own wishful thinking to hang onto.
It occurs to me that although race-realists are often accused of bigotry, there is probably a
slightly different motivation at work. If IQ is related to economics and opportunity, and there
exists large disparities between race groups, then the similarly large disparities in economic
well-being and opportunities becomes the main suspect. Then we might actually be morally
compelled to take these disparities seriously and work to address them. Which upsets the
applecart a lot. I think it is attachment to the idea that our current system is fair and working
pretty well that drives many peoples attachment to the Strong IQ Theory rather than actual
bigotry.
#22 Comment By JonF On July 18, 2012 @ 6:35 pm
Re: most people have accepted that IQ scores seem to constitute a rough and measurable proxy
for this trait,
Really. I am not aware if any such agreement. In fact its usually agreed that a single score on a
single test is a very poor way of measuring a complex, multi-dimensional trait.
Im a bit sympathetic to arguments about intelligence, but whenever IQ rears its head I conclude
that I am hearing arguments by people who scored well on that test and are royally peeved that
vast riches and overweening power have not fallen into their laps as a result.
#23 Comment By JonF On July 18, 2012 @ 6:37 pm
Re: IQ is as much as 80% heritable within countries.
IQ scores have one steadily up for all groups since the test was first introduced. Unless you think
evolution has gone into hyper-drive that right there disproves its hereditability.
#24 Comment By NGPM On July 18, 2012 @ 6:38 pm
It has always seemed absurd to me that there are people who want to turn to genetics as an
explanation for IQ disparities without even considering obvious issues of economic and culture.
Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
If you take the two-week-old child of a Third World couple in which both partners rank mentally
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retarded (but have never been brain damaged) and adopt him out him to a wealthy First World
couple in which both partners I.Q.s of more than 130, do you honestly believe that the child will
grow up to be anything more than a cretin?
I think it is attachment to the idea that our current system is fair and working pretty well that
drives many peoples attachment to the Strong IQ Theory rather than actual bigotry.
Making observations about the way things are is not tantamount to LIKING such things, and even
prejudice is not the same as bigotry.
#25 Comment By TGGP On July 18, 2012 @ 6:54 pm
I would have liked to see a mention of a longitudinal study like Generations of Exclusion, or
genome wide assocation studies like Ian Dearys.
#26 Comment By TGGP On July 18, 2012 @ 6:56 pm
I was going to say your discussion was still much better than average for the media, but I have to
echo criticisms of your claim that the heritability studies have small samples. Sample size is not
the issue, although unrepresentative foster families may be (Turkheimer finds more of a sharedenvironment effect under the French adoption system).
#27 Comment By H. Dibadj On July 18, 2012 @ 8:14 pm
High IQ=Corporate/bureaucracy slave
Successful business owner and happy fulfilled artisans=not even interested in taking the test
Does this observation tell you anything about the artificiality of this number and the absurdity of
measuring humans??
#28 Comment By Andrew On July 18, 2012 @ 9:42 pm
I am wondering,so how do we explain now the obvious economic success of Saudi Arabia?
(smirk, smirk).
@NGPM You forgot the fact that nearly all pre-1960s immigrants were of Christian/European
cultural heritage and European phenotype. Its not politically correct to say so, but that is
definitely one of the most important factors.
I would addthe MOST important one.
#29 Comment By expeedee On July 18, 2012 @ 9:49 pm
Where are all the footnotes? One has to independently look at the data to confirm the facts, and
this article lacks any references to support a challenge to Lynn. This is more anecdotal and lacks
academic rigor.
#30 Comment By RT On July 18, 2012 @ 10:29 pm
JLs comments, particularly re aggregation are spot on. Some of Lynn and Vanhanens datasets
are not the greatest and it is questionable whether they are representative of the populations in
question. For instance, a fair number of their data points for European populations come from a
1981 study by Buj. This study reports scores obtained from samples in the respective nations
capital cities (e.g., the score for Poland is for Warsaw, not the country as a whole; the score for
Germany is actually for Bonn, etc.). Note that the reported scores for the Buj study tend to be
higher than those from other datasets available for the countries in question. Another study they
cite of questionable representativenvess is the lone data point for Italy, a study from the 1960s by
Tesi and Young which found an average IQ of 102 for a sample from the city of Florence, which
Lynn and Vanhanen extrapolate to the entire country. Within Lynns European datasets, the
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norming studies by Raven and Court for their progressive matrices are probably more
representative than most.
The German psychologist Heiner Rindermann has demonstrated that international academic
assessment tests like PISA are highly correlated with the g-factor (which is what IQ tests are
meant to measure) about as strongly as most IQ tests and are, in effect, de facto IQ tests. His
results from such tests are probably more representative of the countries in question than Lynn
and Vanhanens data, though the two data sets agree closely.
Also, if my memory is correct, the IQ data for early 20th century immigrants to the US from
southern and eastern Europe that Unz cites from Sowell was taken from a study by H. Goddard. I
believe Sowell got them indirectly (maybe from Leon Kamins 1974 or Goulds 1980
misrepresentation of Goddards study). In any case, Goddard gave IQ tests to immigrants he
suspected of being retarded and found that the tests identified which ones were retarded. The low
IQs obtained by the subject groups were not intended to be representative of their populations
generally.
#31 Comment By Ryan On July 19, 2012 @ 4:42 am
So though there are a few outliers, all the test results of European iqs show that they all cluster
around the same area (the same is true of other races), and Mexican kids, once having the
benefit of being raised in the U.S., register scores around the bottom of the white range. I think
thats about what most of us in the hbd crowd expected.
Where did you get this data on a European inversion in the U.S.?
Also, its simply not true that Irish-Americans earn more than the general white population.
According to the 2010 Census, they earn the least of the big five (English, Irish, Italian, Polish,
and German). And are the most likely to be on welfare. Their incomes are not much better than
the Irish, likely due to geography, but on all other social indicators, English-Americans score the
best of these five, and the Irish the worst. My guess is that this (pretty small) difference probably
does not have much to do with the difference between Anglo and Celtic genetics. Instead, I think
its that downscale Anglos tend to record their ethnicity as American, and low-class whites of all
kinds like to call themselves Irish.
#32 Comment By RLD On July 19, 2012 @ 7:36 am
Gould was not a Marxist. And to suggest that if his calculations on skull size were wrong (since he
never was given access to the collection) means that his theoretical and mathematical objections
to certain applications of IQ are therefore incorrect simply shows a childish bias on the part of the
author.
#33 Comment By Sean Gillhoolley On July 19, 2012 @ 8:41 am
There is no correlation between IQ and success, so I think we need to stop refering to IQ. It is a
useless metric.
#34 Comment By Bill On July 19, 2012 @ 9:19 am
Im skeptical of Unzs dependence on Wordsum scores when comparing European ethnic groups in
the US, as well as his dependence on the Urban-Rural divide to explain IQ gaps.
Wordsum is basically a vocabulary test. And while, overall, vocabulary correlates with
intelligence, its easy to see how it could distort results, overstating or understating differences,
when comparing subsets of the population. Ironically, it is probably far easier to distort through
environment/culture than standard IQ.
As for the urban-rural explanation, it pretty much provides zero explanation for the White-Black
IQ gap, which seems to be the at the center of the most vexing social issues in the US. After all,
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blacks are more likely to live in urban areas than whites, yet have a significantly lower IQ.
Turning to the issue of Hispanic immigration, the culture/genetics dichotomy matters little if there
is little pressure to assimilate. To be fair, I would probably say that the biggest cultural problem
Hispanics have is on the Spanish side of their heritage (look at Spain today). This culture
encourages corruption and irresponsibility, and has contributed to poverty wherever it has been
prevalent. That crime rates actually rise among second-generation Hispanics does speak well for
the Assimilation conquers all hypothesis.
If the US government safety net, by shielding people from the worst consequences of a frankly
inferior (at least in terms of producing a healthy civil society) culture, effectively rewards that
culture, what incentive exists to assimilate to the far less fun Northern European/Puritan culture
that has influenced most non-Hispanic Whites? In addition, there is a reward (in the form of
affirmative action) for accentuating ones Hispanicness, providing a positive disincentive to
assimilate. In the current conditions, there is practically no reason to expect that Hispanics will
assimilate to non-Hispanic white norms.
And of course, if culture can change quickly for the better, it can also change quickly for the
worse, as David Starkey pointed out when he said that many white British youth had become
black culturally. If the clannishness and irresponsibility of lower-class Latino culture in the US is
rewarded, is it not possible that non-Hispanic whites might adopt these behaviors, effectively
magnifying their effect?
#35 Comment By Neil Craig On July 19, 2012 @ 9:47 am
To enhance the argument that wealth causes growth rather than vice cersa note that among
those poorer countries that grew to wealth (Ireland, Greece) the growth started while the earlier
measurements were being taken. being wealthy is no achievement but becoming wealthy is yet
this was achieved by the allegedly stupider generation. This strongly suggests wealth is the
leading factor (or perhaps education or cultural stimulation) & IQ the following one.
On the other hand the author does not realise that Israels population is made up of oriental Hews
as much as European and that the former have never shown their western cousins high IQs. In
fact if you look at Israeli scientific and technical achievements they are consistent with
overlapping normal curves of 2 groups and most of the best scientists being drawn from the far
end of the normal curve of an Ashkenazi normal curve.
Also the author here is dealing with about as genetically similar and culturally different population
group as possible Europeans. This may have less relevance for seriously unrelated populations.
#36 Comment By Jennifer On July 19, 2012 @ 9:57 am
You cannot use second-generation achievement to argue for racial equality, because Hispanics
get a huge boost from affirmative action that is not justified by their intelligence. In the long term,
this will have devastating consequences for national efficiency.
Unz cannot rebut the evidence from twin and adoption studies. Moreover, he does not even
mention regression to the mean. We know that black IQ regresses to a mean of 85 while white
IQ regresses to a mean of 100. That means that black couples will have less intelligent children
than white couples at the same combined IQ level. This explains why even low income white
children do better than well-to-do black children. I dont know if any research has been done on
regression to the mean among hispanics. If hispanic IQ does indeed regress to a lower mean,
then we have permanently downgraded the intellectual capital of the country. You cannot have a
first-world standard of living with a largely third-world population.
Unz, your superficial analysis will further set us back in having an honest conversation about the
consequences of immigration. At best, you have shown that it is possible that Lynn is wrong. You
dont bet the future of the country on possibilities no matter how good they make you feel.
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#37 Comment By Toddy Cat On July 19, 2012 @ 10:00 am

Is anyone surprised that the takeaway from this article is People are fungible. A Mexican is a
Belgian is a German is an American. And oh, yeah, Hispanic immigration is good, and we need
more of it.
I have no idea if Unz or Lynn is right, but the word for Mr. Unzs article is tendentious, as indeed
is Lynn. We need light on this subject, not heat, and Mr. Unzs ongoing love letter to Hispanics
isnt helping matters any.
#38 Comment By Jennifer On July 19, 2012 @ 10:17 am
useless metric.
This is a patent falsehood. It is well-known that IQ is an excellent predictor of educational and
occupational success for all races. The APA admitted this in the aftermath of publication of the Bell
Curve and has never reversed its position.
This country is finished if we do not get over our equality fetish.
#39 Comment By Stilicho On July 19, 2012 @ 10:32 am
@ NGPM Thank you for the thoughtful and insightful commentary. The point you make about
culture or economic status affecting where a particular member of a group will score withing a
given range for that group is logical, matches my experience, and is supported by the 80%
heritability theory. Education can certainly help an individual reach his maximum score on an I.Q.
test, but it does not increase intelligence. Rather, it gives an individual training and tools to more
fully utilize that intelligence. There is no reason to think that this does not hold true for groups as
well.
#40 Comment By Severn On July 19, 2012 @ 10:38 am
>the IQ disparities discussed above seem to provide a powerful challenge to [the Strong IQ
Hypothesis]
That is a ridiculous and tendentious conclusion. The logical response to the inconsistencies in
Lynns data is to accept that his data is of low quality and dubious reliability. Instead you
acknowledge the defects in his data and then proceed to construct your entire intellectual
edifice on what you have already admitted is quicksand.
You are reputed to be extremely intelligent. If this is true then none of your intelligence makes it
into your writings on immigration and human differences.
When the early waves of Catholic Irish immigrants reached America near the middle of the 19th
century, they were widely seen as particularly ignorant and uncouth ..
What they were widely seen as is utterly irrelevant. What matters is what they were. And what
they were was the equal in IQ of other European peoples in the US, as evidenced by their rapid
climb up the socioeconomic ladder.
Gould was not a Marxist.
Well, that depends on what one means by Marxist. Certainly his scientific views were [11]. He was
a red-diaper baby who said that he learned his Marxism, literally at my daddys knee, although
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he rejected his fathers Stalinist views.

And to suggest that if his calculations on skull size were wrong (since he never was given access
to the collection) means that his theoretical and mathematical objections to certain applications of
IQ are therefore incorrect simply shows a childish bias on the part of the author.
No one refused Gould access to Mortons collection. He simply never wanted to remeasure the
skulls. He also ignored several contemporary studies of brain size that confirmed Mortons ideas.
Goulds criticisms of IQ are without merit not only because his strong biases and
misrepresentations but because he simply did not understand factor analysis and other relevant
methodological and theoretical issues.
useless metric.
You could not be more wrong. The predictive validity of IQ is the strongest and most universal of
all social science variables.
This strong empirical evidence of the apparent malleability of IQ scores
This may comes as news to you, but the US has been conducting a very large and very expensive
fifty year experiment into whether or not the IQ of groups of people is malleable or not.
Im referring of course to our efforts to raise the IQ/intellectual/academic performance of blacks
to the white level.
The evidence from this experiment, perhaps the largest such experiment in world history, is that
IQ is not malleable.
@ NGPM Thank you for the thoughtful and insightful commentary. The point you make about
culture or economic status affecting where a particular member of a group will score withing a
given range for that group is logical, matches my experience, and is supported by the 80%
heritability theory. Education can certainly help an individual reach his maximum score on an I.Q.
test, but it does not increase intelligence. Rather, it gives an individual training and tools to more
fully utilize that intelligence. There is no reason to think that this does not hold true for groups as
well.
Thank you for your contributions, as well. Looking back, I would just caution that terms such as
80% heritability and my own assertion that biology does seem to determine what IQ range a
person is capable of achieving within a 15-point margin of error that is determined by
environment and education could give the impression of a clear-cut distinction between heredity
and environment that biologists tend not to see. For one thing, even a highly genetically loaded
trait such as eye color still assumes certain biochemical inputs for expression, and congenital
abnormalities can produce results completely unanticipated by the genome alone.
Of course, those are extreme cases. More to the point, though, the human brain is a highly plastic
organ and while we have devised IQ tests that, in my opinion, do a good job of measuring
cognitive ability at a present moment, we still havent mapped out the genetic aspects of
cognition. So it is also possible that some people might be more flexible than others if a certain
educational intervention takes place at the right moment.
THAT SAID for demographic and statistical purposes, psychometrics tests are far more useful,
far more accurate and far more telling across broad populations than within individuals. And when
it comes to the demographics of the United States, there can be no gainsaying what we are in
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store for. Its not just in the numbers: drive down the streets on the other side of the Hadrians
Walls that segregate the major urban centers in the U.S. and you can see it for yourself.
#45 Comment By Brian On July 19, 2012 @ 12:32 pm
Unz appears to have missed that there is at most a weak correlation between social factors and
adult IQ.
[12]
And that the only environmental factors that have been shown to affect IQ are those that are
chemical or biological. A dreary country, under a dictatorship, will not depress IQ, unless there
are nutritional deficiencies or diseases associated with the environment.
#46 Comment By Simon Newman On July 19, 2012 @ 1:10 pm
The evidence suggests a strong environmental influence on IQ, and that the up to 15 point IQ
differences within European populations (ca 87-102) may be almost entirely environmental.
Likewise the large differences among African descended populations (ca 64-86) are likely to be
largely environmental.
Unfortunately, normalising for national environment still leaves significant differences among
racial groups, indicating that these differences (eg the US black/white gap of 15-17 points) are
likely largely genetic.
#47 Comment By Hominid On July 19, 2012 @ 2:02 pm
This thread is another classic display of ignorance, misiformation, and emotion-based ideology
colliding with rigorous science.
#48 Comment By Michael OHearn On July 19, 2012 @ 2:05 pm
Intelligence testing was originally designed in France as a predictor of academic success in
school. A recent study in Scotland strongly suggests that the correlation between innate genetics
and IQ is somewhere less than .50. Your article corroborates this finding suggesting that IQ is
largely a function of wealth level, and not vis versa.
The Asian anomaly may be due to their remoteness from Western cultural norms. People within
the Western worldview will largely perform on IQ tests based upon subjective life expectations. If
they are not cut out to be academically oriented because of social, economic and upbringing
factors, they will score lower regardless of genetic endowment, hence the rural/urban dichotomy.
In contrast, those in Japan, China and Korea, largely outside the Western, historically Christian
sphere of influence, will learn Western academic skills as something extrinsic to their own
cultures, and hence there is no dichotomy between rural and urban performance.
From a human perspective, only some economic goods are related to IQ. Some people will always
be needed to metaphorically take out the trash, for example. This is where Ward Connerlys
initiative comes into play.
Gender differences in IQ appear to be genetically caused. The only way to equalize IQ between
girls and boys is to culturally deprive and dumb down boys, which is part of the liberal agenda.
It ultimately comes down to mans role as creature. Whenever man opposes God, God always
wins and man always loses. That is called reality.
#49 Comment By Silver On July 19, 2012 @ 2:43 pm
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useless metric.
Its an extremely useful metric. It makes little sense to recommend we stop talking about it
when weve barely just begun.
As for Unzs article, theres enough there to cast doubt on the strong pessimist interpretation of
IQ, wealth, race and immigration, but not nearly enough to rebut the general hbd view.
I was particularly disheartened by this passage
with the only obvious solution being a strong eugenics program, presumably including sterilization
of a substantial fraction of the population.
You presume far too much, Ron. There is not the slightest need to madly rush into a mass
sterilization program if one takes a favorable view of eugenic measures a eugenic outlook on
life, lets call it. Its about building for the future, not about senselessly lashing out at the
vulnerable. The saddest thing is that in the privacy of your own thoughts you probably agree that
some form of neo-eugenics is the one great hope, so why you gratuitously poo-poo it yourself
when there are legions of marxoids only too willing to do it for you is something of a mystery.
#50 Comment By Silver On July 19, 2012 @ 2:54 pm
Slightly off-topic, while PPP conversions will always involve an element of art (rather than
science) some of those per capita GDP figures for earlier decades are simply ridiculous. Take
Poland. Today Polands per capita GDP is around $20,000 2005 PPP dollars. Therefore to grow
from the state figure of $2,500 in 1989 would require a growth rate of some 10% per annum over
the last two decades, which is way beyond what the per capita GDP growth rate data we have for
Poland in the post-communist period, about 3.5% per annum. The data for other formerly
communist countries is similarly absurd.
#51 Comment By Enoch_Root On July 19, 2012 @ 2:56 pm
For example, one might speculate that the smarter Irish immigrated to America, while their
dimmer relatives remained at home, and the same was also true for the smarter Southern
Italians, Greeks, or other Balkan Europeans. Similarly, perhaps the smarter European Jews
crossed the oceans to New York Harbor in the years before World War I, while their dimmer
relatives stayed behind and later moved to Israel after World War II.
These explanations seem quite unlikely. The intra-ethnic IQ gaps being discussed are absolutely
enormousoften approaching a full standard deviation or moreand that would imply a similarly
enormous gap between the portions of the population that stayed and those that emigrated, with
no contemporaneous source seeming to provide any indication of this. Indeed, during the period
when these immigrant flows were occurring, most American observers emphasized the
remarkable backwardness of the new arrivals and often speculated that they were intrinsically
defective and might constitute a permanent burden to society.
Is in my opinion the weakest part of your argument. Natives always find The Other odd and
backwards. Seems to me you need to work on this portion.
Personally, I believe there is a Native Intelligence hard wired into the individual. Much as eye
color, hair color, etc. Then there are environmental factors that either improve or drag down the
native ability.
I would further argue that risk-takers (in terms of the Irish and Italians that came to the US, for
example, were likely the brightest of their respective families. Remeber, they were to send
money home once they got settled in the States. If a family could only afford to send one
person, who would they send? These were not small considerations.
#52 Comment By Severn On July 19, 2012 @ 4:30 pm
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The evidence suggests a strong environmental influence on IQ, and that the up to 15 point IQ
differences within European populations (ca 87-102) may be almost entirely environmental.
The 87 IQ figure mentioned is statistical noise, as I pointed out to Unz a couple of years ago.
There IS a wide range of IQ variation in Europe though. Rindermann found an IQ of 81 for
Albania, and 102 for Holland.
This data does not support Unzs theory the Irish were dumb and now theyre smart, so who
says that Latinos cant do the same? so he ignores it. Unz is cherry-picking numbers to suit his
agenda.
#53 Comment By JL On July 19, 2012 @ 4:49 pm
A recent study in Scotland strongly suggests that the correlation between innate genetics and IQ
is somewhere less than .50.
No such study from Scotland exists. There was a recent study by University of Edinburgh professor
Ian Deary and colleagues who found, using novel molecular genetic methods, that the heritability
of IQ is at least 40 to 50 percent. In the abstract of the study, they say that these estimates
provide lower bounds for the narrow-sense heritability of the traits. The method they use cannot
capture the full effect of genes, which they explicitly admit. However, studies using different
methods (e.g., the classic twin design) can capture the full genetic effect, and such studies show
that the heritability of IQ is about 80 percent in adults.
#54 Comment By Eric Rasmusen On July 19, 2012 @ 8:06 pm
I commend you for wrestling with the data this way. A few comments, tho:
1. We would expect huge differences as a result of migration. The average IQs of Hindus in the US
is a lot higher than of Hindues in India. We shouldnt expect blacks in the US to be the same as in
Africa (even aside from the racial mixing here), or Irish in the US to be the same as in Ireland, or
Scotch Irish to be the same as Scots, or West Germans the same as East Germans. This last is a
possibility because in 1945 anybody in East Germany who had any brains ran west to escape the
Russian army (well, except for Hitler and Goebbels, and they didnt successfully reproduce).
Similarly, Turkey of today is not what it was in 1900. The Greeks and Armenians were killed or
expelled, a lot of Turks moved to Germany, and I bet the fastest growing subpopulation was
country folk Anatolians, not Istanbul sophisticates.
#55 Comment By Jonathan Gress-Wright On July 19, 2012 @ 10:23 pm
Unz is not disputing that there is a correlation between IQ and socioeconomic development. But a
lot of objections seem to ignore Unzs main argument, which is that the data from LV is more
consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors determine IQ than that IQ determines
socioeconomic factors. How do the biological determinists account for the consistent rise of IQ
levels across different ethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development?
That being said, I find it interesting that he rejects the notion that the brightest are the ones who
emigrate. That seems to be a cornerstone argument of open-borders advocates, like The
Economist.
#56 Comment By VintageVNvet On July 19, 2012 @ 10:38 pm
As a Cal grad in Psych., ca 1970, w. Stanford-Binet IQ tested at various times at +4 to 6SD, I
have been following this discussion in various media for over 40 years; this article and the
comments are mostly all very well put, but do not get down to the heart of the matter of IQ,
nor relative correlations.
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First, commonality of twins may be subscribed simply to uterine environment, as it has been
shown to be, quite as clearly as any social science permits, of the mutability of IQ at that time
due to various influences. And, in that same vein, IMHO, all such social science must be taken
with a serious dose of salt.
Second, while the mutability of IQ due to post partum environmental influences may be worthy
of continuing discussion, IMHO, there is little doubt of the influence of such on individual personal
relative success, no matter the IQ of that individual.
Third, no one has mentioned the work of Gardiner, et alia, re: various kinds of intelligence,
which, again IMHO should be the focus of ALL such discussions, not to mention any and all
guvmint programs intended to increase any nations development.
Fourth, within my own sibling group, there appears to be a difference of more than two SD,
supporting both the interuterine and post partum environmental influences arguements, ( and I
am not at the top of this group.)
Fifth, most Psych. professionals with whom I have discussed the subject of IQ have agreed that
the tests can only be taken as accurate at the time and with the specific group tested at that time,
so the implication that that the numbers can be compared between groups and over long times
seems completely wrong.
Sixth, the most qualified psychometricians with whom I have discussed inter cultural validity of
IQ test numbers have been unanimous in their opinion of clear cultural bias to any and all tests
of this nature.
As such, it seems both premature and implicitly simplistic to use such tests as a sole basis for any
kind of guvmint policy or opinion of the worth of any individual or group.
#57 Comment By Mitchell Young On July 20, 2012 @ 2:47 am
while the percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue-collar jobs had more than doubled, rising
from 11 percent to 25 percent.
Uh, no. Here is what the Besherov article says
Consider the Hispanic success in obtaining skilled, blue-collar jobs, as measured by the census
category for precision production, craft and repair occupations. From 1994 to 2006, as the total
number of these jobs grew, the percentage held by whites fell from 79 percent to 65 percent. The
percentage held by blacks remained constant at about 8 percent, and the percentage held by
Hispanics more than doubled, rising to 25 percent from 11 percent. As whites left these
relatively well-paid jobs, Hispanics rather than blacks moved into them.
So, not the percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue collar jobs, but the percentage of those
jobs held by Hispanics doubled.
Leaving aside the question of why this should be considered a good thing, Unz (or more likely his
research Razib Khan) makes a basic mistake in interpreting logic and statistics. It is likley there
are many more in this article, which will take time to be sussed out. But they will, just like Jason
Richwine sussed out how Unz/Khan downplayed the incarceration rates of Hispanics.
Unz is not disputing that there is a correlation between IQ and socioeconomic development.
No, but Unzs exposition, without qualification, gives the impression that IQ is primarily a product
of living in wealthy nations, and that is simply false. If he is trying to get us to reassure ourselves
that Hispanic immigrants will normalize like the Irish in the wake of his recent suggestion that
the right wing resign itself to demographic subsumation, I have to say I am less than convinced.
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#59 Comment By Brian On July 20, 2012 @ 3:59 am

***hich is that the data from LV is more consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors
determine IQ than that IQ determines socioeconomic factors. How do the biological determinists
account for the consistent rise of IQ levels across different ethnic groups in tandem with
socioeconomic development?***
As Unz notes though, that isnt the case with East Asia. This point is noted by Garrett Jones & W.
Joel Schneider in their paper IQ in the Production Function (easily downloadable on the web)
Jones & Schneider also note:
Another place to look for massive IQ increases would be in a region of the world that experienced
a dramatic increase in the price of its exports: The oil-rich countries of
the Middle East. But a glance at that data, likewise, shows little evidence that being richer, per
se, increases IQ within ten or twenty years:
.
If one uses 1973 as a breakpointsince real oil prices increased fourfold between 1973 and 1986,
before decliningthen one would expect IQ scores to be higher in oil rich countries if simple
reverse causality drove IQ scores. Casual inspection of the evidence doesnt show such a
relationshipindeed, Qatar and Kuwait, two low population, high-GDP-per-capita countries, fail
to stand out along the IQ dimension.
Further, after 1973, there is no clear difference between OPEC and non-OPEC countries, contrary
to what one would expect if income caused IQ in an important way.
Finally, a simple difference-in-difference test shows that OPEC countries have a median IQ score
falling 5.5 points lower compared to non-OPEC countries after 1973 (Given the small sample size,
we will refrain from calculating standard errorsconsider these results as suggestive).
All told, if one wants to use a reverse causation argument to explain the IQ-productivity
relationship, it will have to be more subtle than the simple tests of East and Southwest Asian IQs
presented here.
#60 Comment By German reader On July 20, 2012 @ 9:14 am
Eric Rasmusen wrote:
This last is a possibility because in 1945 anybody in East Germany who had any brains ran west
to escape the Russian army (well, except for Hitler and Goebbels, and they didnt successfully
reproduce).
Not just in 1945 there was massive migration from the Soviet-occupied zone (later the GDR) to
the West until the early 1960s, especially of the most qualified (the best and brightest) sections
of the East German population. Thats why the communists built the wall in 1961; otherwise
Eastern Germany might have been bled dry by the on-going exodus. I too have wondered whether
this large migration which especially affected those youd exspect to score highly on IQ tests
might have something to do with the divergence between Eastern and Western Germany.
Unz is not disputing that there is a correlation between IQ and socioeconomic development. But a
lot of objections seem to ignore Unzs main argument, which is that the data from LV is more
consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors determine IQ than that IQ determines
socioeconomic factors.
No, Lynn and Vanhanens data are not consistent with that. As Ive noted above, it does not make
sense to compare the individual studies whose results Lynn and Vanhanen averaged to calculate
national IQs. Equally absurd is to speculate about the underlying reasons for the supposed trends
between studies. Most of the variation between studies of the same country is simply random
error.
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For example, Unz notes that a 1961 study reported that the Greek national IQ was 88, while a
1979 study said it was 95. He suggests that this change was due to increasing affluence in
Greece. However, we have very good reasons to suspect that the 1979 study is rubbish. It is a
study based on convenience samples in twenty-one European capital cities, conducted by the
Croatian researcher Vinko Buj. The study has been criticized as practically worthless. For
example, the correlations between Lynn and Vanhanens average national IQs and contemporary
student assessment studies such the PISA are around 0.6-0.7, providing strong evidence of the
validity of L & Vs data. In contrast, the correlations between Bujs data and the same student
assessment studies are around zero, suggesting that Bujs numbers are basically random noise.
(There are also other discrepancies in Bujs study, such as countries with standard deviations in
excess of 30 IQ points, which is impossible for representative samples.)
In IQ and Global Inequality (2006), L & V report three additional studies from Greece, with
averages of 97, 89, and 92. The five studies are consistent with the claim that Greek IQ is below
the European average. This is also supported by the fact that Greece at the rock bottom of
European PISA results even though the PISA assessments were conducted when Greece was at
the peak of its recent affluence.
Cherry-picking individual studies from L & Vs data is a pointless exercise. For example, Israels
IQ was 97 in 1975 and 90 in 1989, a seven point decrease. Does Unz have a theory of why IQ was
declining over this period in Israel?
How do the biological determinists account for the consistent rise of IQ levels across different
ethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development?
There is no evidence for any such rise.
#63 Comment By Chuck On July 21, 2012 @ 12:25 am
Unz: To a very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically
indistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable,
while the recorded rise in East German scores of 79 points in just half a generation seems even
more difficult to explain.
JLs comment above is spot on. Unz is comparing cherry picked data points to given the
impression that the IQ scores across nations are highly malleable. Its clear that variance within
countries is due to measurement error. We can estimate this error by looking at the variance in
scores within a country during the same year. From Unzs chart, we have: Belgium (1950/1950) 4
points, France(1962/1962) 6 points, and West Germany (1978/1978) 4 points. So our mean
amount of error, which is reduced by aggregating data is 5 points. We can then compare this to
the average European intra-national variance, which is 5 points (rounding: Argentina 5, Australia
1, Austria 2, Belgium 3, Bulgaria 3, Chech 2, Denmark 2, Finland 2, France 6, West Germany 5,
Italy, New Zealand 2, Spain 2, Switzerland 2, Greece 7, Ireland 11, Isreal 7 points, Poland 14
points, Sweden 7, Mean 5). To put this another way, the mean amount of intra-national variance
is no more than what we would expect, given the noise in the data.
Now to verify JLs point about measurement error, which predicts that intra-national data points
vary randomly, we can compare the change in scores in countries to the two other variables that
Unz provides, year and GPD. In Unzs list, there are 10 countries that show a positive correlation
between change in IQ and GDP and 11 that show a negative correlation. Pure chance. We can
repeat the same exercise for year. Now compare this lack of relation within countries to the
IQ-GDP relation been countries using averaged scores. Based on the above considerations we can
dismiss Unzs exaggerated differences. He is correct, though, that the IQ of East and West
Germans varies more than we would predict from a genetic hypothesis i.e., by 8 points averaging
data points, as Lynn typically does, or by 5 using n-weighted values.
Unz: Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in
1961 and a score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full points in the Flynn-adjusted IQ
of Greeks over just 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspectiveit is interesting to note
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that Greek affluence had grown very rapidly during that same period, with the real per capita GDP
rising by 170 percent.
The intra-national variance here is not much more than we would expect given our estimated
error (above). And in Lynns newest data set, as opposed to the decade old one which Ron
decided to rely on for unspecified reasons, there is zero correlation between Greek IQ data points
and GDP. (Lynn has collected 10 data points which average to 92.) As noted above there is only a
chance association between European intra-national IQ scores and GPD.
Unz: The wide IQ gaps between these European peoples and the previous group seem unlikely to
have a heavily innate basis, given the considerable genetic and phenotypic similarity across these
populations.
For those interested, you can refer to some of L&V updated IQs here: [13] You will notice that
national IQs are estimated from a much larger set of data points. When I get a chance, I will post
a table of his 2012 data. Using the updated IQs, 3 researches recently determined that
haplogroups can explain 50% of the intra European+ IQ variance. Refer here: [14] This seemingly
contradicts Rons claim about European genetic variance and IQ variance. Its notable Ron
considers it to be plausible that European height differences could be genetically conditioned. Yet,
the intra national European variance in height is, in standardized units, greater than the
phenotypic variance in IQ. For example, the largest European IQ difference given by Lynn (2010)
is 8 points. In the 2002 data which Ron decided to use, its 12 points. But the largest height
difference is, in IQ metrics, around 15 points. Refer yourself to the means and standard deviation
here, along with the secular change: [15] Now height, like IQ, is a highly polygenic trait; and its a
trait for which there is presumably less selection pressure for (i.e., height is less related to fitness
than IQ is); if height can vary this much between genetically related European, surely IQ can.
Unz: To a small extent, Lynn and Vanhanen acknowledge the possible importance of non-genetic
factors, and they devote a few pages to a discussion of the impact of health, nutrition, and
education on IQ scores. But they never provide any clear estimate for the magnitude of these
influences..
Lynn (2006) proposes that 50% of the national IQ variance is genetically conditioned. Nothing
that Ron has mentioned contradicts this figure. We can take his European immigrant examples as
examples. If the IQ of Sicily and Ireland is 90 and 93 respectively, and Italian and Irish Americans
are genetically representative of the people of those regions, then the respective genotypic IQs
would be 95 and 97. Which would be virtually undetectable given the crude proxy measures Ron
uses (e.g., income and education). This is, of course, assuming that these populations are
unadmixed with other European American ethnic groups. That assumption seems untenable. If the
difference, though, is so small, why mention it? Because, on the population level small IQ
differences can have large effects, as L & V and others have demonstrated. Additionally, the
largest differences are between, rather than within, races. If we grant Lynns phenotypic National
IQs, N.E Asians and Africans would differ, genotypically, by 1.2 SD, which is a substantial amount.
Unz: It has long been established on both theoretical and empirical grounds that IQ scores
generally follow a mean-reversion pattern, in which the children of outlying individuals tend to
regress toward the typical levels of their larger population or ethnic group
Refer to the comment above.
Unz: Furthermore, the most recent 2009 PISA international student academic tests sponsored by
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provide us with results that raise
further doubts about the correctness of the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ scores from a wide range of
European countries.
Surely if one is going to make this argument, one should use Lynns updated IQs. Readers can
compare the IQ and international test differences in the paper linked above. The only noticeable
discrepancy is with Ireland. There is no justification for citing L and Vs older estimates in critique
of their current position.
Unz: We cannot rule out the possibility that different European peoples might have relatively
small differences in innate intelligence or IQafter all, these populations often differ in height and
numerous other phenotypic traits. But this residual genetic element would explain merely a small
fraction of the huge 1015 point IQ disparities discussed above We are now faced with a
mystery arguably greater than that of IQ itself. Given the powerful ammunition that Lynn and
Vanhanen have provided to those opposing their own Strong IQ Hypothesis,
Its rather important when discussing this issues to venture estimates. As noted, Lynn (2006) has
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offered the figure of 50%. Since the largest National IQ difference is about 10 points (12 points in
Lynn 2002; 8 points in Lynn 2010), the largest European genotypic difference would be 5 points.
Is that a relatively small difference? Its surely not a small fraction, as Ron states. . Has
anything Ron said contradicted this estimate? There are a few points not entirely consistent with
it, but a larger body of data is in agreement. The most suggestive studies to date, mysteriously
gone unmentioned, are the ones which have used haplogroups and skin color as genetic markers
and entered them into regression analyses alongside environmental factors. The variance
independently explained by the genetic marker turns out to be Lynns 50%. See, for example:
Rodriguez-Arana (2010). INTELLIGENCE AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS: GENETICS MATTER BUT
THERE IS STILL MUCHROOM TO REDUCE INEQUALITIES.
Unz: The IQ figure of 87 that they quote from Lynn/Vanhanen is correct, though admittedly
based on a single 1961 study of Mexican schoolchildren in the most impoverished southern part of
that country.
That would be 88 based on 6 samples corroborated by data from 6 international tests in Lynn
2010. Now, going with the point made above, the estimated Mexican genotypic IQ would then be
6 points below the White IQ. That is, we might expect 2+ generation Mexicans reared in the US to
have IQs around 94.
Unz: But such critics always fail to notice that a much larger and more recent study of Irish
schoolchildren revealed precisely the same mean IQ of 87
If we average the 18 data points we are given for Ireland (10 from IQ tests and 8 from
international tests) in Lynn 2010, we derive an IQ of 96, which is .5 SD above the Mexican
National IQ.
In actual values, the Mexican-American Wordsum-IQ increased from 84.4 in the 1980s to 95.1 in
the 2000s, while the rise for American whites was from 99.2 to 101.3. In addition, the late 1990s
IQ of U.S.-born Mexican-Americans has been separately estimated at 92.4 from the large data set
contained in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), a figure consistent with these
Wordsum-IQ findings.
The difference between Blacks and Whites on Wordsum dropped to below 0.6 SD by the end of
the 90s, well below the difference found in other adult samples; this calls this index of IQ into
question. Murray (2007) noted:
The GSS vocabulary test. GSS data are now available through the 2004 survey, 6 years longer
than the observation period available to Huang and Hauser (2001), and they show a continuing
decline in the BW difference for persons born into the early 1980s (authors analysis of the
(GSS). But if the question is whether black performance on the vocabulary test has improved,
there is no inconsistency with the WoodcockJohnson results. The GSS has an absolute scale of
correct answers, from 0 to 10, and the vocabulary items have remained unchanged since the
advent of the GSS. The highest black mean score, whether measured in a single birth year or in
five-year aggregations, occurred among blacks born in 1945 1949. The decline in the
BWdifference in the GSS vocabulary test for persons born sincemid-century is entirely
attributable to a decline in white performance, not improvement in black performance.
The same hold true in part for Mexicans. While the difference narrowed it did so partially because
Whites have been performing worse, as opposed to Mexicans performing better. When doing
longitudinal studies, its preferable to compare comparables studies, when possible, for example,
NLSY 79 and NLSY 97. In the former, according to Murray and Herrnstein (pg. 275), Mexicans
scores 14 points below White. Based on Unzs figures, they scores 10 points behind Whites in the
NLSY97, as Whites scored about two points above the national mean. So there was a closing of
about 4 points. There are other data points for Hispanics in general. Based on Roth et al.s 2001
meta-analysis, the Hispanic White difference is .72 SD (N>5 million). Mexicans comprise 2/3rds
of the US Hispanic population and other large Hispanics groups such as Puerto Ricans dont score
much worse than them, so this is probably a fair index of the Mexican IQ between 1970 and 2000.
Also we can look at other data points for Mexican IQ specifically. Linda Gottfredson reports some
in Implications of Cognitive Differences for Schooling Within Diverse Societies. We have: 0.63
SD in 1974 from Jensens California school district study; 0.55 SD from GABT job applications
from 1940 to 1970; and 0.65 from Colemans repot in the 1960s (see also Jensen 1973 for similar
results). . For a more recent sample we can look at the Nationally representative Add Health PVT
data (1994-1995), which can be analyzed online. The 2nd generation Mexican VIQ was 96.02
compared to the non-Hispanics White VIQ of 105 (SD 12.57). Thats a .72 SD gap. We can look
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still elsewhere. Based on Jason Richwines analysis of the 2003 New Immigrant Survey (Richwine
2009) which was based on a nationally representative sample of immigrants 2nd generation
Mexicans performed a whopping 1.2 SD behind Whites on the very culturally reduced backwards
digit span (which was given in Spanish for those wishing so).
So the great Mexican convergence has turned out to be smoke and mirrors. As with nearly every
other point made by Ron, its been uncovered as a product of cherry picking. The Mexican IQ data
ranges for 0.5 to 1.2 SD with no apparent trend of narrowing..
If readers wish I could continue, but for now I will leave it at that. Whether intentional or not, Unz
has presented a extremely distorted of the facts on the ground. To paraphrase Unz, Science
largely runs on the honor system, and once simple statements of fact are found to be grotesquely
distorted, we cannot trust more complex claims made by the particular scholar.
#64 Comment By roy On July 21, 2012 @ 3:40 pm
commonality of twins may be subscribed simply to uterine environment.
Fraternal twins are no more alike than ordinary siblings. That clearly wouldnt be the case if the
uterine environment was an important variable.
#65 Comment By Brian On July 22, 2012 @ 2:21 am
Readers may be interested in Peter Frosts comments on the published article.
[16]
#66 Comment By Amos Newcombe On July 22, 2012 @ 9:43 am

There is a simple explanation of these widely disparate results: whatever it is that IQ measures
has nothing to do with our intuitive idea of intelligence, and all of these studies are meaningless.
It is the explanation favored by Occams razor, and by me.
Those who try to make a connection between genetics and our intuitive idea of race are going to
have a similar problem.
Until we have scientific definitions for intelligence and race and I think we never will this
whole area of research is not about science at all, but about politics.
#67 Comment By Rob On July 22, 2012 @ 2:47 pm
How can these contradictory findings be squared?
The high correlation between the IQs of identical twins raised apart is not necessarily entirely due
to genetics. Both twins were in the womb at the same time and so subject to the same
environmental influences on their early development. These same environmental influences could
equally well affect the IQs of populations as a whole.
One such environmental influence already proven is DHA consumption by the mother during
pregnancy (ref: [17]). There are probably many more.
#68 Comment By RT On July 22, 2012 @ 10:50 pm
I found Unzs sidebar musings about a possible biological resiliency in East Asian Mongoloids to be
quite interesting. In noting their good average health and the apparent lack of malleability in their
psychometric scores in response to different social and economic environments, I wonder what
conclusion he wants us to draw? Given that Mexican immigrants to the US are largely Amerindian
or mestizo and knowing that Amerindian peoples have a close genetic affinitity to East Asian
Mongoloids (and further knowing that Unz seems to have a penchant for declaring populations
that are relatively genetically similar by world standards to be genetically indistinguishable
which, since he is aware of the work of Cochran and Harpending, of course means that selective
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forces could never have caused any socially significant genetic differences in populations that
otherwise display general genetic similarities and relatively recent common origins), perhaps Unz
is implying that, although he has undoubtedly presented rock solid evidence that the IQ of
European populations is quite malleable, we should expect the IQ of largely mongoloid Mexican
immigrants to America to be more like East Asians in their response to changing environments
and that the current IQ gap of about 0.7 SDs below the white American mean as reported by Roth
and Bobko in their Meta-analysis of the IQs of over 5 million Hispanic American test-takers to
remain fairly constant over time? Yup, that seems to be exactly what Ron is implying. What else
could he be saying? This article was truly enlightening. It should stand the test as time with other
great journalistic efforts like the Myth of Hispanic Crime.
#69 Comment By Sideways On July 22, 2012 @ 11:22 pm
Read three posts above yours, Rob. People have thought of this before, and its trivially disposed
with with by data already collected.
#70 Comment By John Ray On July 23, 2012 @ 9:02 am
An extended commentary by a psychometrician:
[18]

There is a simple explanation of these widely disparate results: whatever it is that IQ measures
has nothing to do with our intuitive idea of intelligence, and all of these studies are meaningless.
It is the explanation favored by Occams razor, and by me.
Compare a babbling simp with an articulate medical doctor and I PROMISE you there will be a
correlation of g-levels (what IQ measures) with intelligence.
More to the point, compare a person who got a 2.0 average in college (did poorly on tests) and a
person who got a 4.0 average at the same college (did well on tests), in the same major. 8 times
out of 10, which one would you prefer to hire?
Test results have no correlation with mental capacity? Rubbish.
#72 Comment By Jim On July 23, 2012 @ 11:57 am
Wrestling with data with words is meaningless. Brain drain is part of the answer. Most intelligent
people in the last three centuries from poor countries moved to rich countries. Another part of the
answer is that there is locality of intelligence. Some parts of a country have much higher IQ
than others because of inheritance.
#73 Comment By Alfred Smith On July 23, 2012 @ 7:49 pm
A refutation of Unzs argument: [19]
#74 Comment By Rebeca On July 24, 2012 @ 12:32 am
It is interesting that they would use SAT scores for the basis for their study. The SAT tests are
taken by people who are trying to get into college. Therefore the population studied does not
include those people on the lower end of the spectrum who will forgo taking the SAT, either
because they have no aspirations of college or their intelligence is lower and they are fine with
being unskilled labor. The SAT has also changed their scoring over the years. So the scores are
now higher for everyone taking the test.
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Rebecca: SAT is strongly but not perfectly correlated with g (factor of 0.81 or something like that)
and so it remains a good proxy rough estimate for IQ. Yes, scores have been adjusted, but it is
also true that more people are taking the SAT than before, so they need to keep adjusting scores
in order to ensure that the median population gets something near the middle-level number of
points on any given section. Otherwise the test would be more useful in measuring the top end of
the spectrum and not at all good at estimating the level of the bottom half. (As it is, the SAT is not
really a reliable gauge of the extremities at either the top or the bottom for the simple reason
that the test is either too easy or too hard for those kids.)
#76 Comment By John Ray On July 24, 2012 @ 9:34 am
A small note on immigrant crime
In response to my article Race, IQ and wealth: A preliminary reply, Ron Unz left a comment
about immigrant crime. He refers to an article and subsequent debate which points out the need
to take into account the ages of criminals in assessing whether or not they commit more crime
than native born people. He shows that the Hispanic crime rate can even be particuarly low once
you make that adjustment.
The article I quoted as a source of information shows that too. Foreign-born Mexican males, ages
18 to 39 (presumably mostly illegals) have a crime-rate of less than 1% of their population. And
that is data from the 2000 official U.S. census, which is about as good as we are going to get.
Unz seems to have missed my main point however: That the CHILDREN of Mexicans who are
males aged 18 to 39 are an entirely different kettle of fish, with a crime-rate of nearly 6% of their
population. The figure for the total population is 3.04%
So the problem of crime from illegal Mexican immigration is there but not quite where it is usually
placed.
Given the apparent low overall crime rate among Hispanics, it is a considerable puzzle that
Obama claims to deport 400,000 of them every year. And these, again according to Obama, are
only the SERIOUS criminals. Minor offenders are let go.
Say that Obama has deported 1,200,000 during his term of office and that there are 12 million
illegals in the USA. That means that 10% of the illegal population (not less than 1%) are
criminals, and serious criminals at that. Something doesnt add up. Dont ask me what.
#77 Comment By Ron Unz On July 24, 2012 @ 3:26 pm
FYI: [20]
Now in general, it seems very likely that students taking the SAT tend to be drawn from the most
able and best prepared slice of their ethnic group, so if the percentage of Hispanics taking that
test has doubled, tripled, or quadrupled since 1980, those students will tend to be drawn from
much lower levels of the performance pool, and we would expect to see a sharp drop in mean test
scores. Instead, the scores have remained roughly constant relative to the white average, almost
certainly implying a rapid rise in average Hispanic academic performance. Thus, instead of
contradicting the Wordsum-IQ results, a more careful examination of the ethnic SAT data actually
tends to confirm them.
The problem is that it is not just the population of HISPANICS which is taking the SATs at a higher
rate, but the population as a whole. This is a confirmed, decades-long trend. This is why the
entire pool is getting lower and lower, and why the College Board has had to adjust the median
score several times since the 1960s.
We are still unsure of exactly what it was you were trying to accomplish by attempting to rebut
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the studies in question. If it was to argue that Mexican immigration is not something to fear in
terms of fundamentally altering the American cultural and socioeconomic landscape in a negative
direction, I have to say I remain less than convinced.
Unz knows nothing about data analysis. This problem last surfaced in his attempt to claim that
Hispanics have a crime rate the same as that of whites.
The IQ data provided by Lynn is not of such quality that you can hang any theories on. It was
offered by Lynn in an attempt to provide a crude estimate of IQ in different countries.
The studies in question were never intended to be used to provide a measure of national IQ.
Thats not a criticism of Lynn he did his best with the data available. But the studies offer only a
very crude insight into the IQ of nations.
Lynn has two data points for Poland a study in 1979, finding an IQ of 106, and a study in 1989,
finding an IQ of 92. The Polish national IQ did NOT drop fourteen points in ten years. The fact is
that the data is poor.
Lynn has two data points for Uruguay, both from 1957. One found an IQ of 93, the other of 98.
Lynn shows one IQ test from France in 1962 showing a IQ of 106, and another from 1979 showing
an IQ of 94.
How does Unz explain these remarkable discrepancies? He just ignores them.
In certain cases, where the data cited by Lynn shows a increase between one test and the next,
Unz sizes on this as evidence that IQ is malleable and that it can easily be made to go up. He
ignores the many instances where the sequence of data suggests that IQ has declined.
Worst of all, he ignores the fact that the data simply was never designed to show what he thinks it
shows. The study of 50 13-to-16 year old white boys in Columbia was never supposed to provide
the national IQ of Columbia, for instance.
Unz is reputedly a very bright man who made a lot of money in banking. But when he wanders
into fields he does not understand, as he is doing here, hes a menace.
But a lot of objections seem to ignore Unzs main argument, which is that the data from LV is
more consistent with the hypothesis that socioeconomic factors determine IQ than that IQ
determines socioeconomic factors. How do the biological determinists account for the consistent
rise of IQ levels across different ethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development?
If you look at the data cited by Lynn, and not at the cherry picked subset of that data which Unz
has given you, you will find precious little evidence for a consistent rise of IQ levels across
different ethnic groups in tandem with socioeconomic development.
Then there is the other problem as a casual inspection of the data used by Lynn will show, the
IQ numbers are ball-park estimates at best and widely inaccurate at worst.
Another instance of the Unz hypothesis being shown wrong: Lynn has two IQ tests for Portugal
one in 1979 showing IQ 101, and one in 1987 showing IQ 88.
If the order in time was the other way around (low first, then high) Unz would cite this as
evidence that IQ has gone up with socioeconomic development. Since it seems to show IQ
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declining sharply, he ignores it.

Of course IQ in Portugal did not really drop thirteen points in eight years. This is just one more
instance of the data not being what its supposed to be. One, or both, of those IQ numbers is some
distance away from Portugals true national average IQ in the 1980s.
#82 Comment By Yuri Nator On July 26, 2012 @ 10:04 am
If one uses 1973 as a breakpointsince real oil prices increased fourfold between 1973 and
1986, before decliningthen one would expect IQ scores to be higher in oil rich countries if simple
reverse causality drove IQ scores. Casual inspection of the evidence doesnt show such a
relationshipindeed, Qatar and Kuwait, two low population, high-GDP-per-capita countries, fail
to stand out along the IQ dimension.
Thats because all of the wealth in those countries was concentrated into the hands of a few
people and didnt have a chance to trickle down to the masses.
#83 Comment By Bob On July 27, 2012 @ 2:28 am
I find this whole comparison of human beings genetics to unthinking fiat to be little more than
cunninglingus of the cerebral cortex.
Why not compare what war over the last five thousand years has cost in lives and destruction to
human intelligence and geographic location? We are surely genius in that respect, right?
#84 Comment By Mike Alexander On July 30, 2012 @ 2:31 pm
I find it strange that the data were corrected for the Flynn effect. For what purpose was this
done. Its seems obvious that the simply passage of time cannot actually affect intelligence, if it
actually did it would mean populations in few centuries ago were too stupid to function and none
of us would be here. Obviously this is the case so what gives? What would happen if average IQ
from people in high-IQ groups in the 1920s were compared to average IQ from modern
populations from societies having a similar per-capital GDP today as then. Would the scores be
comparable, or whould the modern low IQ modern populaiton still be lower? I dont know has
anyone done this?
#85 Comment By mplstim On July 30, 2012 @ 5:11 pm
Im in no position to critique this here essay or what have you,, just dag-nabbed glad Im in that
there upper, top-like group there
however, I do reflexively flinch whenever I see grandiose claims as in the subhead: ..what the
facts tell us
facts are pretty ephemeral and can be and be used as lots of things, from about false to about
true.and their connection to truth is fuzzier than many will admit.
and using the term in such a confident way makes me wonder about how reductionist the writer
might be on a profoundly deep issue.how narrow-minded, shall we say, he might be.
whatever the upshot of running these tests and counting the numbers and what percent, what
totals, etc we still are talking about human beings and nothing essential about a human being
can be reduced to stuff expressed as 4 percentage points above that of Mexicans, and the
national average was 7 points above the Fynn-altered level .blah blah..
as the scriptures say, fook that shat.
such is the language of something hinting at the monstrous
not monstrance, which would be good..
underlying the entire discussion is somehow the horrid little idea that the value of human beings
is intrinsically wrapped up in their intellectual ability.
A stupid and evil idea.
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#86 Comment By Tom Gorman On August 3, 2012 @ 2:49 pm

Dear Commenters,
Please read Rchard Lynn and Helmuth Nygord on VDARE.com dated August 2nd where they
demolish Unz. Thats all you need to see.
#87 Comment By Ron Unz On August 7, 2012 @ 12:51 pm
My response to Lynn/Nyborg is here:
[21]
#88 Comment By E On August 9, 2012 @ 4:34 pm

but it seems just as possible that the success might be driving the high IQs
More possible than the reverse?
Ireland was then overwhelmingly rural and poor, with a low per capita GDP, while Irish Americans
tended to be an urban population and a reasonably affluent one, and this sharp difference in
external material conditions seems the most logical explanation for the wide disparity in IQ
results.
The most logical explanation is that IQ is the cause of material conditions. People create the
environment, not the other way around.
#89 Comment By Gerhard Meisenberg On September 5, 2012 @ 11:31 am
Lynn & Vanhanen dont really claim that all IQ differences between countries are genetic. As far
as I remember, they speculated that perhaps 40% is genetic and 60% environmental. Elsewhere
Lynn proposes a 50-50 split between genetic and environmental factors. This means that if
US-style prosperity and education would suddenly break out in tropical Africa, the average IQ
there would rise from about 70 today to something like 85 or even 90.
We cannot understand all this without the historical context. In all likelihood, international IQ
differences became truly large only recently, as a result of rising secular trends (known as Flynn
effect) in the more advanced countries. Today the Flynn effect seems to have ended in the most
advanced countries, and small IQ declines have been reported for cohorts born after about 1980
in places such as Denmark and Britain. Today we have substantial Flynn effects mainly in the less
developed countries. This means, international IQ differences are getting smaller again. The most
likely reason is that populations in the most advanced countries have near-optimal environments
already. They have reached a ceiling that is set by their genes. People in backward countries have
not yet reached their limits, but we dont know where their limits are. It might be something like
an IQ of 100 for Europeans, 105 for East Asians, and 90 for Africans.
Things become even more interesting. In Europe, it seems that people slowly got brighter from
the Dark Age to the 19th century. This can very well be the genetic result of differentiasl fertility,
because in Europe, there has been a substantial positive relationship between wealth and fertility
through many centuries, which most likely selected for higher intelligence. Yes, we know that
non-trivial genetic changes can take place on that time scale, provided there is consistent
selection by differential fertility or mortality. Once people were bright enough, the Industrial
Revolution was the inevitable outcome, and with it came population growth, greater prosperity,
mandatory schooling for everyone, and all the other trappings of an advanced technology-based
civilization. These environmental improvements triggered a Flynn effect, which raised the IQ of
the next generation even more. Higher IQ produced even more prosperity and even better
schools, which raised the population IQ even more This virtuous cycle has maintained economic
growth through the last 2 centuries. Without it, our turbo-charged civilization wouldnt exist.
Right now the Flynn effect has reached its limits, and further IQ trends in the advanced countries
will be determined in large part genetically: by the effects of migration and differential fertility.
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#90 Comment By David Smith On November 3, 2012 @ 9:11 pm

shifted over relatively short periods of time. How can these contradictory findings be squared? I
do not have the solution, but it would seem a very worthwhile subject for further research, on
both theoretical and practical grounds.
Im no expert (!) , but it seems that heritability is a more complicated issue than is commonly
recognised and that estimates of within-group heritability shouldnt be extrapolated when making
between-group comparisons:
[22]
#91 Comment By Tainbo Cullinge On November 6, 2012 @ 8:37 am

This article is really very good, I commend you Mr Unz. But you miss the elephant in the room.
The attempt to compare IQ scores between nations is perhaps the most futile endeavour I can
imagine. Standardisation is near impossible, and cultural factors are such an overwhelming
influence on results that IQ testing is not really testing anything at all.
Lets take African tests, most tests are administered to people who have spent less than five
years in a classroom, and are written in a language that is usually not that of the subject. And you
compare this to an American student who is specifically trained in how to complete IQ-test-like
questions for 10 years.
Most of what the test investigates is how much experience the subject has with the educational
culture of the test-setter.
The most damning inditement of IQ tests came from Binet, when asked What is intelligence? he
answered What my test measures.
#92 Comment By canadian reader On December 4, 2012 @ 9:57 am
I believe that objective studies of I.Q. and its racial consequences can and must be done with
scientific neutrality even if it politically incorrect.
The anomalies of the Irish and Greek Americans vesus their respective European counterparts,
scoring so well above the American national average can be explained by a combination of diet
and intellectual stimulation due to education.
What is disturbing of course is Lynns documentation of older low Irish scores as normative. This
contrats with contemporary Irelands PISA scores placing extremely high in Europe. Whild many
fled Ireland during the famine period there was an additional 4.5 million emmigrants in the post
famine period up to the early 20th century. Virtually all who could leave did.
There were huge Irish diaspora communities in every major British city, Canada, the USA,
Australia as well as New Zealand. For many decades into the 2oth century their would have been
ample evidence of the success of the Irish descanents in their new countries in genetically
endogamous relationships. The Irish-Canadians are the same as that of the USA, exceeding the
national average in terms of education and employment. What is disturbing is that Lynn must
know about the millions of Irish diaspora, and would have had ample evidence and opportunities
to measure Irish intelligence in Britain as well as globally. Obviously he had an agenda in collating
older Irish data.
#93 Comment By Jonathan Kaplan On April 26, 2013 @ 11:59 am
Ron
I know Im quite late to this party, but just in case you still check the comments, I wanted to ask
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you to rethink your condemnation of Gould.

You write that:
whose fraud on race and brain-size issues, presumably in service to his self-proclaimed Marxist
beliefs, last year received further coverage in the New York Times. Science largely runs on the
honor system, and once simple statements of factin Goulds case, the physical volume of human
skullsare found to be false, we cannot trust more complex claims made by the particular
scholar.
This is, I think, a very distorted view of the Lewis et al article. It is worth noting that Lewis et al
themselves do not accuse Gould of fraud (nor, and this is important, did Gould ever accuse
Morton of fraud!). Rather, Lewis et al argue that Goulds preferred statistical analysis of Mortons
data was no better justified than Mortons, and in some cases, seemed less well justified. Thats
not fraud thats a disagreement about how best to interpret a particular data-set!
First, it is important to note that Gould never claimed to have actually measured any of Mortons
skulls, and explicitly stated that, after Morton had switched from using mustard seed to using lead
shot, Mortons results the actual measurements of skull volumes were likely accurate and
reliable. Gould never claimed that, once Morton switched to using shot, Mortons skull
measurements themselves were wrong.
Gould in fact credited Morton with having recognized that his original method of measurement
was unreliable, and credited him with the integrity to switch to a better, much more reliable
method, despite the fact that the new results Morton got when he switched were *less* in line
with what Gould presumed Mortons assumptions were. (It is interesting that Goulds review of
Mortons work credits Morton with great personal and scientific integrity Gould repeatedly
stresses that Morton *tried* to avoid acting on his biases, and stresses that in leaving us all of his
original data, as well as explaining, in his work, what choices he made and why, Morton was
acting just as a good scientist ought to act! Gould thought it was interesting and important that, in
his view, Morton still ended up coming to biased conclusions. Lewis et al think that in fact Morton
didnt in fact come to biased conclusions, and that is where the argument really is)
Lewis et al acknowledge a) that Gould never made any skull measurements himself, nor claimed
to, and b) Gould explicitly stated that Mortons shot-based measurements were likely perfectly
accurate and reliable. (Now, why they felt it necessary, given that, to remeasure a bunch of skulls
is a bit of a mystery their stated reason, that they were searching for signs of bias on Mortons
part that even Gould explicitly stated he didnt expect to be there, is at best odd.) So, here I just
want to say that, no, Gould never claimed that Mortons actual measurements of individual skulls
were inaccurate, did not remeasure any skulls himself, did not claim to do so, and hence could
not himself be wrong about the skull measurements themselves.
As for whether Goulds choices regarding his statistical analysis were better justified then
Mortons, less-well justified then Mortons, or just about as well justified as Mortons, turns out to
be a tricky question to answer, trickier than Lewis et als analysis suggest. (So for example, a
typical example from Lewis et al goes like this: Gould argues that following Mortons reasoning
about what data to exclude in the case of population A, say, we ought to exclude similarly
situated data from population B; Lewis et al claim that the exclusion in the case of B is different
than in the case of A, and that in any event, the better thing to do is to include the data in both
cases, not exclude it. You get different answers given those two ways of making things consistent;
Lewis et al argue that Goulds way is worse, and that if you take their way, the answer you get is
closer to Mortons than to Goulds)
But in any event, once again, Gould was *explicit* about what decisions he was making regarding
what data to include in his analysis, and what data to exclude, and gave reasons for those
decisions. We might think, on reflection, that those reasons were poor ones, but he didnt try to
hide what he was doing, or lie about his analysis, or anything of the sort. So fraud hardly seems
to be a fair description.
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I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I think it is important not to overstate what Lewis et al
actually showed. Gould may well have been wrong about Morton, but he wasnt dishonest about
it.
#94 Comment By Binky Bear On May 9, 2013 @ 7:11 pm
Leaving aside entirely the fact that people who make IQ tests and other such sorry instruments
construct them for their own glorification and based on their own sense of inherent rightness and
warped values.
This is conservative sickness at its worst-the abuse of scientific procedure to support religious and
ethnocentric notions of superiority founded in jingoism, racism, nationalism and ultimately
egotism. The prostitution of reason to support malignancy.
#95 Comment By canadian reader On May 22, 2013 @ 12:32 am
it appears that the thorny issue of IQ just will not go away. Why? Because IQ is the objective
measure of an persons intelligence. It does not measure ethics or morality just intelligence.
Science for those that are intellectually honest, informs us that a significant portion of this
intelligence is genetically determined. People are different. Different groups of people can be
classed as different. How can that be racism. Racism rather is asking millions of minorities to
succeed in a Eurocentric system where failure is the most likely outcome.
#96 Comment By Frank Lee On June 8, 2013 @ 3:27 pm
Heritability of IQ is not a stable constant, hence you cant argue for any % to be so and not be
automatically incorrect. If black children in America raised their IQ scores in line with white
children over the proceeding decades they would only be the last in a long line of populations to
do the same such raising. Individual countries have raised their IQ scores by more than the
difference seen between blacks and whites in America, and racially identical groups separated by
political borders have seen the same sized differences between each other. So why pretend that
we need to expect this situation to prove any different than every one weve seen before?
It is of course quite possible overall populations do have stable IQ differences, eliminating all
environmental factors (not technically possible, but stabilizing to a single arbitrary environment
and living with possibly unequal synergistic effects), but inherent to that, its pointless to try and
know them until one has eliminated obvious environmental factors. Something that has not been
done here.
#97 Comment By leonard waks On June 15, 2013 @ 5:43 pm
IQ has almost nothing to do with intelligence in the root sense, adaptiveness to life and its
challenges. Psychological traits such as perseverance, flexibility, tolerance of difference, and
achievement motivation are more closely associated with intelligence than any putatively
cognitive measures. IQ correlates well with school grades, and is a thus a fairly decent predictor
of school success. But school success is only a small component of life success. People who take
failures in stride and learn from them, form clear goals and stick to them, gather the energy to
pursue their life goals, are far more likely to achieve them than those narrowly focused on school
learning or grade competition.
The most dominant feature of 20th century life was the inexorable growth of academic
attainment. Thus, at the beginning of the century very few aimed at high school, and very few
were surrounded by high school graduates. As more effort and time were devoted to school work,
IQ scores rose. As more and more people were surrounded by those with high school attainment,
the traits needed for school performance, the same as needed for IQ, developed hence the
Flynn effect.
Our national goal should not be to increase IQ or even pay any attention to it. It should be to
foster those traits, attitudes and capabilities that lead to practical intelligence and effective
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capability. Except at the extremes, these are independent of IQ.

#98 Comment By Ike On July 23, 2013 @ 6:35 pm
Culture or at least factors affecting performance on IQ tests, rather than purely hereditary factors
produce the changes in test results. I say this because the striking results of Mexican immigrant
populations into the U.S. suggest that is the case. Unlike prior immigrant groups, for a number of
reasons partly the political organizations like La Raza and other irredentist groups and party
because of the relatively large continuous immigration Mexican immigrants do not appear to
show an increased in tested IQ after one or two generations in the U.S. Possible explanation is
that they do not assimilate and in fact actively resist and oppose assimilation to mainstream U.S.
culture, unlike the previous immigrants from Italy, etc you refer to in your article.
#99 Comment By Marie On September 1, 2013 @ 9:06 pm
I want to add a comment on diet and environment. East Asians eat more unprocessed and healthy
food and their bodies have access to more nutrients. Also children in these countries begin
taking tests and having extra tuition at very young ages.
It appears that people in the united states eat a lot of food from packets and tins that are lacking
in nutrients. Especially those who are poor because fresh healthy food is more expensive.
Brains do not work when fed crap like tinned cheese product in fact when you look at high IQ
world wide there seems to be some correlation where people eat clean, unprocessed fresh food.
My Austrian friend was very proud of the healthy fresh food they ate and said it was part of their
culture and my Mexican friend would prepare food from tins and tell me this is Mexican food.
Id like to see a study on unprocessed food and IQ.
#100 Comment By Jaime On January 27, 2014 @ 10:40 am
Id like to see a more recent study of Askhenazi Jewish IQ. We have up to date IQ scores and
many other standardized scores on East Asians, and they have continually risen to 106.
However, we also see the lack of exceptional performance of the Jewish youth academically in
comparison to the older generations. It has been a pretty significant drop.
This may point to the previous studies possibly been a skewed sampling, and that Jewish IQ is
regressing to a lower mean.
#101 Comment By Ken On April 25, 2014 @ 8:19 am
From my reading and listening to the media elite I conclude that the establishment rich
(establishment) desire to disregard intelligence in favor of maintaining their status.
In an ideal world individuals would be rewarded based upon their merit, not who their family was.
The whole political system is skewed toward two extremes by design. The republicans aim is to
keep the establishment rich in power. To do this IQ must not exist because the rich are simply not
intellectually exceptional.(THe Bell Curve)
The Democrats aim is to elevate the lowest performing Americans at the expense of the high IQ
performers, This is evident in their push for income, educational, housing, career, etc. EQUALITY.
By pushing the intelligent whites and Asians down the rich can maintain their perch over society.
It is time for the intelligent to come together and change the world to a more merit based society
if that includes elements of socialism, then so be it.
I was raised in the military. I am a veteran and now a civil servant. THe military is definitely a
merit based socialist system. THere are still problems of officer elitism but the ability of talent to
rise has been improved since WWII.
Again the Intelligent (IQ>120) must unite to transform America to the shining beacon on the hill;
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the only functional way is a merit based social/economic structure. We are currently beyond
broken.
#102 Comment By James Graham On June 27, 2014 @ 10:52 am
Whenever Stephen Jay Gould and IQ are mentioned in the same context I recall what he wrote in
the March 29, 1984 issue of The New York Review of Books:
I am hopeless at deductive sequencingI never scored particularly well on so-called objective
tests of intelligence because they stress logical reasoning
The fact that he obviously thought putting that admission in print involved no risk to his reputation
explains much about the man.
#103 Comment By Benjamin David Steele On January 20, 2015 @ 11:25 am
Great article! It is nice to see a conservative willing to state the obvious about what the data
shows. This is extremely inconvenient data for a particular kind of reactionary ideologue. That
said, I have one minor quibble about Unz comments on Gould.
I dont care too much about the issue of skull sizes. It largely seems irrelevant to any present
debate about biological determinism. But I would point out that the critics of Gould express their
own bias and their crticisms should be taken with a grain of salt.
[23]
Some caveats are in order here. First of all, Holloway and his colleagues analyzed fewer than
half of the skulls in Mortons collection. Second, their analysis, far from being straightforward,
was highly technical and based on many judgment calls, as were those of Gould and Morton. The
divergent results depend in part on whether to include or exclude certain skulls that could unduly
skew estimates of brain sizes. Third, neither Morton nor Holloway et al. corrected their
measurements for age, gender or stature, all of which are correlated with brain size.
Finally, at least one of the PLoS authors, Holloway, is obviously biased against Gould. The Times
quoted Holloway saying: I just didnt trust Gould. I had the feeling that his ideological stance was
supreme. Holloway faulted Gould because he never even bothered to mention a 1988 paper by
John S. Michael that found Mortons conclusions to be reasonably accurate. But Holloway and
his co-authors stated that the paper by Michael, written when he was an undergraduate at the
University of Pennsylvania, has multiple significant flaws rendering it uninformative.
#104 Comment By John Knight On November 1, 2015 @ 7:24 am
If Ireland has an IQ of 87 and ranks 7th on PISA, then where do you think that puts us at 35th on
PISA?
psthats a rhetorical question because most of the ROW knows the answer.
#105 Comment By John Knight On November 2, 2015 @ 6:30 am
This is a follow up on my own question which has not been posted yet, so i hope its not too
confusung.
If Professor Lynn himself believes the IQ of Ireland is 87, and if Ireland ranks 7th on PISA in
reading, and scores about 25 points ahead of us in science, math, AND reading, and if one IQ
point is 8 PISA points, isnt he suggesting that our IQ is 84.
By way of background, I am of Irish descent and heard all the nasty stories about Ireland. The
first time I went there I was truly astounded by how different reality was from US media myth. So
it would not be that much of a shock to discover that this is his opinion.
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Article printed from The American Conservative: http://www.theamericanconservative.com

URL to article: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-wealth/
URLs in this post:
[1] Dumb and Dumber: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04
/30/dumb_and_dumber
[2] further coverage in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06
/14/science/14skull.html
[3] lengthy interview: http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2012/05/helmuth-nyborginterviews-richard-lynn.html
[4] discovered a remarkable result: http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2008/02/flynn-effectamong-mexican-americans.html
[5] opinion column by Douglas Besharov: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/opinion
/01besharov.html
[6] Image: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/archive/august-2012/
[7] The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-east-asian-exception-to-socioeconomic-iq-influences/
[8] Unz.org: http://unz.org/
[9] : http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org
/Behavioral%20Dev%20and%20Construct%20Validity%2083.pdf
[10] : http://www.vdare.com/articles/roll-over-michael-barone-even-fourthgeneration-mexicans-are-failing
[11] : http://socialistworker.org/2002-1/410/410_08_StephenJayGould.shtml
[12] : http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2010/03/ses-and-iq.html
[13] : https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/nationaliqs-calculated-and-validated.pdf
[14] : https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/haprinderm.pdf
[15] : http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/papers/downloads/1002.pdf
[16] : http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/ron-unz-on-race-iq-andwealth.html
[17] : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12509593
[18] : http://pcwatch.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/race-iq-and-wealth-preliminary-replyin.html
[19] : http://www.vdare.com/articles/has-ron-unz-refuted-hard-hereditarianism
[20] : http://www.ronunz.org/2012/07/24/unz-on-raceiq-rejecting-the-ostrichresponse
[21] : http://www.theamericanconservative.com/unz-on-raceiq-response-to-lynnand-nyborg/
[22] : http://bostonreview.net/BR20.6/block.html
[23] : http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2011/06/24/defendingstephen-jay-goulds-crusade-against-biological-determinism/
Copyright 2011 The American Conservative. All rights reserved.
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