http://www.kokogiak.com/amazon/detpa...od=books&type=
Comment: This book must be a good candidate for being the most important book of the 21st century. British psychologist Richard Lynn and Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen find that recent IQ data from scores of countries world-wide show really strong correlations, of around r = .65, with national prosperity -- whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated for 1820 or for the 1990s. Quite contrary to the theorizing of most Western economists of the past fifty years, the underdeveloped (later, 'developing') countries of fifty years ago have not generally closed the gap with the help of ongoing Western handouts and advice. Clearly, several East Asian countries have in that time made enormous strides -- as may also happen soon in the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe; but in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. largely Black Africa), mean IQ estimates hover around 70 and progress has been slight. Of the world's 21 countries which steadily tripled their GDP from 1983 through 1990 and 1993 to 1996, none was on or near the African mainland; whereas of the 27 countries whose GDP decreased by 50%, ten were African (Angola, Burkina Faso, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Madagascar, Somalia, Sudan, Zambia and Sao Tome & Principe).
Yet will L&V prove persuasive about causation? Doubters will raise four particular problems.
First, IQ and the Wealth of Nations is published by an American mail order house which charges £70 for the book. Terrorized by the politically correct, mainstream Western 'publishers' have for ten years been entirely unwilling to bring out books that touch on race - whether by Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton or myself. Recently, it turned out that top psychologist Steven Pinker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who had converted to hereditarianism after hearing from friends how a second child was often very different from a first, felt he had to remove a chapter about race from the final draft of his new pro-heredity book, The Blank Slate. L&V are not alone in finding themselves up against the Zeitgeist, and the reception of their book has not so far been auspicious. L&V's reply will have to be that such repression indicates that the liberal-left consensus (which in 1950 persuaded the United Nations to declare all races to be of equal intelligence) is a hysteria that must one day lift.
Secondly, some will doubtless try to quibble with the IQ estimates that are the central novelty of IQ and the Wealth of Nations. L&V typically present some three 'normative' IQ studies for each of the countries they discuss; they do not provide details of social sampling; and they estimate IQ's for some nations by taking the average of the IQs in neighbouring countries - e.g. crediting Afghanistan with IQ 83 as an average of India's 81 and Iran's 84. Surprisingly, L&V maintain that the mean IQ in Israel is only 94 - ignoring the possibility that Sephardic Jews, like other Africans, may have special deficits in the visuo-spatial abilities that are needed to do well on 'culture-fair' intelligence tests like the famous Raven's Matrices. None of this is ideal. However, L&V have a very strong reply from both the general consistency of their IQ estimates and the sheer strength of IQ's correlations with national productivity. If workers had seriously confounded their assessments of national IQ, L&V would simply have had to present the usual miserably low correlations of around .25 that obtain throughout psychology and the social sciences. As it is, L&V have plainly struck gold.