Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Eg South Korea was poorer than many African countries in the 60s, now they make smartphones.
This would have been hard to predict given a blank slate talent is everywhere thesis, but not if you know they have one of the highest IQs in the world. Same with Singapore.
Of course a really bad government (North Korea) can screw you up.
Nonetheless all counties there were dirt poor at some point in the last hundred years. North Korea still is.
IQ is largely a measure of education, which itself is largely related to how developed your country is. Large groups of relatively uneducated rural dwellers will drag the average down.
It's well known Asians are smarter, whether for cultural or genetic reasons, but the devil is in the details. If you look at average populations I would expect the inverse for counties like China that only developed recently.
East Asia(Japan,Korea,China) has the highest IQ in the world as I read somewhere a while ago. Education has also been a traditional priority. Two combined, no surprise.
Makes sense. If you're a genius in a country of people who make worse decisions (IQ/culture/other), you may ne worse off than an average person in a country with an average average decision making level
Yep, countries with a greater average IQ have much less people believing dumb theories (e.g about bill gates and covid-19), countries like Japan and South Korea. All countries that reduced funds for public education years ago in a short-sighted attempt to save money are seeing it's dire consequences, and now amplified thanks to the internet.
Some sources online list the average IQ of the bottom 14 countries to be under 60. I find this really hard to believe and to me indicates more of an issue with testing IQ than the intelligence of people across various countries
There's an extremely common logical fallacy you bump into here. When looking to explain one side of an issue, you need to make sure your explanation fits within the breadth of data. So, for instance, East Asia has the highest IQ scores in the world. It's safe to say that it's not because the rest of the world was enslaved. Incidentally East Asia works as a general contradiction against an immense number of otherwise seemingly unfalsifiable social theories which tend to be fitted to Western observations, such as poverty -> crime/violence correlations.
I think it's proven that South East Asians have highest IQ second to only Askenazi Jews.
I read various paper mentioning that. South East Asia was never poor even if you go back to historical accounts of travelers from Italy or Arab world, you'll never find poor and south asians cities mentioned in the same line.
I heard that a lot of times from mostly uneducated people. All nations have equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education, environment, common wealth, and social inequality.
The other problem being that "high IQ explains everything" people don't actually go around personally going around giving people IQ tests. They just read somewhere that X guy has IQ Y and then decide that's evidence for something.
To put numbers in perspective, IQ is generally defined as a normal distribution (also called a gaussian curve, bell curve, etc.--it's a "normal" distribution because it's extremely common in nature) with a global average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 points. What this means in practice is that, roughly, about 2/3 of the population has an IQ in the range 85-115.
So, assuming each country also has the same shape of distribution but different averages, a difference of 15 points means that an average person in the "smart" country is smarter than 83% of the people in the other country. An average IQ difference of 30 points would be more like 98%.
Which, to me, seems like a pretty extreme difference. Without knowing more about their methodology I don't know if I trust these numbers much. On the other hand, looking at the countries at the lower end, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the difference was due to environmental factors such as poor nutrition.
Unfortunately, IQ is a field of study that's far too politically charged for there to be much in the way of reputable research.
Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Eg South Korea was poorer than many African countries in the 60s, now they make smartphones.
This would have been hard to predict given a blank slate talent is everywhere thesis, but not if you know they have one of the highest IQs in the world. Same with Singapore.
Of course a really bad government (North Korea) can screw you up.
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