Table of Contents

Race, IQ, and Wealth

The Mismeasure of IQ

The Distribution of European Intelligence

Questioning the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”

Implications for the American Immigration Debate

IQ Puzzles and a Super-Flynn Effect?

The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences

Rejecting the Ostrich Response

The Rural/Urban Divide

The Boston Globe Takes Notice

Incorporating the Racialist Perspective

Response to Lynn and Nyborg

Is It "Game Over"?

Irish IQ & Chinese IQ

A Coda on Mexican-American IQ

Super-Flynn Effects in Germans, Jews, and Hispanics

The Entire Series and Debate

Race/IQ Revisited

The Jason Richwine Affair

Race/IQ Revised

Should Scientists Bother Reading the Books They Denounce?

Race, IQ, and Wealth

What the facts tell us about a taboo subject

The American Conservative • July 18, 2012 • 7,500 Words

The Mismeasure of IQ

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,” 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 these—rather than economic or governmental structures—tend 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 experts—notably 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. Science largely runs on the honor system, and once simple statements of fact—in Gould’s case, the physical volume of human skulls—are found to be false, we cannot trust more complex claims made by the particular scholar.

Despite Kenny’s obvious lack of familiarity with the technical questions he raised, these issues remain important ones to explore, given today’s 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.

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 rate—the so-called “Flynn Effect”—the 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 nation’s 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 and—since they argue that intelligence itself is largely innate and genetic—that 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.

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 Greece’s 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 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 Europe—such as Austria, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and West Germany—all 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 scores—12 points—is 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 Croatia’s per capita GDP during the period in question. One of the few European nations to exhibit a sharp decline in tested IQ, Poland—whose score fell from 106 in 1979 to 92 in 1989—did 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.

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 Israel’s 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 Israel’s 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-American—to the extent it can be distinguished—is somewhat above the national white American average of around 100 and also above that of most German-Americans, who arrived around the same time.

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 Ireland’s 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 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 nation’s 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 Ireland’s problems. This led him to the research that culminated in the publication of IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

But Lynn’s 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 Australia’s population is wholly or substantially Irish 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.

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 Vanhanen’s 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 enormous—often approaching a full standard deviation or more—and 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 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 generation—rather than, as seems more likely, often the poorer and most miserable—roughly 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 Croatia’s 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 Ireland’s 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 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 populations—of roughly similar cultural and historical background and without severe nutritional difficulties—can 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 IQ—after 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 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 claim—or at least hint—that 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 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. 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 Wordsum-implied 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 America’s 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-Americans—now numbering almost 35 million and well on their way to eventually surpassing Anglo-Saxons in number—had 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, 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.

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 America—with most of this flow being illegal and low-skilled—a 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 socio-economic 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 Besharov’s 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.

America’s 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 America’s 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 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 IQ—the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”—while 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, 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.

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 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 changes—as in the case of the Irish or Mexican-Americans—what 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.

Sidebar

The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences

Interestingly enough, these rapid rises in IQ due to changes in the general socio-economic environment appear completely absent when we examine the international or domestic IQ data for East Asian populations, for whom even tenfold differences in real 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.

The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences

The American Conservative • July 18, 2012 • 1,100 Words

In “Race, IQ, and Wealth,” I examined the pattern of IQ scores for various European peoples as presented by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and the Wealth of Nations and noted the considerable evidence for a large socio-economic influence. In nearly all cases, impoverished, rural populations seemed to exhibit far lower IQ scores than affluent, urban ones, even when the populations compared are genetically indistinguishable. Furthermore, these lower IQs often rise rapidly once conditions improve, in what might be called a “Super-Flynn Effect.”

However, this strong relationship between wealth and nominal IQ seems to disappear when we examine East Asian populations. A few decades ago, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and even Japan had extremely low per capita GDPs relative to those of America or Europe, yet almost all their tested IQs were around 100 or higher, comparable to those of the wealthiest and most advanced European-derived nations. In many cases, their incomes and standards of living were far below those of the impoverished nations of Southern and Eastern Europe, yet they showed no signs of the substantially depressed performance generally found in these latter countries, whose IQs were usually in the 8894 range. This can be seen in the table below.

For consistency, all these results are drawn directly from Lynn/Vanhanen, and include their Flynn and other IQ adjustments up and down, several of which seemed rather large and arbitrary, with the GDP obtained from the World Bank, adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) unless indicated by an asterisk. Much of this economic data is somewhat uncertain and should be used only for rough comparative purposes. A wide range of additional IQ results from these same countries are found in their 2006 sequel, but these lack testing-date information, making it impossible to compare with income levels or discern historical trends, and they anyway seem to fall into the same range.

This clear pattern of East Asian IQs remaining almost unaffected by depressed socio-economic conditions had also occurred when such ethnic populations lived as small minority groups in America. Whereas in the early decades of the 20th century schoolchildren whose families had immigrated from Southern and Eastern Europe tended to have very low tested IQs, often in the 8085 range, most studies of that era showed that children from Chinese-American and Japanese-American immigrant backgrounds had IQs similar or even superior to the white mainstream population, despite their much lower socio-economic backgrounds.

One possible explanation of this striking result might be that these East Asian test results actually were artificially depressed due to relative deprivation and that once this condition was alleviated, Asian scores would rapidly rise by the same amounts as had those of various European-origin groups in different periods, perhaps 1015 points. But this would imply that the fully-adjusted mean IQ scores of East Asians might approach the 120 range, and this seems unlikely, since affluent, well-educated present-day Asian nations such as Japan or South Korea show no evidence of mean IQs so high.

Indeed, the most obvious aspect of the East Asian IQs shown in the table below is that they bear almost no relationship to the wealth of the countries at the time the testing was performed. For example, Japan in 1951 was desperately poor, and its real per capita GDP rose tenfold during the 40 years that followed, but its IQ rose just a couple of points. Similar huge rises in income without significant rises in IQ occurred in South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. The 2006 sequel by Lynn and Vanhanen provides numerous additional IQ reports from East Asian countries, but they all continue to fall into this same general range of scores. Furthermore, Asian-Americans living in the United States these days are generally affluent, but although they perform very well in school, their tested IQs do not have a mean anywhere near 120.

The most plausible inference from these decades of accumulated data is that the IQs of East Asian peoples tend to be more robust and insulated against the negative impact of cultural or economic deprivation than those of European groups or various others—a truly remarkable finding. This might be due to cultural factors of some type, or perhaps certain aspects of East Asian spoken or written languages. But a fascinating possibility is that this IQ robustness may have a substantially genetic component.

This would be somewhat similar to various physiological findings in recent years. For example, health studies in America have repeatedly shown that individuals of East Asian ancestry tend to have significantly longer life expectancy and lower rates of illness than most other American ethnic groups, and this effect seems independent of other environmental or dietary inputs and persists even after controlling for socio-economic factors. Over one hundred years ago, The Changing Chinese by A.E. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, provided copious anecdotal evidence indicating greater Chinese resistance to illness and injury and perhaps even an ability to survive on more meager food rations. Certainly these sorts of traits might be expected to have undergone strong selection in a country such as China, whose huge population had lived many centuries at the absolute Malthusian edge of starvation.

With regard to mental traits, decades of testing have established that the intelligence subcomponents of East Asians and Europeans are somewhat different in structure, with East Asians being relatively stronger in spatial ability and Europeans stronger in verbal ability. Since these differences are also found in East Asians raised and acculturated in America and other Western countries, they seem to have a large genetic component. Although this particular result was less well established at the time, the general notion that different groups might have differing relative strengths in particular abilities was the centerpiece of Howard Gardner’s famous “Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” publicized in his 1985 book Frames of Mind, which has received widespread attention in media and educational circles over the last couple of decades.

Although the precise genetic basis of the differing East Asian and European skews in mental ability has not been determined, some corresponding physical traits have already been localized in recent genetic studies, notably skin color. Both Northeast Asians and Northern Europeans tend to have relatively pale skin, presumably due to the evolutionary pressure they experienced to synthesize maximal amounts of Vitamin D under weak sunlight during the thousands of years they lived in northern latitudes. But in the last decade, we have discovered that the particular genetic mechanisms that they evolved to block melanin production and produce lighter skin are dissimilar, having developed via entirely different mutational pathways.

To the extent that East Asian IQs are indeed far less vulnerable to negative socio-economic factors than those of other racial groups, recognizing this fact might make it far easier for us to admit the important role that such environmental influences might play in determining the nominal IQs of other populations.

—Ron Unz

Rejecting the Ostrich Response

The American Conservative • July 24, 2012 • 2,300 Words

The central finding of my recent article “Race, IQ, and Wealth” was a simple one.

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen today rank as perhaps the world’s leading academic advocates of the theory that the innate IQ of a given nation is fixed and determines its international success on a host of major economic and social criteria. Yet even a cursory analysis of the actual data which they accumulated and presented actually disproves their own hypothesis, given the huge IQ variations between genetically-indistinguishable groups and in national IQs over just a generation or less. So it strikes me as mighty peculiar that theory proposed in “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” had been immediately refuted by the evidence presented in “IQ and the Wealth of Nations”, but nobody seemed to have noticed this during a decade or more of heated, bitter discussion.

The Lynn/Vanhanen theory is hardly a totally obscure one. For example, if you Google the specific phrase IQ+”Wealth of Nations”, you will find some 103,000 search results, certainly small potatoes compared to “Lindsey Lohan”, but not exactly nothing. And many of those webpages are themselves blogposts, including vast numbers of comments, at least a portion of which were ferociously hostile to the ideas of Lynn/Vanhanen. One would think that Lynn/Vanhanen foes somewhere along the way would have thanked those scholars for graciously debunking their own theory.

I suspect the mystery behind this strange state of affairs might involve something appropriatedly called “the Ostrich Response.”

For decades now, many liberal intellectuals have tended to shy away from any scientific investigations involving “race” or “IQ”, or (especially) those two concepts in close proximity, perhaps fearing the dreadful Satanic truths which they might discover. As a perfect example of this, several of the individuals receiving my article told me they felt great trepiditation when they read my title, fearful at the possible factual conclusions presented therein, and were enormously relieved when these turned out largely to be the ones they might have most desired.

Unfortunately, one problem with avoiding debates on horrifying topics is that these debates take place nevertheless, but with only one side participating. Hence the 103,000 search results dealing with the Lynn/Vanhanen theory, of which an enormously high percentage seem totally laudatory.

An additional unfortunate consequence is that this absence of rational debate by serious thinkers means that the arguments of both sides remain crude, ignorant, and untested. As a perfect example of this, during just the last five days, my article has received close to 350 heated comments across several blogsites, with the vast majority of these—on both sides—being of very low quality.

For example, a typical anti-IQ commenter absurdly claimed that the DNA of Amerinds was “indistinguishable” from that of Chinese, hence the two groups must obviously have identical innate IQs.

Meanwhile, one of the most vigorous IQ-racialists has repeatedly denied that there exists any evidence whatsoever that the Irish had ever had IQs below 100, totally ignoring three large studies reported by Lynn which placed their IQ at 87 in 1972 and around 92 in 1992, studies representing a total sample size of nearly 6,500 individuals, a massive national total second only to that of Germany. Furthermore, Lynn himself has stated that his years of research in Ireland during the late 1960s had convinced him that the Irish were a low-IQ population, with a heavy government eugenics program being the nation’s only hope.

A more plausible criticism was that the Lynn’s 17 Buj IQ studies should be excluded, on the grounds that Buj restricted his testing to the capital cities of the countries he examined, and these are unlikely to be nationally reresentative. But excluding that large set of national samples from Lynn’s work sharply reduces his total dataset, and in addition actually tends to strengthen my own analysis, since the IQs of the various Southern and Eastern European countries become more uniformly low.

Another claim repeatedly made was that the implausible European IQs I had cited came from studies testing children, and these should be excluded on grounds of childhood unreliability. The totally ignorant commenter failed to realize that with the exception of the doubtful Buj studies, ALL of Lynn’s remaining IQ studies are based on samples of children, and if we exclude these—together with the Buj studies—Lynn’s total European dataset is reduced to exactly ZERO. Perhaps this indeed represents a means of salvaging Lynn’s thesis, since an analysis of zero datapoints is certainly consistent with anything and everything. All in all, it appears that an enthusiastic interest in engaging in IQ debates is no strong sign of actually possessing much of the attribute under discussion.

Taboo subjects avoided by well-informed and intelligent participants tend to regenerate into these battles of competitive ignorance, which is hardly a good outcome for scientific topics with major public policy ramifications.

Fortunately, such forbidden topics may also attract enormous interest once they are broached under reasonable circumstances. For example, my current article is now on track to receive more pageviews in its first 7 days than my Hispanic Crime article did in its first 90, and has already accumulated more Likes and Tweets than all my previous articles combined. Furthermore, a vigorous debate on some of the important issues raised may gradually act to sand off some of the rough edges of confusion and error, and such a debate is beginning to occur, as a number of reasonably prominent websites have been discussing my article and often attracting significant numbers of commenters, though ones overwhelmingly hostile to my views. Here are a few of the most prominent links:

- Race, IQ, and Wealth, Steve Sailer

- Has Ron Unz Refuted “Hard Hereditarianism”?, VDare.com

- The new Ron Unz piece on IQ, Marginal Revolution

- Race, IQ and wealth: A preliminary reply, Political Correctness Watch

- Ron Unz on Race, IQ, and Wealth, Peter Frost’s Evo and Proud

- Cities Make You Smart, Turbulence Ahead

- IQ and the Wealth of Nations?, Social Democracy for the 21st Century

Of these, the VDare article, represents the strongest and most detailed rebuttal to my analysis, so I will confine my response to its arguments.

Some of the points VDare makes about the “noisiness” of the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ data are perfectly correct, though I myself had emphasized this in my own text. For example, the 1979 Irish study which yielded an outlying IQ of 98 was so tiny—just 75 adults—that it probably should be discarded on statistical grounds, likely having been drawn from a single unrepresentative location. Meanwhile, attempting to precisely compare the non-convertible currencies of Communist East Bloc countries with those of Western Europe for GDP purposes is foolish. However, the overall pattern is that the wealthier, more urbanized East Bloc countries did tend to have much higher measured IQs than their poorer, more rural allies, and the same was generally true for Western European countries during that same period.

However, given that VDare ranks as America’s premier “hard core” anti-immigrationist website, the primary focus of the article is (naturally enough) my claim that Mexican-American IQs seem to have risen quite rapidly in recent decades. My argument had relied heavily upon the analysis of GSS Wordsum-IQ data by The Inductivist blogger, who showed that although the figures for American-born Mex-Ams had generally been 84-85 during the 1970s and 1980s, they had risen to around 92 during the 1990s and then 95 during the 2000s. As it happened, two of the three Mex-Am IQ samples quoted by Lynn/Vanhanen for the 1970s and 1980s had been in the exact same 84-85 range, tending to support the validity of the Wordsum-IQ analysis.

The VDare column points out that a different and later book by Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence, contains a much larger collection of 20 Hispanic IQ results, and that these show considerable fluctuations, with no clear pattern, but generally with lower results than I had suggested.

First, the analysis I quoted had been restricted to Mex-Ams, while two of these other studies are actually of Puerto Ricans, and many of the remainder are of Hispanics in general, who constitute a somewhat different population. Furthermore, the sharp rise in Wordsum-IQ had been restricted to the American-born Mex-Am cohorts, and none of these other IQ tests apparently make the distinction. Finally, an important advantage of the Wordsum-IQ data is that it is based on nationally representative samples, while all of these other IQ samples are localized, as well as often quite small and probably non-representative. For example, one of the IQ tests was based on an absurdly tiny sample size of 37, while four of the others had samples in the 100-163 range, considerably reducing their validity. Indeed, the wide fluctuations of these local samples tend to underscore the value of national results derived from the GSS and the NLSY.

As it happens, two of the IQ samples provided in this Lynn collection are drawn from the 1920s, which raises another interesting issue. I had noted the extremely low 80-85 IQ scores for 1920s European immigrant populations collected by Thomas Sowell, and most of his data had been drawn from “Intelligence and Immigration”, a volume published in 1926 by Clifford Kirkpatrick, a prominent researcher of the time who maintained a very welcome tone of scientific objectivity. Although America’s Mexican population was relatively small during that era, Kirkpatrick included them in his analysis, but since their language, socio-economic status, and IQ scores were all very similar to those of Italians and Portuguese, he grouped these three ethnicities together in the same broader category of “Latins,” and noted that their results were far below that of mainstream Americans. So given the considerable rise in Italian-American and Portuguese-American academic performance during subsequent generations, perhaps we should not be too surprised to see a similar rise in Mexican-Americans.

Finally, the VDare column correctly notes that GSS Wordsum is a highly imperfect proxy for IQ, having a correlation of 0.71, compared to an IQ correlation of 0.81 for the SAT. The article then links to an analysis claiming that the the SAT gap between whites and Hispanics has held steady at 0.6-0.8 between 1980 and 2010, which would seem to indicate that Hispanic ability has stagnated rather than sharply risen during those decades. My own IQ claims referred to the subset of American-born Mex-Ams rather than all Hispanics in general, but since it seems plausible that a rising percentage of those Hispanic SAT scores came from the former group, the SAT non-trends might seem a little surprising.

These SAT findings would constitute a serious blow against my analysis except for the fact that the SAT-takers are obviously not a nationally representative sample of their ethnic population. Just a fraction of students take the SAT, and—more importantly—that fraction may change dramatically over time. As it happens, there has been a huge rise in the number of Hispanic SAT-takers, which grew 150% just between 2001 and 2010, while the overall Hispanic population expanded only by 43% and the cohort of 18-year-olds even less than that; thus, the fraction of Hispanics taking the SAT roughly doubled, while the fraction of whites taking the SAT changed only slightly, perhaps in the 15% range. Although I haven’t yet managed to locate similar SAT demographic data going back to 1980, I strongly suspect that the huge 2001-2011 relative rise in Hispanic test-takers merely continued a trend extending back for decades.

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.

Incidentally, I am grateful to the pseudonymous VDare author for directing me to Lynn book “Race Differences in Intelligence.” My own analysis had been based on the data in his “IQ and the Wealth of Nations,” supplemented by his sequel “IQ and Global Inequality,” but Lynn is an exceptionally prolific scholar, and the third book contains a wealth of useful additional data, much of which seems to further support my analysis. As an example, he reports two sizable IQ studies from Lithuania in the post-Communist early 2000s, which place the national IQ at 90 or 92. These seem implausibly low figures to me, and probably reflect Lithuania’s rural character and that its average income was less than one-third that of Germany during that period.

Finally, I must note the tragic loss which we all suffered in the passing of Alexander Cockburn, one of America’s most courageous and honest journalists, as well as co-editor of the Counterpunch webzine. Many were the mornings I’d read endless amounts of absurd, dishonest nonsense in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, only to discover a far more plausible and accurate discussion of world events on Counterpunch’s bright pages. Alex was very decidedly a man of the Left, indeed of the second generation, given that his father Claud had been one of the leading Communist journalists of the 1930s. But the severe compression of the allowed ideological landscape in American journalism had also established him as a port in the storm for leading conservative writers as well. A few years ago, I happened to be glancing through old issues of Buckley’s National Review from the 1980s and was stunned to notice how many of those authors, having been purged by Conservativism, Inc., now used Counterpunch as the primary distributor of their current writings. As I told Alex at the time, perhaps he was actually the true heir of William Buckley, Jr.

The Rural/Urban Divide

The American Conservative • July 26, 2012 • 1,500 Words

As I have recently mentioned to several people, I had been aware of the large anomalies and logical inconsistences in the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ model for nearly a decade, and had repeatedly pointed them out on various Internet discussion forums. But since nobody ever paid the slightest attention to what I was saying, I finally decided to write up and publish my Race, IQ, and Wealth.

However, although 80% of my piece consisted merely of setting down in print what I already had long known, I did make some fascinating additional discoveries, the most significant being the seemingly enormous impact of rural/urban conditions upon the tested IQ of white European populations.

As I noted, one very intriguing pattern is that according to Lynn’s IQ data certain European populations such as the South Italians, Irish, Greeks, and South Slavs tended to have IQs much lower than other European populations such as the German and the Dutch. However, according to the Wordsum-IQ data, this pattern is exactly reversed in the United States, with the descendents of immigrants from Southern Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Yugoslavia having much higher IQs than Americans of German or Dutch ancestry. If IQ were largely genetic, this would seem almost inexplicable, but patterns of urbanization might be the obvious explanation: Southern Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Yugoslavia were traditionally far more rural than Germany or the Netherlands, but in America the pattern of ethnic settlement is exactly reversed, with Dutch-Americans and British-Americans being far more rural than those other groups.

Next, consider the aggregate IQs of rural and urban/suburban whites. During the 1970s according to Wordsum-IQ data, the intelligence gap between whites raised on farms and those who grew up in an urban/suburban background was enormous, almost exactly equal to the white/black gap. The data would indicate that a non-trivial slice of the white farmboys of the 1970s suffered from clinical mental retardation, which seems quite implausible.

Furthermore, if IQ were genetic, we might tend to expect rural white IQs to slightly drop over time, as many of the most intelligent and ambitious whites moved away to the Big City each generation, leaving their dimmer relatives behind. Instead, we discover the exact opposite effect. The Wordsum-IQ of urban/suburban whites remained almost exactly constant between the 1970s and the 2000s, while the scores for whites from a farming background increased rapidly, thereby eliminating one-third of the overall gap. In effect, urban/suburban whites showed no Flynn Effect, while whites on farms showed a very sizable one. One very plausible explanation would be that the increasing presence of TV and other modern technologies in rural areas greatly improved the “cognitive development environment” for rural whites, thereby raising their IQ scores, while urban/suburban whites had already possessed such an environment and gained little.

Finally, let us consider the European evidence. Today, the international PISA academic tests are widely regarded as one of the best means of estimating national IQs, and if we consider the 2009 PISA scores, we find that the scores were extremely similar for Ireland, Poland, Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and several other countries. Since Lynn standardizes the British IQ to 100, that indicates that Ireland and Poland today have IQs around 100, which seems quite plausible.

However, a huge sample placed Ireland’s IQ at 87 in 1972, and Lynn himself has stated that his own Ireland research in the late 1960s convinced him that the Irish were a low IQ population, whose only hope for the future lay in a strong eugenics program. So the evidence indicates that the Irish IQ was around 87 at that point, and has risen nearly a full standard deviation in the four decades which followed. Lynn also provides two additional very large samples, which placed the Irish IQ at around 92 in the early 1990s, so at the half-way mark, the Irish IQ had risen by half the difference between the endpoints, which seems remarkably consistent.

Obviously, for the Irish to raise their Flynn-adjusted IQ by nearly a full standard devision in just over one generation is a total absurdity from a genetic perspective; thus, the huge rise must be due to some class of “environmental” factors. When we consider that Ireland had been one of most rural European countries and rapidly urbanized during exactly that period, the impact of urbanization seems a plausible possibility.

Also consider Poland, another very rural European country that also urbanized during those same decades. The largest European IQ sample found anywhere in Lynn establishes the Polish IQ as having been 92 in 1989, very close to the Irish IQ around the same time. And as mentioned above, the PISA score indicate that Poland’s IQ is around 100 today, seeming to demonstrate an IQ rise very similar to that of Ireland.

The most heavily rural countries in Europe include Portugal, Lithuania, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, and other parts of the Balkans, and according to Lynn’s data, these also tend to have the lowest national IQs. Meanwhile, Australia has always been heavily urbanized and although as much as one-third of Australians have Irish ancestry, Australia’s mean IQ had always been very close to 100, even when Ireland was at 87. Since per capita GDPs tend to follow a strong rural/urban pattern, this may explain a large portion of Lynn’s wealth/IQ correlation within Europe.

On the other hand, this urban/rural IQ pattern is totally absent in East Asian populations, whose IQs seem almost entirely unaffected by even the most massive trends of urbanization. This has led me to suggest that for some unknown, possibly biological reason, East Asians can achieve nearly their full IQ potential without requiring the same beneficial “cognitive development environment” which white Europeans seem to require.

Obviously, this data does not conclusively establish my rural/urban hypothesis regarding the extreme environmental malleability of white IQs. But it does constitute a massive amount of hard empirical data which seems to totally contradict “the Strong IQ Hypothesis.” Those who believe in the rigid genetic nature of IQ should be required to propose some equally successful alternative explanation for these remarkable patterns.

In the week following its release, my Race/IQ article has already produced an enormous amount of vigorous commentary across the Internet, with links to several of the most recent examples provided below.

- Ron Unz and IQ, HBD Chick

- No Mexican Flynn Effect (or Ron Unz is no longer credible), Occidentalist

- No Exception, Occidentalist

- Hispanic Performance by Generation, Occidentalist

Unfortunately, this discussion has been almost entirely restricted to narrow racialist circles, with virtually all non-racialist journalists or pundits maintaining a studious silence on the matter and giving the controversy a very wide berth, although I would argue that issues of race and intelligence have considerable importance in American society. As a consequence of this silence, the debate has been enormously one-sided, with perhaps 95% of the bloggers and commenters disputing my analysis, with varying degrees of knowledge, accuracy, and civility.

For example, one of the most energetic IQ-racialists characterized my analysis as “egregiously dishonest” and “laughable commentary”—calumnies which were widely propagated all across the Internet—before rechecking his own calculations, and then grudgingly conceding that “on re-analysis, Ron Unz’s claim concerning the difference in the GSS sample was upheld”. Similar harsh denunciations of my article have been typical across the hundreds of websites which Google indicates have taken notice of the debate.

It has been suggested to me that perhaps it would be a serious mistake for mainstream journalists or analysts to even take notice of this controversial subject, but I tend to disagree with this approach. As I have previously mentioned, Google indicates that there exist some 103,000 web pages already discussing the theories of Lynn and Vanhanen, and the overwhelming majority of these seem extremely laudatory. To the extent that the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ analysis is contradicted by strong evidence, this should probably be brought to wider attention, lest casual observers tend to naively assume that Lynn and Vanhanen are factually correct although politically-incorrect.

Furthermore, I would suggest that my own hypothesis regarding rural/urban factors might have potentially important policy implications for American society. Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admission has thoroughly documented the often corrupt admissions practices followed by our leading universities, which largely select America’s future national elites in academics, finance, media, and politics. As he indicates, one of the few meritocratic and non-corrupt aspects of college admissions is the reliance on standardized tests such as the SAT, which supposedly assess actual intellectual ability; the SAT has a high 0.81 correlation with IQ.

However, if my above rural/urban IQ analysis is correct, then the SAT would tend to substantially underestimate the ability of rural students, even aside from their lack of access to SAT coaching or prep courses, with the error perhaps approaching 100 SAT points. Given that rural students are already heavily under-represented in the Ivy League and other elite colleges, perhaps this possibility should receive proper consideration.

The Boston Globe Takes Notice

The American Conservative • July 30, 2012 • 1,200 Words

If New York is America’s finance capital, with Los Angeles filling the same role for entertainment and Silicon Valley for technology, then surely the Boston area constitutes our center of academic and intellectual life, being home to a host of top universities such as Harvard, MIT, BU, Tufts, and many others. Partly for this reason, most estimates of average educational levels and “intelligence” have placed the Bay State at or near the very top of the rankings.

Thus, with Boston making much of its living from the intellect-processing industry, it is hardly surprising that the first major media discussion of my article Race, IQ, and Wealth should appear in the Boston Globe, these days owned by the New York Times Company. The piece provided an excellent (and quite favorable) summary of my major points, and featured a large photo of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the grandfather of modern intelligence testing, with a version of the piece also running in the print edition of the Sunday Globe.  I very much hope this is an early indication that coverage of my analysis will gradually begin extending beyond the hostile racialist websites which have so far represented its primary audience.

- What Do IQ Differences Really Mean?, Josh Rothman, The Boston Globe

Meanwhile, Steven Pinker, one of Harvard’s own leading luminaries and a very prominent evolutionary psychologist, has commended me for the IQ analysis presented in my article, but wonders if I’m not simply “tilting at a straw man.” He finds it difficult to believe that Richard Lynn or indeed anyone other than “an idiot or a fanatic ideologue” could possibly deny that socio-economic, cultural, and educational factors might often have a very substantial impact on tested IQ scores. His point seems a reasonable one, but I just do not think it is correct.

As I have previously mentioned, Google indicates that the IQ theories of Lynn and Vanhanen have been discussed on some 100,000 web pages, and virtually all of these have interpreted them as proposing a very strict genetic-determinist model of IQ, with the vast majority of the commentary being quite laudatory. I have recently read through some 800 pages of Lynn’s various books and am not sure I have encountered a single major mention of socio-economic or cultural factors as playing a sizable role in determining tested IQ. Even nutrition, an environmental factor whose importance Lynn readily acknowledges, received just a brief mention in the 300 pages of his primary work. I think it likely that Lynn is actually saying what everyone seems to believe he is saying, and that he rejects the possibility that “cultural factors” could rapidly shift population IQs by the 5, 10, or perhaps even 15 points, a result which I seem to find directly in his own data.

Consider that my article has provoked a vast outpouring of Internet debate, with perhaps 700 or more comments across several websites, the vast majority of them quite hostile.  My analysis has been attacked on every possible basis, often in mutually contradictory terms.  There has even been some scattered criticism of Lynn himself, with suggestions that he sometimes published weak data.  Yet I think not a single individual has claimed that I had misinterpreted or mischaracterized Lynn’s scientific position, so if I have misunderstood Lynn’s theories, I seem not to have been alone.

Academic and ideological communities are often quite narrowly circumscribed, and what is believed to be fully established scientific truth within certain intellectual circles may be viewed as absurd nonsense in others. For example, several prominent academics who accepted without question my arguments regarding the considerable malleability of IQ were meanwhile quite surprised and skeptical about the charges of serious scientific misconduct which I levied against the late Stephen Jay Gould, although those charges had received widespread mainstream coverage in recent years. Meanwhile, quite a number of other academics regarded my criticism of Gould as representing about the only correct portion of my entire article. It wouldn’t surprise me if in sheer numerical terms, nearly all of today’s bitter IQ debates are actually fought between Lynnists and Gouldians, with those denouncing Gould almost invariably hailing Lynn and vice-versa. Factual reality runs second to ideological tribalism.

Perhaps this will gradually change over time. One encouraging development has been that sentiment on my Race/IQ analysis seems to be slowly shifting even within racialist circles, as the overwhelming weight of the evidence I have presented gradually begins to make itself felt. For example, the highly-quantitative Occidentalist blogger had initially characterized me as someone “egregiously dishonest” who had produced “laughable commentary,” but then rechecked his calculations of GSS Mexican-American IQ and admitted that I had been entirely correct. He had similarly belittled my claims that this rapid rise was separately supported by the NLSY-97 data, but has now published an entire blogpost confirming the numbers I quoted:

- Hispanics, the NLSY 97, Occidentalist

Likewise, Peter Frost’s first sharply critical column on my article sparked a vast outpouring of commentary, overwhelmingly hostile and dismissive. But when he then published his second, equally critical column—quoting a lengthy private exchange we had had—some of his commenters seem to think I had actually made some pretty good points.

- More on Race, IQ, and Wealth, Peter Frost’s Evo and Proud

And although the last few days have seen a continued flood of racialist blog commentary on my article, the tone has also seemed to slightly shift away from absolute denial and total hostility.  Perhaps this demonstrates that a polite and respectful approach, backed by copious solid evidence, may sometimes sway even strong ideological opposition.

- Did Ron Unz Score An Own Goal Too?, Anatoly Karlin

- More from Ron Unz on IQ, HBDChick

- Mexican-American IQ, HBDChick

- Rural White Americans, HBDChick

- Ron Unz’s Rural/Urban Data, HBDChick

- IQ Estimates from Wordsum Scores by Ancestry, Audacious Epigone

- Ron Unz Dismantles Racial Explanations of IQ, Victor Ganata

- Intelligence, Again, Alexandria

Finally, one of the main points in my original article had been that although there was very strong evidence of a powerful socio-economic influence upon the IQ scores of European peoples, this influence seem almost totally absent in the case of East Asians, and that Lynn’s failure to notice this stark racial difference had probably led him to underestimate the general role of such environmental influences. In effect, East Asian IQ appears very “robust” against environmental deprivation, and Lynn therefore assumed that all ethnic IQs were equally robust.

Interestingly enough, a suggestion very similar to mine was made on purely empirical grounds just a couple of months ago with regards to the PISA international academic tests. Shanghai, the world’s largest city with a population of 18 million, had widely outscored every nation in results, but many reasonably suggested that a city attracting China’s best and brightest was hardly indicative of the country as a whole, let alone its vast and impoverished rural population.

However, Andreas Schleicher, the OECD official responsible for the PISA, claimed that the unpublished results from rural China were also surprisingly strong: “Even in rural areas and in disadvantaged environments, you see a remarkable performance…Shanghai is an exceptional case…But what surprised me more were the results from poor provinces that came out really well. The levels of resilience are just incredible…The results for disadvantaged pupils would be the envy of any Western country.”

- China: The world’s cleverest country?, Sean Coughlan, BBC

Once the full PISA results for China are eventually released, I suspect that the evidence for my suggested “East Asian Socio-Economic Exception” will become much stronger.

Incorporating the Racialist Perspective

The American Conservative • August 2, 2012 • 1,700 Words

As I’ve often told my friends over the years, the careful investigation of racial and ethnic differences presents huge difficulties in present-day American society.

On the one hand, the topic is a very interesting and important one, especially in a society with America’s enormous diversity, but the powerful social taboos surrounding such discussions have dissuaded the vast majority of skilled and objective academics from dipping more than a toe into these treacherous waters.

Therefore, this vacuum of discussion has been filled by a considerable number of small but energetic racialist websites and bloggers, usually maintaining anonymity, whose research competence tends to be very mixed and whose analysis is usually molded by a gripping ideological framework. But with neutral academics being AWOL, the data collected by this racialist community is often the only game in town.

A perfect example of this is found in my own recent Race, IQ, and Wealth article, in which nearly all of my IQ data was obtained from the published writings of Richard Lynn, a leading academic hero of racialists worldwide. As it happens, for nearly a decade it had seemed obvious to me that the likely conclusions to be drawn from Lynn’s data were exactly the opposite of those long believed by Lynn and his acolytes, and I think I have now forcefully made that case. But without Lynn’s research my own analysis would have been impossible. If others outside Lynn’s ideological circle had closely examined the data earlier, I am sure they would have come to much the same conclusion.

Similarly, although Hispanic-friendly institutions such as the Ford Foundation, the New York Times, and Ivy League academic departments deploy annual budgets totalling in the billions of dollars, the first and only place I learned of evidence for the remarkably rapid recent rise of Mexican-American IQs was at The Inductivist, a quasi-racialist blogsite operated as a part-time hobby by an ordinary individual. Supporting evidence of this IQ rise was later privately confirmed to me by another rightwing or quasi-racialist blogger, who asked to remain unidentified, perhaps concerned that his blogger friends might grow angry with him.

Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the attention that my Race/IQ article has so far received has come from similar quarters, with such racialist blogsites as HBDChick, Occidentalist, and Evo and Proud having made my article nearly the sole focus of their discussion over the last week or more, including well over a dozen separate posts and hundreds of comments. Certainly most of the reactions in these venues has been angry and often vituperative, but it has also often been quantitative and technical, and I am absolutely willing to absorb the insults of the former to gain the value of the latter.

For example, a sharp-eyed racialist blogger carefully checking my numbers quickly noticed that a paragraph in one of my columns had incorrectly used “British” where I should have said “German,” allowing me to immediately confirm the mistake and publish a correction on the web.

On a far more substantive point, my analysis had mentioned that although the Ireland Irish seemed to have had very low IQs as recently as the early 1970s, the American Irish were significantly above the white average in Wordsum-IQ. But one of the bloggers discussing my claims discovered that the GSS “Irish” category actually comprises both the Scots-Irish and the Catholic Irish, and the latter actually had nearly the highest Wordsum-IQ of any American ethnic group, which greatly strengthens my argument, given the enormous IQ gap with their cousins in Ireland. Since the Catholic Irish are also among the most highly urbanized American populations, this finding further reinforces my rural/urban hypothesis.

But perhaps the best example comes from the most extensive attempt to refute my analysis, which appeared on the quasi-racialist VDare.com website. Although several different arguments were made, the strongest and most detailed focused on an examination of the ethnic distribution of American SAT scores between 1980 and 2010, performed by another highly-quantitive racialist blogger. The article pointed out that there was virtually no net change in the substantial Hispanic/white performance gap on the SAT during those four decades. Since the SAT is a far better proxy for IQ than my Wordsum values, and the number of participants across those years number in the millions, any possibility of a large rise in Hispanic IQ would seem completely disproven. My claims had focused on American-born Mexican-Americans rather than Hispanics in general, but since the former group represented a large and rapidly growing portion of the latter, my argument would seem to have suffered a very serious blow.

However, this is incorrect. We must remember than only a fraction of the students in each ethnic group actually take the SAT, and this fraction tends to consist of the smartest and best prepared students. Most importantly, this fraction may sharply differ between ethnic groups and also change over time. With some effort, I managed to obtain the ethnic distribution of SAT test-takers back to 1975 and then compared these results with the ethnic distribution of 18-year-olds during those years, found in the Census-CPS data.

Just as I had suspected, the changes were dramatic. In 1975, 22% of whites took the SAT, and this had risen to 33% by 2011, a substantial rise of 50%. However, during these same decades, the percentage of Hispanic test-takers had grown from 6% to 32%, an enormous rise of over 400%. Thus, in 1975 white 18-year-olds were nearly four times more likely to take the SAT, but by 2011 the ratios were almost exactly the same. So during the decades in question, Hispanic SAT takers had shifted from being drawn from just the tiny academic elite of that group to being just as representative of their entire population as for white students. Since the white/Hispanic gap remained unchanged during this tremendous broadening of the Hispanic testing pool rather than greatly widening, the only possible explanation would seem to be a huge rise in average Hispanic academic performance, just as was reflected in the Wordsum-IQ scores. (My thanks to Razib Khan for locating the SAT and demographic data).

Thus, upon closer examination the SAT evidence cited for the alleged lack of Hispanic gains actually becomes very powerful evidence for strong Hispanic gains. And once again, none of this would have been brought to my attention without the dedicated research efforts of racialist partisans strongly opposing my conclusions.

Meanwhile, when I have examined the comment-threads of the tiny number of left-liberal websites which have discussed my article, I’ve obviously been gratified by the supportive atmosphere and friendly remarks, but I’ve almost never noticed anything of substantive let alone highly-technical value. Hence I tend to spend more of my time reading through the endless insults and attacks directed at my work in racialist sources, in realistic hopes of discovering information nuggets of major value. If anti-racialists wish to play a meaningful role in these debates rather than merely cheerleading from the sidelines, they would be well advised to invest some time and effect in familiarizing themselves with the quantitative and scientific issues involved.

Despite the very useful research role played by these racialist critics, I am obviously eager to also have my ideas also brought to the attention of a much wider and more mainstream audience, and this has now begun to happen. At the beginning of this week, my article received a strong endorsement from Andrew Sullivan, a prominent blogger at the Daily Beast/Newsweek, who had actually served as TNR Editor in 1994 when that magazine had originally promoted The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein.  Yesterday my piece was republished by LewRockwell.com, one of the leading libertarian websites, while Slate’s Will Saletan had previously distributed a recommendation to his thousands of Twitter-followers very shortly after original release.  Articles on controversial, racially-charged issues often have a long shelf-life, and my 2010 Hispanic Crime article, which proved quite influential, required a full year to accumulate roughly the same number of pageviews that my current piece has garnered in just a couple of weeks, which is certainly an encouraging sign.

Surprisingly enough, my IQ analysis has so far received virtually no coverage whatsoever from mainstream/establishment conservatives, although they must surely now be aware of it. Perhaps one reason might involve the serious fault lines within the broad conservative movement, whose elites and leading pundits may often have sharply different views on racially-connected topics from large slices of the conservative grass roots, whose votes they require for victory. Bear in mind that the publication of my article on the TAC website and elsewhere has drawn a huge outpouring of extremely angry comments, now numbering in the many hundreds, and these individuals would surely be just as infuriated by any other conservative media publication which discussed my IQ findings in a less than wholly dismissive manner.

Over the years, liberal journalists and pundits have repeatedly accused leading conservatives of following a “dog whistle” approach to politics, namely taking positions aimed at mobilizing and energizing the racialist portion of their political base while still using language which retains plausible deniability for the rest of the political world. Publicly endorsing the conclusion that ethnic/racial IQ differences are probably not nearly as wide or intractable as is generally believed in certain quarters might generate the sort of angry firestorm which could undo the benefits of many years of diligent “dog whistling.” So perhaps they believe a safer approach is just to hide in the cellar until the controversy blows over, and they can then reemerge to promote tax cuts and a strong national defense.

A very similar situation had occurred a couple of years ago following the publication of my Hispanic Crime article in 2010. In the weeks which followed, a massive public debate ensued, with heavy participation by racialists, paleo-conservatives, libertarians, and liberals, but with virtually no coverage by mainstream conservatives, presumably fearful of fracturing their ideological base. So while the Conservative Politburo met in endless special session to determine the party-line response and eventually decided to say nothing, the topic was thrashed out by everyone else on the Internet.  Perhaps the mainstream conservative reaction to discussions of race and IQ will follow the same trajectory.

Finally, Prof. Lynn has now responded at great length to my article, and I have been informed that his rebuttal is scheduled for publication later today on the website of Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, a leading racialist organization.  In due course, I will certainly reply to his arguments.

Response to Lynn and Nyborg

The American Conservative • August 4, 2012 • 2,300 Words

Richard Lynn has now produced a lengthy and detailed rebuttal to my article Race, IQ & Wealth questioning his theories, as has Helmuth Nyborg, another leading IQ expert and strong supporter of Lynn.  Their analyses have been published or highlighted on several prominent racialist websites, and I am herein providing my own rejoinder.

First, I will admit to being a bit confused about Lynn’s overall position.  Although he often seems to be endorsing my viewpoint in its generality, he seems to strongly dispute nearly all the specific details.

For example, Lynn claims that he has never denied the substantial role of educational and other environmental factors in determining the IQ results of different populations, and that he is simply suggesting that genetic factors may also influence “some” of the IQ differences he reports.  As it happens, this is almost exactly the central thesis of my own article, in which I argue that the evidence overwhelmingly refutes what I call the “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” but that a “Weak IQ Hypothesis” might very well be correct.  Essentially, I am proposing that the enormously large differences in population IQ reported by Lynn are primarily due to factors of social environment—poverty, education, rural deprivation—but that even if these external differences were completely eliminated, there still might remain a much smaller residual genetic effect, though its size and direction is somewhat speculative.

But although Lynn seems to be affirming my “Weak IQ Hypothesis” in the general case, he seems to oppose it in every given particular, which I find perplexing.  For example, the word “education” appears only once in the index of his 300 page book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, and in that reference he provides a few sentences citing academic articles claiming a strong educational role in IQ, but then follows with a paragraph debunking and refuting the notion that education has any fundamental or permanent impact on IQ.  Meanwhile, there seems to be no discussion anywhere of related factors such as “culture” or “rural deprivation”, and I am not aware that he raises any of these possibilities in his reporting and analysis of specific national IQ scores, even when these seem to show massive fluctuations over time.  He certainly does recognize the important role of various biological factors such as nutrition and health, but even these merit only three or four pages out of 300.

In his 2006 sequel, he discusses these issues at greater length, but with little more clarity or consistency.  For example, he raises the possibility of socio-economic factors substantially impacting both IQ and educational attainment, but concludes “This explanation cannot be correct” based on adoption studies (p. 44).  Although at points in the book he vaguely seems more open to the role of “social environment” as a factor, he almost never seems to consider it when he discusses specific differences in national IQs.  I might speculate that he is providing himself some “plausible deniability” by accepting non-genetic explanations in the vague abstract while almost always ignoring or dismissing them in each specific case.  If I am mistaken, and he does indeed support “the Weak IQ Hypothesis,” I would be very glad to know this.

Numerous others might also benefit from such clarification.  Not a single one of the vast outpouring of critical remarks I have received from Lynn admirers has ever suggested that I was misrepresenting Lynn when I characterized his position as essentially IQ-determinism.

As to the specifics of Lynn’s rebuttal, one significant problem I quickly encountered was a high degree of what seems to be serious factual error.  For example, he directly and repeatedly quotes me as claiming “the European peoples are genetically indistinguishable” and “all the European peoples are genetically indistinguishable,” devoting several long paragraphs to refuting this claim.  However, I never made any such totally absurd and scientifically ridiculous statements, and when I asked him for his source, he was unable to locate it anywhere in my writings.  Admittedly, I did claim that East Germans and West Germans were indeed “genetically indistinguishable” and also that Greeks and Turks are quite genetically similar (as Lynn himself has stated on various occasions), but obviously such statements are entirely different from claiming the same is also true for Swedes, Basques, and Greeks.  As Lynn himself explains in rebutting my (non-existent) claim, Nordics tend to be fair and blue-eyed while Sicilians are very rarely so, rendering it rather unlikely those two groups would be “genetically indistinguishable.”  If Lynn wishes to portray me as a total ignoramus on genetic matters that is certainly his privilege, but I would prefer he read my writing more carefully and avoid inventing spurious quotations to buttress his case.

In another example, Lynn implies my review of national IQs was careless in that I relied upon the data in his 2002 and 2006 books, and ignored the more recent and extensive data presented in his 2012 book.  However, since this latter book was actually published on July 16, 2012, six days after my own article had been sent to the printers, I do not believe I can reasonably be faulted for failing to incorporate his new material.  Furthermore, once I managed to obtain an electronic copy of his new 2012 book, I discovered it contained at least several puzzling anomalies, which Lynn has been unable to clarify for me.

For example, Lynn refutes my evidence for a low Ireland IQ during the 1970s by referring me to the more extensive data in his latest book, saying it debunks my claim.  However, when I examined the Ireland IQs in that book (p. 402), I discovered that he had inexplicably failed to include the massive 1972 study of 3,466 students which established an Irish IQ of 87 and which had appeared in all of his previous books.  When I asked him why he had excluded the largest early Irish IQ study, he said he had no answer, and that perhaps “this omission was a mistake.”  As it happens, nearly all of his other Ireland data tends to be from around 1990 or later, and simply reinforces the strong evidence of a rapidly rising Irish IQ which I had already discussed in my own analysis.

As another example, I had pointed out that Austrians and Croatians were quite genetically similar, and that the huge 11-13 point IQ gap reported by Lynn (2002) seemed wildly implausible as a primarily genetic effect, probably instead reflecting the depressed socio-economic condition of Croatia at the time, and hence likely to rapidly shrink under economic development.  Lynn “refutes” my claim by citing the more recent data in his 2012 book which shows the Austrian/Croatian IQ gap has now narrowed to just a single point, mostly due to a huge rise in Croatian IQ; this would seem the exact prediction of my own model.  Strangely enough, his 2012 data allegedly includes a Croatian sample from the large Buj (1981) collection, which had never appeared along with the other 19 Buj results in any of his previous two books, and when I asked him why he had never previously included this particular Croatian result, he had no explanation.

Sometimes Lynn construes my slightly loose phrasing as serious error.  For example, I mention that Lynn’s 2010 research showed that today the Southern Italian IQ “was as low as 89.”  He claims I misquoted him, since only the Sicilian IQ was 89, while other parts of southern Italy were in the 90-92 range.  Since his other studies had placed Northern Italian IQ at 102-103, I had described this gap of 10-14 points between Northern and Southern Italians as being “almost a full standard deviation” while he argues it is closer to being two-thirds of a standard deviation.  Since the IQ gap between Southern Italians in Italy and those in America is so wide, he suggests that only the very smartest Southern Italians immigrated here, but this seems totally implausible, especially when we consider that mean reversion would have drastically reduced any initial difference.  Furthermore, all the IQ data from the 1920s which I quoted placed Italian-American IQ back then in the 78-85 range, which directly contradicts Lynn’s hypothesis.

Lynn also challenges my Balkan analysis.  His 2012 book places the Bulgarian IQ at 92.5 and the Romanian IQ at 91, with the largest and most recent Romanian study coming in at only 88.  Just I claimed, these figures tend to be 10 points or more below such northern European peoples as the Germans, Dutch, or Swiss, and I find a strictly genetic explanation of this huge gap far less plausible than the obvious social differences between Europe’s wealthiest and its poorest countries.  Lynn claims these very low Balkan IQs are due to substantial African and Middle Eastern ancestry, but I have never heard of this being the case for Balkan Slavs, and would like to see some evidence.

Lynn’s 2012 book also places the Greek IQ at 92, and he challenges my assertion that Americans of Greek or South Slav ancestry are actually well above the white American average in income, IQ, and other indicators of ability. However, I obtained this exact result from the GSS dataset by running RACE=WHITE/ETHNIC against the WORDSUM, EDUC, and CONINC variables.  Both Greeks and Yugoslavs have Wordsum-IQ and years of education significantly above the white average, while the family income of both these ethnicities are among the highest of any white group, \$122,700 for Greeks and \$113,500 for Yugoslavs against just \$97,900 for the average white American.  These results would seem implausible if Lynn’s very low IQ figures for Greeks and Balkan Slavs were largely innate.

Again, Lynn suggests that only the absolutely smartest Greeks and South Slavs came to America, and again I point out there is no evidence for this, that the IQ differences results from such selective migration would have substantially regressed after the first generation, and that the 1920s American IQ tests for Greek immigrants placed them at just 83.

In attempting to rebut my GSS evidence of a very rapid rise in American-born Mexican-American Wordsum-IQ over the last few decades, Lynn cites a 2010 paper by Ang et. al which he says refutes my claim of such a Super-Flynn Effect.  However, he is incorrect.  The study he references aggregates all Hispanics, while my result was solely for American-born Mexican-Americans, a much smaller subset.  Indeed, if the foreign-born Mex-Ams are included, the rise in Wordsum-IQ largely disappears.

Furthermore, I have also pointed out that between 1975 and 2011, there was a five-fold rise in the percentage of Hispanics taking the SAT, while the gap between white and Hispanic scores remained essentially unchanged.  Given that the Hispanic results were dipping so much deeper in their ethnic ability-pool, I think this can only be explained by a large rise in general Hispanic academic performance.

Lynn also disputes my claim of an anomaly in the pattern of East Asian IQ scores.  Yet across all of his 50-odd such IQ studies, there is just a single case of East Asians scoring below 100, despite enormous poverty and deprivation.  Meanwhile, most of his Southern European IQ studies yield results closer to 90 than to 100.  I am deeply skeptical that the East Asian/Southern European ability gap is actually so enormously large.  Furthermore Lynn never addresses the historical fact that virtually all the Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups in America had tested IQs of around 80-85 during the 1920s, while their Chinese-American and Japanese-American immigrant counterparts usually scored 100 or above.  I suspect huge factors of cultural, educational, and socio-economic deprivation were responsible for the absurdly low immigrant European IQ scores, and Lynn completely ignores this important evidence, perhaps because it would be very difficult to reconcile with his strongly genetic IQ model.

Finally, Lynn closes his rebuttal by repeating his boilerplate disclaimer that he has “never maintained that IQ is overwhelmingly determined by genetics,” although this seems to be his clear reasoning in every single particular example he discusses.  However, if I am mistaken and he is not being disingenous on this point, I cannot possibly understand why he chooses to oppose the overall conclusions of my article.  As mentioned above, I had emphasized that absolutely none of my analysis would rule out “the Weak IQ Hypothesis,” in which some residual European IQ differences might indeed be due to genetics rather than environment.  If—as Lynn seems to be suggesting—this were actually his own position, why would he have written a heated 6,000 word rebuttal instead of simply thanking me for agreeing with him?

I find much less to discuss in Helmuth Nyborg’s rather brief rebuttal.

Nyborg criticizes me for relying solely on Lynn’s 2002 book, but as I have repeatedly made clear, I supplemented this with his 2006 book as well as some of his other books and writings.  I obviously did not use the data in his 2012 book, since it appeared in print simultaneously with my own article.  Nyborg also cites the contrary IQ evidence of twin/adoption studies, which I had already addressed at length in my own article.

He describes “the Strong IQ Hypothesis” as a “straw man” position, an “imposter” which “obviously runs counter to all behavior genetics evidence,” and I would certainly agree with those charges.  But just because a hypothesis is patently absurd does not mean it may not be widely held or promoted in certain circles, and my entire article was merely intended to demonstrate that absurdity.  Meanwhile, I pointed out that “the Weak IQ Hypothesis” seems perfectly consistent with all evidence, and if that is actually the position of Lynn and Nyborg, then we should have no major disagreement.

I am also very glad that Nyborg emphasizes that Lynn and his co-author stand as “undisputed and widely respected leaders of the field” of IQ studies.  Some of my critics have grown very concerned over the major anomalies I have highlighted in Lynn’s data and have begun suggesting that by focusing my attention on Lynn’s work, I was unfairly attempting to discredit the entire field of IQ research.

Finally, I do regret the nasty personal attacks and misrepresentations which Nyborg, Lynn, and many of their allies have endured.  But given the many hundreds of caustic insults and harsh denunciations I have recently received from Lynn’s energetic admirers, I would suggest that there might be two sides to this story.

Is It "Game Over"?

The American Conservative • August 10, 2012 • 1,100 Words

Given the vast outpouring of agitated and angry remarks by those bloggers and commenters whose long-cherished beliefs have been challenged by my Race/IQ article, it’s always very nice to discover a supportive voice, even if I might not necessary agree with absolutely every single point made.

For example, Jason Antrosio’s popular academic blog “Living Anthropologically” just yesterday published a lengthy analysis of my article and the controversy it had generated under the very flattering title “Race IQ—Game Over.” The author, a professor of anthropology on the East Coast whose blog has accumulated a remarkable 8,800 Likes, suggested that my analysis might constitute a far more effective refutation of the “strong hereditarian IQ position” than those previously made by such notable academics as Jared Diamond and Stephen Jay Gould, whose “extremely weak rebuttals…would be dismissed, in a kind of ‘that’s all you have?’ sort of way.” He now suggests that individuals seriously challenged by racialists on the topic “can declare game over on Race/IQ—see Unz 2012.”

After all, my “research” had largely consisted of reading the books and data of Richard Lynn and his allies, and pointing out that the actual evidence seemed to directly contract the sweeping theory they seemingly advanced, making it quite difficult to challenge my arguments without abandoning Lynn’s data and methodology; and these have long constituted the central core of the racialist framework for cross-national IQ studies.

Indeed, some of my critics have already taken this exact route. For example, anthropologist Peter Frost seems to be arguing that almost none of the world’s IQ or even quasi-IQ data (PISA, Wordsum) is reliable enough for us to draw any ethnic conclusions whatsoever— we jus’ don’ know nuthin’—a position which would seem to place him very close to the Gouldians in ultimate conclusions.

My own position is far less extreme, and also less conclusive than Antrosio’s sweeping appraisal. I am merely arguing that there seems overwhelming evidence against the “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” but also admitting that a “Weak IQ Hypothesis”—which suggests a much more limited genetic influence upon IQ—remains perfectly consistent with all the available evidence, whether or not it actually happens to be true.

Consider once again the telling case of Ireland—English-speaking, culturally and socio-economically West European, and located right next door to Britain, which had controlled it for many centuries. Based on Lynn’s research, there seems overwhelming evidence that the Irish IQ was nearly a full standard deviation lower than the British IQ around 1970, but has now seemingly converged, at least based on PISA results and per capita GDPs, representating a rate of change totally absurd from any genetic or plausibly biological perspective. Furthermore, this pattern of rapid convergence is supported by quite a number of intermediate IQ scores during intervening decades provided by Lynn, and is also totally consistent with the above-average IQs of (self-identified) Irish-Americans.

None of this proves that the Irish and British have precisely the same innate potential IQ. Perhaps the Irish are a bit brighter than the British, or perhaps they are a bit dimmer, and presumably this could be determined by various types of exhaustively controlled experiments. But it seems extremely unlikely that such innate differences—if they do exist—accounted for more than a small fraction of the vast 13 point IQ gap which just recently separated the two populations. Some other external factor, very possibly huge differences in urbanization, was the probable explanation.

Similar, though somewhat less extreme evidence of relatively rapid changes in tested IQ apply to many other major European peoples, such as the South Italians, Greeks, South Slavs, Germans, and Dutch, changes which also seem highly unlikely to have a primarily biological explanation. If South Italians and Greeks are far dimmer than the Dutch in Europe, but far brighter in America, while this same exact reversal occurs between South Slavs and Germans in those two locations, genetic factors hardly seem the most plausible explanation. And if “environmental” factors of whatever type can account for such huge differences between separated populations which are relatively close in culture and socio-economic conditions, we should be quite cautious in quickly affixing a genetic or biological explanation to Lynn’s often small and perhaps unrepresentative IQ samples from desperately impoverished Third World countries such as the Congo, Ethiopia, or Bangladesh.

Thus, I am hardly ruling out all possible genetic or biological explanations for IQ differences, but merely arguing that these usually seem far smaller than Lynn and his ardent admirers appear to believe, especially in those cases—such as among relatively affluent European populations—in which our actual data seems most solid and reliable, and least likely to be heavily distorted by horrific levels of physical and cultural deprivation.

Obviously, such nuances in my analysis are hardly recognized by the throng of angry “Lynnists” found all around the Internet, for whom a biological explanation of IQ seems like an all or nothing matter. For example, one racialist blogsite has now published almost a dozen separate posts on my article, attracting a vast number of angry comments and commenters. The latest, which focused once again on the contentious issue of Irish IQ, has already attracted almost 100 comments, some more useful than others.  Jason Malloy, a prominent IQ commenter, claims to have personally reviewed the huge 1972 study suggesting a very low Irish IQ, and judged it well done and seemingly quite reliable. Meanwhile, a particularly “excitable” commenter slurred Lynn as obviously being a fanatic anti-Irish bigot, whose KKK- or Nazi-style hatred of the Irish rendered his Irish conclusions worthless; but the same good fellow seems to still totally accept all of Lynn’s similar research results for non-white populations.

Finally, I was very pleased to see a lengthy and excellent discussion of my article by Ron Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason Magazine, America’s leading libertarian publication. While I’m obviously gratified to receive such a vast outpouring of (admittedly rather hostile) attention on somewhat obscure racialist blogsites, I’m also hoping that my arguments will eventually begin reaching a broader audience as well, and certainly the coverage in Reason.com is an important step in this direction.  And I was also pleased to see another another lengthy overview of the dispute by Tom Schoenfeld, a neurobiologist whose blog focuses on issues of “Public Science.”

I certainly wouldn’t say the Race/IQ debate is “Game Over,” but at least things do seem to be moving in the right direction.

Irish IQ & Chinese IQ

The American Conservative • August 14, 2012 • 1,700 Words

One of the many surprises I’ve encountered when reading the dozens of web pages and many hundreds of comments attacking my Race/IQ analysis is the overwhelming focus of these critics upon my Irish data. Although I discuss similar ethnic IQ evidence regarding the Greeks, Balkan Slavs, Southern Italians, Dutch, Germans, and various other European peoples, it sometimes seems like the attacks on my Irish analysis are more numerous than those against all these other cases combined, perhaps even if we also throw in all the examples dealing with East Asians and every other non-Irish race on the planet.

One obvious explanation might be the possible ethnic origins of many of these anonymous racialist bloggers and commenters. For example, when I pointed out that Lynn had devoted many years of personal research in Ireland and eventually concluded that they were clearly a low-IQ race, several commenters angrily denounced Lynn, one going so far as to call him an anti-Irish bigot of KKK- or Nazi-like proportions. But if so many people want to attack the Irish Front of my analysis, and suggest I’m just dishonestly cherry-picking the data to fabricate a fraudulent case, perhaps we should indeed take a closer look at the Great Irish IQ Question.

First, Lynn was hardly unique among leading IQ experts in characterizing the Irish as being low IQ. For example, Hans Eysenck, one of the foremost IQ researchers of the 20th century said exactly the same thing in his 1971 book “Race, Intelligence, & Education,” claiming that the Irish IQ was very close to that of American blacks, and that the Irish/English IQ gap was almost exactly the same size as the black/white gap in the U.S., being roughly a full standard deviation. Eysenck’s stated position unsurprisingly caused a considerable furor in the British media, including all sorts of angry responses and even (facetious) threats of violence. So the huge and apparently well-designed 1972 study of 3,466 Irish schoolchildren which placed the mean Irish IQ at just 87 hardly seems an absurd outlier.

But let’s explore the Irish IQ data in a more systematic fashion. Although Lynn has inexplicibly dropped that 1972 study in his latest 2012 book, this new volume otherwise contains a plethora of additional Irish IQ studies, displaying a wide variety of results. Indeed, when we consider the total number of Irish studies–10–and the total aggregate sample size—over 20,000 individuals—we discover that Lynn provides us with more aggregate test data on the IQ of Ireland than for any other country in the entire world. Furthermore, since Lynn used British scores for normalization, and Ireland is geographically and culturally an immediate British neighbor as well as English-speaking, British tests could presumably be used without modification, reducing the risk of language or cultural bias during the translation process. Thus, I think a case can be made that we have more reliable information about the recent IQ history of the Irish than that of any other people in the world.

And what does that information tell us? Here is the complete listing of all IQ studies provided by Lynn (omitting his careless duplications), including sample-size, year, and Flynn-adjusted score, to which I have added a 2009 IQ of 100 based on the recent PISA results, which were almost identical to those of Britain:

- 96 (1964) = 90

- 3466 (1972) = 87

- 1361 (1988) = 97

- 191 (1990) = 87

- 2029 (1991) = 96

- 1361 (1993) = 93

- 2029 (1993) = 91

- 10000 (2000) = 95

- 3937 (2009 PISA) = 100

- 200 (2012) = 92

Now to my eye, this list of datapoints indicates a clear and obvious rise in Irish IQ, during which the gap to British scores steadily dropped from 13 points in 1972 to zero in 2009. But since my critics will surely say I’m as blind as a bat, I also took out my statistical toolkit and ran a weighted-correlation on the data, comparing year with IQ and weighting by sample size. The result was a correlation of 0.86. Indeed, the pattern is so robust that even if we drop the 2009 PISA score since “it’s not really IQ,” the correlation scarcely changes. Obviously, if tested Irish IQs were innate and unchanging as so many seem to claim, the correlation would have been 0.00, a very different value.

Within the social sciences, a correlation of 0.86 is extraordinarily high, almost implausibly so. The inescapable conclusion is that Irish IQs rose at an almost linear rate during the three or four decades after 1972.

Why this occurred is an entirely different matter. I find it extremely difficult to think of a plausible biological explanation, though others are welcome to try. During this exact period, Ireland was undergoing a very rapid rise in urbanization and affluence, and I’d suggest those factors. Perhaps there’s some other cause instead. But the empirical rise of Flynn-adjusted Irish IQ by nearly a full standard deviation in 37 years seems proven fact.

This rapid convergence between Irish and British IQs should hardly surprise us. According to the GSS, the Wordsum-IQs of (Catholic) Irish-Americans rank among the very highest of any white ethnic group, with a value almost identical to that of their British-American ethnic cousins.

Meanwhile, some equally important evidence has suddenly appeared regarding the separate question of Chinese IQ.

In my original companion article, I presented Lynn’s two dozen samples for East Asians and noted the remarkable fact that virtually all of the IQ results came in at or somewhat above 100, despite the desperate poverty and low socio-economic status of many of the populations when tested. I also pointed out that the Flynn-adjusted national IQs remained approximately constant over the decades, despite massive changes in national wealth and development.

These patterns were totally different than those of European-derived populations, and I hypothesized that for some biological or cultural reason, East Asians were relatively immune to socio-economic deprivation compared to Europeans. Lynn’s latest 2012 book more than doubles the number of such East Asian IQ samples, and these completely follow the same same pattern, strengthening my hypothesis.

Put another way, suppose we examine the many hundreds of national IQ samples collected by Lynn and restrict our attention to those from deeply impoverished and/or overwhelmingly rural populations. Virtually every such East Asian case comes in at or well above 100, while scarcely a single such non-East Asian population scores anything close to 100.  The worldwide bifurcation between East Asians and other groups seems almost absolute.

However, a closer examination of the underlying data later led me to consider that the evidence was possibly less strong than I had originally imagined. The vast majority of the East Asian IQ studies reported by Lynn include few details of the circumstances under which they were conducted, but those that do almost invariably turn out to be based upon urban samples, and hence are not necessarily representative of national scores. This raises the possibility that most of the remainder were similarly urban. Whether my IQ urbanization hypothesis is correct or whether cities merely attract brighter people, it is well known that urban populations usually tend to have higher IQ scores, so if the East Asian IQ data did turn out to be almost entirely, any ethnic conclusions would be weakened.

As a related example of this, when the international academic PISA scores were announced last year, the 15M Chinese megalopolis of Shanghai ranked at the absolute top, with scores averaging far above those of any nation in the world, drawing some attention. Since PISA scores are a crude proxy for IQ, Shanghai was estimated to score a very high 111, but as China’s most elite urban center, it was almost certainly a major national outlier, and not to be taken as a fair comparison to national averages elsewhere. (The same was true for the high IQs of Chinese city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong). Although there were hints that China’s larger scale PISA scores were also very strong, these were merely hints.

However, that has all now changed, as blogger Anatoly Karlin has located the 2009 PISA scores for a dozen major provinces on the Chinese Internet, and published a lengthy post presenting and analyzing them. These scores are indeed truly remarkable, and completely confirm the apparent pattern of Lynn’s IQ samples, in which desperately poor East Asians tend to score at or above the levels of the most successful and well-educated Western populations.

The twelve provinces whose scores were released do include several of China’s most developed and best performing areas, including Beijing, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, as well as Shanghai, so the average is probably a bit above that for the country as a whole. But since the total population is at least well into the hundreds of millions, heavily rural as well as urban, the average PISA score of 520—corresponding to an IQ of 103—cannot be too dissimilar from the overall Chinese figure. And with China’s per capita GDP still only \$3,700 and well over half the population still living in rural villages when the tests were conducted, these are absolutely astonishing results.

For example, the reported Chinese PISA scores are far above those of the United States and nearly every European country, many of which are almost totally urbanized and have incomes ten times that of China. Even if we attempt to exclude Europe’s less affluent and lower-performing immigrant populations, and consider only the PISA averages for native Europeans, China’s numbers were exceeded only by the natives of Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. Consider that this performance was achieved by a country which was still mostly rural, and whose rural incomes averaged little more than \$1000 per year.

Although opinions may certainly differ, I regard this new evidence as very strong support for my “East Asian Exception” hypothesis. I believe it is almost unimagineable that any non-East Asian population of rural villagers with annual incomes in the \$1000 range would have tested IQs very close to 100. Just consider the generally dismal IQ scores we find in Southern Europe, the Balkans, Argentina, and Chile, where incomes are often ten or twenty times that level.

We would certainly expect Chinese numbers to rise further as the country continues to develop, but my point is that East Asian IQs seem to possess a uniquely high floor compared with those of any other population group.

Needless to say, I feel no need to retract any of the conclusions from my previous article China’s Rise, America’s Fall.

Finally, here are links to some interesting recent posts on my overall analysis, spanning the range of debate, commendation, and distortion with bitter denunciation:

- New Mexico, Gregory Cochran/Westhunter

- Look Mom I’m in The American Conservative (on Race/IQ), Jason Antrosio/Living Anthropologically

- The Unbelievable Ron Unz, HBDChick

A Coda on Mexican-American IQ

The American Conservative • August 27, 2012 • 1,000 Words

Although the claims regarding Irish IQ had unexpectedly attracted so many of the angry attacks on my recent Race/IQ series, it seemed quite obvious to me that this represented merely a stalking-horse for the related question of Mexican IQ.

In my original article, I had pointed out that up to the early 1970s, both Mexicans and Ireland Irish had identically low IQs, and perhaps coincidentally both were impoverished, heavily rural populations. However, in the decades which followed, Ireland had grown more affluent and urbanized, and Irish IQ had rapidly risen, eventually reaching a value almost identical to that of the neighboring British. I then noted the bits of evidence that the IQ of American-born Mexican-Americans had also apparently been rising at a similarly rapid pace, perhaps propelled by similar gains in socio-economic and urbanization factors. Since massive recent immigration has rendered the data on the Mexican-American portion of this analogy somewhat fragmentary and inconclusive, my critics naturally focused their most intensive fire on the Irish side, denying any large change in the local IQ; but an exceptionally strong correlation of 0.86 seems now to have decisively resolved this dispute in my favor.

In the most recent iteration of this debate, I mentioned that Hans Eysenck, one of the leading psychometricians of the 20th century, had apparently discussed the well-known facts of low Irish IQ in his 1971 book Race, Intelligence, and Education.  Although the quotes I found seemed quite reliable, I decided to confirm them for myself, and for \$6.40 (plus \$3.99 shipping and handling) ordered his book from Amazon. When the copy arrived, I was disappointed to discover it contained no index, so I just began browsing through the contents to find the Irish references.

These were indeed exactly as had been claimed. Citing older research studies not mentioned in more recent texts, Eysenck described the Irish/British IQ gap as being almost identical in size to the black/white IQ gap in America, and provided several half-plausible explanations of why the Irish might have become an innately low intelligence population (pp. 127-128). The entire discussion ran merely a page or two, but given Eysenck’s stature in the field it undoubtedly represented the conventional academic wisdom of his day.

However, in skimming the book in search of those references, I discovered several far more interesting and surprising items.

First, Eysenck casually mentioned the fact that Americans of Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ancestry had very low IQs compared to their separated European cousins, and suggested that this was because the least intelligent members of those ethnic groups had immigrated to America (p. 47-48).  Yet just forty years later, that pattern has completely reversed itself, with the children or grandchildren of those same American ethnicities now having far higher IQs than their stay-at-home European relatives. So these days, the explanatory “Just So Story” has switched polarity, and we are asked to assume that it was only the brightest Greeks and South Italians who took ship for the New World.  Explanatory arguments which reverse themselves every generation or two hardly acquire great credibility in the process.

But even more remarkable was Eysenck’s long and detailed discussion of Mexican-American IQ (pp. 120-127). Although he mentioned that the scores themselves were well below those of white schoolchildren, he explained that a close examination of the pattern of the results across different types of tests and circumstances indicated that this particular gap was very likely due to factors of socio-economic or cultural deprivation, perhaps magnified by language problems, and that the underlying intelligence of Mexicans was probably pretty close to that of whites. Therefore, he predicted that the Mexican IQ would converge to the white value as social conditions improved, which was exactly what my fragmentary evidence seemed to indicate.

Worse still for my critics, Eysenck’s discussion had been drawn directly from the work of Arthur Jensen, who had conducted detailed research studies on the question of Mexican-American intelligence and had similarly concluded that the IQ gap with whites was overwhelmingly “environmental” in origin. Now I claim no great expertise in IQ matters, but those who do seem to regard Jensen as one of the most towering figures in the history of their academic discipline.

Presumably, this might place my numerous and noisy IQ-activist critics in a bit of a quandary. My strong impression is that Jensen and Eysenck rank as perhaps the Marx and Engels of their movement, and suddenly purging them both on charges of Gouldist-deviationism would surely constitute an ideological earthquake, vastly greater in magnitude than that of the Moscow Purge Trials or Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” on Stalin. Yet for my critics to admit they’d never bothered consulting the past pronouncements of their intellectual idols might also be quite embarrassing.

Naturally, such difficulties are non-existent for those individuals whose overweening self-confidence leads them to lob endless casual insults all across the Internet while regarding the evidence of their anecdotal personal experiences in New Mexico as vastly superior to my quantitative analysis or perhaps even the detailed IQ research of Prof. Arthur Jensen.

Lastly, this once again demonstrates the enormous potential value of occasionally examining the contents of old books and articles, as opposed to simply relying upon the echo-chamber effect of reading columns produced by ideological websites or bloggers, most of which tend to quote each other back and forth, often with diminishing reference to external reality.

And on a totally unrelated matter, the Wall Street Journal just ran a major article on the difficulties of teaching students from a non-English speaking family background, and the various suggestions of educational experts for improving this process. Although the article was quite detailed, I noticed the total absence of a certain two word phrase, which surely would have been central to any such discussion just a dozen or more years ago. Ironically enough, I suspect that the younger readers of this column don’t have the faintest idea of what I mean.

Super-Flynn Effects in Germans, Jews, and Hispanics

The American Conservative • September 10, 2012 • 1,000 Words

Although the vast majority of the angry responses greeting my Race/IQ article focused on a few of the ethnicities I had examined—Irish, Mexicans, Italians—my coverage had actually been quite broad, and I presented a large number of IQ gaps whose existence seemed inexplicible from a strictly genetic perspective.

Indeed, the first example I cited was the case of Germany, which showed a consistent IQ gap of 5-10 points between East and West, despite the two populations being genetically indistinguishable. Since Communist East Germany was dreary but hardly suffered from Third World levels of malnutrition or physical deprivation, I argued that a biological cause was unlikely, and that the difference was therefore almost certainly due to socio-economic or cultural factors.   Naturally, my critics either ignored or ridiculed my analysis. The central argument of my piece had been that although GDP and IQ were highly correlated, the direction of causality might well be from the former to the latter, and this attracted much derision.

Fortunately, scientific research moves forward, and INTELLIGENCE, a leading academic journal, has just now published an article establishing that exact result.  The study examined the IQ scores of hundreds of thousands of German army conscripts from the eastern and western portions of the newly unified country, as well as the regional scores on the international PISA academic exam. Over a period of just a few years, the eastern Germans showed dramatic IQ gains, bringing them into complete convergence with their western German cousins, far too rapidly for any biological or genetic factors to have operated. The journal article itself is behind a paywall, but is accurately summarized by the Abstract:

Economic, Educational, and IQ Gains in Eastern Germany 1990-2006, Eka Roivainen, Intelligence, Nov/Dec 2012

Abstract: Lynn and Vanhanen [2012] have convincingly established that national IQs correlate positively with GDP, education, and many other social and economic factors. The direction of causality remains debatable. The present study re-examines data from military psychological assessments of the German federal army that show strong IQ gains of 0.5 IQ point per annum for East German conscripts in the 1990s, after the reunification of the country. An analysis of IQ, GDP, and educational gains in 16 German federal states between 1990 and 1998 shows that IQ gains had a .89 correlation with GDP gains and a .78 correlation with educational gains. The short time frame excludes significant effects of biological or genetic factors on IQ gains. These observations suggest a causal direction from GDP and education to IQ

Allow me to repeat the concluding sentence of the Abstract of this peer-reviewed academic article: “These observations suggest a causal direction from GDP and education to IQ.”

On another matter, the vast quantity of Richard Lynn’s IQ scholarship had rather overwhelmed me, and during the preparation of my own Race/IQ article I had merely read two of his major IQ books, plus a few other writings. Then, during the back-and-forth disputes which followed, I examined three more of his IQ books. But only now have I finally gotten around to reading his 2011 book The Chosen People, dealing with Jewish IQ issues. In doing so, I immediately discovered a very interesting result.

On pp. 273-279, Lynn performed an exhaustive literature search for all Jewish IQ studies in America, and presented the 32 examples he found, ranging in date from 1920 to the present day. He then noted the intriguing fact that Jewish IQs had substantially risen relative to white gentile scores during the course of the 20th century. Jewish IQ had averaged 101.5 in the first 14 studies from 1920-1937, then 107 in the nine studies from 1944-1960, and finally 111 in the last nine studies from 1970-2008. All these results had been separately normed against a fixed IQ of 100 for the average white population.

A relative rise of 10 IQ points over just eighty-odd years in America seems unlikely to have any biological or genetic explanation, so it must be cultural or socio-economic in origin, hence an example of what I call the “Super-Flynn Effect.” Presumably, the underlying factors are somewhat similar to those which produced Ireland’s rise of 13 IQ points in the three decades after 1972, or the 15-20 point relative rise in the very low 1920s IQs of Greek, Italian, and Slav immigrants to America, or the recent rise in Mexican-American IQs.

Finally, although my critics have repeatedly disputed my claims for a rapid recent rise in the IQs of American Hispanics, I’ve now discovered an additional bit of evidence to support my case. A few months ago, I’d read The Price of Admission by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Daniel Golden. He documents the totally dishonest and unfair admissions practices of America’s elite universities, which seem to allocate their spots through an unsavory mixture of “ethnic diversity” and financial corruption, and his outstanding book was almost universally praised all across the ideological spectrum. According to Golden, about the only American college which seems to admit students strictly based on academic merit is Caltech, the California Institute of Technology.

Now according to incoming student test scores and National Merit Scholar percentages over the last few years, four American universities stand right at the top in student ability—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Caltech, with Caltech probably being first among equals. HYP selects their students based on Diversity+Corruption, while Caltech relies upon academic merit, but when I examined their undergraduate ethnic distribution, the Hispanic percentage at Caltech was 8%, exactly the same as Harvard and Princeton, and only a touch below Yale. Furthermore, the Hispanic percentage at Caltech had been rising quite rapidly over the last decade, at a faster pace than at HYP. All these figures only include American Hispanics rather than foreign students, and can be easily obtained from The National Center for Educational Statistics.

In addition, MIT probably ranks #5 in student scores, and also skews much more toward the meritocratic/non-corrupt side of the spectrum. And although it’s located in one of the least Hispanic regions of the country, MIT has almost twice the percentage of Hispanic undergraduates as HYP. (Stanford’s Hispanic enrollment is similar to that of MIT, but since Stanford follows the HYP admissions system, its evidence is less strong.)

If Hispanics today still had the low IQ scores my critics allege, I believe these Caltech and MIT enrollment figures would be wildly implausible.

The Entire Series and Debate

The American Conservative • October 10, 2012 • 800 Words

With my long sequence of articles and columns on Race/IQ having now apparently wound to a close, I thought I’d provide a full collection of the entire series and accompanying debate for convenient future access, not least for myself.

Running almost a dozen separate items across nine weeks and totalling some 23,000 words, the pieces certainly helped to expand my own limited knowledge of the topic in question, and also brought me into contact with a wide variety of (overwhelmingly hostile) websites and bloggers of which I’d previously been unaware. The thousands of (overwhelmingly hostile) comments I received were also quite enlightening.

Normally, I would include a very brief summary of every item, but in this particular case the list was so enormously long, interested readers will be forced to rely upon the usually self-descriptive titles instead. In one or two cases, my critics later realized they’d made a simple calculational mistake and after insulting and attacking me, later “disappeared” their rebuttals, rather than admit their error—those links are currently broken.  I also apologize in advance for the numerous hostile responses I’m sure I missed…but there were an awful lot!

Meanwhile, I’ve spent most of the last month working on a new and somewhat related research topic, namely the contours of America’s current “meritocracy” and especially the college admissions system by which it is largely created. The subject is actually much less innocuous than it might sound.

- Race, IQ, and Wealth, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, July 18, 2012

- The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, July 18, 2012

- Race, IQ, and Wealth, Steve Sailer/ISteve, July 18, 2012

- Has Ron Unz Refuted “Hard Hereditarianism”?, David Sanders/VDare.com, July 20, 2012

- The new Ron Unz piece on IQ, Tyler Cowen/Marginal Revolution, July 21, 2012

- No Mexican Flynn Effect (or Ron Unz is no longer credible), Occidentalist, July 21, 2012

- Ron Unz Dismantles Racial Explanations of IQ, Victor Ganata, July 21, 2012

- Intelligence, Again, Alexandria, July 22, 2012

- Cities Make You Smart, Turbulence Ahead, July 22, 2012

- IQ and the Wealth of Nations?, Social Democracy for the 21st Century, July 22, 2012

- No Exception, Occidentalist, July 23, 2012

- Race, IQ and wealth: A preliminary reply, Political Correctness Watch, July 24, 2012

- Ron Unz on Race, IQ, and Wealth, Peter Frost/Evo and Proud, July 21, 2012, July 24, 2012

- Race/IQ: Rejecting the Ostrich Response, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, July 24, 2012

- Ron Unz and IQ, HBD Chick, July 25, 2012

- Hispanic Performance by Generation, Occidentalist, July 26, 2012

- Race/IQ: The Rural/Urban Divide, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, July 26, 2012

- More from Ron Unz on IQ, HBDChick, July 26, 2012

- Mexican-American IQ, HBDChick, July 26, 2012

- IQ Estimates from Wordsum Scores by Ancestry, Audacious Epigone, July 26, 2012

- Rural White Americans, HBDChick, July 27, 2012

- What Do IQ Differences Really Mean?, Josh Rothman/The Boston Globe, July 27, 2012

- Hispanics, the NLSY 97,  Occidentalist, July 28, 2012

- Did Ron Unz Score An Own Goal Too?, Anatoly Karlin, July 28, 2012

- Ron Unz’s Rural/Urban Data, HBDChick, July 28, 2012

- More on Race, IQ, and Wealth, Peter Frost/Evo and Proud, July 28, 2012

- Race/IQ: The Boston Globe Takes Notice, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, July 30, 2012

- Irish-American IQs, HBDChick, July 30, 2012

- Race and IQ, Balloon Juice, July 30, 2012

- Race and IQ: A Conservative Debunks, Andrew Sullivan, July 30, 2012

- Race, IQ, and Wealth, LewRockwell, August 1, 2012

- Race/IQ: Incorporating the Racialist Perspective, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, August 2, 2012

- Richard Lynn and Helmuth Nyborg Reply to Ron Unz, American Renaissance, August 2, 2012

- IQ and the Wealth of Nations: Richard Lynn Replies to Ron Unz, Richard Lynn/VDare.com, August 2, 2012

- Helmuth Nyborg’s Reply to Ron Unz, Helmuth Nyborg/VDare.com, August 2, 2012

- Professors Lynn and Nyborg Respond to Ron Unz, HBDChick, August 2, 2012

- Data? We Don’t Need No Data, Henry Harpending/West Hunter, August 3, 2012

- IQ Estimates from Wordsum Scores by Ethnicity and Community Type, Audacious Epigone, August 4, 2012

- Race/IQ: Response to Lynn and Nyborg, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, August 5, 2012

- The Case of the Missing Irish IQ Data, HBDChick, August 6, 2012

- Are Smart Countries Richer or Are Rich Countries Smarter?, Ronald Bailey/Reason.com, August 7, 2012

- Searching for Objectivity in the Nature vs. Nurture Debate, Dissecting Public Science, August 8, 2012

- Race IQ – Game Over: It Was Always About Wealth, Jason Antrosio/Living Anthropologically, August 9, 2012

- Race/IQ Is It “Game Over”?, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, August 10, 2012

- New Mexico, Gregory Cochran/Westhunter, August 10, 2012

- The Unbelievable Ron Unz, HBDChick, August 11, 2012

- Look Mom I’m in The American Conservative (on Race/IQ), Jason Antrosio/Living Anthropologically, August 10, 2012

- Race/IQ: Irish IQ & Chinese IQ, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, August 14, 2012

- Disagree With Ron Unz’s Conclusions on Chinese IQ, Anatoly Karlin, August 17, 2012

- Race/IQ: A Coda on Mexican-American IQ, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, August 27, 2012

- Tell Ron Unz It Is Not 1975, StatSquatch, August 29, 2012

- Redebunking Ron, Occidentalist, August 29, 2012

- Race/IQ: Super-Flynn Effects in Germans, Jews, and Hispanics, Ron Unz/The American Conservative, September 10, 2012

Race/IQ Revisited

The American Conservative • May 9, 2013 • 500 Words

For a combination of demographic and ideological reasons few topics in American public life are more explosive than those involving race.

Racial factors obviously underlie a wide range of major public policy issues yet are almost always ignored by nearly all participants. However, every now and then a careless statement or uncovered document will suddenly bring these subterranean flows to the surface, producing a volcanic eruption of white-hot controversy. Thus American politicians and policy analysts, knowingly or not, spend most of their careers walking through mine fields and occasionally blowing themselves up.

Consider the newly released Heritage Foundation report sharply criticizing the fiscal impact of the proposed immigration reform legislation currently being considered by Congress.  For a couple of days the focus had been on the green eyeshades issue of whether the multi-trillion-dollar claims had improperly failed to include dynamic scoring in their underlying econometric model.  But then the debate suddenly took an explosively controversial turn when the media discovered that co-author Jason Richwine possessed a long paper-trail of highly heretical racial views, especially with regards to IQ matters.

Racial differences constitute the intellectual pornography of our American elites, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a host of web journalists are now eagerly covering this prurient debate, which seems likely to overshadow any analysis of the original 92-page report itself. Most mainstream conservative pundits have been sharply critical of Richwine, but a few associated with the VDare webzine, such as Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire, have risen to his strong defense.

Now from a personal perspective, I have very mixed feelings about the proposed immigration legislation and haven’t followed the ongoing debate in much detail.  But less than 24 hours ago I noticed a huge upsurge in traffic to an article I’d published last year on racial IQ issues, and that caught my attention.

At the time it appeared my 7,500 word cover story had sparked a huge debate on the web, involving many dozens of overwhelmingly hostile responses together with nine follow-up columns of my own, totaling a further 15,000 words.  But with the notable exception of a short column in the Boston Globe, the entire mainstream media maintained a studious silence on such a taboo subject, and that greatly irritated me. So perhaps the current outpouring of media commentary on Race/IQ may finally provide timorous journalists with the excuse they require to actually investigate this important subject and perhaps bring some of the major conclusions to a much wider audience.

And by purest coincidence, the same Dr. Richwine had also been one of my principal interlocutors in 2010, when publication of my major article analyzing Hispanic crime rates had similarly provoked a raucous debate on the web, a debate that was similarly almost totally ignored by the mainstream media.

If my findings on these important topics now attract broader attention, I’ll be the first to congratulate our journalistic community, since late is always better than never.  And I’ll certainly owe a large debt of gratitude to the unfortunate Dr. Richwine.

The Jason Richwine Affair

Amid the fury over the ex-Heritage staffer's work the question to ask is: was he right?

The American Conservative • May 13, 2013 • 2,400 Words

Amid loud cries of “Witch! Witch! Burn the Witch!” an enraged throng of ideological activists and media pundits late last week besieged the fortress-like DC headquarters of the conservative Heritage Foundation, demanding the person of one Jason Richwine, Ph.D., employed there as a senior policy analyst. The High Lords of Heritage, deeply concerned about any possible threat to their million-dollar salaries, quickly submitted, though they waited until late Friday, the dead-zone period of national news coverage, before announcing that young Dr. Richwine had been expelled into the Outer Darkness.

Only a week earlier, Richwine had reached a pinnacle of his career, listed as co-author of a widely trumpeted Heritage research study demonstrating that Congressional passage of proposed immigration reform legislation would cost American taxpayers some six trillion dollars …or perhaps the figure was six quadrillion dollars.

But then some enterprising journalist discovered the dreadful evidence of Richwine’s horrific heresy, namely that his 2009 doctoral dissertation at the Harvard Kennedy School had focused on the very low IQs of those racial groups providing most of our current immigrants, with his conclusion being that such inflows must be halted lest American society be dumbified into disaster. Taken together Race and IQ constitute an exceptionally volatile mix in modern American society, and ignited by a six trillion dollar spark, the resulting explosion blew Richwine out of his comfortable DC employment.

Now it seems to me that Heritage’s reaction was a bit difficult to justify. After all, the title of Richwine’s dissertation had been “IQ and Immigration Policy” perhaps providing some slight hint that his topic had something to do with IQ and immigration policy. So the inescapable conclusion is that Heritage was perfectly willing to employ someone with Richwine’s racial views but only so long as the media and the public remained unaware. Last week the media found out, hence exit young Richwine.

However, the behavior of Richwine’s mob of media-tormenters seems just as reprehensible. Glancing over a few of the multitude of denunciatory columns I see little sign of any serious attempt to rebut rather than merely vilify poor Richwine. His attackers seem horrified that anyone might dare believe such heretical notions, rather than whether those beliefs are correct or incorrect. This absurd situation has certainly been noted by Richwine’s own legion of determined defenders, with blogger Steve Sailer citing this case as a perfect example of the recent American tendency to “speak power to truth.”

But in the famous words of Talleyrand, the approach followed by Richwine’s critics “was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” When a Harvard Ph.D. makes extremely controversial claims about race and intelligence and the main response is to lynch the messenger rather than dispassionately refute the message, the natural conclusion of reasonable onlookers is that Richwine may have been “politically incorrect” but he was factually correct. For example, David Weigel’s lengthy discussion in Slate seems to imply this perspective, and how can anyone blame him? If race and IQ constitute the sort of intellectual pornography never to be candidly discussed in respectable company then the primary sources of information and opinion become small brown-paper-wrapper websites, whose opinions on such ideologically-charged topics may or may not be wholly reliable.

I suspect that Weigel is merely one of many prominent journalists and media pundits who draw important portions of their world view from furtively exploring the nether regions of the Internet. After all, our reigning academic orthodoxy has insisted for decades that “race does not exist,” a scientific claim roughly equivalent to declaring that “gravity does not exist.” Hence, many younger journalists have come to doubt this palpable absurdity, and may often seek transgressive truths by reading the perspectives of various racialist bloggers, who unfortunately are often just as ignorant and mistaken as their orthodox opponents. The Washington Post and Slate.com are sister publications and there was the amusing spectacle of bloggers David Weigel and Jennifer Rubin taking diametrically opposite positions on the Richwine controversy, although neither apparently has the scientific or quantitative background necessary to evaluate the actual issues under dispute.

Having thus sketched the political atmospherics of the Richwine Affair, including the bad and self-damaging behavior of so many participants on all sides of the controversy, I should also discuss the substantive issues, namely whether Richwine’s views are right or wrong, and also my impression of the general quality of his scholarship in advocating them. My own background is in the hard sciences, and I prefer determining reality based on evidence and quantitative data rather than from ideological first principles. Personally, I’m less interested in whether Richwine’s views are “incorrect” than whether or not they are correct.

My first substantial encounter with Richwine came in early 2010 when I published a major article arguing that Hispanic crime rates in America were roughly similar to those of whites of the same age, a claim that naturally ignited a firestorm of hostility from various rightwingers. Although most of the attacks were merely vituperative, Richwine had recently undertaken major research on exactly that same topic and had come to polar opposite conclusions, so he soon became my strongest analytical opponent, resulting in a long series of very productive exchanges. Although he confined his critique to just one of the three or four major pillars of my case, he initially made some effective points. But after several rounds of debate and the discovery of additional evidence from California, I think most impartial observers concluded that my analysis was almost entirely correct. I urge all interested parties to read my original article and the series of lengthy exchanges with Richwine and others, and then formulate their own conclusions.

Richwine’s behavior during this lengthy debate was exemplary and the exchanges proved very useful in extending my own analysis.  And later that year we were both invited to reprise our arguments in a public debate at a major anti-immigrationist conference, where I met him for the first time.

As I mentioned earlier, an unfortunate consequence of Richwine’s intellectual martyrdom may be the widespread assumption among uninformed journalists that his various theories were probably correct, and indeed Weigel states that Richwine “demolished” my own analysis of Hispanic crime. But that is Weigel’s own error and I tend to doubt that he either read my article or the subsequent exchanges with Richwine before making such an erroneous claim. Perhaps the current controversy surrounding these racial issues may prompt the major media to more carefully compare my own arguments with those of my opponents, carefully weigh the evidence, and then bring the important conclusions to much wider public attention.

With regard to Richwine’s IQ arguments, last year I published a major 7,500 word article on exactly the same topic of Race/IQ, arguing that there was overwhelming evidence that the IQs of various ethnic groups were far more malleable and environmentally influenced than is widely believed by many of those interested in the topic. Once again, this article provoked a vast outpouring of angry commentary from various rightwing bloggers and pundits, probably the most uniformly hostile reaction I’ve ever received to anything I’d written. I responded to my multitude of critics in a long series of columns, totaling perhaps another 15,000 words. By the time the debate wound down, I think the accumulated evidence in favor of my position was absolutely decisive, and several of my strongest early opponents privately told me so, though I’m sure many of my angriest critics will never admit that.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media timorously avoided this explosive subject and almost entirely ignored the many tens of thousands of words produced during the long debate. Once again, perhaps the current Richwine controversy will provide the media a second opportunity to objectively review the topic and bring the important facts to a wider audience.

Richwine himself had not participated in last year’s heated Race/IQ debate and at the time I was only vaguely aware of some of his previous work on that topic. But the question of Mexican-American IQ was an important focus of my own analysis and taken together with some additional evidence that came out during the course of the debate, I would argue that the conclusions Richwine formed in his doctoral dissertation are almost certainly incorrect.

Obviously, it would be absurd for me to attempt to summarize nearly 25,000 words of my arguments in just a few sentences, and I urge all interested parties to read my material and decide for themselves whether my arguments are persuasive. But after quickly reviewing major sections of Richwine’s controversial doctoral dissertation, I would like to make a few important points.

First, he argues that the large IQ deficit of impoverished Hispanic immigrants is likely to inflict a long-term social disaster upon American society. However, it is well known that nearly all previous immigrant groups—southern and eastern Europeans—who came here in poverty similarly scored very low on IQ tests in the decades after their arrival, with results that were sometimes far below those of today’s Mexican immigrants. Yet after a generation or two their tested intelligence had almost invariably converged close to the American mean. Evidence of the past does not necessarily predict the future, but such a strong historical pattern should leave us cautious about assuming it will not continue.

In fact, Richwine specifically discusses the famous study by Carl Brigham, who concluded on the basis of the tests taken by WWI recruits that southern and eastern Europeans were drastically inferior in innate mental ability to America’s mostly northwestern European population and argued that their continuing immigration would produce a national disaster. Richwine rather cavalierly dismisses this historical analysis as having been based on poor testing methods and probably motivated by a belief in “bizarre …racial categories.” But Brigham was a highly regarded psychometrician and his careful research was widely accepted by nearly all the leading experts of that time. Having carefully read his book, I cannot find any serious fault with his methods nor any indications of unscientific bias on his part. Brigham may have been mistaken in his conclusions, but they seem to have been based on the best evidence and theory of his day.

Furthermore, Richwine chooses to ignore a vast amount of additional evidence from that same period, much of which was collected in Clifford Kirkpatrick’s important 1926 academic monograph “Intelligence and Migration.” Kirkpatrick provides page after page of separate studies demonstrating that during the 1920s the tested IQs of American schoolchildren of Greek, Slavic, Italian, and Portuguese ancestry were usually in the 75-85 range, and that Jewish schoolchildren sometimes performed just as poorly. These results are hardly obscure since they have been cited for decades by Thomas Sowell, and I think it is a serious scholarly lapse for Richwine to have essentially ignored them. Perhaps he simply believes that all IQ experts of a century ago were frauds and their empirical work should be dismissed, but if so, he should explicitly make that argument. Otherwise, we must accept that southern and eastern European immigrant groups had very low IQs a century ago and have average ones today, which is an extremely important finding. In fact, I have demonstrated that there is overwhelming evidence that various other group IQs have risen rapidly over time, and I also provided some strong indications that this exact process is already occurring among today’s Hispanic immigrants.

On another matter, Richwine must be aware that Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck rank as two of the greatest figures in twentieth century psychometrics. Yet decades ago both these scholars reviewed the structural evidence of Mexican-American IQs, and reached conclusions almost identical to my own, namely that the acknowledged gaps to white intelligence scores were largely perhaps almost entirely due to environmental factors and would steadily disappear as the population became more affluent and acculturated. Scientists should not argue from authority and Jensen and Eysenck might certainly have been mistaken, but it seems unreasonable for Richwine to never mention their contrary analysis.

Richwine’s doctoral work was performed at Harvard’s Kennedy School for Public Policy, which is separate from the main graduate school containing academic disciplines such as evolutionary biology, psychology, and sociology. The typical Kennedy School graduate receives a Masters Degree in Public Administration, and is often a mid-career government official, seeking to burnish his academic credentials. The three faculty members who evaluated Richwine’s dissertation—George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser, and Christopher Jencks—are noted social scientists, but with the possible exception of Jencks, who was apparently a late addition, none seems to have a strong background in IQ issues; otherwise, they surely would have brought the facts I have cited above to Richwine’s attention and required him to properly address them. And once the media mob began baying for blood, Richwine’s advisors immediately backpedaled on any familiarity with IQ issues and quickly disassociated themselves from the dissertation they themselves had approved.

Again, the fault is less Richwine’s or that of his advisors than the totally taboo nature of the topic in question. Even given the best of intentions and effort it is difficult to undertake solid research in a subject that few are willing to discuss in public and one in which there exists such widespread misinformation.

Several months ago a prominent liberal academic with whom I’ve become a bit friendly was horrified by my article speculating on the Social Darwinist roots of Chinese success, pointing out that my analysis so sharply deviated from the established description of reality promoted by Stephen Jay Gould. He also mentioned that several of his friends wondered why I seemed so “obsessed” with race.  I would argue that racial issues are an interesting and important subject, especially in a country as racially diverse as our own, but another factor behind my focus has been what I see as a dangerous vacuum of calm and reasonably informed discussion.  After all, if I don’t write about Hispanic crime, I shudder to think who else will.

Perhaps our major media might use the opportunity of this current controversy to begin covering racial subjects in a manner more substantive and thoughtful than just quoting endless exchange of smears and slurs. If so, then the intellectual martyrdom of Dr. Jason Richwine may have served a useful purpose.

Race/IQ Revised

The American Conservative • June 7, 2013 • 500 Words

Last year I published Race, IQ, and Wealth, presenting the overwhelming evidence that group IQs were far more malleable and shaped by social influences than is widely acknowledged in many quarters. The result was a lengthy and ferocious Internet debate, including an overwhelmingly negative and even hostile response to my suggestions, mostly by bloggers who had long specialized in that forbidden topic.

As the dozen or so rounds of the debate played out, some of my critics, including the most scholarly, began to acknowledge that my arguments actually had quite a bit of merit, and these “second thoughts” continued after the controversy had died down.

For example, late last year an erstwhile blogger-critic informed me that  he had discovered the precise details of the huge but hotly-disputed 1972 IQ study in Ireland that I had repeatedly cited, and the methodology seemed exceptionally well-designed and sound. Therefore, I think it can no longer be seriously disputed that just forty years the population of Ireland did indeed have a mean IQ of only 87.

The recent defenestration of the unfortunate Dr. Jason Richwine has brought these issues once again back to the fore, and apparently sparked renewed interest. During the previous debate, one of my earliest and strongest quantitative critics had been someone styling himself “The Occidentalist” and running a blog of a similar name. But a few days ago, he published an extremely detailed 5,000 word article entitled “The Argument Ron Should Have Made” in which he now grudgingly acknowledges that many of my central arguments seem to have been correct after all.  This is a welcome change from his original response last year, which had characterized me as “egregiously dishonest” and my views as “laughable commentary.”

As I’ve noted before, it’s a bit ironic to me that virtually all the significant debate on this important topic takes place without the substantive participation of the huge population of “anti-racist” intellectuals, who apparently confine their activities mostly to keeping their fingers firmly jammed in their ears while occasionally organizing employment blacklists of a few Richwines here and there.

Indeed, Steve Sailer, founder and leading figure in the racialist blogging community, yesterday posted an interesting item. Apparently a “leading academic” had contacted him and said he planned to introduce Sailer’s ideologically heretical material in his college course, but was wondering if there existed any remotely plausible arguments on the other side, anywhere on the Internet.

Sailer replied that as far as he knew, no one had ever significantly rebutted his own genetic-determinist theories on IQ or other matters, and that all the prominent intellectual figures who had once tried had long since abandoned their efforts as futile, recognizing that Sailer was entirely correct. To this posting, one of Sailer’s regular commenters replied “LOLOLLLOLOLOLOL!”.

Should Scientists Bother Reading the Books They Denounce?

The Unz Review • August 11, 2014 • 400 Words

The letters column of the Sunday New York Times Book Review carried a sharp attack on Nicholas Wade’s best-selling new book A Troublesome Inheritance by several individuals, organizers of a denunciatory public statement that they had persuaded some 139 prominent genetic scientists to sign.

Although these signatories may be credible experts in their own scientific fields, their participation revealed themselves to be total laughingstocks as public intellectuals, demonstrating that they had not even bothered to read the book they were so harshly condemning.

One of their central charges against Wade was that he had claimed that worldwide differences in IQ test results were due to recent natural selection and largely caused by genetic differences. Yet as Wade has now pointed out, he had actually made exactly the opposite suggestion, noting on pp. 192-3 of his book the strong evidence that large differences in worldwide IQ may be caused by environmental factors such as wealth and education, with changes in those conditions sometimes causing relative IQ rises of 10 or 15 points within just a single generation or so.

I am well aware of his position on this controversial topic because he had cited my own 2012 article Race, IQ, and Wealth as his source for this analysis.   In that long analysis and the series of a dozen or more columns that followed, I had provided the overwhelming empirical evidence against what I termed “the Strong IQ Hypothesis,” drawing primarily upon the data gathered by leading IQ advocates such as Richard Lynn.

Nicholas Wade is hardly an insignificant figure, being a longtime science editor and reporter at The New York Times and perhaps America’s foremost journalist on evolutionary matters, whose previous bestsellers have gathered almost universal praise.  Therefore, I find it very odd that his most strident critics apparently have not bothered to carefully read the book they were attacking.

One might suspect that the organizers of the vilification campaign perhaps quietly feared that Wade’s views were likely correct and that reading his persuasive book might reduce their zeal in criticizing it, much like the timorous ideological opponents of Richard Lynn had for years avoiding his writings, thereby failing to notice that he had scored a game-ending own-goal against his IQ-determinist theories.

In any event, I expect that this contretemps will at least quickly generate 139 additional book  sales for Wade, or at least 139 quick visits to local academic libraries by cheapskate scientists.