If you're so clever and rich, why aren't you happy?

[imomus]

Well, IQ has been largely discredited. Eysenck and the others who championed the system of measuring intelligence are out of fashion. These days we tend to say "IQ tests merely measure one's ability to take IQ tests". Well, those of us on the left, anyway. Of course, it's true that Wikipedia's entry on Intelligence Quotient does say that IQ "is taken by psychologists to be an excellent proxy for intelligence, and possibly the best measurable definition of intellectual ability", but they add that it's "generally not taken to represent intelligence perfectly".

Caveats like that are important when we come to the fraught, hot-button-scattered area of the correlations between race and intelligence. Wikipedia says:

"While the distributions of IQ scores among different racial-ethnic groups overlap considerably, groups differ in where their members cluster along the IQ scale. Some groups (e.g. East Asians and Jews) cluster higher than whites, while other groups (e.g. Blacks and Hispanics) cluster lower than whites."

This is borne out by stuff we're seeing in the news. "Europe's skills fall behind Asia", the BBC reported recently, citing a report published in Brussels by the Lisbon Council which says that Europe's 11.6 trillion euro economy is threatened by the fact that France and Germany "are no longer among the world's leaders in developing knowledge and skills" and are being overtaken by countries like South Korea.

Wikipedia's article on Race and Intelligence admits the controversy of such correlations, but doesn't deny they exist, and also makes clear another correlation: there are strong links between average intelligence and national wealth. "For example, a randomly selected group of Americans with an average IQ of 103 had a poverty rate 25% lower than a group with an average IQ of 100."

And, while it would be a mistake to equate education with IQ, it seems clear that where they're in sync, as in South Korea, they have a dramatic effect on the wealth of a nation. The graph on the right shows the "earnings dividend" produced by different levels of education in different countries. As you can see, getting a higher education more or less doubles your earnings in almost every country.

Again, it's South Korea which is the education star: 97% of South Korea's 25 to 34-year-olds today have high school education. That's the highest rate among the main industrialised countries.

This brings us to a book published in 2002 by Dr. Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and Dr. Tatu Vanhanen, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland. Incidentally, Finland is Europe's one success story in terms of educational investment and achievement, and it's showing in the nation's booming economy. And that's pretty much the message of the book these men wrote, IQ and the Wealth of Nations: that the average IQ of a nation correlates with its GDP.

The Wikipedia's article on the book gives us a handy Top 100 run-down of nations by their (estimated) average IQs. Here's the hot Top 25:

Hong Kong (PRC) 107
South Korea 106
Japan 105
Taiwan 104
Singapore 103
Austria 102
Germany 102
Italy 102
Netherlands 102
Sweden 101
Switzerland 101
Belgium 100
China 100
New Zealand 100
United Kingdom 100
Hungary 99
Poland 99
Australia 98
Denmark 98
France 98
Norway 98
United States 98
Canada 97
Czech Republic 97
Finland 97

At the bottom of the list we find a sad cluster of African countries: Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Congo-Kinshasa, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana... But wait, I say "sad" assuming that being rich and good at IQ tests makes you happy. But it isn't so. Not only have we been adamant in the past on Click Opera that richer isn't happier, we've also read the research that says that the world's happiest people live in Africa. In a survey of happiness published in New Scientist magazine in 2003 the country with the highest percentage of happy people was... Nigeria.

Comments

[harveyjames.livejournal.com]

FIRST!!!

[babyhands144.livejournal.com]

Maybe they are too dumb to know they are poor :)

[soundofwaves.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating!

[genghiscohen.livejournal.com]

Momus, do you appear as the unreliable tour guide each day the Whitney is open (and during all hours of operation)? Do art tourists get tourist pictures with you?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm there every day between about 2 and 5, and yes, photos can be taken, but not in the galleries, out on the stairs.

[siokaos.livejournal.com]

maybe it's that I was raised in a super-PC liberal utopia, but your jump from race to class in the fourth paragraph is a bit heavy. I'd have mentioned the socioeconomic factors before making that step.

good read tho

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is just a sketch of an argument that's huge. I also map race and nation rather too glibly here.

From the BBC today...

[mattcallow.livejournal.com]

...posh kids being taught how to be happy (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4915714.stm).

Re: From the BBC today...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Send them to Nigeria!

Actually, this all reverberates very interestingly with Rem Koolhaas' obsession with Lagos (http://imomus.livejournal.com/124794.html), "so bad it's good". But it makes clear the problem of politicians and advisors who champion happiness as the goal of politics: Richard Layard (http://imomus.livejournal.com/175376.html), for instance. If the Nigerians are the world's happiest people, do we start making our political institutions like theirs? Koolhaas clearly thinks we have something to learn from Lagos, but I don't know if anyone would model their political system on Abuja's.

The I'll move to Nigeria instead of London!

[nananaina.livejournal.com]

I don't think is matter of money i think is matter of sun!

I never asked myself where happiness came from but when i los it.

[glassplastic.livejournal.com]

Is there a correlation to religion in any of these articles? I remember reading in one of your other entries about Female Chauvanist Pigs an interview with the author where she said that young religios women were the ones most happy with sex, and, as an athiest, that made a lot of sense to me, as for me and fellow non-religious people, sex can only be sex (which is great), but for someone religious, it has all sorts of societal and spiritual meanings on top of it.

So would IQ work the same way? Would people with a direct religious belief system and non-existential view on teh world be naturally happier?

much happier cared-for and immortal

[mongoltrophies.livejournal.com]

the evident negative correlation between religiosity and intelligence (http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20&%20religion.htm)

Obvious

[pirateman.livejournal.com]

Hey, ignorance is bliss!

[(Anonymous)]

The New Scientist article (http://matus1976.com/eudaemonists/articles%20essays/persuiofhappiness_1.htm) mentioned how Nigerians tended to answer the survey with either extremely positive or extremely negative responses, whereas the Japanese, for example, tended to cluster near the middle. I wonder if that affected the statistic...? Another thing the article mentioned was the distinction between happiness and satisfaction. While Nigerians may have been the happiest, they were far from being the most satisfied. I personally would have a hard time disentangling happiness from satisfaction, but then again I live in a country where the two are probably more closely linked than elsewhere.

The statistic is especially interesting considering that in addition to being citizens of "the most corrupt nation," Nigerians are also often referred to as the "most distrusted." As one commentator pointed out, "It is common knowledge, that every Nigerian administration both military and civilian since 1970, has gone to great lengths to burnish its image abroad... So, if this new high happiness score is a government ploy, it was, to say the least, a very brilliant 419 caper." I don't necessarily think that the statistic is fabricated, however, as far as learning from Nigeria goes, I think Koolhaas is right; there is certainly a lot to be learned both from Lagos and from the Nigerian political system, but that obviously doesn't mean that either should be emulated.

eremi

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I find it rather odd that the effects of prenatal and postnatal nutrition hasn't been raised. Surely that has a profound effect upon the development of intelligence. There is a strong correlation between demographic groups with a higher poverty rate, poorer nutrition during those periods, and diminished intelligence. So, I think that relating intelligence to poverty is really just missing a stage.

Wikipedia states:
"The rates of low birth weight (LBW), defined as less than 5.5 pounds, are correlated with infant death...LBW babies are at risk for many developmental, behavioral and cognitive abnormalities, including mental retardation. LBW (and premature birth) affect Blacks at twice the overall rate for the U.S. population.

A study of LBW babies indicates that breastfeeding can significantly improve their IQ scores tested at 8 years old. After controlling for possible confounding factors, an improvement of 8.3 IQ points was found in the breastfed group as compared to the formula fed group. Black mothers are known to breastfeed infants less and for a shorter time than White mothers. Studies have shown IQ gains lasting into adulthood with increased duration of breastfeeding. Several recent studies shows that the intake of certain micronutrients, like those present in breast milk or fish oil, affects IQ scores even in developed nations. Helland et al have shown larger head size at birth and higher IQ scores at 4 years of age when mothers took fish oil supplements during pregnancy and lactation. Jensen believes that dietary supplementation is a promising avenue of research for raising Black children's levels of g. Lynn has proposed a nutritional hypothesis for the Flynn effect."

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

I, too, can make intellectually lazy conclusions to support my desired world view based upon correlating statistics:

1. Africa has more happy people

2. Africa has more armed conflicts

Conclusion? War = happiness.

posh-wrong punch up ?

[(Anonymous)]

he's an evader of all sorts, the momus pecks like a merry robin red breast from tree to tree,cultural tidbit, fat filled coconut, soaked with contra-seeds pecking away at cultures winter drawing, slowly fading away...but how about a posh arts showoff fight ? to show the distance between the aforementioned unwashed barbarions and the effete elite...? on the left we have momus all the trappings of a cultural arts upbringing and on the right we have the nasty shite slime chavvy kovac for all his nasty espousing he still does an arts unpopular punch....measure of men m'lud, quotes, blogs of daring, jack hammering masturbatory intellectual worth onto digital pages...surely a measure of measure on the worlds state of affairs...come roll up for the end of times...if only our poet in play was aware of the prose before him...cue the sounds of a 17th century lute..."and he fwarts and fwarts like thee he nonny pishe , prancing and dancing to the sound of the pood drumm...bishumy...." of course accompanied by C64 chip music.

Mensa

[(Anonymous)]

Has anyone noticed that whenever a (usually local) news programme features some super-intelligent kid with an IQ of hundreds who has just got into Mensa and studying for a degree at the age of about 13, he or she is nearly always shown in their bedroom proving their super-intelligence by reading bloody Ayn Rand? I think that says a lot about IQ tests.
I am not anonymous; I just haven't signed up. My name is S Parkin.

Re: Mensa

[(Anonymous)]

(Not that that will mean anything)

[tassellrealm.livejournal.com]

The idea that you can measure intelligence in this way, is itself not very intelligent.

The hippocampus is a muscle, and like a muscle, the more you use it, the bigger it gets.

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

The hippie-campus? Is that in San Fran?

a too personal response, as per usual

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

i haven't studied the IQ test techniques too closely, just a bit for psych courses, but I do know that when i was tested as a 5-year-old trying for admission at the best of New York City's private schools, I was rejected from many because I was too fickle/stubborn/solipsistic to adhere to the rules of the test. As in, if a question was something like, "which of these things is not like the other," I would refuse to answer because I felt none of the answers was to my liking, and would instead lauch into an imagery-rich tirade as to what would be a better response.

also, i wonder if this is the sort of test you can 'practice' for if you have the desire and resources, just as the SATs often measure how well you understand the SATs [my score jumped over 200 pts after studying a few practice tests]. of course, those scores have somehow magically been found to be relatively accurate indicators of future performance as well. ehh...

also #2, i ate Ethiopian food and drank Ethiopian beer yesterday, and perhaps these are something of an American invention, but they made me very happy.

blahblahblah,
mischa

self-important paralegals

[mongoltrophies.livejournal.com]

I'm told this type of practicing is one of the favorite pastimes of Mensa members--they "increase" their intelligence by constantly doing the kinds of puzzles that IQ tests use.
Now, while it's known that a person's intelligence does vary somewhat, and I'm sure that doing puzzles can't be bad for you (especially if you're young enough that your brain is still growing), the simplicity of becoming smarter by those standards I think may indicate what a narrow band of reasoning ability they measure.

[palux-negro.livejournal.com]

Like Richard Stallman said: Soviet union failed becose they didn't have fotocopiers. Africa don't have Internet.
I think the level of inteligence can be counted by the degree of how true is the word "fine" in "fine arts" and i can say that fine arts at my country are not so "fine".

[loverboy82.livejournal.com]

wasn't it photocopied "samizdat" which created an underground literary culture critical of the soviet government? africa could conceivably "get wired" but wouldn't there still be massive problems of starvation, AIDS and wars?

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Money is happiness lube.

i.q

[(Anonymous)]

happiness needs lube?

[desant012.livejournal.com]

I seriously thought IQ was debunked; at least, in the liberal arts and social sciences. I remember in anthropology the saying was "intelligence is plasticity".

I don't know, I get the stink of pseudo-Nazi WASPS who are the only ones who still cling to IQ ... it was a system designed specifically to weed out "inferior-gened" immigrants (Irish, Scottish, Polish, etc.) back in the cheery days of eugenics. Of course, that claim is coming straight from memory.

[myani.livejournal.com]

Just before hopping the plane straight to Nigeria, I had one quick thought. Japan is ranked #3 in average IQs and has an incredibly high GDP level, and even though they work too much and practice some of the "worst" habits (chain smoking and alcoholism), they still live longer and healthier than everybody else. That's certainly happy enough for me! Plus, I already speak Japanese...

I believe one of the main reasons why Europe's economies are being overtaken by countries like South Korea is because Europeans don't have the balls to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

That and they have huge social programs. But their standard of living is much better than the U.S.'s. I'm not sure I like our obsession with work-ethic.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

I really hated this entry. You imply cause and effect even while trying to side-step the issue. I think it's much more likely that IQ tests are measuring the mind-sets that come with various socio-economic class. Poor people tend to have lower IQs, but in my direct experience they're no difference in the nebulous mental capability I'd call intelligence.

Anyway, I call bullshit.

And you gave me a billion cool points with my guest from Ann Arbor. She loves you and really wanted to go to PS1 but they needed to get on the plane and didn't have any time. Anyway, she sends you a big hug. She was like, "You know Momus? THE Momus?"

I kept telling her that I didn't really 'know' you, but it didn't matter.

Oh yeah: Your friend was incredibly beautiful. Breath-taking, actually.

[atarashi.livejournal.com]

rubbish rubbish rubbish, i say, about this supposed correlation between racial groups and intelligence levels. first of all this only gives those biological determinists out there more ammunition, second of all this depends on the whole idea that race exists in fixed biological categories when we all know that nobody is 'purely' their race anymore, our DNA has been mixed throughout centuries.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

this only gives those biological determinists out there more ammunition

The trouble with implying, as I think you may be here, that all talk of biological determinism is inherently right wing is that it cedes to the right a vast territory of undeniable facts. It also works against programs aimed at restoring justice. Imagine a medical authority unable to allocate resources to black communities striken with above-average rates of sickle cell disease or diabetes because it refused to accept the "biological determinism" built into the evidence that these communities suffer disproportionately from these ailments.

This ostrich attitude illustrates the risk of putting equality of opportunity ideology above equality of outcome ideology. Equality of outcome ideology takes account of actual differences and corrects them by allocating resouces unequally (more to the less privileged, less to the more privileged). Equality of opportunity ideology simply refuses to recognize existing differences. It tends to allocate the same resources to everyone, regardless of their circumstances, or to assert that "everyone has the same chances in life".

The point?

[(Anonymous)]

I also call bullshit. IQ does not equal intelligence. At the same time, neither IQ or Intelligence have a direct correlation with happiness.

You can get better IQ scores simply by practising tests. Spend a week taking some, you'll improve. You probably won't be much smarter though, or know more about the world, or have any more common sense. But your IQ will be higher, so apparently you're more intelligent.

It's like studying maths or physics - the more you study, the better you'll do on your tests. Doesn't mean you have any brains though, just the ability to read, retain information, and regurgitate it.


And as I live in Hong Kong, and it seems to have the highest average IQ... well, I can pretty much say it doesn't have the most intelligent people. Sure, people are nice and well educated, but COMMON SENSE seems vastly lacking in Hong Kong (and South Korea when I've visited) compared to back home in the UK and Ireland. Part of the reason I think, is that Hong Kong kids live quite a cocooned life, studying for school, preparing for tests... so they score well, but when they graduate, they have a load of certificates, but barely enough common sense and smarts to find their way on a map, or organise well. That's a bit generalisation, there are many intelligent people in Hong Kong too, my girlfriend and friends among them, but there's definitely a few more clueless people than usual.

Oh, and don't Hong Kong and Finland have some of the highest suicide rates in the world? Personally I attribute that to the crowded city, 70 hour+ working weeks and plentitude of tall buildings (or darkness and alcohol, in Finlands case), rather than anything to do with IQ or money.

Re: The point?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

COMMON SENSE? Come now, surely we're all agreed now that that's a social construct, completely without scientific basis, and deeply conservative in intent. What's more, you can improve your common sense score by practising. That's just common sense, isn't it?

huh?

[loverboy82.livejournal.com]

you said finland was europes sole success and had a high IQ. but its down at the bottom of the top 25 with a whole bunch of other European counties above it.

so are you trying to make the point that altho asians are smarter&richer than whites are smarter than africans, the africans are happier?

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Why is there even a debate about this? It's easy to see right through the entire concept of IQ - it's based on nothing but arbitrary tests, and has a legacy as a vehicle for social architecture.

Academia doesn't even take IQ seriously anymore; even if psychologists do, nobody pays attention to them. This whole debate seems like it's built on a completely hollow foundation.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

It's odd how Momus didn't mention that averages tend to get pulled down by large masses of the willing and unwillingly uneducated. Europe, for example, has a wonderfully large number of Muslim immigrants that do not want education, do not want to assimilate and spend their time contemplating how to redecorate Europe in Medieval Arabic (read: stone women, slice off hands and murder anyone that doesn't toe the religious line.) In America, we have millions of immigrants whose children get free schooling and consistently underperform: every "I started out at the bottom and graduated from Harvard Medical School because I believed in myself" story has 10000 "I don't want to speak English or do anything but live here and enjoy your social welfare system" stories along with it...

Japan and South Korea and Hong Kong score high because they are racially and socially homogenized to a point that Western countries cannot emulate. IQ might be genetic, it might be situational, but when you get a bunch of racially homogenized people and package them into a homogenized system that emphasizes achievement in hard sciences and engineering, you get...SURPRISE...a quite homogenous product. I would love to see Japan try to handle California or New York City with its wonderful model that produces such well-educated people.


The point I'm making is: statisticians need to constantly generate mounds of reports and data so us real scientists won't kick them out to the woodshed behind the research labs.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

I think you would agree, that they should also include medians and modes, along with mean intelligence? An average only has limited accuracy. But alas, we would get nowhere if we spent all of our time comparing minute differences...

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

How do you answer the charge that outcome based ideology punishes producers?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."