Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Hive Mind
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/ * http://economics.gmu.edu/people/gjonesb * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garett_Jones
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2007019131
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2007019131
HEADING: Jones, Garett
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670 __ |a The impact of U.S. troop deployments on economic growth, 2005: |b t.p. (Garett Jones, Ph. D.) p. 4 (asst. prof. economics and finance, Southern Ill. Univ., Edwardsville)
670 __ |a Banking crises, 2015: |b ECIP t.p. (Garett Jones, George Mason University) data view screen (b. April 6, 1970)
PERSONAL
Born April 6, 1970.
EDUCATION:Brigham Young University, B.A. (with honors), 1992; Cornell University, M.P.A., 1993; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1994; University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., 2000.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Economist, educator, and author. Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, assistant professor of economics and finance, 2000-07; U.S. Senate, office of Senator Orrin Hatch, legislative assistant and economic policy adviser, 2002-03; U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, economist, 2004; University of California, San Diego, Department of Economics, visiting scholar, 2006-07; George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, Department of Economics and Center for Study of Public Choice, assistant professor, 2007-10, associate professor, 2010—, BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at Mercatus Center, 2009—. University of the Philippines, School of Economics, visiting professor, 2010; Russian School for Institutional Analysis, member of expert faculty, 2011; Academic Writing Workshop, sponsored by Elsevier and European Journal of Political Economy, faculty mentor, 2012.
AVOCATIONS:Backpacking.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals, including Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Intelligence, and Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics. Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, editorial board member, 2012—; Econ Journal Watch, coeditor, 2013—. New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, associate editor, 2010—.
SIDELIGHTS
In Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, economist Garett Jones lays out a case that while intelligent individuals may not always prosper, societies with a high average intelligence quotient, or IQ, will. He bases this on a broad range of research, and asserts that high-IQ nations will not only do better economically than low-IQ ones, they will also have better health, more education, and higher levels of cooperation. People with high IQs tend to be patient, a factor that benefits their nation’s savings rate, and to be well-informed voters, he writes. He also notes that people with high scores in one area of intelligence—say, mathematics—will generally score well in other areas, and that contact with intelligent people makes others smarter.
“I refer to this as the Da Vinci effect in the book–the idea that when you’re excellent in one area, that’s a reasonable predictor that you’re at least above average in other areas,” Jones told James Pethokoukis in an interview for the American Enterprise Institute’s Web site. “This is the most–perhaps the most robust finding in all of cognitive psychology–skills predict skills, weaknesses predict weaknesses, not perfectly but moderately.” Of the latter point, he told Pethokoukis: “We become a little bit like the people around us. So if you’re surrounded by people who are a little smarter, a little more patient, a little better informed, you yourself are likely to become a little smarter, more patient, better informed. So your peers matter at least a little bit everywhere.”
Jones writes that intelligence scores tend to be highest in eastern Asia and western Europe, and the countries to which people have migrated from those regions, such as the United States and Canada. For other parts of the world, he says, the challenge is to find ways to raise the collective IQ. People from lower-IQ regions who migrate to higher-IQ ones quickly benefit from their new surroundings, he says, and tend to become more productive and prosperous. He does not make a genetic argument for intelligence. “This isn’t a book about where IQ comes from,” he told Pethokoukis. “It’s a book about where your nation’s IQ takes you.”
Some critics thought Jones delivered valuable information in an accessible manner. Hive Mind “is persuasive and informative, but it’s also a model of good nonfiction writing,” remarked Adam Ozimek in Forbes magazine’s online edition. Jones eschews both academic jargon and personal anecdotes, and “by leaving aside filler like this and focusing on what you need to know, the book comes in at a slim 168 large text pages that truly fly by,” Ozimek observed. E.L. Whalen, writing in Choice, related that Jones offers “statistical evidence garnered from a wide variety of studies” but “spares the reader the technical details associated with statistical analysis.” Ozimek concluded: “Anyone interested in education, social science, or economics should read this book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, E.L. Whalen, review of Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, p. 1200.
ONLINE
American Enterprise Institute Web site, https://www.aei.org/ (January 12, 2016), James Pethokoukis, “Is America Smart Enough? A Q&A with Garett Jones on IQ and the ‘Hive Mind.’”
Counter Currents Publishing Web site, http://www.counter-currents.com/ (June 3, 2016), Howe Abbott-Hiss, review of Hive Mind.
Economist Online, http://www.economist.com/ (June 23, 2007), Bryan Caplan, “Garett Jones: A Very Intelligent Economist on Economics and Intelligence.”
Forbes Online, https://www.forbes.com/ (December 6, 2015), Adam Ozimek, “IQ Matters for the Economy.”
George Mason University Web site, http://www2.gmu.edu/ (March 27, 2017), brief biography and curriculum vitae.*
Garett Jones
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the macroeconomist. For the baseball player, see Garrett Jones.
Garett Jones is an economist (focused mostly on macroeconomics) holding joint titles of associate professor at George Mason University and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center.[1] He is associate editor of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics. He was a guest blogger for EconLog from September 2012 to April 2013. Jones' research has included monetary policy and its role in short-term business cycles, as well as IQ and its relation to productivity and economic development.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Academic career
1.1 Research on IQ and its role in productivity and economic growth
1.2 Research on money
2 Hive Mind
3 Blogger
4 Media appearances
5 References
6 External links
Academic career[edit]
Jones completed a B.A. in history with a minor in sociology from Brigham Young University in 1992. He did a M.P.A. in public affairs from Cornell University in 1993, followed by a M.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994. Jones completed a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, San Diego in 2000. After holding a number of visiting scholar and other academic positions, Jones joined the faculty of George Mason University in 2007.[2]
Research on IQ and its role in productivity and economic growth[edit]
Jones started his research on IQ in a paper with Schneider in 2006 that argued that IQ is a statistically significant explanatory variable of economic growth,[3] thus agreeing broadly with the thesis advanced by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in their book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. The chief observation that Jones made, and popularized, is that national IQs have much greater predictive power for individual earnings than the individual's IQ.
Jones' further research has been on identifying the causal mechanisms by which IQ might affect productivity and economic growth at a national level.[1] One mechanism posited by Jones is that smarter groups tend to be better at arriving at and enforcing norms of cooperation. Jones has used laboratory experiments involving repeated prisoner's dilemma, combined with the SAT scores of participants, to offer support for this hypothesis.[4] Jones has also suggested that patience and delayed gratification might offer an explanation.[5]
Jones has also argued that certain sectors requiring very high quality work and with very low error-tolerance can only exist and thrive given access to a high-IQ population, because in such sectors, it is not possible to replace a single high-IQ worker by multiple low-IQ workers and achieve the same output. Jones informally dubs such sectors "O-Ring sectors" in contrast to "foolproof sectors" where a larger workforce of people with lower productivity can produce the same output as a smaller workforce of people with high productivity.[6]
Jones offer a summary of his and others' research on the relationship between IQ and national productivity in an article for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.[7]
Research on money[edit]
Some of Jones' research has focused on the role of money, monetary policy, and mechanisms to reduce the risk of financial crisis.[1][8][9][10]
Hive Mind[edit]
Garett Jones wrote the book Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own which builds on his research on the relationship between IQ and national productivity.[11] It was released in November 2015 by Stanford University Press.
Blogger[edit]
In September 2012, Garett Jones joined EconLog as a guest blogger.[12][13] Jones has blogged about the works of many economists such as James Buchanan, Lant Pritchett, and others, often putting emphasis on under-appreciated aspects of their work and unorthodox conclusions that can be drawn from it.[14][15] Jones' blogging stint at EconLog ended in April 2013.[16]
In January 2013, Jones wrote two critical posts regarding how the calculation of gross domestic product favored wasteful government hiring and purchase decisions.[17][18] These were picked up across the blogosphere, including by Veronique de Rugy on the website of National Review.[19][20]
Media appearances[edit]
Garett Jones has appeared on TV and print media, typically in relation to his opinions on macroeconomic policy and financial crises.[21][22]
Garett Jones
BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism
The Mercatus Center
and
Associate Professor
Department of Economics
Center for Study of Public Choice
George Mason University
Curriculum Vitae (From Trudy--I cribbed from the CV; when I try to copy and paste it, it comes out as symbols. But it can be viewed here: http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/VitaJones.pdf
Associate Editor
New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
Editorial Board Member
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics
Co-Editor
Econ Journal Watch
Co-Host
Adam Smith Reading Group
email: jonesgarett@gmail.com twitter: GarettJones
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Books
Hive Mind: How your nation’s IQ matters so much more than your own, published by Stanford University Press. Now in paperback, and $9.99 on Kindle!
[Amazon] [Stanford UP]
“Anyone interested in education, social science, or economics should read this book...a model of non-fiction writing.' –Adam Ozimek at Forbes
“On balance this is a notable text—perhaps 2016’s most important economics book, both for the development specialist and the general reader.” –Economist Fred Thompson in Governance
“…[T]he book is excellent, and well worth reading…This is a model of concise explanatory writing.” –Economist Dietrich Vollrath
“#HiveMind is a bit of a Trojan horse. It strictly limits itself to uncontroversial statements, but leads to lots of uncomfortable questions.” –Economist Salim Furth
“…[I]f you only have time to read one economics book this year, make it Garett Jones’s Hive Mind…” –Economist Scott Sumner
“I must say, the finest fusion of economics and psychology is not some book on nudges or biases, but The Hive Mind by Garett Jones. It’s also the first time that differential psychology has been substantively applied by an economist to the questions of economic development and political economy.” –Pseudoerasmus.
“Summing up: Recommened. All Readers.” [Also ‘Community College Recommended’] -E.L. Whelan, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
The introduction, free here, offers an overview of Hive Mind’s thesis, as well as evidence for the Paradox of IQ. Chapter 1, also free, reviews the mainstream evidence that IQ tests are more than just a test score: Modern IQ tests predict brain size, reaction time, job performance, and emotional intelligence.
Stanford UP created a 3-page infographic that shows how your nation’s IQ matters more than your own: It sums up the core argument of Hive Mind. The PDF slides from one of my recent talks on Hive Mind are here.
Two podcast interviews about Hive Mind. Both discuss joint causation between IQ and income, the potential of genetic engineering, and more:
With Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute
With Simon Fraser University’s Garrett Petersen
And here, The Wall Street Journal tells the story of how I chose my book title.
Banking Crises: Perspectives from the New Palgrave Dictionary, editor, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
[Amazon] [Palgrave]
This collection of articles from the New Palgrave, the oldest encyclopedia of economics, offers a variety of serious perspectives of financial crises and their cure. From contributors like the post-Keynesian scholar Randall Wray to New Keynesian theorist Gauti Eggertson to the financial historian Charles Calomiris, the collection offers both historical, theoretical, and experimental takes on the recurring problem of fragile finance.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Biography
I was raised in Orange County, California, the proud son of a union pipefitter. After earning a BA in history from Brigham Young (with a sociology minor), an MPA from Cornell, and an MA in political science from UC Berkeley, I earned my Ph.D. at UC San Diego in 2000. My dissertation was on how the Federal Reserve can control short-run interest rates, and used accidental increases and decreases in bank reserves to estimate the economic effects of what we would now call quantitative easing.
I enjoy backpacking in the High Sierra and getting lost in Venice. In the past, I’ve worked in the U.S. Senate, and my research areas include behavioral economics, monetary economics, corporate finance, and economic growth. Media appearances include C-Span’s Washington Journal, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fox Business, and the New York Times; a more complete collection here.
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Selected Academic Papers
IQ and National Productivity
(New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2011)
PDF
Abstract: A recent line of research in economics and psychology hypothesizes that differences in national average intelligence, proxied by IQ tests, are important drivers of national economic outcomes. Cross-country regressions, while showing a robust IQ-growth relationship, cannot fully test this hypothesis. Thus, recent work explores the micro-foundations of the IQ-productivity relationship. The well-identified psychological relationship between IQ and patience implies higher savings rates and higher folk theorem-driven institutional quality in high average IQ countries. Experiments indicate that intelligence predicts greater pro-social behavior in public goods and prisoner’s dilemma games, supporting the hypothesis that high national average IQ causes higher institutional quality. High average IQ countries also have higher savings intensity by a variety of measures. Other possible IQ-productivity channels are discussed, as are possible environmental causes of differences in national average IQ.
Average Player Traits as Predictors of Cooperation in a Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma
(With Omar al-Ubaydli and Jaap Weel, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, forthcoming)
Abstract: Many studies have looked at how individual player traits influence individual choice in the repeated prisoner's dilemma, but few studies have looked at how the average traits of pairs of players influence the average choices of pairs. We consider cognitive ability, patience, risk tolerance, and the Big Five personality measures as predictors of individual and average group choices in a 10-round repeated prisoner's dilemma. We find that a pair's average cognitive ability measured by Raven's cognitive ability test predicts average cooperation rates robustly and average earnings more modestly. Openness predicts both greater joint cooperation and the use of reciprocity to sustain cooperation.
Google Scholar
Human Capital and Institutional Quality: Are TIMSS, PISA, and National Average IQ robust predictors?
(With Niklas Potrafke, Intelligence, 2014)
SSRN
Abstract: Is human capital a robust predictor of good institutions? Using a new institutional quality measure, the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), we find that cognitive skill measures are significant, robust, and large in magnitude. We use two databases of cognitive skills: estimates of national average IQ from Lynn and Vanhanen (2012a) and estimates of cognitive ability based on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) scores estimated by Rindermann et al. (2009). The Rindermann cognitive ability scores estimate mean performance as well as performance at the 5th and 95th percentiles of the national population. National average IQ and the 95th percentile of cognitive ability are both robust predictors of overall institutional quality controlling for legal system, GDP per capita, geography dummies, and years of total schooling. Some possible microfoundations of this relationship are discussed.
Patience, Cognitive Skill, and Coordination in the Repeated Stag Hunt
(with Omar al-Ubaydli and Jaap Weel, Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, 2013)
Link
The O-Ring Sector and the Foolproof Sector: An Explanation for Skill Externalities
(Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013)
PDF Presentation Slides
Abstract: If intelligence or other skills are as important as some people say, why do markets reward these skills so modestly? Informally, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? I offer a general equilibrium model to explain this puzzle: The core assumption is that in some (but not all) sectors of the economy, lower-skilled workers can be good substitutes for higher-skilled workers. This is true even though in the cutting-edge sectors of the economy, lower-skilled workers are poor substitutes for higher-skilled workers. In equilibrium the economy-wide wage gap is pinned down by the sectors where high and low skilled workers are the best substitutes for each other, not the worst.
IQ and Entrepreneurship: International Evidence
(with R.W. Hafer, April 2012)
PDF
Abstract: National measures of cognitive skill, including IQ tests, have received attention recently as a possible driver of cross-country productivity differences. In a parallel literature, national measures of entrepreneurial activity and pro-entrepreneurship policies have received similar attention. This paper is the first to demonstrate that higher national average IQ reliably predicts higher ratings for the Acs-Szerb Global Entrepreneurship Development Index (GEDI). Results hold after controlling for GDP, education levels, inequality, broad economic freedom indices, and other factors. Microfounded explanations for these results are considered.
Will the Intelligent Inherit the Earth? IQ and Time Preference in the Global Economy
(February 2012)
PDF
Abstract: Social science research has shown that intelligence is positively correlated with patience and frugality, while growth theory predicts that more patient countries will save more. This implies that if nations differ in national average IQ, countries with higher average cognitive skills will tend to hold a greater share of the world’s tradable assets. I provide empirical evidence that in today’s world, countries whose residents currently have the highest average IQs have higher savings rates, higher ratios of net foreign assets to GDP, and higher ratios of U.S. Treasuries to GDP. These nations tend to be in East Asia and its offshoots. The relationship between national average IQ and net foreign assets has strengthened since the end of Bretton Woods.
U.S. Troops and Foreign Economic Growth
(with Tim Kane, Defence and Peace Economics, 2012)
PDF Excel with Readme Original Kane Dataset on Troop Deployments, 1950-2003
The Bond Market Wins
(Econ Journal Watch, 2012)
PDF
Human Capital in the Creation of Social Capital: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets
(with John Nye, 2011)
Link Media Coverage in WSJ, Real Time Economics
National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind across Asia
(Asian Development Review, 2011)
Link Presentation Slides
Speed Bankruptcy: A Firewall to Future Crises
(Published in Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Summer 2010)
PDF
Cognitive Ability and Technology Diffusion: An empirical test
(Economic Systems, 2012)
PDF Presentation Slides
IQ in the Production Function: Evidence from immigrant earnings
(Economic Inquiry, 2010)
PDF Presentation Slides
Are Smarter Groups More Cooperative? Evidence from repeated prisoners’ dilemma experiments, 1959-2003
(Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2008)
PDF Results for Corrected and Extended Datasets, 2013
Dynamic IS Curves With and Without Money: An international comparison
(with R.W. Hafer, Published in Journal of International Money and Finance, 2008)
PDF
On Money and Output: Is money redundant?
(with R.W. Hafer and Joseph Haslag, Published in Journal of Monetary Economics, 2007)
PDF
Intelligence, Education, and Economic Growth: A Bayesian averaging of classical estimates (BACE) approach
(Published in Journal of Economic Growth, March 2006)
PDF
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Additional Writings and Presentations
A simple illustration of Buchanan-style Club Goods, some calculus
PDF
Will Open Borders change your nation’s SAT score?
Powerpoint, based on this debate with Bryan Caplan at Northwood University, 2015.
10% Less Democracy: How Less Voting Could Mean Better Governance
Slides, PDF
Precautionary Saving: A two-period illustration
There are few good closed-form results for precautionary saving, here’s a simple example that you might find useful if you’re learning or teaching dynamic economics with a little math.
One page PDF Excel with graphs, closer to the intermediate macro level
Using the Solow Growth Model as a Forecasting Tool
Does today’s fast growth in country X signal that country X is catching up to the economic frontier? Or will the growth likely sputter out far before country X catches up?
Abstract: If a moderately rich country grows fast, that’s a strong signal of convergence, according to the Solow Model. But a poor country has to be growing exceptionally fast for it to be a signal that they’re one their way to catching up with the global frontier.
Excel File
Taxes Rational Workers Want: An Illustration of the Chamley-Judd Theorem
A 2-page discussion of the Redistribution Impossibility Theorem, with links to two simple Excel simulations, March 2013
Abstract: As a rule, rational workers prefer to tax workers, not capitalists.
PDF Excel 1: Paying for government Excel 2: The Impossibility of Redistribution
Did Stimulus Dollars Hire the Unemployed? and No Such Thing as Shovel Ready
(Mercatus Center Working Papers, with Daniel Rothschild, 2011)
A Political Coase Theorem for the Intelligent
(Slide presentation at Konstanz University, 2011, and Public Choice World Congress, 2012)
PDF
The Economics of Financial Crises
(Slide presentation for Moscow State University graduate students visiting GMU, December 2009)
PDF
The Great Recession
(Slide presentation for George Mason University’s inaugural Alumni Weekend, October 2009)
PDF
Economics of the Geithner Plans
(Slide presentation for the Mercatus Center’s Capitol Hill Campus series, April 2009)
PDF
Tax 101
(Slide presentation for the Mercatus Center’s Capitol Hill Campus series, March 2009)
PDF
Imitate FDR’s Treasury Secretary: Bankruptcy not Bailouts
(November 2008: Published in U.S. Exchequer, pages 45-46)
PDF Link to U.S. Exchequer
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Miscellany
My media clippings, catalogued by Mercatus.
My Twitter feed, GarettJones: All the economics I can fit into 140 characters.
A macroeconomic revolution all in one photograph.
An outdated photo of me in my office in Carow Hall.
A 2009 photo of my brother Jerry and I backpacking in the Vogelsang section of Yosemite National Park. Photo taken by my brother Mitch.
A TV series you really ought to watch, Milton Friedman’s Free To Choose.
And another: The first sitcom inspired by public choice theory, Yes Minister.
Another kind of spontaneous order.
Garett Jones: A Very Intelligent Economist on Economics and Intelligence
Pushing the envelope on IQ studies
Free exchange
Jun 23rd 2007
by The Economist
GUEST BLOGGER | Bryan Caplan
Thirteen years after Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve outraged the country, it’s hard to find a serious social scientist who denies that intelligence is a Very Big Deal. But it still takes courage to push the envelope. That’s just one of the reasons why I’m thrilled that Garett Jones, a leading expert on economics and IQ, will be joining the faculty of George Mason University, where I work, this fall.
So what’s Garett been up to? For starters, he’s done the most careful statistical study (with co-author W. Joel Schneider) of the relationship between intelligence and economic growth. Published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Growth, the Jones-Schneider study find that “In growth regressions that include only robust control variables, IQ is statistically significant in 99.8% of these 1330 regressions, and the IQ coefficient is always positive. A strong relationship persists even when OECD countries are excluded from the sample. A 1 point increase in a nation’s average IQ is associated with a persistent 0.11% annual increase in GDP per capita.”
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Garett’s got another neat paper on intelligence and cooperation in Prisoners’ Dilemma experiments. By combining data from many previous experiments, and looking up the average SAT scores of the schools where the experiments were conducted, Garett answers a big question on the cheap. Result: “A meta-study of repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5% more often for every 100 point increase in the school’s average SAT score.”
But my personal favorite is Garett’s job market paper (also co-authored with Schneider), “IQ in the Production Function: Evidence from Immigrant Earnings.” A common objection to international IQ comparisons is that the tests are not cross-culturally valid. This paper shows that the average IQ of immigrants’ country of origin predicts a lot about immigrants’ earnings in the U.S. In short, despite obvious shortcomings of international IQ tests, they still predict real-world outcomes right here in the U.S.
Now I should add that Garett Jones works in several other areas of economics, too. But I’m confident that his work on economics and intelligence will bring him the most attention and the most controversy. As I see it, that makes him a perfect fit for GMU.
Quoted in Sidelights: I refer to this as the Da Vinci effect in the book – the idea that when you’re excellent in one area, that’s a reasonable predictor that you’re at least above average in other areas. This is the most – perhaps the most robust finding in all of cognitive psychology – skills predict skills, weaknesses predict weaknesses, not perfectly but moderately.
We become a little bit like the people around us. So if you’re surrounded by people who are a little smarter, a little more patient, a little better informed, you yourself are likely to become a little smarter, more patient, better informed. So your peers matter at least a little bit everywhere.
This isn’t a book about where IQ comes from. It’s a book about where your nation’s IQ takes you.
About the author
James Pethokoukis
@JimPethokoukis
James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he was the Washington columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, the opinion and commentary wing of Thomson Reuters.
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Maps of the day: Every US state’s top international trade partner for imports and exports in 2016
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James Pethokoukis Is America smart enough? A Q&A with Garett Jones on IQ and the ‘Hive Mind’
Economics, Pethokoukis, Society and Culture
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Is America smart enough? In his new book, Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, economist Garett Jones explores the important role of national IQ in creating national prosperity. I recently sat down with him to discuss how exactly a country’s cognitive firepower translates into a better economy — and what we can do about it, if anything.
Jones is the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at The Mercatus Center, and associate professor at George Mason University. He has worked on Capitol Hill, and has contributed to C-Span’s Washington Journal, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business Week, Fox Business, and theNew York Times. He holds a BA from Brigham Young University, a MPA in Public Affairs from Cornell University, a MA in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, and a PhD in Economics from UC-San Diego.
Here are edited excerpts of our conversation, which is available in its entirety via my podcast at Ricochet.
James Pethokoukis: You identify a paradox, as you say, in IQ: knowing a person’s IQ doesn’t tell you a lot about how much money he earns. Yet nations with very high test scores are far more prosperous than those with low test scores.
Jones: Well, part of it comes from the fact that almost nothing predicts any individual person’s wages that well. People are diverse. But when it comes to IQ in particular, an average person’s IQ has only a moderate relationship with that person’s wages.
Shutterstock.
Shutterstock.
IQ tests are usually measured in terms of points. Your IQ is measured in terms of IQ points, so in the US we’ll call the average IQ 100 and people at the 97th and 98th percentile will have an IQ of about 130. So one IQ point on average only predicts perhaps 1% higher wages for the typical person. A lot of estimates are actually much smaller than that, perhaps half that.
So if one IQ point is only predicting half a percent higher wages or 1% higher wages, then we’re saying that when people’s IQs differ by 30 points, which is quite a bit, that covers about two-thirds of the U.S. population, the 30 IQ point difference.
But that right there might predict maybe a 30 or 35% wage gap. You have neighbors living on your own street who earn 15% more or 15% less than you and you probably wouldn’t guess who they are. So these kind of moderate differences in wages are what people usually find when it comes to IQ.
Now, one can endlessly debate what is a big difference and what is a small difference. But my real point of comparison is looking at differences across countries. When you look across countries, the difference in IQ scores is about the same range, maybe 30, maybe 35 points, depending on who’s looking at it –if you look between the highest, the richest countries and the poorest countries.
And there, we’re talking about differences in living standards on the order of 800%. We’re talking about huge differences in living standards across countries. So countries differ massively in their living standards, whereas you and your neighbors differ only moderately in living standards.
What would be some examples of high IQ countries and their living standards and what would be the low IQ countries? And how do we even know? Do they give IQ tests across a range of countries or are we looking at other tests as stand-ins for IQ tests?
Well, actually, I start off the book [by] reporting tests that aren’t IQ tests at all, partly because I want to win over my readers by showing them these results are really broad.
A group of psychologists, Rindermann, Sailer and Thompson, did some great work pulling together these international math, science and literacy tests that you hear about in the news every so often. And they standardized them a bit and turned them into what they call cognitive ability scores.
It turns out that these cognitive ability score estimates differ widely across countries. East Asian countries are at the top. You find out that Singapore, elite parts of China, Japan, South Korea, these places tend to be the places that do the best on these tests on average. And the lowest scores on these kinds of tests tend to be found in sub-Saharan Africa. This is also what’s found with IQ tests – that the highest IQ type test scores are in East Asia, the lowest on average are in sub-Saharan Africa.
In chapter two of the book, I present a debate between rival groups of psychologists on this question of whether those test scores, especially in sub-Saharan Africa are reasonable estimates.
And in broad, general terms, the authors from both camps seem to agree. Currently, cognitive skills on average are lowest in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s why it’s important to find ways to raise those cognitive skills.
Are IQ tests really telling us something extraordinarily useful about people’s cognitive ability? And if there are multiple abilities, don’t we have to look different kinds of IQ tests? Or is there one standard test?
That’s actually one of my favorite bits in chapter one — which people can read for free on the Stanford University Press website if they like. I actually discuss the debate about emotional intelligence or social intelligence. It turns out that IQ is a pretty good predictor of emotional intelligence.
Part of what this comes from is the fact that cognitive skills predict cognitive skills. People who are better on the math parts of an IQ test tend to be better at the verbal parts of IQ tests. So our parents and grandparents often told us that life is fair and things balance out in the end. That’s not true when it comes to cognitive skills.
I refer to this as the Da Vinci effect in the book – the idea that when you’re excellent in one area, that’s a reasonable predictor that you’re at least above average in other areas. This is the most – perhaps the most robust finding in all of cognitive psychology – skills predict skills, weaknesses predict weaknesses, not perfectly but moderately.
That’s part of the reason why psychologists and economists alike, when we want to find somebody’s average cognitive skill set, you just give them one test, and that can be an OK stand-in, not a perfect stand-in, but an OK stand-in for their broader set of skills. Economists are used to using these shortcuts. I mean, if you’re using this crummy number called GDP per person to try to say whether a country’s rich or poor, I mean, that’s terrible. But it’s something we all do and we’re used to it on a regular basis.
Certainly if you went to college, you may have taken the SAT test. Is that a kind of IQ test?
I’d say for people who’ve been to a decent American high school or someone who had something like that experience, then an SAT is a moderately good IQ test. It appears perhaps that the older versions of the SAT were more like an IQ test and now they’re a little bit less like one. They’re a little bit more like an achievement test.
But still, if I know your SAT score and I know that you’re somebody who went to a sort of somewhat adequate American high school, I can do a much better than average job predicting your IQ score on a much fancier, more sophisticated IQ test.
We’re also looking at nations with different test scores and how prosperous or perhaps poor they are. And nations with high test scores are far more prosperous than nations with low test scores.
Yes.
Might it be because economic development comes first, that nations get prosperous and that raises the test scores? Do we understand that causality properly?
This is not a question of reverse causation. It’s really a question of joint causation. So it’s a lot like the relationship between health and income across countries. We all know that if you get healthier, you probably can do more work. But we all suspect that if your nation becomes richer, especially if you’re looking at the poorest nations, if your nation becomes richer, people get healthier. So health causes the productivity, productivity causes health. We’re used to this idea of join causation.
The heart of my book is arguing that a substantial portion of the relationship between IQ and prosperity is group IQ causing group prosperity. So I certainly believe, and I provide evidence in chapter three, that whereas nations get richer, they get healthier, and as they get healthier, people’s brains develop because the brain is just a part of the body.
Looking at how improving test scores or how higher test scores translates into a more prosperous nation, what are the channels we’re talking about?
I sum it up in the introduction actually, the five channels of the hive mind. Smarter people on average are more patient and if people are more patient, they save more, and that means there’s more capital within your country to fund purchases of homes, computers, office buildings, factories.
The second channel is that smarter groups are more cooperative. There’s a variety of experimental and non-experimental research suggesting that smarter groups cooperate more. And a whole lot of the problem of politics and a whole lot of the problem of corporate organization is getting people to collaborate, getting people to think win-win.
The third channel is that smarter groups tend to be better informed voters. There’s moderate evidence that they tend to be slightly more laissez-faire, slightly more pro-market in their attitudes. Smarter people are more likely to see the invisible hand, I think. And they just tend to be better informed.
One way to discipline your government is to just remember what’s happened over the last couple of years. Better informed voters are important, and IQ tests are one useful proxy for picking up whether your voters are informed.
The fourth is that a lot of modern productivity is working on these delicate projects, team tasks, where if one thing goes wrong, the whole project can literally blow up. There’s a great model by Michael Kremer of Harvard showing how in settings like this, skills will have massive payoffs to the group and open up vast new technologies. So small differences in test scores, small differences in cognitive skills could lead to vast effects on productivity.
Then the fifth channel that multiplies all the four is the peer effect. The routine finding from sociology, anthropology, econ, is that we tend to be a little bit like. We become a little bit like the people around us. So if you’re surrounded by people who are a little smarter, a little more patient, a little better informed, you yourself are likely to become a little smarter, more patient, better informed. So your peers matter at least a little bit everywhere.
So what is the relationship between your national IQ score and higher GDP growth or higher productivity growth? Is it an income effect or a productivity effect that then creates higher income?
I tend to think of it really as a productivity effect. And the one that I’m most interested in is the institutional effect, the idea that human capital is a key ingredient for building good institutions. Good institutions, countries with low corruption, countries with somewhat competent government, countries that support support markets and competition to a moderate to strong degree. These are policies that are easier to get when you have voters, politicians, bureaucrats who have on average higher cognitive skills.
So that’s one where you can see how once you build a network, once you have a system, once you have a set of institutions in your country that are moderately more laissez faire, moderately less corrupt, you can see how that helps any individual person who wanders into the country.
That makes that a person more productive. A migrant who comes to the US or to France from a much poorer country instantly becomes more productive once he crosses this invisible border. Part of that, not all of it, but part of it comes from as a side effect of human capital.
What explains those vast differences between a low-income country with a lower hive mind collective IQ and the higher income, higher IQ countries? Is it because they’re poor?
Where I tend to focus in the heart of the book is on the experimental evidence and partly the theoretical evidence, the theoretical arguments for why it is that a higher IQ should matter.
Daron Acemoglu, a great economist – he’s going to win a Nobel Prize someday — wrote a great paper once called “Why Not a Political Coase Theorem.” And he was trying to answer the question: why is it that governments find it so hard to bargain to win-win outcomes, where both the entrepreneurs and the government can collaborate? Why are we trapped in a world where there’s occasionally places like North Korea, where there’s one person on the top getting all the pie, but it seems like couldn’t he just cut a deal with the populous where both sides can win, where the masses can get richer and he get richer too?
Part of his story and his model is patience. If politicians are more patient, they’re more willing to wait for the reward. They’re more willing to say, hey, I’m going to let these entrepreneurs invest in a project that may pay off 10, 20 years from now, and I’m just going to tax them a little bit all the time. Instead, many politicians just tend to swoop in and grab all the pie right now.
Since there’s a variety of IQ experiments showing that smarter people tend to be more patient, I argue that countries with smarter politicians, higher IQ politicians, higher IQ bureaucrats on average are going to be more patient. They’ll be telling each other, hey, let’s just – let’s just grow the pie a whole and then just tax these guys, and that’s a better way for us to make money than to just to try to grab it all now.
So that’s one theoretical channel where you have a bunch of literally dozens of experimental studies showing that high IQ people tend to be more patient. And you’ve got a powerful economic theory that explains why you’ll get better politics if your politicians are more patient. I plug those two together and I say, this is part of the reason; not the whole story, part of the reason why high IQ countries tend to have better governments.
What is the United States’ score?
We’re pretty good. Toward the end of the book I have a data appendix, and I only report data from where there are two separate estimates for the country’s test scores. The IQ score for the US is usually about 98, just a little below the UK. And so that’s right around the top 10%, maybe top 15% of the world’s average IQ scores. And the US always outperforms what you’d expect by a variety of measures. The US seems to be just a little bit magical by a lot of estimates.
Agreed. So what explains the fact that we score as high as we do?
That’s a great question. And it’s – let me dodge it in an interesting way by pointing out that by just doing a raw demographic breakdown, it turns out that the highest scoring regions of the world tend to be either in East Asia or its offshoots or northwestern Europe and its outshoots. So for reasons that are still poorly understood, those places tend to have the highest test scores.
And the US and Canada tend to be populated, overwhelmingly populated by people who are from northwest Europe with some folks from East Asia. And you can get a rough estimate of the US’s average IQ score just by looking at the weighted average of test scores in northwest Europe, test scores in East Asia, test scores in Latin America. So the US is a composite nation, and our scores seem to reflect that.
We can find ways to raise scores, but that’s the way it looks right now.
Anytime you’re talking about IQ, wondering how much is the environment, how much are genetics, are there ethnic or racial links? Amazingly controversial.
It is, yes.
To what extent did your book delve into those issues? ,
This isn’t a book about where IQ comes from. It’s a book about where your nation’s IQ takes you. So I really did write this book to say: here’s why IQ matters vastly more than you think it does. And it matters more than even a lot of the pro-IQ people think it does.
That’s really where I figured I could add unique value. But in Chapter Three, I do discuss what Jim Flynn has to say about this. So Jim Flynn is the man who discovered what we now call the Flynn Effect.
Jim Flynn’s a philosopher and back in the late ’70s, he got very interested in this debate over whether IQ differences across so-called races were genetic. Flynn himself was a man of the left. He’s been involved in progressive politics his whole life. I’ve been fortunate to meet him twice. He’s a fascinating person.
He read some research by Berkeley’s Arthur Jensen. And Arthur Jensen became convinced that IQ differences across demographic groups, across so-called races, were heavily, not 100%, but heavily genetic in origin. Flynn did something unique. Flynn decided to disagree with Jensen not by calling him names, but by actually constructing an argument.
So Flynn and Jensen created together one of the great intellectual debates of the 20th century. And one of the things Flynn found along the way is that IQ scores have been rising across time across all the rich countries. There’d been scattered data pointing to this before, but people had not really pulled it all together. And he wrote a first paper on this. And the title of it was called “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations.” Great paper.
This let people know that there were big increases in IQ across time – too big for anybody to plausibly argue that they were genetic at all. It had to be environment.
People don’t change that fast.
Indeed – people don’t change that fast. People try to run the numbers – no way. And in particular, the IQ gains came on the most – often, not always, but often came on the most abstract parts of the IQ test, the most visual – the most weird visual finding pattern stuff, not stuff you’re learning in school. So it seemed to Flynn –
It’s not just more people were being educated in schools and got better. Is that what you’re saying?
At least not in any kind of direct way at all. Because it’s not the things you’re practicing in school that people seem to be getting better at. Flynn’s made a point of this over the decades. So IQ gains seem to have a very strong environmental component. So Flynn is a man who has fought for decades saying, “I disagree with Arthur Jensen and his genetic story, but I disagree with it on the basis of data and theory, not ideology.”
So that said, he says, “I’ve knocked down a lot of genetic stories across the decades. It would be nice to actually do some serious, rigorous human genome type results to knock this down once and for all.” But he says, if it’s up to American universities, this research will never get done. And he personally is convinced that the average American professor who works in this area is convinced there are genetic differences in IQ across races. And that’s the reason the research will never get done. They’re afraid of what they’ll find.
So what I think about this topic isn’t nearly as interesting as what Jim Flynn thinks the average American professor thinks about this topic. So Flynn is a man who, again, a man of the left, who thinks these differences are overwhelmingly, perhaps completely environmental in origin. And he thinks that’s an argument for how we should change our way of thinking about IQ. But he himself thinks that a lot of American professors think there’s some uncomfortable findings that will occur if we start doing more research into the genetics of IQ.
So this is about academic freedom, professors worrying about getting tenure and whether it’s worth the heat to do that kind of research.
Thing is that’s incredibly important to make research, to make progress in this area if we’re going to raise IQ scores in the poorest countries. The way science often makes progress is just digging into all of the data for a long time. Maybe it’ll turn out the best interventions are educational. Maybe it’ll turn out the best interventions are in public health. Maybe it’ll turn out the best interventions are medicinal. Are there pills that people should be taking? Who knows? The reason I have to say “who knows” is because there just isn’t very much work in the area. If this were as important as cancer research, we’d have a lot of answers by now.
Some experts believe that as the economy becomes more automated, if you have high cognitive capabilities, you’ll do just fine in that kind of economy. If not, you’re not going to do as well. What can we do to raise IQ scores?
Well, if we’re looking at the very recent trends over the last couple of decades, there is not much evidence that there’s been a bigger return to IQ than there used to be. I think there’s moderate evidence that there’s actually an increase in return to personality-type skills.
One of my colleagues one said offhand a line that I think others have said, which is that 90 % of success is staying off the Internet. And I think there’s something to this idea that the return to personality-type measures is probably a lot higher than it used to be. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, especially in certain settings. I’ve looked at the normal statistical results and they don’t find an increase in return to IQ in recent decades. But there’s a couple of studies out there that do find an increase in returns to what they call non-cognitive skills.
I think personality might be mattering more. If the robots are going to take some jobs, they’ll probably be taking a lot of brainy type jobs. But they’re going to be a little behind the times when it comes to personality. And a lot of in-person services are going to depend on personality traits.
But it’s not a huge leap to imagine a US economy in 25 or 50 years, where I’d much rather have a 160 IQ with amazing math skills.
Let me break it down this way. A lot of IQ researchers break down intelligence into two big factors: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. So crystallized intelligence is basically the list of stuff you know, including mental tricks, like learning how to do long division. That’s a form of crystallized intelligence – the set of tricks you use to do division.
Then, there’s fluid intelligence, which is closer to what a lot of psychologists like to think of as intelligence. I think it is James Thompson, the psychologist, who says something like intelligence is what you need when you don’t know what you need. It’s that ability to solve new problems.
So Google and its many spinoffs replace a lot of the need for crystallized intelligence. But the need for fluid intelligence is going to be with us for quite some time. The ability to look at a new, novel situation and figure out what’s going on here.
Some pro-IQ supporters, especially on the Internet, tend to think that there’s this some kind of cutoff where above a certain level IQ matters a lot. Below it, it doesn’t matter very much. And I just don’t find evidence of that. I think that there’s a reason why the market pays for IQ, for higher IQ across the range of the scores. It’s because it’s always good to have somebody around who can just look at an ambiguous situation and figure out what’s going on.
Do IQ scores measure that fluid intelligence? What are they actually measuring?
It really depends on what kind of IQ test you’re taking. The one that economists like to use — because it’s quick to give people — is the Raven’s, which is a visual pattern finding test. You’re giving basically eight elements of a pattern and your job is to complete the pattern through multiple choice. And that is a very strong predictor of your overall fluid intelligence. Whereas, another IQ type test, vocabulary, like a simple vocabulary test, is a crude IQ test, but that’s measuring more crystallized intelligence. There’s a trivia question part of some IQ tests. That’s measuring crystallized intelligence.
So there’re parts of a big IQ test that’ll be weighted toward the fluid and other weighted toward the crystallized. Skills do tend to predict skills, but if I were trying to build a research agenda, I would try to build a research agenda around finding ways to raise fluid intelligence.
So I guess I’d rather live in an economy with a higher number of people with a higher amount of fluid intelligence, and that would make us a higher income, higher prosperity country.
So you’re talking about Singapore then?
OK, Singapore then.
Singapore has average test scores by any measure but they’ve chosen an immigration policy that highly favors high achieving immigrants from around the world… If you’ve got great skills, you can come to Singapore. And the fact that they’ve built their immigration policy around that is something worth thinking about in the future. Quite a few countries have followed these high-skilled policies.
So you can import these people? Or you can try to ‘build your own’? Is there a research agenda that governments should be involved in to try to raise perhaps both kinds of intelligence? Raising intelligence across the board and creating an elite race of super intelligent people? I think I read something about China trying to do that.
Realistically, everyone would like their kid to be just a little bit smarter. A lot of people would be willing to do a little bit to make sure their kid is not at the very bottom of the class.
So just imagine a generation of people saying, “What can we do to make sure our kid isn’t at the bottom of the class?” And if you imagine generations of people saying that, that’s a lot of small changes that add up. Even like in science, we could be talking about generations of mild tinkering – nutrition, sending your kids to the right pre-schools… Some of these will work, and some of them won’t work. But if you can find ways to credibly raise skills in small ways across decades, it will show up in politics.
Let the Flynn effect continue to do its work.
But in a way some of the Flynn effect will be human created. People will say “hey, let’s see what interventions we can do to make our kid just a little bit smarter, or at least not at the bottom of the class.” Anywhere in America, people can understand why it would be nice to have some kind of intervention so your kid is not at the bottom of the class. Nobody’s going to object to that on political grounds.
So if someone proposes a medical change and says “we can guarantee your kid will have a 140 IQ,” there will be people enraged. If instead the interventions were, “let’s find a way to make sure your kid will have an IQ no lower than 90…”
Why do you think people would be angry if people thought there were an intervention that would raise a kid’s IQ from 110 to 140?
It sounds weird. I mean, think of how people thought of in-vitro fertilization when it first came around. When something’s new…
If people are pretty worried about whether their kid is going to get into an elite college, it may offset the weirdness factor. More people might be willing to say, “What time is the appointment, Doctor? We can be there at 8 am.”
Yes maybe there’s a lot of people on the Upper East Side that would be willing to push for that, a lot of neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Southern California, Silicon Valley, I can imagine people pushing for it. As long as they don’t have to push for it publically, as long as they don’t have to be the first or second or third person doing it.
Now we are creating our sci-fi screenplay where we have our financial elite and we have the people who will pay whatever it takes to make their kids, well maybe not super-smart, but maybe super weird.
Back in the ‘90s when the internet was coming around, there was a growing concern that there would be a digital divide between the haves and the have-nots, or as they used to call it, the Information Superhighway Haves and the Information Superhighway Have-nots. And I think we know enough now that that has basically collapsed. Most technologies tend to be things that the elites get first, but give it ten, maybe twenty years, and it diffuses everywhere. If not everywhere then just about everywhere, 2/3, or 3/4s, 80 or 90% of the economy.
I went looking for this data recently on smartphones, and smartphones are incredibly diffused through the economy — not so much among the elderly, but the moderately poor and young in America are incredibly likely to have smartphones. It’s mostly a phenomenon of the elderly. Something like that would happen with anything. People are doing it with “super-preschooling” now, and it’ll happen – if medical research pans out- in other areas as well.
It sounds like having policy makers actually think about policies in terms of “Is this a pro-IQ raising sort of policy?” is something we should be doing to more broadly increase American wealth and productivity.
Yes, looking at broad-based measures of human capital. Not years of education. Years of education is terrible measure of human capital. Look at broad-based test scores to get a sense of where a country’s economic future is heading. The policies of places like Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, these are the kinds of models that should get a serious look.
You mentioned immigration, but also what would be other policies?
I do not know so much what they do in other areas, but those countries do focus on it more or less explicitly with their immigration policy. Also in particular broad-based public health measures.
I think the obsession with years of education really needs to end, and there should be an obsession with broad-based test scores. I think the obsession with years of education really needs to end. And there should be an obsession with broad based test scores. If people don’t want to use IQ scores, that’s fine. But they should at least be looking at broad based test scores, things like the NAEPs, other test scores that the US government is quite happy to report on the Department of Education’s website. These should be the measures we look at. We should be looking a lot less at years of education.
Quoted in Sidelights: statistical evidence garnered from a wide variety of studies
spares the reader the technical details associated with statistical analysis
Jones, Garett. Hive mind: how your nation's IQ matters so
much more than your own
E.L. Whalen
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1200.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Jones, Garett. Hive mind: how your nation's IQ matters so much more than your own. Stanford Economics and Finance, 2016. 205p bibl index
afp ISBN 9780804785969 cloth, $29.95; ISBN 9780804797054 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3552
BF431
2015-21620 CIP
According to Jones (economics, George Mason Univ.), IQ--be it of an individual or the average of a nation's population--as measured on standard
tests is a statistic most indicative of performance. He supports this contention with statistical evidence garnered from a wide variety of studies (he
spares the reader the technical details associated with statistical analysis). Whereas individuals' IQs are less strongly related to their performance,
the relationship between national averages of IQ and performance indicators such as gross domestic product is robust. But the beneficial
indicators are not limited to economic statistics; they include better public health, higher levels of education and skills, patience, prudence and a
willingness to save for the future, greater cooperation, and stable and soundly based political institutions. Jones points out that the myriad benefits
associated with higher averages of national IQ do not demonstrate causation. He notes for example the Flynn effect, the observation of rising IQs
over time. IQ levels are subject to change, and Jones concludes his book with the challenge to discover underlying factors that enhance a wide
range of cognitive skills. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All readers.--E. L. Whalen, Clarke College
Whalen, E.L.
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Hive Mind
Howe Abbott-Hiss
HiveMind1,380 words
Garett Jones
Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016
In Hive Mind, economics professor Garrett Jones departs from the usual individualistic focus of libertarians like himself in that he makes the case, knowingly or not, for more ethnocentric policies. He does this in a normie-safe manner; the reader might at times suspect he is a secret shitlord, but is being careful not to offend orthodoxy too directly.
Jones writes in a simple accessible style which sometimes leaves the reader hoping for more details. This was a wise move, in that it encourages independent research, which may be more effective in red-pilling the reader. Luckily there are extensive endnotes, and six papers to which the author contributed are cited.
The book discusses the value of IQ for the success of groups. Jones believes that being part of a high-IQ group is far more valuable than having a high IQ as an individual, and discusses several reasons for this. Simply bringing this up contributes to red-pilling even without going into the details on race and IQ, in that it points out another area in which diversity is not a strength.
The functioning of groups is investigated here partly in terms of cooperation, and high-IQ groups are for several reasons more successful in this sense. Jones draws this conclusion from research investigating several different aspects of cooperation.
Firstly, high-IQ individuals are more patient. This means they tend to have higher rates of savings. Their patience is part of a higher general concern for the future, as Alt-Right readers may already know from looking at racial differences in time preference.
Second, they are more pleasant in dealing with others, at least initially. They will however be more willing to punish others when it turns out that others are not playing fair.
Third, they are more perceptive, that is, they are more able to accurately assess what others are thinking and feeling. In terms of group cohesion, this means less paranoia and pointless infighting.
As one might guess from all of the above, low IQ is a good predictor of corruption. High rates of corruption are exactly what one would expect when people have less concern for long-term consequences, less inclination to treat others fairly, and less understanding of whether others are trying to take advantage of them.
One interesting finding is that if one group of people is divided into two groups which are each homogeneous in terms of IQ, the average productivity will be higher than if it is divided into two more heterogeneous groups. The benefits of homogeneous IQ, in other words, are not a matter of simply hoarding advantages for one group which will be lost by the other. Instead it benefits the wider group for people on different levels of intellect within it to interact more with their own kind.
Although it is of course not presented this way, the above could be taken as support for a policy of ethnic nationalism or segregation. Many readers will doubtless think of this on their own, which may be more effective than the author bluntly endorsing such policies to those still viscerally repelled by them.
An appendix provides two sets of national IQ estimates, covering most countries in the world. This may be particularly helpful for anyone confronting normie suspicion of this type of data. Indeed, some countries have very different average IQs depending on which data set you consider more valid, but those countries for which this is the case tend to come out dramatically lower than the West in either case. No one has estimates in which Muslim nations, for instance, have similar intelligence to our own.
Jones comments on a similar point with regard to estimates of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. There were disagreements between IQ researcher Richard Lynn and psychologist Jelte Wicherts concerning which studies were worth including in these estimates. While Lynn’s initial figure was 67, which is at the level of mental retardation, even Wicherts’ highest estimate was only 82. The latter would put the average sub-Saharan African at the 12th percentile in the UK.
Jones shies away from any explicitly pro-white policy, or even from excluding immigrants on the basis of IQ. He even brags that he signed a letter endorsing mass immigration, although he does not claim that this would be the best policy for native whites. Instead he defends it mainly in terms of benefits to the immigrants.
Of course, employed immigrants from poorer countries will likely earn more money here by benefiting from our more functional society. But the fact that we are so much more functional is exactly why we need to maintain our distinct culture, which means excluding most of the world. Jones unfortunately does not come to this conclusion.
The political implications of some of the findings covered, thankfully, are mentioned. One chapter is dedicated to the positive influence of patience and cooperation on politics, and another to the issue of well-informed voters. Jones believes that higher-IQ voters would be more likely to hold politicians accountable for their behavior due to their greater capacity to remember that behavior, and also cites evidence that they tend to hold more pro-market and socially liberal views, somewhat like his own. Obviously, the situation will get worse in all of these areas if current immigration and fertility trends continue, but the author is not willing to state this explicitly.
The crime issue is ignored, although there is a well-known correlation between IQ and criminality, and a stronger one between race and crime. This does not mean that there are no references to possible harm from alien cultural traits, though; there is a brief response to the concern that immigrants from less democratic and less free countries would prefer to vote for governments more like those in their homelands.
The question of how immigrants and their descendants will tend to influence the political institutions of their new homes in tremendously important: governments are made by people, after all. And since immigration by the currently less-skilled will likely be part of the future of the world’s rich economies, I sincerely hope that the rich countries will find deep and effective ways to raise the human capital, the education levels, and the test scores of all these nations’ citizens and all of their immigrants. Our future may depend upon it.
Here, then, is the typical multiculturalist attitude: hope that we are able to fundamentally change immigrants, rather than simply exclude the type of people who would require this kind of transformation.
Jones does make an effort to provide evidence that some alleged harms of low-IQ immigration are minimal, although not necessarily zero. He argues that differences in average IQ were only connected to very small differences in average earnings for immigrants once they reach the host country. A similar point is made about depressing the average American wage.
However, considering the disconnect between the author’s policy stance and the data on the issue that is the main focus of the book, this book is reminiscent of the infamous Robert Putnam study on diversity, or even of a much older document. In 1929 President Hoover appointed a new National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement to study the causes of crime in the nation. The group, popularly known as the Wickersham Commission, focused mainly on prohibition and came to an odd conclusion.
After documenting the numerous destructive results of the policy, including major increases in organized crime as well as police corruption and brutality, the commission’s final report endorsed even more aggressive enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment. A columnist at the time mocked it in terms which could summarize the current dominant view on race with only a few words altered:
Diversity’s an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
It’s filled our land with vice and crime,
It don’t enrich us worth a dime,
Nevertheless, we’re for it.
The Wickersham Report, of course, did not erase the popular contempt for Prohibition or prevent its repeal. If anything it did the opposite, regardless of the intentions of the authors or their government sponsors. Hopefully Jones’s work has a similar effect.
Quoted in Sidelights:
is persuasive and informative, but it’s also a model of good non-fiction writing
By leaving aside filler like this and focusing on what you need to know, the book comes in at a slim 168 large text pages that truly fly by.
Anyone interested in education, social science, or economics should read this book.
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IQ Matters For The Economy
Modeled Behavior
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Adam Ozimek Adam Ozimek, Contributor
It’s not uncommon to see economists reference IQ as something that drives individual outcomes like wages, health, and education. But as something that determines economic growth? That you don’t hear every day. However I suspect a new book by Garett Jones will change that.
“Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own”, is persuasive and informative, but it’s also a model of good non-fiction writing. When an academic writes a popular book, the prose often lacks readability due to excess jargon, lack of clarity, and other sins. I often find myself pausing when reading books by academics and having to reorient myself: what’s the point of what I’m being told right now? How does it fit into the bigger argument? What have I learned so far? With Jones book there are mercifully few of these moments. In fact more than once I found myself beginning to ask myself these rhetorical questions only to see that in the next paragraph Jones does it for me with a reminder of what you've read, what you're reading, and why.
On the other hand, when non-academics write a book like this it’s often bloated by anecdotes and narratives, like a long unnecessary detour into the personal life of a cited academic. I know other people like to read for the sake of reading, but I read non-fiction to learn and I hate this wasted space. By leaving aside filler like this and focusing on what you need to know, the book comes in at a slim 168 large text pages that truly fly by.
So what do you learn from reading Hive Mind? Exactly what the subtitle promises: how IQ matters for groups. To establish the bigger narrative, Jones makes a lot of arguments that are important and interesting in in their own right. First, that IQ is a useful measure and not just culturally biased or capturing one unimportant dimension of intelligence. Then there are the variety of mechanisms through which group IQ leads to better group outcomes. The evidence presented ranges from small groups, like experimental evidence on two person prisoner dilemmas, to large groups, like political outcomes for countries. You get a nice introduction to some important economics topics along the way, like O-ring technologies, and repeated prisoners dilemmas.
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For example, Jones argues that one reason higher IQ leads to better group outcomes is because high IQ people are better at predicting what others are thinking. In addition to experimental evidence he presents, the book is itself a good demonstration of this, as Jones does an excellent job of anticipating reader objections, raising them, and addressing them. Importantly, this means he doesn’t oversell his results as the only thing that matter when other things do.
A great example of this is on immigration. Jones begins his discussion of immigrant with thorough and persuasive arguments for why low-skilled immigration might increase average native wages, and if it has a negative impact the effect is small compared to the huge gains to low-skilled immigrants. And then he plants a seed of doubt by raising the specter of how low-skilled immigration might hurt institution quality in the long-run. What is so praise-worthy of his immigration discussion is that he puts this issue in the proper context: not with a brief hand wave or straw man case for low-skilled immigration, but with a strong and thorough one. This isn’t just honest, but it’s a slick act of persuasiveness. Jones wants us to walk away considering the impact of immigrant IQ on institution quality, and he knows we won’t do that if we are distracted by all the benefits he left out.
Anyone interested in education, social science, or economics should read this book. Now when I think about economic growth, IQ is high on the list of factors that come to mind. In addition, those who are considering writing their own books on these topics should read it especially closely, because it’s a model of non-fiction writing.