I know, but the way it does so is bizarre (IQ seems to have a much stronger effect between countries than between individuals).
Why is this bizarre? It simply means that high IQ individuals don’t capture all the value they create.
Edit: another possibility is that smart people tend to move to places that were doing well. I believe there was a thread in the comments to SSC a while back where it was discovered that the average IQ of American States correlated with a rather naively constructed measure of “favorable geography”, e.g., points for being on the coast and for having navigable rivers.
Why is this bizarre? It simply means that high IQ individuals don’t capture all the value they create.
Consider that if it had been the opposite—IQ was more a personal benefit than a country benefit—we’d be explaining it as “obviously smart people benefit themselves at the expense of others”. Being able to explain something or its opposite isn’t explaining, unless we dig deeper.
Consider that if it had been the opposite—IQ was more a personal benefit than a country benefit—we’d be explaining it as “obviously smart people benefit themselves at the expense of others”.
Yes, it’s called basing your beliefs on the evidence.
No, it’s choosing the first plausible rationalisation for the data. People have been suggesting lots of plausible explanations for the effect, and they all sound plausible (and may all the true, to some extent), but we really don’t know until we test.
Why is this bizarre? It simply means that high IQ individuals don’t capture all the value they create.
Edit: another possibility is that smart people tend to move to places that were doing well. I believe there was a thread in the comments to SSC a while back where it was discovered that the average IQ of American States correlated with a rather naively constructed measure of “favorable geography”, e.g., points for being on the coast and for having navigable rivers.
Consider that if it had been the opposite—IQ was more a personal benefit than a country benefit—we’d be explaining it as “obviously smart people benefit themselves at the expense of others”. Being able to explain something or its opposite isn’t explaining, unless we dig deeper.
Yes, it’s called basing your beliefs on the evidence.
No, it’s choosing the first plausible rationalisation for the data. People have been suggesting lots of plausible explanations for the effect, and they all sound plausible (and may all the true, to some extent), but we really don’t know until we test.
So, why were you calling reality “bizarre” again?