The study showing a correlation between “IQ” and quality of government (reference 3) estimated IQ based on the performance of public school 4th and 8th graders on standardized tests in math and reading. With that measure, the opposite causal direction seems far more likely: high quality state government leads to better public schools and thus higher test scores (which the author uses as a proxy for IQ).
State IQ was estimated from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standardized tests for reading and math that are administered to a sample of public school children in each of the 50 states. … State data were available for grades 4 and 8. … For each year, for each test, the national mean and standard deviation was used to standardize the test to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. This standardization places the scores on the typical metric for IQ tests. The means of the standardized reading scores for grades 4 and 8 were averaged across years as were the means of the standardized math scores. State IQ was defined as the average of mean reading and mean math scores.
This is why papers like H. Rindermann, Relevance of Education and Intelligence for the Political Development of Nations: Democracy, Rule of Law and Political Liberty, Intelligence, v36 n4 p306-322 Jul-Aug 2008 are relevant. This one looks at lagged data, trying to infer how much effect schooling, GDP and IQ at time t1 affects schooling, GDP and IQ at time t2.
The bane of this type of studies is of course the raw scores—how much cognitive ability is actually measured by school scores, surveys, IQ tests or whatever means that are used—and whether averages is telling us something important. One could imagine a model where extreme outliers were the real force of progress (I doubt this one, given that IQ does seem to correlate with a lot of desirable things and likely has network effects, but the data is likely not strong enough to rule out an outlier theory).
Thanks Anders. It occurs to me at this point that having a personal Anders to back you up with relevant references when in a tight spot is a significant cognitive enhancement.
The study showing a correlation between “IQ” and quality of government (reference 3) estimated IQ based on the performance of public school 4th and 8th graders on standardized tests in math and reading. With that measure, the opposite causal direction seems far more likely: high quality state government leads to better public schools and thus higher test scores (which the author uses as a proxy for IQ).
This is why papers like H. Rindermann, Relevance of Education and Intelligence for the Political Development of Nations: Democracy, Rule of Law and Political Liberty, Intelligence, v36 n4 p306-322 Jul-Aug 2008 are relevant. This one looks at lagged data, trying to infer how much effect schooling, GDP and IQ at time t1 affects schooling, GDP and IQ at time t2.
The bane of this type of studies is of course the raw scores—how much cognitive ability is actually measured by school scores, surveys, IQ tests or whatever means that are used—and whether averages is telling us something important. One could imagine a model where extreme outliers were the real force of progress (I doubt this one, given that IQ does seem to correlate with a lot of desirable things and likely has network effects, but the data is likely not strong enough to rule out an outlier theory).
Thanks Anders. It occurs to me at this point that having a personal Anders to back you up with relevant references when in a tight spot is a significant cognitive enhancement.
This certainly indicates that the opposite causal direction is more likey, given just that evidence.
I suspect that both directions are active; but I would need further evidence to back this up.
See correction to article