It would be better if, after having read the paper (otherwise by your own high standards you wouldn’t have defended an article without having read it first), you would be kind enough to tell the readers of this blog how Kanazawa has taken the effects of low SES-low IQ developmentally mediated effect in consideration in his study.

You are correct in guessing that I haven’t read the article (I believe in free access; so neither publish nor read material that is not freely available). I’ll welcome if you or someone else could mail me the relevant portions or post them on this blog (under fair use).

As for invoking authority covertly by referring to peer-review in a prestigious journal, I would like to disclose that I haven’t taken a single course or class in psychology- either in school or college- so if authority is the determinant: you can stick to reading articles in scholarly journals by those who have doctoral degrees. Blogs are not for you. Otherwise, if you believe more in open discussions and logical arguments, lets argue on facts and study method weaknesses etc and rely more on public-review to catch any discrepancies.

What I could gather from the abstract was that “The macro-level analyses show that income inequality and economic development have no effect on life expectancy at birth, infant mortality and age-specific mortality net of average intelligence quotient (IQ) in 126 countries”. I take this to mean, that SES has no effect on longevity , if the effects of IQ are factored out. the ‘if’ is very important. This a very perverse position. This assumes that longevity is due to IQ and if IQ mediated difference in longevity data is factored out, the effcets on longevity of SES are negligible. This depends on an a priori assumption that longevity is primarily explained by IQ; and only after taking its effects into consideration, we need to look for an effect of SES on longevity.

What prevents the other, more valid and real interpretation : that SES predicts longevity and that there is little effect of IQ on longevity net of SES. Here the variation in longevity is explained by SES and after taking that into account, it would be found that, independent of IQ as a consequent of SES, IQ by itself would have little effect on longevity. the same set of data leads to this interpretation, because IQ and SES are related to a great degree and both are also related to longevity. It is just a matter of interpretation, that which is the primary cause and which an effect.

To take an absurd position, I can argue that longevity predicts/ causes both SES and IQ and reverse the causal link altogether. One can take a theoretical stand, that if people live longer , we have more labor force, blah, blah,blah… so more prodcutivity so better SES; further longevity menas that there are more wise old folks in the society and as IQ is mostly deterinmed by social influences (I do not subscribe to this, I am just taking an absurd position to show the absurdity of Kanazawa position), hence longevity of the population(more wise men) causes high IQs.

Also, please note that the above conclusion is only for the macro data he has. That interpretation is independent of his micro level data that found that self-reported health was more predicted by IQ than by SES. That micro data has nothing to do with the interpretation of the macro data. Again I don’t know where he got the micro data, but I’m sure that would be a developed world population sample.
I am somewhat familiar with the macro data on which he is basing such claims, and there I do not see any reason to prefer his interpretation over other more realistic interpretations.

In the future, lets discuss merits of arguments, and not resort to ad hominem attacks over whether someone is qualified to make an argument or not. (in my opinion, by reading an abstract too, one can form a reasonable idea of what the arguments and methodologies employed are, and is thus eligible to comment)

Thanks for dropping by and commenting.

I guess we agree on more things, than we disagree on. For example, in section IID of your paper, you concur with my explanation of Flynn effect that it is most probably due to the increase in living conditions and due to environmental factors enabling the full flowering of potential. Environment can and does have a strong disruptive negative effect, though it only has a limited positive enabling effect (no amount of good environment can give you an intelligence that is disproportionate to what your genes endow on you; but even minor lack of right environmental inputs or toxins, can lead to dramatic stunted achievement of that potential intelligence).

Also, it is heartening to note, that early on in your paper you take the position that your paper will not settle genetic vs environmental debate on IQ, but would only provide evidence that national IQ is a good indicator of ntaional productivity.

I have no issue with the same and agree that if one disregards the process by which adult stable IQs are archived, then the stable adult IQ that has been archived would be a very good predictor of productivity and economic status (in a free market environment where other conditions re not adversely affecting success). There is no qualms with the causal relation between a better IQ leading to better SES, in a fair world.

What I do strongly disagree with is the assumption that low IQ is solely dependent on genetic factors. Bad socio-economic factors are the key drivers of low IQ- especially in situations where the socio-economic status is so low that it does’nt guarantee access to basic amenities of life like proper nutrition/ health care.

It is interesting to note that poor SES would cause stunted growth of IQ, and due to the causal relation between IQ and SES would lead to less productivity and lower income, thus maintaining or even aggravating the low SES. This is the downward vicious cycle from which it is very hard to emerge. This type of economy and culture would definitly have lower IQ than what could have been achieved in the right conditions. The sub-saharan countries that Kanazawa used in his study, match this pattern and some of the African countries National IQ (as per data appendix in your paper) viz. Kenya: 72, south afric: 72, ghana : 71 confirms to this pattern).

The opposite observation, that a spiraling economy should radically lead to high IQs is not reasonable, as the circle is vicious only in the downward direction. Monumental leaps in SES would not lead to dramatic effects in IQ, if the earlier SES levels were just sufficient to ensure that no negative effects of environment come into play. The Flynn effect is a tribute to the fact that high jumps in SES (above the base level) only lead to small incremental changes in IQ.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when the SES to low IQ causal link is suggested it is only for the achievement of the stable adult IQ and instrumental during the critical childhood developmental periods. Although, environmental toxins do have the capability to adversely affect IQ during adulthood, and there is emerging evidence for plasticity and neurogenesis in adulthood, a simpler and reasonably model is whereby adult IQ is stable and not much affected by SES changes (either up or down) once it has been stabilized. Thus, even if some positive effects of rising SES have to be observed, they would be observable only in children exposed to that SES and not in the IQ of the rest of the adult population, that has already acheived a stable IQ.

Thus, I do not agree with your explanation of the east Asian example. To me the data set appears to be very limited ( no IQ results before the 1950′s; no data sets for the same country or population over time) and even if we assume that only after the 1980s the SES of these countries rose above the minimal needed SES, we still do not have the data for the IQ of children born under theses SES condition, to proclaim that ther eis no rise in IQ.

Further, it is quite plausible that productivity is dependent on many other factors than IQ, some of which are directly related to SES independent of IQ. Given a base level of SES, in which the East Asians had managed to develop their inherent genetic IQ to the fullest, the SES may still not be good enough to convert that IQ advantage to productivity. For example, a given household that has sufficient SES to provide good nutrition and health care, and thus ensure that its children archive their full IQ potentiality, may still not have enough resources to send them to a good school (or any school for that matter), may lack access to basic infrastructure support which handicaps the utilization of its intelligence and so on. Thus despite having the human capital, lack of the more prosaic monetary capital, may prevent them from archiving their full productivity. Thus, IQ may increase first to the maximal achievable level and only then SES increase dramatically.

It would be interesting to turn the East Asian example on its head and beg the question that if IQ is the definitive causal relation leading to SES , how do you explain the anomaly that despite high IQ’s in 1950s (or for that matter Asian big brain since time immemorial) he East Asian countries did not have the corresponding productivity levels or SES. You might counter by saying that IQ -> SES causal link is mediated by factors like free markets, reforms etc to ensure that proper economic conditions are in place etc etc and only if these ideal market conditions are in place then only IQ predicts SES.

To that my simple counter-argument would be that SES -> IQ causal link also works but only in conditions when the SES is below the base level and that SES would not predict IQ absolutely. Given the same optimal SES in differnet countries, different cultures (which have different genetic pools) will have different IQ levels based on their inherent genetic capabilities.
As per this the IQ of east asians can be explained as either arising from the fact that they have already archived the SES required for full flowering; or that they still have to archive their highest IQ levels and their IQ levels are genetically vastly superior and may show more rise in future.

From Anecdotal evidence I can tell you that an average Indian has far more intelligence and creativity potential that the average IQ of 82 would suggest; most of the high SES families that have archived that high IQ migrate to US/ west and archive high SES there.
What brings down the national average is the sad fact that still a lot of Indians live below the poverty line – living in sub-optimal SES conditions that leads them to have low IQ’ than what their genes or genetic makeup would suggest.

Looking forward to a fruitful discussion.
PS: Despite the tone of my original mail, I have high regards for economists in general and people like Amartya sen, Kahnman and Traversky in particular.

If bad social and economic outcomes were the key driver of low IQ, then we’d expect East Asians to have had low IQ’s back when they were poor–say, back in the 50′s and 60′s. Check out Table 4 of my paper (page 28) to see if that’s the case…

http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/iqprodprelim.pdf

Guess not. So, East Asians have been beating Causasians on IQ tests (on average) for as far back as we have data. You can get more historical data along these lines from Lynn’s (2006) book, Race Difference in Intelligence.

And one can go even further back if you look at brain size, which correlates about 0.4 with IQ. Asian brains have been well-known to be larger than Caucasian brains for as long as folks have been measuring both of them. Hard to fit that in with WASP-driven science…

So simple reverse causality surely plays some role, but it can’t explain East Asia…..