IQ and the Wealth of Nations

Palairet, Michael

doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6800427

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…On balance, it seems likely that Kanazawa (2006a) has been seduced and misled by the heady ‘just‐so stories’ of evolutionary psychologists into testing a contentious thesis based on untenable assumptions and supported by uncritically interpreted, inadequate analyses. Indeed, for want of better evidence to support this conclusion, one needs only consider that Kanazawa (2006a) cited both the critical review of Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) by Palairet (2004) and the detailed critique of the ‘relative income hypothesis’ by Lynch et al (2004) without registering any of the serious flaws these reviewers identified. At the same time, Kanazawa (2006a) relied on a number of discredited texts, including The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) and The g Factor (Jensen, 1998), and cited none of the literature questioning evolutionary psychology (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Montagu, 1999). It may well be that Kanazawa (2006a) simply overlooked ‐ Richardson's (2004) scathing review of Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) on the pages preceding Palairet (2004), and just as he overlooked the additional macro‐ and micro‐level analyses that were available to him. However, this would also be consistent with a researcher who was so misled by the plausibility of a natural, racialized explanation for global inequalities in health – an explanation, moreover, that fits very neatly within historical and contemporary racist beliefs of the ‘inferior and primitive African’ (Krieger, 2005) – that it led him to the assumptions, data, analyses and interpretations that were capable of supporting these ideas.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is remarkable given that he cites Richardson's (2004) review of Lynn and Vanhanen's (2002) IQ and the Wealth of Nations ‐ the second of two critical reviews published side‐by‐side in the respected journal Heredity. And while Palairet's (2004) review focused on the econometric data used, the first review (Richardson, 2004) provided a detailed critique of IQ scores. In particular, Richardson (2004) pointed out that IQ scores were originally developed to screen children for educational difficulties and are better measures of an individual's middle‐class values than intelligence per se .…”

Section: Contentious Theoretical Assumptions Underpin the Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Worse still, for countries for whom Lynn and Vanhanen were unable to find studies of IQ, crude estimates were generated based on the average ‘national IQ’ of neighbouring countries and, where countries were deemed to have ‘racially mixed’ populations, the estimated ‘national IQ’ was calculated using the average of the IQs for each racial group recorded in neighbouring or nearby countries, weighted in proportion to the distribution of racial groups within the population. It is not clear why Kanazawa (2006) described these as ‘careful estimates’, particularly when he cited Palairet's (2004) sceptical review of Lynn and Vanhanen which suggested that their data contained “anomalies and assumptions verging on the heroic”. Indeed, Richardson's (2004) accompanying review described this as “an excuse in creative data collection”.…”

Section: Analytical Weaknesses Challenging the Savanna Principle As Amentioning

confidence: 99%

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Health, wealth and IQ in sub‐Saharan Africa: Challenges facing the Savanna Principle as an explanation for global inequalities in health

Ellison

2007

British J Health Psychol

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Kanazawa's (2006) national- and individual-level analyses seem to support his hypothesis that: IQ scores are better predictors of health than wealth or inequality, except in 'evolutionarily familiar' sub-Saharan Africa which offers limited selection for intelligence (British Journal of Health Psychology 11: 623-42). However, the present paper exposes the flawed assumptions, questionable data, inappropriate analyses and biased interpretations on which this thesis was based. It questions the assumptions that: IQ scores are markers of adaptive genetic differences in intelligence; humans evolved within a predictable 'environment of evolutionary adaptedness': and this environment characterizes contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, offering little selection for intelligence. It also demonstrates that the macro-level data on which these analyses were based were collected across a range of different years, using a range of different sources, and were significantly intercorrelated. While none of these analyses adjusted for study year or study type, all were susceptible to multicollinearity and the 'ecological fallacy'. These flaws were compounded by the selective presentation and partial interpretation of the analyses, which focused on the absence of an 'independent' relationship between 'national IQ' and health within sub-Saharan Africa, but ignored the fact that this is also true for every other region of the world. Likewise, the individual-level analyses did not explore the relationship between IQ scores, self-reported income and health by race, which would have demonstrated the impact of the ecological fallacy. Instead, Kanazawa (2006) mistook statistical associations for evidence of causality and falsely concluded that populations in sub-Saharan Africa are less healthy because they are unintelligent and not because they are poor.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contentious Theoretical Assumptions Underpin the Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Analytical Weaknesses Challenging the Savanna Principle As Amentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Health, wealth and IQ in sub‐Saharan Africa: Challenges facing the Savanna Principle as an explanation for global inequalities in health

Ellison

2007

British J Health Psychol

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“…Weede and Kämpf (2002) concluded that 'there is one clear and robust result: average IQ does promote growth'. Palairet (2004) asserted that 'Lynn and Vanhanen have launched a powerful challenge to economic historians and development economists who prefer not to use IQ as an analytical input'. Even Earl Hunt, who at first rejected Lynn and Vanhanen's (2002) work as futile, has more recently confirmed that 'in spite of the weaknesses in several of their data points Lynn and Vanhanen's empirical conclusion was correct' (Hunt & Wittmann, 2008).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Do Societies With Higher Average Cognitive Ability Have Lower Income Inequality? The Role of Redistributive Policies

Salahodjaev

Kanazawa

2017

J. Biosoc. Sci.

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SummaryPast studies suggest that, across nations, the average cognitive ability of a population is negatively associated with income inequality; societies with higher average cognitive ability tend to have lower levels of income inequality. However, it is not clear why. This paper proposes that social transfers from the wealthy to the poor may be a major mechanism by which some societies achieve lower income inequality than others, because more intelligent individuals may be more likely to have a preference for such transfers. Publicly available societal-level data were analysed in a series of multiple regression models. The empirical results in this study replicate the earlier finding that societies with higher cognitive ability have lower levels of income inequality, but the association is entirely mediated by social transfers. Social transfers therefore appear to be the primary mechanism by which societies with higher levels of cognitive ability achieve lower income inequality.

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