Social Classes of Intelligence, Economic Growth and Technological Achievement: Robust Regression and Outlier Detection

Abstract

A previous study has shown that the intellectual class, which is represented by the 95th percentile intelligence quotient (IQ) at a normal distribution, displayed the strongest impact upon economic growth. Meanwhile, those with average ability (50th percentile IQ) exhibited the second strongest impact, and followed by the non-intellectual class (5th percentile IQ). In addition, the researchers discovered that only the intellectual class was significant for technological progress. As such, this article re-analysed the dataset employed in prior study via robust regression. As a result, after eliminating several outliers, the levels of IQ for the intellectual class and the average ability group displayed equal impacts on economic growth, and the impacts were larger than that of non-intellectual. Furthermore, the IQ of the average ability group was significant for technological achievement, although not as strong as the intellectual class. Besides, the number of professional researchers employed in the research and development (R&D) sector did not reflect similar paramount effects as the impact of the average ability IQ in generating technological development. Thus, based on the conclusions drawn, this study suggests that the R&D sector should employ professionals who possess not only high academic qualifications, but also exceptional levels of cognitive skills, especially to spark new innovations. JEL: J24, O31, O47, Z13

Cognitive ability and economic growth: how much happiness is optimal?

“…Looking more closely at the mechanisms of how cognitive ability can lead to higher growth, one can consider the individual-level effects that can be aggregated at the country-level, e.g., better learning of work tasks, fewer errors, dealing with complexity (see above). However, there are also institutional effects as better universities, better governance, more rule of law, more human rights, being a "good country," faster technological progress and absorption (diffusion) from foreign countries and improved educational systems (e.g., Burhan et al 2018;Jones 2012;Rindermann andCarl 2018, 2020). Finally, cognitive ability seems to have with ability increasing effects: effects of cognitive ability on various productivity measures increase nonlinearly at higher levels of ability, indicating that higher ability levels disproportionately boost a nation's productivity (Coyle et al 2018).…”

Social development versus economic growth: current contradictions and perspectives of convergence

“…Economic growth, its cyclic character, specifics in developed and developing countries, contradiction of economic growth with social development and necessity for overcoming it are studied in the works of Abdelhalim and Eldin (2019), Ali Asadullah (2019), Au (2019), Bethencourt and Kunze (2019), Burhan et al (2018), Chen et al (2018), Conroy and Weiler (2019), Cumming and Von Cramon-Taubadel (2018), Hamid et al (2019), Khan et al (2019), Kiuru and Inkinen (2019), Klofsten et al (2019), Kontogiannis et al (2019), Long and Ji (2019), Melnikas (2019), Naderi et al (2019), Pereira et al (2020), Pulido and Mora (2019), Rathnakar (2019), Sandberg et al (2019), Shastri et al (2019), Sorj and Fraga (2020), Summers et al (2019), Sun et al (2018), Sunarsih et al (2019), Xiong et al (2020), Zhang et al (2019) and Zhen and Tian (2019).…”