国家经济快速发展时智商会上升

为什么国家经济快速发展时智商会上升

https://evonomics.com/does-your-iq-predict-how-rich-you-will-be/

国家财富与智力的关系。

作者：路易斯·普特曼，《好、坏、经济》。 2015 年 12 月 19 日

布朗大学经济学教授。 他的书《好、坏和经济》是写给普通读者的。

以防万一您以前没有听说过，我为您提供了一些您可能会觉得有点麻烦的信息。 情报专家理查德·林恩 (Richard Lynn) 和塔图·范哈宁 (Tatu Vanhanen) 在 2006 年出版的《智商与全球不平等》一书中报告说，如果将英国的平均智商测量值设为 100，那么美国人的平均智商分别为 100 和 98。 中非共和国、马里和肯尼亚人的平均智商分别为 64、69 和 72。印度、印度尼西亚和伊拉克人的得分略高于较贫穷国家的人，但低于较富裕国家的人：他们的平均智商为 分别为 82、87 和 87。

国家收入和智商相关吗？ 最近的一项使用 157 个国家/地区样本进行的研究发现，两者之间存在高度且具有统计意义的相关性。 那么，人们可能会得出这样的结论：正是这些国家人民的智商较低，才解释了世界上较贫穷国家人民平均收入较低的原因。 林恩和范哈宁显然是这么认为的。

这真的是真的吗？

如果现在是欧洲帝国日不落的十九世纪，这样的跨区域研究在英国或美国可能会被认为是不言而喻的，它似乎为殖民列强提供了道义上的理由： 维持他们对下等人的统治，帮助他们在“天赋较差”的情况下尽可能地提升自己。

但现在是二十一世纪，智商测试是一种现代科学工具。 种族主义已被彻底揭穿。 那么什么给出呢？

在一篇新发表的题为“人口的智力决定国家的财富吗？”的论文中 维托里奥·丹尼尔（Vittorio Daniele）在意大利卡坦扎罗的麦格纳希腊大学教授经济学，他基于弗林效应给出了一个解释。 在几十年来发表的一系列研究中，新西兰政治学家 J. R. Flynn 提出了一个著名的发现，在智商测试数据已经有足够时间可用的大多数富裕国家，平均智商分数一直在稳步上升。 一些研究还表明，在特定时间点，年轻人的智商往往高于老年人。

假设每一个新出生的群体都比前一代拥有更大的智力潜力，如果这种潜力是由基因决定的，那么这种假设几乎没有道理。 事实上，今天生活的人携带着祖父母基因的重组，如果说有什么不同的话，先天智力较低的人在当今更加娇生惯养的环境中生存的可能性更大，而不是更小，所以遗传智力应该是下降，而不是上升。

正如 Daniele 认为且大多数专家都同意的那样，近几十年来，每个群体都接触到了更多类型的刺激，这些刺激建立了智商测试旨在测量的认知特征。 如果我的孩子是在计算机时代长大的，而我的父母是在收音机时代长大的，那么我们可以预期孩子们会在世界上最贫穷国家的最偏远地区或贫困环境中长大—— 想想那些生活在没有电力和管道的家庭中的农民的孩子，也许无法接触到报纸——他们所经历的环境，与我父母年轻时的美国城市世界相比，仍然不太能产生此类认知技能。 另一方面，中国深圳或巴西里约热内卢等地新兴中产阶级的孩子们正面临着与当代美国同龄人类似的刺激。 因此，将他们纳入测试人群中，他们国家的平均智商测试分数逐年提高。

最新数据支持了这些观察结果，表明过去几十年来经济发展最快的国家的智商一直在稳步上升。 作为衡量智力与增强理性分类、定量推理等能力的现代认知刺激之间相互作用的指标，人口的平均智商是经济现代化和发展的指标，而不是其原因。

为了反驳这样一种论点，即跨国智商差异反映了智力遗传能力的差异，而正是这些差异反过来解释了收入差异，丹尼尔表明，国家间平均智商差异可以通过与以下相同的因素来很好地预测： 预测当代收入的差异，尤其是 1500 年左右欧洲殖民主义时代前夕的发展水平差异。

Why IQs Rise When Nations Experience Rapid Economic Development

https://evonomics.com/does-your-iq-predict-how-rich-you-will-be/

The relationship between national wealth and intelligence.

By Louis Putterman,  at The Good, The Bad, The Economy. 19 December 2015

Professor of Economics at Brown University. His book The Good, The Bad, and The Economy is addressed to general readers.

 

Just in case you haven’t heard this before, I’ve got some information for you that you might find a bit troubling.  In their 2006 book titled IQ and Global Inequality, intelligence experts Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen report that setting the average measured IQ in the U.K. at 100, people in the U.S. had average IQs of 100 and 98, respectively.  People in the Central African Republic, Mali and Kenya had average IQs of 64, 69 and 72. People in India, Indonesians, and Iraq scored somewhat higher than those in the poorer countries but lower than those in the richer countries: their average IQs were 82, 87, and 87 respectively.

Are country incomes and IQs correlated?  A recent study using a sample of 157 countries finds a high and statistically significant correlation between the two.  One might conclude, then, that it is the lower IQs of their people that explains the lower average incomes of people in the world’s poorer countries. Lynn and Vanhanen evidently think so.

Could this really be true?

Were this the nineteenth century, during which the sun never set on European empires, a cross regional study with findings like this might have been treated as self-evident in the U.K. or U.S.  It would have seemed to provide a moral justification for colonizing powers to maintain their rule over their inferior charges, helping them to advance themselves to the extent possible given their “more meager innate endowments.”

But it’s the twenty-first century, and IQ tests are a modern scientific tool.  Racism has been roundly debunked.  So what gives?

In a newly published paper titled “Does the intelligence of populations determine the wealth of nations?” Vittorio Daniele, who teaches economics at Magna Graecia University in Catanzaro, Italy, provides an explanation that builds on the Flynn effect.  In a series of studies published over several decades, the New Zealand political scientist J. R. Flynn has famously found that in mostly rich countries in which IQ test data have been available for sufficient periods of time, average IQ scores have been steadily rising.  Some studies also show that at a given point in time, IQ tends to be higher for the young than for the old.

Supposing that each new cohort that is born has greater intellectual potential than the one before it could hardly make sense, if that potential is determined genetically.  Indeed, those living today carry re-combinations of their grandparents’ genes, and if anything people of lower innate intelligence are more, not less likely to survive in today’s more pampered environments, so heritable intelligence should be falling, not rising.

As Daniele argues and most experts agree, is that in recent decades, each cohort is being exposed to more of the kinds of stimuli that build the sort of cognitive traits IQ tests are designed to measure.  If this is true for my children, who were raised in the computer age, versus my parents, who grew up in the age of radio, then we can expect children growing up in the most remote locations or impoverished circumstances in the world’s poorest countries—think of the children of peasant farmers living in homes without electricity and plumbing, perhaps lacking access to newspapers—to be experiencing an environment that is still less generative of these sorts of cognitive skills than the urban American world of my parents’ youth.  Children of the rising middle classes in places like Shenzhen, China or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on the other hand, are being exposed to stimuli similar to those of their contemporary American counterparts.  Their inclusion in the tested populations is thus raising their countries’ average IQ test scores year by year.

The latest data support these observations by showing that IQs have been rising steadily in countries experiencing the most rapid economic development during the past few decades.  As a measure of the interaction between intelligence and modern cognitive stimuli that strengthen capacities for rational classification, quantitative reasoning, etc., a population’s average IQ is therefore an indicator of economic modernization and development, not their cause.

To rebut the argument that cross-country differences in IQ reflect differences in inherited capacity for intelligence and that it is those differences that in turn explain differences in income, Daniele shows that between-country differences in average IQs are well predicted by the same factors that predict differences in contemporary incomes—especially, differences in level of development on the eve of the age of European colonialism circa 1500.

Much of the data and explanatory framework borrow from my own work on the determinants of long-run economic growth, discussed in a series of academic articles and in my general audience book The Good, The Bad and The Economy. Interestingly, some of the research reported there also shows that differences in ancestral levels of development circa 1500 help to explain income differences between ethnic groups within given countries, including those between mainly European and mainly African-descended, as well as Hispanic, populations in the United States.  The approach used by Daniele to explain international IQ differences could probably be applied, then, to the inter-ethnic differences in measured IQ that have been seized upon by some to construct pseudo-scientific cases for racial inequality.  Work like Daniele’s will hopefully prove helpful in putting such ideas to rest once and for all.