This book must be a good candidate for being the most important book of the 21st century. British psychologist Richard Lynn and Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen find that recent IQ data from scores of countries world-wide show really strong correlations, of around r = .65, with national prosperity -- whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated for 1820 or for the 1990s. Quite contrary to the theorizing of most Western economists of the past fifty years, the underdeveloped (later, 'developing') countries of fifty years ago have not generally closed the gap with the help of ongoing Western handouts and advice. Clearly, several East Asian countries have in that time made enormous strides -- as may also happen soon in the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe; but in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. largely Black Africa), mean IQ estimates hover around 70 and progress has been slight. Of the world's 21 countries which steadily tripled their GDP from 1983 through 1990 and 1993 to 1996, none was on or near the African mainland; whereas of the 27 countries whose GDP decreased by 50%, ten were African (Angola, Burkina Faso, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Madagascar, Somalia, Sudan, Zambia and Sao Tome & Principe).

Yet will Lynn and Vanhanen (L&V) prove persuasive about causation? Doubters will raise four particular problems.

First, 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations' is published by an American mail order house which charges £70 for the book. Terrorized by the politically correct, mainstream Western 'publishers' have for ten years been entirely unwilling to bring out books that touch on race - whether by Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton or myself. Recently, it turned out that top psychologist Steven Pinker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who had converted to hereditarianism after the birth of his second child, felt he had to remove a chapter about race from the final draft of his new pro-heredity book, 'The Blank Slate'. L&V are not alone in finding themselves up against the Zeitgeist, and the reception of their book has not so far been auspicious. L&V's reply will have to be that such repression indicates that the liberal-left consensus (which in 1950 persuaded the United Nations to declare all races to be of equal intelligence) is a hysteria that must one day lift.

Secondly, some will doubtless try to quibble with the IQ estimates that are the central novelty of 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations.' L&V typically present some three 'normative' IQ studies for each of the countries they discuss; they do not provide details of social sampling; and they estimate IQ's for some nations by taking the average of the IQs in neighbouring countries - e.g. crediting Afghanistan with IQ 83 as an average of India's 81 and Iran's 84. Surprisingly, L&V maintain that the mean IQ in Israel is only 94 - ignoring the possibility that Sephardic Jews, like other Africans, may have special deficits in the visuo-spatial abilities that are needed to do well on 'culture-fair' intelligence tests like the famous Raven's Matrices. None of this is ideal. However, L&V have a very strong reply from both the general consistency of their IQ estimates and the sheer strength of IQ's correlations with national productivity. If workers had seriously confounded their assessments of national IQ, L&V would simply have had to present the usual miserably low correlations of around .25 that obtain throughout psychology and the social sciences. As it is, L&V have plainly struck gold.

Thirdly, there is the question of cause and effect. Can L&V convince us that IQ actually causes national wealth, rather than vice versa? The literature on the causal importance of IQ is only partially covered here, and L&V settle rather easily for the view that IQ and wealth will both tend to cause each other. This concession will weaken their case in the eyes of those who already deplore the idea that IQ is causal. L&V would have done better to point to the exceedingly slight IQ advantages accruing to Black children in the USA even when their fathers are seriously rich, and to the failure of the American Black-White gap in intelligence to decrease despite many billions of American dollars being thrown at the problem for the past forty years. Even a century of national impoverishment does not lower IQ -- as shown by the cases of mainland China, Poland and Russia in L&V's own data. By contrast, IQ correlates .50 with individual upward social mobility, relative to the position of the testee's father. The simple truth is that a normal national IQ is necessary though not sufficient for prosperity; and that a low IQ holds whole countries back even if individuals can compensate for dullness by good looks or hard work. Neglecting such points, as also the full range of arguments that race differences are of substantially genetic origin, L&V will have partly themselves to blame if their book is set aside.

Lastly, L&V show remarkable modesty about the implications of their findings. This may have been intended as placatory; but it, too, will win them few friends. Rather than stress the need for eugenics in Africa, L&V conclude their book with two bizarrely half-hearted recommendations. The first is that the West should recognize continuing IQ differences and thus continue pumping subsidies into Africa as a matter of "ethical obligation." The second is that some fraction of this conscience money should be spent not on eugenics but on "improvements in nutrition and the like." No change there, then, for this is what the West has been doing ever since it abandoned the responsible idea of empire! It is remarkable that L&V should have troubled to write a 'controversial' book which cannot be published by a mainstream publisher only to come to such feeble practical recommendations. L&V have provided a way of forgetting their book which social-environmentalist ideologues will be desperately eager to take.

This brilliantly conceived, superbly-written, path-breaking book, does for the global study of economic prosperity what Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) The Bell Curve did for the USA. IQ and the Wealth of Nations examines IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 nations. It shows that national differences in wealth are explained first, by the intelligence levels of the populations; second, by whether the countries have market or socialist economies; and finally, by unique circumstances such as, in the case of Qatar, by sitting atop a sea of oil.

One striking fact is that the average national IQ of the world is 90. Few nations have IQs equal or near the British average of 100 (less than 20%). The highest average IQs are found among the Oriental nations of North East Asia (IQ = 104), followed by the European nations (IQ = 98), and the mainly White populations of North America and Australasia (IQ = 98), the nations of South and Southwest Asia from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia (IQ = 87), the nations of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands (IQ = 86), the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85), and finally by the nations of Africa (IQ = 70). Because many nations have IQs of 90 or less (almost 50%), this poses a serious problem if the book's conclusion that IQ = 90 forms the threshold for a technological economy is correct. IQs can vary greatly within a geographic region. In Latin America and the Caribbean, IQs range from 72 in Jamaica to 96 in Argentina and Uruguay, and appear to be due to the racial and ethnic make-up of the populations.

... Mean national IQ correlates 0.71 with per capita Gross National Product (GNP) for 1998, and 0.76 with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 1998, and that national IQs predict both long term (1820-1922) and short term (1950-90; 1976-1998) economic growth rates measured variously by per capita GNP and GDP (mean rs ~ 0.60). Lynn and Vanhanen prove that the widespread though rarely stated assumption of economists and political scientists that all peoples and nations have the same average IQ is wildly wrong. They document that IQs predate earnings, are heritable, and are stable from age 5 onwards, and predict educational level and many other positive outcomes as evidence that IQ is the cause, not antecedent. The take home message of IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that national differences in IQ are here to stay and so is the gap between the rich and the poor nations.

The book's content is irresistible - at its heart is a table of the average IQ scores of 81 different countries, drawn from studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The national average IQs range from 107 for Hong Kong to 59 for Equatorial Guinea.

Lynn and Vanhanen benchmarked their IQ results so that Britain is 100. America scores 98 on this scale, and the world average is 90. IQ's are assumed to form a normal probability distribution ("bell curve") with the standard deviation set at 15. Here are a few examples:

Nation Avg. IQ
Eq. Guinea 59
Nigeria 67
Barbados 78
Guatemala 79
India 81
Iraq 87
Mexico 87
Argentina 96
US 98
China 100
UK 100
Italy 102
Japan 105
Hong Kong 107

Admit it, you want to know what the rest of the table says! Beyond satisfying sheer curiosity, though, the strong correlation between IQ and the wealth of nations is of world-historical importance. From now on, no public intellectual can seriously claim to be attempting to understand how the world works unless he takes IQ into account.

How much can we trust these IQ results?

As soon as I received the book, I turned to Appendix 1, where Lynn and Vanhanen describe all 168 national IQ studies they've found - an average of just over two per country.

Are the results internally consistent? In other words, when there are multiple studies for a single country, do they tend to give roughly the same answer?

I expected a sizable amount of internal divergence. I spent 18 years in the marketing research industry, so I know how expensive it is to come up with a nationally representative sample. Further, Lynn and Vanhanen use results from quite different IQ tests. They rely most on the non-verbal Raven's Progressive Matrices, which were designed to be used across cultures, even by illiterates. Yet, they also have a lot of results from the Wechsler exams, which are more culture dependent - the Wechsler include a vocabulary subtest, for example. And they report results from other IQ tests, including a few from the oddball Goodenough-Harris Draw-A-Man test. Also, sample sizes vary dramatically, from a few dozen in some obscure countries to 64,000 for one American study. Finally, some studies were of children, others of adults.

This doesn't sound promising. Nevertheless, the results show a high degree of internal consistency. Here are the first eight countries for which they have multiple scores:

Argentina: 93 and 98
Australia: 97, 98, and 99
Austria: 101, 103
Belgium: 99, 103, 98
Brazil: 88, 84, 90, and 85
Bulgaria: 94, 91
China: 100, 92.5, 103.4
Democratic Republic of Congo: 73, 72

That's not bad at all. In fact, leaving aside China, the results are remarkably consistent. There are, of course, a few countries for which different studies came up with quite divergent results, especially Poland, where the two scores Lynn and Vanhanen found were 92 and 106. Still, the correlation among results when there are two or more studies for a country is a striking 0.94.

You shouldn't take every score on faith. The reported IQ for Israel (only 94????!!!) has elicited much criticism. Lynn has replied that he wanted to publish the data as he found it, even if some of it looked implausible. His hope is to encourage further research to resolve seeming anomalies.

The IQ structures of the two giga-countries, China and India, demand more intense study, in part because the future history of the world will hinge in no small part on their endowments of human capital. The demography of India is especially complex due to its caste system, which resembles Jim Crow on steroids and acid. By discouraging intermarriage, caste has subdivided the Indian people into an incredible number of micro-races. In India, according to the dean of population genetics, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, "The total number of endogamous communities today is around 43,000..." We know that some of those communities - such as the Zoroastrian Parsees of Bombay - are exceptionally intelligent.

But we can't say with any confidence what is the long run IQ potential of Indians overall. Their current IQ score (81) is low, especially compared to China (100), the other country with hundreds of millions of poor peasants. Yet, keep in mind just how narrow life in rural India was for so long. In 1952, on the fifth anniversary of independence, the Indian government commissioned a survey to find out if the average Indian villager had heard yet that the British had gone. The study was quietly cancelled when early results showed that the average villager had never heard that the British had ever arrived!

It appears likely that some combination of malnutrition, disease, inbreeding, lack of education, lack of mental stimulation, lack of familiarity with abstract reasoning and so forth can keep people from reaching their genetic potential for IQ. Lynn himself did early studies demonstrating that malnutrition drives down IQ. The co-authors conclude their book by recommending that

"The rich countries' economic aid programs for the poor countries should be continued and some of these should be directed at attempting to increase the intelligence levels of the populations of the poorer countries by improvements in nutrition and the like."

A clear example of how a bad environment can hurt IQ can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries. They average only around 70. In contrast, African-Americans average about 85. It appears unlikely that African-Americans' white admixture can account for most of this 15-point gap because they are only around 17%-18% white on average, according to the latest genetic research. (Thus African-Americans white genes probably couldn't account for more than 3 points of the gap between African-Americans and African-Africans.) This suggests that the harshness of life in Africa might be cutting ten points or more off African IQ scores.

Similarly, West Africans are significantly shorter in height than their distant cousins in America, most likely due to malnutrition and infections. The two African-born NBA superstars, Hakeem Olajuwon and Dikembe Mutombo, are both from the wa-benzi [people of the (Mercedes ) Benz]upper class. Only the elite in Africa gets enough food and health care to grow up to be NBA centers.

This also implies that African-Americans might be able to achieve higher IQs too, although the environmental gap between white Americans and black Americans appears to be much smaller than between black Americans and black Africans. As I pointed out in VDARE in 2000, the most promising avenue for improving African-Americans' IQs is by promoting breastfeeding among blacks mothers, who nurse their babies at much lower rates than whites.

In fact, we know that IQ is not completely fixed over time because raw test scores have been rising for decades, about 2 to 3 points per decade. To counteract this, the IQ test-making firms periodically make it harder - in absolute terms - to achieve a score of 100. Lynn was possibly the first scientist to make this phenomenon widely known, although New Zealand political scientist James Flynn has gotten more credit for this recently. And, indeed, Lynn and Vanhanen scrupulously adjust the test results in their book to account for when each test was taken.

Having lived in a number of small towns, I am continually amazed at the relevance of this classic study to contemporary local politics and social relationships. Long before "investigative reporting", a grad student goes undercover for a year in a small town and reports his findings -- social groups, power, politics and tradition. This is not a dry scientific analysis, but a fascinating description of American life outside the city.

What is most illuminating about this gossip-ridden compendium of neo-conservative arguments against the brilliant collaboration of famed sociologist C. Wright Mills ("White Collar", "The Sociological Imagination", "The Power Elite") with his long-time friend and fellow University of Wisconsin graduate student Hans Gerth is the fact that it is an obvious attempt to discredit the now famous work of these two scholars. The two collaborated to successfully translate for the American academic and intellectual community many of the heretofore-unavailable works of famed German sociologist Max Weber. In what one of my former professors would refer to as the "carbuncle theory" of history, these two authors attempt to discredit Mills and Gerth by engaging in a vicious (and totally uncalled for) smearing of their admittedly difficult and sometimes stridently competitive combined efforts.

As with the famous carbuncle theory, which was a notorious attempt by conservative turn of the century scholars to explain away Marx's brilliant observations regarding the way in which social forces act as the motive force of history as simple dyspepsia due to his chronic affliction with carbuncles. Of course, the professor's point is that, in the last analysis, Marx's theories must be judged based on their rational and intellectual merits, not on some silly emotional attempt to discredit the author without considering the weight of his or her intellectual argument. So, too, here, we must keep in mind that however messy and unpleasant the process, the fruit of intellectual labors must be judged based on their results rather than on the personalities or character flaws of the individuals involved. Sad to say, it appears that these two authors are all too willing to sully their own academic reputations by engaging in such gossip mongering.

Another reviewer admits to shock and surprise regarding the ways in which petty egos and aggressive careerism affect the ways in which the gentlemen in question behave. Might I suggest he read James D. Watson's own surprising autobiographical accounting for similar shortcomings, personal ambition, and pettiness among the several Nobel laureates who jointly discovered the helical nature of DNA in "The Double Helix"? Perhaps it is time for such naïve people to grow up and recognize the fact that the stuff of science and research is often a messy and unpleasant business, and not at all the stiff, pristine, disinterested, and sanitized search for truth that appears monthly within the carefully arranged type-set pages of "Scientific American" magazine. Noted scientific luminaries like Albert Einstein admitted as much in their own memoirs, and perhaps the reading public should realize that anything as worthwhile as meaningful scientific research doesn't necessarily emanate from people who always chew with their mouths closed. Bad people may in fact do brilliant science, and it matters not a rattler's damn whether we like these people or not.

Therefore, regardless of what these two sociologists say in their shameless attempt to rake over the ashes of the dead in this mean-spirited effort to make their own academic reputation here, the fact remains that both C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth published widely recognized and acclaimed works during their very fruitful careers, and the efforts they made to collaborate on "From Max Weber", "Character and Social Structure", and other tomes has stood the test of time, and are all still in active use. Moreover, there is a new resurgence of interest in C. Wright Mills work in particular, and one suspects that the two authors writing this book are attempting to capitalize on his newly resurgent cache (witness the new publication of his collected letters) in order to make their own bones and to sell some books of their own. I do not recommend this book. It is a pathetic and singularly unscientific attempt to discredit some of sociology's most prolific and productive authors by deliberately sullying their characters and personal reputations.

As Oakes and Vidich state in their introduction, this book is an anaylsis of the ethics of academic career management. It is NOT a study of how scholars' career choices are affected by the historical conjuncture in which they find themselves, nor is it meant as an assessment of either Gerth's or Mills' contributions to sociological scholarship. Instead, we get an analysis "built close to the ground it covers." In nearly exhaustive detail, the authors paint a devastating picture of one man -- Gerth -- whose undisciplined brilliance left him nearly totally dependent for his academic achievements on another man -- Mills -- who proved to be totally and ruthlessly pragmatic in his own career choices. Although Oakes and Vidich claim not to be taking sides, Gerth comes across as a tragic, bungling, and ultimately self-destructive emigre who was no match for Mills' amibitions to become a "big shot." Mills himself used that telling phrase to describe the people he admired and whose tactics he copied.
Who should read this book?: Graduate students who've not yet made up their mind about going into an academic career, as well as junior faculty whose sensibilities have been jarred by their dawning recognition that "success" is not going to be solely a function of their "talent." Oakes and Vidich's own assessment of what a reader can learn from the book is summed up in their last sentence: "The path to a successful scientific career is traced by the fine line between overweening ambition that inspires doubts about honesty and a diffidence or restraint that disqualifies its possessor from participation in the contest for priority." They make their case very well in this engrossing portrait of the relationship between Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills.

Many of Max Weber's early English translations were created through the joint efforts of H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. When the secrecy, paranoia, and intrigues surrounding their work are carefully examined,it is revealed that two of sociology's notable minds are shown to have all too common shortcomings. Essential reading for those concerned with the ethincs of scholarhship,the work may also be an eye opener for those engaged in collaborative academic research and writing. When one

considers the effort and intellectual rigor requiredto produce important scholarship, and the paltry sums and ego wars typically involved in academic publishing, this book inadvertently gives newmeaning to the notion of a lumpenprofessoriate: a professionally insecure band of academics and their apprentices who diligently toil in a garden of the mind that is sadly overrun with the weeds and detritus of a university system increasingly dominated by a careerist tone--and which can sport a commercial logic and a backbiting spirit that the denizens of Wall Street might envy.

This study serves as a warning to scholars presently working to establish themselves in an academic career and to their keepers, as well: all that glitters,indeed, may not be worth the candle if it distorts the collective norms of scholarly inquiry to the point where they become warped and corroded by the potential of winning a bit of praise from "the marketplace". The danger imnplied throughout the book is that lesserlights may not have the academic gifts of Gerth and Mills--thus anticipating the current academic scene.

Oakes and Vidich are insightful and thorough, but some comparative data would strengthen their argument. Too bad that none are provided. Were Mills and Gerth more similar to,or significantly different from, others in like-situated cohorts of American students and emigre scholars from the Nazi era? If they were different, why? If there was a pattern,why not explore its significance? Such a curious and devastating omission is quite ironic, given the extensive treatment of CHARACTER and SOCIAL STRUCTURE--the thrust of which champions Mills's quest to identify the structural determinants of personal troubles. That Oakes and Vidich are so steeped in biographical specifics that they should stress the individual trees of idiosyncracy (which are located in the PERSONALITY) and ignore the structural forest of the academy, strikes me as odd, at best, for a sociological work,and as being overly psychological, at worst.

Without an interpretive structural framework it is simply impossible to know whether Gerth and Mills were merely examples of STRANGE FOLKS, i.e., wayward individuals, ofifthe issues touched by their distinctively opposed, yet mutually reinforcing, academic styles suggest the emergence of an uncomfortable order of social fact that may come to dominate the modern academy. That two Weberian scholars should miss this is

unfortunate. otr