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How can this IQ data explain that the United States is way down on the list of High IQ nations? And yet, so many entrepreneurial geniuses were made in America.

An intelligent critique of IQ as a measure of personal success is given by Black Swan author, Nassim Taleb in the essay:

IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

Thanks for the article. I’ve been researching IQ since I was given an IQ test back in 2010. I will have to read this more in depth but after quickly scanning the article two things jumped out at me. One-the author accuses IQ test of being used by racist. That’s usually an attack used by liberals use against IQ tests. Two-his graphs show some people with an IQ of 80 or 90 making 130,000 or more a year. I have had to work with low IQ people in the past and with the exception of Downs actors or other anomaly’s I have a hard time believing any of them are capable of earning that kind of money.

[How can this IQ data explain that the United States is way down on the list of High IQ nations? And yet, so many entrepreneurial geniuses were made in America. ]

These are average numbers. It’s not average IQ people who design Boeing aircraft or bootstrap entire new industries. The US average is weighted down by blacks, who average about 80 IQ (20 points lower than whites). The reason Ashkenazi Jews are so well-represented in finance, tech and creative industries? An average IQ of 107 to 115.

Japan is actually very highly-ranked in terms of its GDP per capita. If you subtract out the effect of American natural resource endowments, US output per capita would probably be around Japan’s. I’d say its relative lack of individual innovation has to do with its patent system, which favors domestic megacorps that file first for junk patents without any technical substance and squashes startups that file later, but actually have a working product. China is surging because of its high IQ population, combined with a dismantlement of the command economy that dictated work assignments, housing and food allowances.

[How can this IQ data explain that the United States is way down on the list of High IQ nations?]

In fact, when you take out the effect of the roughly 25% of the US population that is black or Hispanic, you end up with a US average that is probably higher than every European nation. It’s not the average that gets you a Microsoft or a Boeing, but the guys at the very top. A high average is just an indicator that you have a higher and more numerous top end than the guys with a low average. We have the advantage, thanks to Europe’s antipathy to Jews, of housing more Ashkenazi Jews than exist in Israel.