IQ and the wealth of nations

What Hacker News says

1. jensen123Dec 2015
   I guess you are correct that there is a lot of racism here and there. However, there is also a lot of rabid anti-racism. For example, you'll never read an article in the mainstream press about how blacks, on average, have lower IQs than white people, although this clearly is relevant in the whole crime debate. Why are blacks more likely to commit crimes than whites? The IQ explains a lot, but mentioning it is taboo, it seems. What happened here in Alabama is of course horrible, but it seems unlikely that corrupt and racist cops is the whole explanation for the high crime rate among blacks elsewhere in the US.

   This shouldn't be necessary, but I probably need to point out that not every single black person has a lower intelligence than every single white person. It's just the average. Some black individuals have higher IQs than some white individuals, of course. Which means that solutions like segregation/apartheid are ham-fisted and totally unfair to these high IQ blacks.

   For more info on the IQ and race thing, I recommend the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.

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2. rubashovApr 2012
   These hard to prove theories, such as Jared Diamond's and in the reviewed book, exist in large part to counter the highly convincing and data driven eugenic theories. The eugenic and IQ based theories are politically unacceptable. "A Farewell to Alms" and "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" lay out very convincing and heavily researched cases that explain different national economies very well. The explanations are just not PC.
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3. tptacekAug 2026
   There is no such thing as "average IQ by country". It's baffling to me that so many people believe there would be, because so few of us have ever been asked to take a proctored IQ test in any setting, let alone as part of a nationwide survey. These things aren't real; they generally source Richard Lynn's fraudulent numbered from "IQ And The Wealth Of Nations" and unproctored online IQ tests with, like, dropdowns where you can claim to be from specific countries.
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4. tptacekJul 2026
   No, there aren't. Countries generally don't do latitudinal IQ surveys. Very few people reading HN have ever been asked to take an IQ test, let alone compelled to do so. Numbers attributing "IQ" to countries are generally fraudulent (i.e., Richard Lynn's "IQ And The Wealth Of Nations" numbers).

   I'm not making any other claim than that specific one: there is no such thing as "national IQ averages". If you claim there's some other kind of "IQ average" that isn't "national", you're addressing a point I didn't make.

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5. tptacekJan 2026
   This the "cold winters theory", popularized by the academic fraudster Richard Lynn (of "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" fame). It's a just-so story. You could tell the same story about the selective pressure for intelligence and problem-solving in hot climates; try to eat in the Kalahari sometime.

   Really, the more you think about that theory, the dumber it gets.

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6. tptacekSep 2025
   Bing's answer, which is a prominent callout box listing East Asians at 106, Ashkenazim at 107-115, Europeans at 100, African Americans at 85 and sub-Saharan Africans at "approaching 70" is wildly, luridly wrong. The source (or the sole source it gives me) is "human-intelligence.org", which in turn cites Richard Lynn, author of "IQ and the Wealth of Nations"; Lynn's data is essentially fraudulent.

   Anybody claiming to have a simple answer to the question you posed has to grapple with two big problems:

   1. There has never been a global study of IQ across countries or even regions. Wealthier countries have done longitudinal IQ studies for survey purposes, but in most of the world IQ is a clinical diagnostic method and nothing more. Lynn's data portrays IQ data collected in a clinical setting as comparable to survey data from wealthy countries, which is obviously not valid (he has other problems as well, such as interpolating IQ results from neighboring places when no data is available). (It's especially funny that Bing thinks we have this data down to single-digit precision).

   2. There is no simple definition of "the major races"; for instance, what does it mean for someone to be "African American"? There is likely more difference within that category than there is between "African Americans" and European Americans.

   Bing is clearly, like a naive LLM, telling you what it thinks you want to hear --- not that it knows you want rehashed racial pseudoscience, but just that you want a confident, authoritative answer. But it's not giving you real data; the authoritative answer does not exist. It would do the same thing if you asked it a tricky question about medication, or tax policy, safety data. That's not a good thing!

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