國家經濟快速發展時智商會上升

為什麽國家經濟快速發展時智商會上升

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

國家財富與智力的關係。

作者：路易斯·普特曼，《好、壞、經濟》。 2015 年 12 月 19 日

布朗大學經濟學教授。 他的書《好、壞和經濟》是寫給普通讀者的。

以防萬一您以前沒有聽說過，我為您提供了一些您可能會覺得有點麻煩的信息。 情報專家理查德·林恩 (Richard Lynn) 和塔圖·範哈寧 (Tatu Vanhanen) 在 2006 年出版的《智商與全球不平等》一書中報告說，如果將英國的平均智商測量值設為 100，那麽美國人的平均智商分別為 100 和 98。 中非共和國、馬裏和肯尼亞人的平均智商分別為 64、69 和 72。印度、印度尼西亞和伊拉克人的得分略高於較貧窮國家的人，但低於較富裕國家的人：他們的平均智商為 分別為 82、87 和 87。

國家收入和智商相關嗎？ 最近的一項使用 157 個國家/地區樣本進行的研究發現，兩者之間存在高度且具有統計意義的相關性。 那麽，人們可能會得出這樣的結論：正是這些國家人民的智商較低，才解釋了世界上較貧窮國家人民平均收入較低的原因。 林恩和範哈寧顯然是這麽認為的。

這真的是真的嗎？

如果現在是歐洲帝國日不落的十九世紀，這樣的跨區域研究在英國或美國可能會被認為是不言而喻的，它似乎為殖民列強提供了道義上的理由： 維持他們對下等人的統治，幫助他們在“天賦較差”的情況下盡可能地提升自己。

但現在是二十一世紀，智商測試是一種現代科學工具。 種族主義已被徹底揭穿。 那麽什麽給出呢？

在一篇新發表的題為“人口的智力決定國家的財富嗎？”的論文中 維托裏奧·丹尼爾（Vittorio Daniele）在意大利卡坦紮羅的麥格納希臘大學教授經濟學，他基於弗林效應給出了一個解釋。 在幾十年來發表的一係列研究中，新西蘭政治學家 J. R. Flynn 提出了一個著名的發現，在智商測試數據已經有足夠時間可用的大多數富裕國家，平均智商分數一直在穩步上升。 一些研究還表明，在特定時間點，年輕人的智商往往高於老年人。

假設每一個新出生的群體都比前一代擁有更大的智力潛力，如果這種潛力是由基因決定的，那麽這種假設幾乎沒有道理。 事實上，今天生活的人攜帶著祖父母基因的重組，如果說有什麽不同的話，先天智力較低的人在當今更加嬌生慣養的環境中生存的可能性更大，而不是更小，所以遺傳智力應該是下降，而不是上升。

正如 Daniele 認為且大多數專家都同意的那樣，近幾十年來，每個群體都接觸到了更多類型的刺激，這些刺激建立了智商測試旨在測量的認知特征。 如果我的孩子是在計算機時代長大的，而我的父母是在收音機時代長大的，那麽我們可以預期孩子們會在世界上最貧窮國家的最偏遠地區或貧困環境中長大—— 想想那些生活在沒有電力和管道的家庭中的農民的孩子，也許無法接觸到報紙——他們所經曆的環境，與我父母年輕時的美國城市世界相比，仍然不太能產生此類認知技能。 另一方麵，中國深圳或巴西裏約熱內盧等地新興中產階級的孩子們正麵臨著與當代美國同齡人類似的刺激。 因此，將他們納入測試人群中，他們國家的平均智商測試分數逐年提高。

最新數據支持了這些觀察結果，表明過去幾十年來經濟發展最快的國家的智商一直在穩步上升。 作為衡量智力與增強理性分類、定量推理等能力的現代認知刺激之間相互作用的指標，人口的平均智商是經濟現代化和發展的指標，而不是其原因。

為了反駁這樣一種論點，即跨國智商差異反映了智力遺傳能力的差異，而正是這些差異反過來解釋了收入差異，丹尼爾表明，國家間平均智商差異可以通過與以下相同的因素來很好地預測： 預測當代收入的差異，尤其是 1500 年左右歐洲殖民主義時代前夕的發展水平差異。

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.