Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own - Hardcover

Jones, Garett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804785961 ISBN 13: 9780804785969

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Over the last few decades, economists and psychologists have quietly documented the many ways in which a person's IQ matters. But, research suggests that a nation's IQ matters so much more.

As Garett Jones argues in Hive Mind, modest differences in national IQ can explain most cross-country inequalities. Whereas IQ scores do a moderately good job of predicting individual wages, information processing power, and brain size, a country's average score is a much stronger bellwether of its overall prosperity.

Drawing on an expansive array of research from psychology, economics, management, and political science, Jones argues that intelligence and cognitive skill are significantly more important on a national level than on an individual one because they have "positive spillovers." On average, people who do better on standardized tests are more patient, more cooperative, and have better memories. As a result, these qualities-and others necessary to take on the complexity of a modern economy-become more prevalent in a society as national test scores rise. What's more, when we are surrounded by slightly more patient, informed, and cooperative neighbors we take on these qualities a bit more ourselves. In other words, the worker bees in every nation create a "hive mind" with a power all its own. Once the hive is established, each individual has only a tiny impact on his or her own life.

Jones makes the case that, through better nutrition and schooling, we can raise IQ, thereby fostering higher savings rates, more productive teams, and more effective bureaucracies. After demonstrating how test scores that matter little for individuals can mean a world of difference for nations, the book leaves readers with policy-oriented conclusions and hopeful speculation: Whether we lift up the bottom through changing the nature of work, institutional improvements, or freer immigration, it is possible that this period of massive global inequality will be a short season by the standards of human history if we raise our global IQ.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Garett Jones is Associate Professor of Economics at the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University. Garett's research and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, and Businessweek.

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Hive Mind

How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own

By Garett Jones

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8596-9

Contents

Figures, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: The Paradox of IQ, 
1. Just a Test Score?, 
2. A da Vinci Effect for Nations, 
3. James Flynn and the Quest to Raise Global IQ, 
4. Will the Intelligent Inherit the Earth?, 
5. Smarter Groups Are More Cooperative, 
6. Patience and Cooperation as Ingredients for Good Politics, 
7. Informed Voters and the Question of Epistocracy, 
8. The O-Ring Theory of Teams, 
9. The Endless Quest for Substitutes and the Economic Benefits of Immigration, 
10. Poem and Conclusion, 
Data Appendix, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

JUST A TEST SCORE?

HERE'S THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT ABOUT IQ TESTS: skill in one area predicts skill in another. If a person has an above-average score on one part of an IQ test — the vocabulary section, for instance — she probably has an above-average score on any other part of the test. A thorough IQ test such as the Wechsler or the Stanford-Binet actually contains about a dozen separate tests. So check to see whether that person did well on solving the vocabulary test: if she did, she's probably better than average at memorizing a long list of numbers, she could probably look at the drawing of a person talking to a police officer and instantly realize that the officer is standing knee-deep in water, and she probably did better than average on the wood block puzzle.

That's the real surprise of IQ tests and other cognitive tests: high scores in one area tend to go along with high scores in other areas, even ones that don't outwardly appear similar. Psychologists often talk about the "general factor of intelligence," the "g factor," or the "positive manifold," but let's call it "the da Vinci Effect," since Leonardo's excellence spanned so many subjects from painting to clock design to military engineering. The da Vinci Effect means that our parents and grandparents are usually wrong when they tell us "everything balances out in the end" or "if you're weak in one area that just means you're stronger in another." When it comes to IQ tests — on average — if a person is stronger in one area, that's a sign the person is probably stronger at other tasks as well.

We'll return to the notion of the da Vinci Effect a lot, so it's a concept worth understanding well. The claim isn't that every relationship between mental skills is always strongly positive — there are always exceptions to every rule, just as there are people who smoke two packs a day and live to be ninety. But, as we'll see in this chapter, many of the most commonly recognized general skills have strong positive relationships, and it's rare to find any sort of negative relationship across large groups of people.

IQ tests are often the stuff of controversy. What can they really tell us? What can they actually measure? What real-world outcomes can they help us to predict? That's exactly what we'll discuss in this chapter. It's going to focus exclusively on studies done in rich countries, studies in which test subjects are reasonably healthy and have some prospect of a real education. And I make a claim that, in these settings, the mainstream of psychology is also comfortable making: IQ tests are a rough, imperfect measure of what the typical person would call general intelligence.

Of course, a test score is just a test score until we've seen real evidence that it predicts something beyond other test scores. But when we see that the da Vinci Effect turns up repeatedly during IQ tests in today's rich countries, we know we're getting closer to the real-world version of intelligence: the ability to solve a variety of problems, quickly recall different types of information, and use deductive reasoning in multiple settings. When ordinary people say someone is intelligent, they usually mean that the person has mental skills that span a wide range. They mean that that person's mental skills have at least a touch of the da Vinci Effect.

"True on Average"

I discuss a lot of facts in this book and make a lot of claims about general tendencies. It should go without saying but bears repeating when discussing the important topic of human intelligence: these statements are only true on average. There are many exceptions; in fact almost every case is an exception, with about half of the cases turning out better than predicted and half turning out worse.

It would be tedious if I had to repeat the phrases "true on average" or "this relationship has many exceptions" or "tends to predict" every single time I make a factual claim. So I won't. But remember: every data-driven claim in this book is only a claim about the general tendency, and there are always exceptions. Every person we meet, every nation we visit, is an exception to the rules — but it's still a good idea to know the rules.

Intelligence: As with Strength or Size, Oversimplification Often Helps

Suppose you were given a hundred computers and told your job was to figure out which ones were faster than others. There's one catch: you don't know the actual processor speed of any of the computers. How would you rank them? You might try running ten or twenty different pieces of software on each of them — a video game or two, a spreadsheet, a word processor, a couple of web browsers. For each computer, you could write down, on a scale of 1 to 100, how fast the computer runs each piece of software, and then average those numbers together to create a computer speed index for each computer. Of course, the process won't be entirely fair — maybe you unintentionally chose a spreadsheet program that was designed specifically for one type of computer — but it's a step in the right direction. Further, it's probably better than just trying out one or two applications indiscriminately on each computer for half an hour and then writing up a subjective review of each machine. Structuring the evaluation process probably makes it fairer.

Now suppose you were trying to assess the overall physical strength of a hundred male Army recruits. You know that some people are great at carrying rocks and some are great at pushups and so on, but you also suspect that, on average, some people are just "stronger" than others. There will be tough cases to compare, but perhaps you could create a set of ten athletic events — call it a decathlon. People who do better in each event get more points. Wouldn't the people with the ten highest scores generally be quite a bit stronger — in the common sense of the word — than those with the ten lowest scores? Of course they would. There'd be an exception here and there, but the ranking would work pretty well. And here's a big claim you'll probably agree with: recruits who did the best in the decathlon would usually be better at other lifting-punching-carrying tasks that weren't even part of the decathlon. The decathlon score would help predict nondecathlon excellence.

Again, an index, an average, will hide some features that might be important. But for large, diverse populations, there is almost surely a da Vinci Effect for strength. It's not impossible for an adult male who benches only seventy-five pounds to be great at pullups, but it will be relatively rare....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804785961
• ISBN 13: 9780804785969
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande