Differential psychology/psychometrics

New paper out: National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits

22. December 2020

Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Karlin, A. (2020). National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits. Mankind Quarterly, 61(2). https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.11 Patient people fare better in life than impatient people. Based on this and on economic models, many economists have claimed that more patient countries should fare…

Economics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

New paper out: What Happened to Brussels? The Big Decline and Muslim Immigration

22. December 2020

Researchgate link (ungated) Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Dumoulin, B. (2020). What Happened to Brussels? The Big Decline and Muslim Immigration. Mankind Quarterly, 61(2). https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.8 We examined regional inequality in Belgium, both in the 19 communes of Brussels and in the country as a whole (n = 589 communes). We find very strong relationships between…

Immigration, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Hereditarian predictions

7. October 2020

Putting these in writing in a single place for ease of reference. Unfortunately, no one wrote down all these predictions some years ago to show they really were predictions, but one could probably find textual evidence for many of these in various papers and blogposts. Some of them have been supported already, and some are…

Genomics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Quantitative genetic and natural selection: 2018-2020 studies

25. September 2020

There are many studies that look at signs for selection using large genomic datasets. This post provides a selective summary of such studies from 2018 to now, so very recent progress. There are in general two ways to approach the question of selection. First, one can look at known variants for traits found via GWASs,…

Evolutionary biology, Genomics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Chanda Chisala did not come up with the UK race gaps argument

15. September 2020

Many people seem to have this impression. These arguments go back more than 10 years. This post quotes various UK newspaper articles going back to 2006: Underperformance of Poor White British Boys. Racial Reality. June 2, 2010 John Fuerst is probably the first hereditarian to seriously grapple with these issues: Partially falsified. Unwelcome Discovery. February…

intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Smart fraction theory: literature collection

9. September 2020

I am finishing up a large study on smart fraction theory (intellectual classes model). To this end, I reviewed all the empirical papers on the topic, and some historical ones. To save others and future-Emil the trouble of finding all these papers, here’s my collection. These are mainly collected by Google Scholar and following citing…

intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Macroeconomics and intelligence: a collection

28. August 2020

See prior post on national IQs and who you can’t cite. Economists and intelligence researchers don’t generally talk: Test scores, on the other hand, offer direct measures of a variety of more-or-less specific abilities and, when the tests in question are well-constructed, objective, standardized tests, they are fairly precise measures that can be kept quite…

Economics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Motivation and IQ scores

24. August 2020

Der er is a famous meta-analysis showing that motivation affects IQ scores to a substantial degree: Duckworth, A. L., Quinn, P. D., Lynam, D. R., Loeber, R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (2011). Role of test motivation in intelligence testing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(19), 7716-7720. Intelligence tests are widely assumed to measure maximal…

intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

IQ testing in America: not banned

22. August 2020

See also this post by greyenlightenment. There is a widespread (e.g. 1, 2, 3) but false belief that the 1970s supreme court case Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) resulted in a de facto ban on using IQ (intelligence) or other cognitive testing in employment relations. This is not the case. Here’s…

intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

National IQs: measurement invariance studies

22. August 2020

A lot of national intelligence criticism focuses on the measurement validity. Are the scores really comparable across countries? Most of the criticism is armchair stuff, or vaguer claims based on smaller studies such as this one: Multiple examples from different societies demonstrating that https://t.co/drJKXid5W0 — Will (@Evolving_Moloch) August 21, 2020 However, there are proper statistical…

intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability