Very Good. This might be evidence that welfare state & social liberalism support 'eugenic' trends while the opposite does 'dysgenic'. Two specific mechanisms: 
 
(1) Tradeoffs between family and work are largest for high-SES women. Public/subsidised child care (and socially liberal values) ease the tradeoff. Note also that the overall higher birth rates of the Northern Europe may well be down to high-SES people having more kids than in the South. 
 
(2) High divorce rate (again socially liberal values), leads to 'recycling' of high-SES men. They have a higher probability to remarry, and seal the new relationship with kids. This counteracts the general trend that high-SES women have less kids than low-SES, no matter what. 
 
Still, most of the countries listed are going through a demographic transition, and tend to therefore show a 'dysgenic' pattern. But it's the action in the stationary states that is most interesting, and arguably most OECD countries are stationary in this regard. Ie. there are no large factions of population without access to good incomes, health care and education. 
 
This would be great research agenda, if the terms 'eugenics' and 'dysgenics' could be rebranded in some other framework/terminology.

The East-West cultural division in Finland is much older than the Swedish imperial period, during which Swedish names came about. The cultural, and gene flow probably traces back to Bronze age (1500-500 BCE). See eg Wikipedia: 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Finland#Bronze_Age

By definition, if you are in church, you are not doing crime. Same applies to fishing. 
 
This "religion makes people behave better" meme is quite strong in some circles. I also believe that if we'd go through the scientific literature rigorously, there would be also at least some causal support for it, possibly even beyond to the fishing example above. 
 
It all eventually falls to the question of paternalism - should we lie to some people, keep them uninformed or somehow constrained to achieve a society that functions better in some respect.  
 
Surprisingly large proportion of the people would say no in one instance but yes in another. Many say we shouldn't lie to people about 'heaven and hell', but at the same time are willing to accept other paternalistc measures such as regulating drugs and alcohol.

Watson's answers were completely sensible. 
 
On Africa, I think there are lots of reasons to be optimistic. Better schooling and nutrition will certainly boost IQ, scholastic achievements, utilisation of technology and economic development. (On a personal note, I've been to Sub-saharan Africa once, and it made me a bit more optimistic in this regard - I recommend it!)  
 
And even if there would be a some kind permanent handicap, due to either environment (or genes), nobody will stop Africans from utilising the innovations that are made on other continents.  
 
And if DNA research shows that the IQ gap is genetic, what changes? Probably not that much. The IQ gap has been common knowledge from about 1969 after Jensen's famous article, and despite that, the socioeconomic status of blacks has just risen. 
 
The IQ story may be true but it's not a show-stopper.

Continuing on Jaakkeli's rant, it appears to be the case (sorry no referece now) that high divorce rate could be making a 'eugenic' impact, because highly educated men have a lot better 'second-hand value' than less educated men. And typically, a new marriage is solidified by having kids. 
 
I'd sometimes like to ask these dysgenics folks, do they think that if suddenly everyone started to look for as stupid and ugly partners as possible (ie. opposite what they now do), would we then suddenly flip from dysgenic to a eugenic trend?

It seems to be quite difficult for any group to 'insulate' itself from the trends of the surrounding world.  
 
Small religious groups have a high defection rate. According to Human Development report, the TFR of Arab states has declined from 6.7 in 1970-75 to 3.7 in 2000-05. Saudi Arabia in particular has gone from 7.3 to 4.1. 
 
It has been slower in sub-saharan Africa (from 6.8 to 5.5), but the point is that the demographic bust is happening everywhere.  
 
I believe the real question to be, what societies adapt best to the 'post-pill equilibrium', if you like. France seems to be doing the best, according to the original post.

TGGP: 
That "Return of Patriarchy" (Foreign Policy Magazine), is a story that is easy to tell, but is not supported by the facts. For instance, in today's Europe, the TFR's are quite good particularly in liberal countries that do the most to make it easy for women to reconcile work and family. TFR is lowest in Italy and eastern Europe where support is the worst. 
 
The logic comes from the pill. It is the women who ultimately decide the number of kids. Either society (practically men) make work-life balance easy for women (more kids), or difficult (less kids, but with higher variance). 
 
The pill actually makes it more likely that the power of women in society grows. But there should be now worries. In Eurobarometer survey EB65.1, MEN in EU-15 report their ideal family size to be 1.86 kids, while WOMEN wish for 2.23! See table 8 at 
 
http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_253_en.pdf

Thanks,  
Very interesting interview! Its good to see some alternative thinking in Economics.

Some Certified Finnish (Computer) Geeks: 
 
Jaakko Oikarinen - Inventor of IRC - the Internet Relay Chat 
 
Linus Torvalds - Creator of Linux 
 
Michael Widenius- The main author of MySQL database 
 
Teuvo Korhonen - An academic behind Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), algorithm for visualizing neural networks. 
 
Two of the above are swedish speaking finns by the way, and you can recognize them from the names. Even though in general, a swedish name doesn't imply swedish native tongue in Finland - the former group is much larger than the latter.

Aki Kaurismäki is a hopeless alcoholic. It will be great if he produces any more movies. It's no wonder he likes the loser theme.

A neglected issue in twin studies is that identical twins often differ in birthweight and thus also on childhood IQ (which is due to differential access to nutrition in the uterus depending on their positions).  
 
These childhood differences may partly determine how much you study and who you marry. Therefore the assignment to partners is not random, and the health outcomes may even wholly be due to childhood differences. 
 
So, I'd believe the result if they control for the twins' birthweight. If not, I'm not convinced.

"but if f''0.5 then surely" 
 
should be  
 
"but if a < 0.5 then surely"

some points... 
 
1) First, your model must refer to a closed system where all people know each other - since I don't care about social status of people far away from me (eg. in eastern Nepal) 
 
2) To be a bit more exact, you should write: 
 
S = aP + (1-a)E 
 
where a and (1-a) are coefficients that either vary in society in general BUT are same for all individuals OR they vary from person to person. Nevertheless, you seem to imply that we can have various "Value systems" that weigh P and E differently in social status. 
 
3) When talking about adeptness, you imply that people have initial endowments of P and E, and that they possibly aquire more by education and experience. So let's write 
 
P = Pi + Pq 
E = Ei + Eq 
 
where i=initial and q=aquired. Then let's say people decide to divide their time T to either aquiring a mix of Pq and Eg 
 
Maximize S under constraint "Time = Pg + Eq", where Time is fixed. 
 
4) You imply that E gives you P but not other way around, right? 
 
Pq = f(E) where f() is increasing, perhaps with negative 2nd derivative. 
 
Now my personal maximisation looks like this: 
 
Max S = a[Pi +(Pq + f(Ei + Eq)) ] + (1-a)[Ei + Eq] 
 
And since Time = Eq + Pq, we substitute 
 
Max S = a[Pi +(Time-Eq + f(Ei + Eq))] + (1-a)[Ei + Eq] 
 
derivating by Eq:  
 
-aPi + aPif'(Ei + Eq) +(1-a)Eq = 0  
 
aPi[f'(Ei+Eq) - 1] + (1-a)Eq = 0 
 
Where solving Eq shows how much to invest to Eq, and it clearly depends on Pi, Ei, a, and the form of f(). The marginal return to Pq is a, and the marginal return to Eq is more than (1-a), depending on f(), but if f''0.5 then surely all investment goes to Eq, since it's marginal return is always higher. 
 
Now to derive any general patterns one must assume a certain distributions for Pi and Ei. 
 
5) Now how is parameter "a" determined in people's minds? You claim that P-Adept can manipulate the parameters a. Uhh.. so lets go: 
 
a = g(collective investment to Eq) 
 
So, if we assume a is a social parameter accepted by all, it may be a function of collective investment to Eq. There's one funny problem with that though - since collective investments are not taken into account in personal maximisation, it will have no effect on the results..  
 
6) So, to justify all this, you seem to imply that the social value system (practically parameter "a") is synonymous with libertatianism/communism, and that either of these is supposedly good, or?? 
 
7) 
 
1. All institutions will tend to be dominated by the P-adept 
2. All institutions that have no in-built exogenous criteria for measuring
More....

wow, a big post. You really are intersted in mormons. 
 
Religions are funny things. They are conservative social value systems. Like this piece shows, they DO adapt over time to their surroundings and reinterpret their 'truths'. They just do it A) slowly and B) with relative disregard of facts. 
 
So how do slowly evolving value systems fair against quickly evolving ones? The fundamentals of human life don't actually change that fast: birth, marriage, death, and finding some food in the between. They might actually do quite well. 
 
The best selling point of any religion is that they create socialisation. Jump in and you will have pals, things to do every week, traditions, identity, mission and yes, surprisingly often, mating opportunities. 
 
Still anyone looking at the factual trends will be happy to notice that the megatrend really is secularisation. I would even generalise it to Islamic countries. For the case of UK, the rough facts according to ESRC study are these: 
 
* two religious parents have roughly a 50-50 chance of passing on 
their beliefs;  
* one religious parent does only half as well as two together.  
* two non-religious parents will successfully pass on their lack of 
faith;

Some hypothetical reasons to relatively high number of finnish visitors: 
 
(1) Biosciences in general are pretty strong in Finland. Especially cancer related resarch. One of the best known scientists in Finland is a geneticist: Leena Palotie, one of the founders of the UCLA Human Genetics Genome Center.  
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leena_Palotie 
 
(2) Finland is genetically very interesting country, due to it's long isolation and founder effect, and due to the fact that we speak a non-indoeuropean language while having overwhelmingly european genes. Finns are interested in their own genetic history, and are introduced to the field this way. 
 
http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/geeneng.html 
http://www.helsinki.fi/lehdet/uh/299e.htm 
 
(3) Even before Lynn & Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations controversy broke out in Finland, this site had lots of Finnish readers, but I imagine it has still created more hits as people have gone out to search more information. 
 
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002693.html 
 
(4) There is racism in Finland, and wouldn't be surprised if people were looking for IQ & genetics related information from the internet more than some other people for this particular reason. 
 
http://www.uta.fi/~milla.hyttinen/rif.html 
 
(5) Finns are relatively active internet users in general. For example Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was invented in Finland, as well as Linux, both of which are very popular in Finland today. 
 
http://e.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=36672

From the poll: {
Americans are far more likely to believe in God and to attend religious services than people in most other developed countries – particularly countries in Europe where philosophers have written that "God is dead." }

I'm sure there is plenty of theories that try to explain this. I would guess it's the tradition of the religious groups that escaped persecution to america etc.

But still, this proves that the material advancedness of a nation doesn't quarantee intellectual development. Ok to be fair, maybe belif in God is not the right indicator. But those who believe, also often hold really irrational beliefs like 'jesus was the son of god because the holy spirit from the skies landed on him' or something weird like that.

WHY. Why do people need to believe in miracles?? Please can anyone just give me a small hint? I think I have missed something about mankind.