We say the things...
that other people are
unable to say. Consider this passage from TCS:
Indeed, the one exception to this global good news of economic growth producing greater equality -- Africa -- substantially undermines their protests against globalization.
The last 30 years have been a disaster for Africa. In 1970, 76% of the world's poor lived in Asia and only 11% lived in Africa. Today, those two continents have switched places -- 66% of the world's poor live in Africa while only 15% live in Asia. These differences are due almost entirely to the different growth paths each region took. Asia rode a wave of export-led growth in an increasingly globalized world to stunning economic progress, while Africa's economy tragically shrunk.
These sad facts have led Sala-i-Martin to conclude, rightly, that figuring out how to turn around the growth performance of Africa is "the most important question in economics." Where might we want to look -- and, more importantly, not look -- for answers to the problems Africa faces?
The author drops the topic after this provocative sentence. But we need not stop there - low IQ is certainly a factor. What else might contribute? Obviously high IQ is not a guarantee of a population's economic success (e.g. China in 1970), but it is likely to be a necessary if not sufficient condition...
Razib adds: Check out
Richard Lynn's article online that summarizes a lot of the conclusions and presents data from his book
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations coauthored with Tatu Vanhanen. I don't buy it all-but it's thought-provoking.
Razib update: Many people wonder if the IQ profile of a nation is a chicken & egg problem. I suspect that drought, famine and war have a negative effect on the intellectual attainments of a population-and their predisposition to pay attention if someone is giving them an intelligence test. On the other hand, check out this
table. South Africa and Zimbabwe have been relatively stable countries (the latter until recently was a food exporter-and despite political repression South Africa's blacks were relatively prosperous enough that the country was/is an
immigration magnent for its neighbors) compared to others such as Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo-and yet their IQs are still pretty low. I recommend Steve Sailer's
long rumination on this topic. I do think there are serious problems using data from Third World countries-so I take the persistance of the black-white
IQ gap as indicative of possible (likely) genetic factors that might be at work. Though I don't think the IQs for African countries are totally inelastic and wholly accurate (African-Americans are 82% African and have mean IQs of 85)-I do think when you start out at 70 it's a whole lot to ask to make it all the way up to ~100 with better nutrition and political stability.