doi:10.1016/j.paid.2006.05.007
Book review IQ and Global Inequality, Lynn Richard, Vanhanen Tatu. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Books, PB ISBN: 1-59368-024-4, $17.95; HB, ISBN: 1-59368-025-2, $34.95 This new book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen is an elaboration of theirIQ and the Wealth of Nationsin which they presented measured IQs for 81 nations and estimated IQs for the remaining nations in the world (TotalN= 185 countries) (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2002). They showed that these IQs correlated around 0.70 with per capita income and rates of economic devel- opment. This was predictable, they argued, because intelligence is correlated with earnings among individuals. Nations are aggregates of individuals so the same correlation would be expected across nations. This was a very bold claim. The causes of national differences in wealth are one of the major problems in economics on which hundreds of books have been written and to which several jour- nals are devoted. The problem has also been addressed by sociologists (Max Weber), historians (David Landes), psychologists (David McClelland) and most recently by an evolutionary biologist (Jared Diamond). None of these have suggested—dared to suggest?—that national differences in intelligence might be a major factor determining why some nations are so rich while others are so poor. In advancing their intelligence theory, Lynn and Vanhanen begin by noting that economists re- gard it as axiomatic that all peoples of the world have the same intelligence. For instance,Easter- lin (1981), the Kenan Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania has written, ‘‘I think we can safely dismiss the view that the failure of modern technological knowledge to spread rapidly was due to significant differences among nations in the native intelligence of their popu- lations. To my knowledge there are no studies that definitively establish differences, say, in basic IQ among the peoples of the world’’ (p. 5). More recently, two other economists, Eric Hanushek of the Hoo…