Quote:

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Hong Kong 107 Korea, South 106 Japan 105 Taiwan 104 Singapore 104 Austria 102 Germany 102 Italy 102 Netherlands 102 Sweden 101 Switzerland 101 Belgium 100 China 100 New Zealand 100 U. Kingdom 100 Hungary 99 Poland 99 Australia 98 Denmark 98 France 98 Norway 98 United States 98 Canada 97 Czech Republic 97 Finland 97 Spain 97 Argentina 96 Russia 96 Slovakia 96 Uruguay 96 Portugal 95 Slovenia 95 Israel 94 Romania 94 Bulgaria 93 Ireland 93 Greece 92 Malaysia 92 Thailand 91 Croatia 90 Peru 90 Turkey 90 Colombia 89 Indonesia 89 Suriname 89 Brazil 87 Iraq 87 Mexico 87 Samoa (Western) 87 Tonga 87 Lebanon 86 Philippines 86 Cuba 85 Morocco 85 Fiji 84 Iran 84 Marshall Islands 84 Puerto Rico 84 Egypt 83 India 81 Ecuador 80 Guatemala 79 Barbados 78 Nepal 78 Qatar 78 Zambia 77 Congo (Brazz) 73 Uganda 73 Jamaica 72 Kenya 72 South Africa 72 Sudan 72 Tanzania 72 Ghana 71 Nigeria 67 Guinea 66 Zimbabwe 66 Congo (Zaire) 65 Sierra Leone 64 Ethiopia 63 Equatorial Guinea 59

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What I found interesting to ponder was the fact that the worlds poorest countries were also the ones with the lowest IQ average, generally speaking.
Does the fact that they have been poor for generations mean that their IQ average is low because they are poor or are they poor because they have a low IQ average?
The quote is from here btw, I found the figures to be presented in a non-racist manner myself , though if I have missed something please advise. The site itself is fascinating.
I have always been interested in evolution and mankind and have merely posted the quote and link as an interesting site for others to have a look at.

Given that most of the lower ones are African nations I wonder if poor nutrition through drought after drought would affect IQ overall. I guess that would come under your "been poor for generations mean that their IQ average is low" theory.

My hypothesis is that this trend is a result of the poor state of educational infrastructure in economically-backward regions. The fact is that IQ is not an entirely accurate indicator of one's "intelligence": a person with good linguistic and mathematical skills will definitely do better than one lacking in these, and a decent education is essential for development of these skills. With 35.2% of the population of a country like India being illiterate, you can't expect people to fare well in IQ tests, of all things.

Another point is that it's a fact that people who have experience/practice answering IQ test-type questions tend to do better in IQ tests; people in countries like Sierra Leone and Ethiopia probably don't have as much exposure to such materials as those in Hong Kong and South Korea.

In my opinion, the statement "IQ becomes the main cause for national wealth differences" isn't true; rather, the national wealth affects the average IQ of a country's citizens.

"India 81"

I am sorry but I should have neever goven yat yest

Just wondering how you measure the average IQ of a country.
And how can such an IQ-test be objective when the people who are famous for their clarity of thinking and even made of Reason a deity, my southern neighbours the French, the people who invented more than 300 different types of cheeses, produced such thinkers as Descartes, Montesquieu,
Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes come only in twentieth place.
I bet the tests had been designed by an anglophone.

As achernar says, I think this has everything to do with education - and the emphasis put on different styles of teaching - and very, very little to do with innate intelligence.
Having taught English to children in Japan for a number of years it doesn't surprise me at all that they are good at doing IQ tests. Japanese education is excellent at teaching maths, science and one of the world's most complex writing sytems...not so good, for example, at helping children to think through an argument and express their conclusions articulately. And of course IQ tests don't test that kind of 'intelligence'.

It's my opinion that there is a hereditary component to apply and acquire knowledge. However, I don't think that what explains those national results, which is probably 90% environmental. There are those who are too quick to accept heredity as the reason for differentiation, just as there are those who are too quick to deny that heredity is a factor.

I don't know the criteria used here, flem, but I'd presume that they are averages. Instead of accusing the test makers of being English speakers (wow, those French must be awfully clever to do so well on a test administered in another language), why don't you look into it and find out?

Something else I'd like to mention is a repetition of what an anthropology lecturer said once: Intelligence is culturally defined. A Kalahari Bushman is going to have different needs than a, say, Canadian. His success might depend more on practical botany, zoology, physical fitness, and hand-eye coordination than vocabulary, reading retention, math, and logic.

Lastly, IQ is a pretty feeble tool at predicting success. China outscores the US but through the 20th century was relatively poor and remains so-- 2004 per capita GDP of US$5000. The USA, coming in slightly below average, is the world's sole economic hyperpower, enjoying the world's largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world, with a per capita GDP of US$37800.

The remark about the French was entirely ironic. You may know that the French usually consider the Belgians to be stupid. And as you see we are well in front of them.
There has been research into the efficiency of the Belgian
education system that confirmed those good IQ-scores.
My serious problem however is: what does that mean "the average IQ of a country"? Who gets tested? What percentage of people are tested? And what do you understand by "intelligence"? A farmer may do very badly for a traditional IQ-test and yet have much more "understanding of nature" than a bookish intellectual. In my opinion there is far too much "futile testing" in our world.
On the other hand I believe that those IQ-tests do test "something". Certain types of intelligence. My question would be: what sort of intelligence can you test via IQ-tests? And when do you have a sufficient amount of research to be entitled to saying that you have determined "averages per country"?
There is however a language aspect too. IQ tests have a section on linguistic competence. But not all languages are equally difficult. And moreover what do you test? In some parts of the world language skill is seen as more important than insight in grammar. In my country the teaching of French has long been very theoretical, very much a matter of
grammar and not enough practical competence. Some countries attach more importance to orthography than others. If you include the relation between orthography and pronunciation then English is definitely more tricky than most languages.
And how many foreign langauges do you include?
Doesn't such an "international" classification compare apples with pears?
I never trusted statistics, opinion-polls and IQ-tests. I would like to hear the arguments of those who believe in them.
And by the way I am not a francophone, I am a Dutch-speaker.

I was not accusing the testmakers of being anglophones but entering in the frame of mind some people have that there is such a thing as German innate "Gründlichkeit", French "clarté", Anglo-Saxon "empirical approach" etc. In that case "intelligence" might mean something different for each of these groups.
I did definitely not intend to say that the French were handicapped because the tests were in another language than French.
In other words the perception of what intelligence might be
is indeed culturally defined. And therefore I see no point in making any kind of "international IQ-comparisons". The very idea of making such IQ-tests and the contents of such IQ-contests is culturally defined. Someone having to survive in the jungle would probably draw up a very different IQ-test than an Oxford don.
In the same way what is understood as a joke within one group of people, may not be so within another.

Something else that bothers me about these results is that to a significant extent IQ tests (like most, if not all tests) indicate "test sophistication" as well as ability. Among those countries where (just about) everyone attends school for 9-10 years or more, some education systems will place most emphasis on tests than others, and therefore produce kids with a high level of "test sophistication". I suspect that may be part of the reason for the high averages for some of those countries in the Far East.

However, all this pales into insignificance by comparison with the very poorest countries: there, the national average may include people with absolutely no schooling at all, people with a few years' worth of formal education and so forth. In the case of such countries, I think the average is likely to be quite meaningless.

The significance of schooling goes far beyond literacy. People with little or no schooling will often be unfamiliar with the kind of reasoning and concepts of relevance inherent in IQ tests. Here's an example of a question in an oral IQ test, that I came across many years ago, but I don't have the source to hand and can't remember in which African country it had been used:

"Everyone who owns a house has to pay a property tax on the house. Boima owns a house. Does he have to pay property tax? Yes/no".

For almost anyone who had spent a few years at school this question was laughably simple. However, people with no schooling at all, or very little, were much more likely than others to bring in matters from outside the text and muddy the waters in doing so. Some people who were tested based their answer on a Boima they happened to know and on whether or not they thought he paid property tax. It takes a certain kind of reasoning - often acquired most easily and effectively at school - to understand that the answer must be based solely on the statements in the question. In other words, one needs some familiarity with the kinds of questions asked in schools and the basis on which answers must be given, in order to answer correctly. People who have no familiarity with "school conventions" may not understand that if they know someone called Boima who is very poor and is struggling to pay the rent, this has absolutely nothing to do with the way the question has to be answered. When tested, they are allowed a wry smile at the irony of it, but nothing more. They need to understand that they are not being asked a factual question as to whether a person in their village or town called Boima actually owns a house and pays property tax, but that they are being asked to demonstrate their ability to reason logically.

This is interesting. I believe that the original IQ tests were developed by a Frenchman. What they are supposed to measure (and nothing else)is how a kid is going to do at school. In general they've proved to be pretty good indicators, which is why they're still used. In the past few years, people have become really sensitive to culturally- and economically-specific 'intelligence' tests and have done their best to modify them accordingly. Whether or not this has reached Africa is a moot point.

These statistics are really confusing and kind of sinister and what it looks like to me is that they're testing school systems and not kids at all. They're blocked nationally and not ethnically - kids born of parents from Sierra Leone or Zaire who have been raised in Hong Kong or Canada...will they test at the same level? I doubt it. I had lots of Zairian kids when I taught in Montreal - all sons and daughters of people with enough money to get out of Zaire, of course - and they were pretty sharp. The products of private lycees, most of them. How many of such schools continue to operate today in places like Sierra Leone? It's kind of difficult to concentrate on an intelligence test when someone went and cut your hands off two years ago.

Actually, I see no reason for producing such statistics. They're seized on by louts seeking 'proof' for boneheaded theories about racial selection. Oh dear (sigh)...

The IQ-test was created in 1904 by Alfred Binet. Later it became the Stanford-Binet test.A useful article on what the IQ test measures can be found at http://
www.audiblox2000.com/dyslexia_dyslexic/dyslexia014.htm

It is no surprise to me that Hong Kong comes top (apart from because I live there!) .
Whoever mentioned 'test sophistication'got it in one.I generalise, but I would imagine that students here are subjected to more tests and exams than anywhere else. Three year olds are given tests. Four year olds have dictations every week. I could go on for hours about this.
One week after swatting and taking an exam, most students have forgotten every word of what they learnt.An IQ test would be right up their street, as they would know exactly what to answer to increase the mark.

The crack about cheese really should've tipped me off.

I'd like to relate to you all a conversation a young lad from Equatorial Guinea had with his father about IQs:

Son: Dad, what would I be if I had an IQ of 140?
Dad: Son, you'd probably be a doctor or lawyer.
Son: What if I had an IQ of 120?
Dad: You'd probably be an engineer or something similar.
Son: What if I had an IQ of 90?
Dad: You'd probably be digging ditches.
Son: And what if my IQ was 60?
Dad: With an IQ that low, you wouldn't even be able to tie your shoelaces.
Son: Dad, is that why so many Australians wear thongs?