From: Abiola Lapite

Hello,

I greatly enjoy reading your blog, as most of the time I find myself learning something new and interesting I hadn't seen before. However, I'd be wary if I were you of leaning on "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", the quality of the data of which is (to put it very kindly) *questionable*, and driven as much by Richard Lynn's eugenic and racist fixations as anything else. For more, see here, and I also highly suggest looking at the dataset posted here by Steve Sailer yourself. Note that adjustments for the Flynn effect are ad hoc, applying to some and not to others, that sample sizes are often ridiculously small, and that absolutely no information on the moments of the test scores is disclosed. Does it really pass the smell test with you that an entire third of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is so retarded as to require institutionalization?

The bottom line is that the reason the data in "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" seems to have such predictive power is that it was largely *cooked up* to reflect the economic data. I've been fighting the racist claptrap being pushed by Richard Lynn and his fans for ages now, and it saddens me to see yet another individual whose writing I admire succumb to their junk. Do not be seduced by the fancy integrals being applied to the data: this "research" deserves to be consigned to the same graveyard as the old "Rassenkunde", and for much the same reasons.

My reply:
Thanks for writing!
ad smell test: I obtained the data from the La Griffe du Lion site; they don't provide any information on higher order moments, the sample size, etc. This is one of the reasons why I didn't come up with any estimates. I removed the link to Steve Sailer's site after ostracised pointed out that he refers to genetics in his article. What I do believe: IQ is not only determined by nature but also by nurture and if somebody told me that most inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa can be regarded as retarded (relative to IQ levels in developed countries), I wouldn't doubt those findings.