Does the average Indian voter have low IQ?

correction: rec1man pegs it at a potential Indian mean IQ of approx 93 (not 89). Either of these is much higher than Lynn’s estimate. Poor nutrition and lack of basic educational stimulation reduces this by perhaps 5 points or more. rec1man’s approach is to triangulate by using various diaspora populations.

the critique of Nisbett’s book is at

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/Intelligence%20and%20How%20to%20Get%20It%20(Working%20Paper).pdf

sn has brought out a lot of points from pretty much the same universe of literature that i had thought to quote at a later time. they provide a good intro on the topic.

The IQ question is an important one for India and a compelete cross-sectional study with values for 1- IQ using a culture-neutral test, 2- endogamous group,3 – nutrition, 4 – educational level should be done.

If the numbers come out similar to the ones quoted by Lynn, then the urgency to tackle malnourishment and illiteracy are very great.

Steps to advance in a low IQ environment.

1. Scholarship programmes – An absolutely urgent requirement.
2. Better provision of education, separation of funding and provision.
3. Freer markets – a united all-india market for agro products is an absolute necessity. free markets everywhere else can be a big boost.
4. broadband connections to everywhere – there is a huge difference between broadband and narrowband connection – that difference is the absence of necessity of literacy. broadband connections can transmit video and audio and can connect a huge amount of very useful information to people who presently have a literacy gap with using the present net. The best teachers’ best lectures can be recorded and shared. Everyone can learn from the very best.
5. prizes can be awarded to new successful business models that employ a lot of people. This will move the problem of “how to work with a low IQ populace” to the creativity of an entire market. I would also make the endowment of the national innovation foundation to 50-100 times its present value.
6. wiki pedagogy – already hinted at in point 4. a better pedagogical approach, with all best practices shared in a wiki which all schools in the country can access. An FAQ for all major student doubts should also be created.
7. Nutrition – iodine in salt, iron in flour. a serious micro-nutrient supplementation program for pregnant women and young children.
8. Cultural changes – changes in the civics syllabus on how to vote for a broader interest(?), counselling on avoidance of dysgenic practices.
9. Biological research on boosting IQ – Prizes can be awarded for biological research that can boost IQs. Any medicines thus created could be given out subsidised or mixed in the water supply.

Is it assumed that voters with a high IQ will not vote to obtain short-term gains, even if it is against the long-term interest of the nation, and consequently, themselves also? 🙂

@ Shantanu:

Thanks for posting this topic.

With my poor IQ, this was a fascinating topic to learn.

cheers

@Bhavananda

Voting along caste or religious lines is perfectly rational because it is (or appears to be) consistent with self-interest. Being bribed to vote a particular party is simply a more extreme manifestation. I’d be surprised if this was related to the IQ in general more than weakly. There is a way to check this out from the election results. Have some objective way to decide who the more competent/deserving candidate was. And check if in fact the more educated (a proxy for IQ) section of the electorate was more likely to vote for this person (not that they actually preferred this person) than the less educated segments.

In free and developed societies where people pursue their interests and likes with less concern for their family and group backgrounds, there is a correspondence between IQ on the one hand and ability to co-operate on the other (for example, students in the more elite universities do a lot better in dilemma games by choosing to cooperate). Cooperation, in this context, is acting against narrow self interest.

Leadership can and does make a difference in persuading people to act in their long term interests. In Confucian societies, its much easier for leaders to ask for sacrifices from the populace; this increases the adaptability of such societies. India doesn’t fit in this mold. I didn’t follow the recent elections that closely but, in the end, I think the image projected by the Congress reflected greater competence and fairness. BJPs message wasn’t coherent and the leadership wasn’t inspiring.

@prakash

4.The best teachers’ best lectures can be recorded and shared. Everyone can learn from the very best.

http://www.youtube.com/iit

Note that the IITs have a great open source initiative along these lines for engineering education. Their content, taken as a whole, is more coherent (because it is curriculum based) than what finds at elite ivy league schools such as MIT and Stanford. Such creative folks should be given encouragement (in this case the effort is steered by Prof. Ananth at IIT Madras and I am told managed by Prof. Mangalasunder); instead they are harassed by Ministry of Human development (Arjun Singh et al).

5. Prizes can be awarded to new successful business models that employ a lot of people. This will move the problem of “how to work with a low IQ populace” to the creativity of an entire market.

The Indian Railways is one such organization with a lot of relevant know-how. It is, like the armed forces, a state within a state, and provides for the welfare for a huge number of people, ranging from uneducated tribals to innovative technocrats (Sreedharan of Delhi metro fame is ex-railways). The armed forces also is a repository of hard to find cultural knowledge as they deal with the full range of groups and get them to work together. If such organizations are dismantled in the name of narrow-minded privatization, we’ll lose a lot.

watch this link to know wht actually IQ means

http://www.geocities.com/rnseitz/Definition_of_IQ.html

@15 Anandaram

1. Are you serious? A variable that, within countries, accounts for a big chunk of achievement should be “highly suspect” when it shows covariation with national income across countries? And in modern knowledge based economies, it is a no-brainer that the quality of the HR matters (which in turn covaries a lot with IQ). High tech companies are filled with high IQ people. Why do you think the US armed forces (since 1920s) and every other modern armed forces uses IQ testing to place individuals in various positions? Although tests like the SAT and GRE and CAT are not strictly IQ tests, they are essentially IQ filters.

2. The whole point about IQ (the fluid intelligence as opposed to crystallized knowledge or what is called achievement) is that it peaks in the early 20s and declines thereafter (gradually, except in the much later years). You need it to learn complex topics/skills, of the sort that has become increasingly common in modern hi-tech societies. Contextual knowledge of the sort that people in specific locales over generations (e.g. tribes in forests) acquire would not seem to demand much by way of high IQ (although the individuals who make various breakthroughs are likely smarter than average). Educational achievement realizes the IQ potential; of course one can stunt this potential via illiteracy or malnutrition. The smart person with 120 IQ (say) can handle typical college courses but would be out of depth in esoteric subjects (say theoretical physics). Its no different than realizing that some people are more talented in certain sports but that they wont realize their talent without exposure to proper training, diet etc. Those who dont have the threshold level of talent (like IQ) wont reach such heights, no matter what the training.

3. The demands of the modern economy are vastly different. They need, in many cases, people with higher IQ (than lower IQ). It is conceivable that, compared to the current context, for ancient economies other factors were more consequential (than the quality of the human resources). As an aside, I’d expect the IQ of developing countries to rise by a few points with improvements in nutrition and environment (this is called the Flynn effect but such increases dont seem to affect the core part of IQ called “g” ) and then plateau. The rise of England as an industrial power has been related to the fact that the upper classes (smarter people) were much more likely to reproduce and survive successfully. So much so that most current day englishmen (regardless of their economic class) have upper class ancestors. This trend has been reversed (as it has in most other countries as well) over the last half century) becaused medical care has become more universal and the lower classes have greater fertility.

@ Prakash:

How about Freedom as a variable, which is more closely linked to national growth? Instead of IQ. You touched upon it briefly, with your allusions to trade. India has been independent since 1947, but have its people been free? To pursue their goals without obstruction from the state? Remember the Licence-Raj?

And, re: the Jews – how about the Marwaris of India? Have they not done as well as a community?

Cheers

“China is one of those countries that has underperformed in recent history, relative to its mean IQ (which is at least 10 points or more higher than the Indian IQ) which is comparable to European countries.”

Freedom as a key variable?

This study is seriously flawed. Please refer to this table:
http://www.isteve.com/IQ_table.htm summarized by Steve Sailer from the Author’s studies. The 4 IQ tests used to compute the IQ of India was in the 1970’s the last being 1979 about 30 years back.
To think India has not made any significant advancement and crowing over the causes is wrong.
As per literacy rate studies between 81 and ’01, the rate jumped from the mid-40 percentile to the mid 60 percentile.
Unicef pegs India’s literacy at 66% in 2007. http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html
The study would be a bit skewed if it were to consider a country’s GDP based on natural resources. For example, it cleverly avoids Saudi Arabia, a country with incredible oil resources but poor literacy. Surely with all that Oil Money Saudi GDP cannot be correlated to the intelligence of its people.
So hold your horses folks 🙂

@ Patriot and DD

Kindly note my second comment which has been quoted by Shantanu in the post.

IQ and the wealth of nations mentions 3 factors explaining the GDP of nations – IQ, Natural resources and Free Markets. I totally agree that free markets are extremely important. I want more free and open markets. An open market is what will prevent educational institutions from turning insular as it happened under the ancient caste system.

Having said that, IQ is an important variable which cannot be ignored. Being in the IT industry, I can testify to the fact that the industry is already facing manpower quality issues.

Linking to Raman Roy’s WSJ article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124443240028093443.html

Quoting from the same.
“It is disappointing to see that only 150 to 200 applicants meet the actual criteria and get recruited when Quatrro advertises and we get 7,500 to 10,000 applications. Technically, a large proportion of the applicants meet the requirements but in terms of competency and capability, they don’t match up. ”

And this if i may mention, is when the IT/ITES industry has not employed more than 20 lakh or so. A country of 11,000 lakh people facing IT manpower quality issues at 20 lakhs.

I’m not saying that the IT industry is any kind of a universal benchmark, but come on.. it is a relatively cozy job with decent pay. Raman should not be rejecting 499 out of 500 candidates in an industry where adding labour is the easiest way of adding revenue.

@ Kalidas – Valid point. Atanu Dey (I think) has pointed out that india is better off with a certification system than a university degree system. a certification system is a test of skill, essentially.

@ Prakash –

I think the issue is one of how such IQ tests are constructed. I think Bhavananda also touched upon this in his earlier post.

IQ tests give a lot of importance to understanding of maths and logic concepts. How about being able to identify the difference between a leaf from a jamun tree and that of a guava tree? How about being able to identify twenty different types of seeds and being able to tell what are the appropriate conditions under which they can sowed? How about being able to construct a gigantic juice mixer out of a washing machine (lateral thinking)?

The issue is that while maths and logic are very important in particular lines of business and sciences, they are not at all important in others – therefore, to a large extent IQ tests are biased towards those that have an inclination towards maths.

The other problem with all these co-relation/regression tests is that you have to build up databases over periods of time for each country/region – which is clearly absent – so that you can correlate each region’s performance with IQ internally, first, before you get into cross-regional inferences where a lot of other variables come into play. In other words, where is the data for homogenous population groups over time, before we start analysing hetergenous population groups.

And, as far as the numbers are concerned, the numbers will come – I am confident of that – Liberalised India is only 20 odd years old and we already have changed the business models of two global industries (IT Services and Automobiles) – wait for the next 20 years, as innovation builds on innovation. I am pretty optimistic about India.

@ Sanjay –

Excellent post. Agree, in toto.

As an aside, I dont want to give the impression that IQ only matters for high-tech professions. It matters across the board. Consider the following thought experiment: A group of high-schoolers independently, without supervision, set up a fast food stand in a sports stadium to earn some money for their group during a well attended sports event. Group A: The group is made up of 10 students, average IQ 95. Group B: The group is made of 10 students, average IQ 110. Which fast food stand will do better in terms of profits for the day? There is an overwhelming probability that group B will outperform group A. Even simpler tasks like cleaning, serving in restaurants, require IQ and can benefit from it provided the workers are not demotivated (bored). Countries like China and Japan have very well trained workers in their service sector; yes, to some extent one can point at their culture, but one cant ignore tha the relatively higher IQ of chinese and japanese workers play a part, allowing them to innovate in their relatively simple jobs, as required.

@Patriot: Your comments are interesting because they give me an opportunity to clarify.

1. I am glad we are in agreement on the importance of IQ which is also termed as fluid intelligence and is thought to be identified by the “g” factor which appears to have strong genetic and its neural underpinnings are now being understood.

2. You think that explaining 54% of the variance is not impressive. I agree that 46% remains due to other factors (e.g., natural resources, historical factors etc.). But as a social scientist I am truly amazed that a single variable can explain so much of the variance. A model doesn’t need to explain all the variance for it to be useful or important. Most famous medical treatments (e.g., the use of Aspirin as a thinner to reduce strokes and heart attacks) were based on studies that effectively “explained” less than 10 percent of the variance. It doesnt matter because of the importance of the outcome (saving lives). Similarly there is no doubt that seat belts save lives. But if you sketch a 2 x 2 table you will find that nothing happens to many people who dont wear seat belts and some of those who do wear seat belts die in crashes. So from a variance point of view, the effect of seatbelts can seem small. But in fact, they do save lives. In America, Seat belts are the most effective safety devices in vehicles today, estimated to save 9,500 lives each year. From a variance point of view, this amount is miniscule considering the billions of passenger trips. So dont confuse effect size (in this case the percent of variance explained) with the importance of the effect.

3. In any case, this type of research is in its infancy and will use better measures of IQ as it moves along. It is unfortunate that such research is mostly considered politically incorrect (because it leads to the conclusion that human groups differ!, a fairly obvious fact given that human groups have been isolated from each other for hundreds or thousands of generations). In my view, and in consonance with the blog name, truth matters. One can be fully human and have a low IQ. Whats wrong with that? Or one can be inhuman and have a high IQ. IQ like any other trait has a natural variation.

4. Read “The Bell Curve” by Murray (the data are mostly american) Somebody needs to write a similar volume thats relevant to Indian samples. Check Amazon or Wikipdiea.

4a. In response to the growing controversy surrounding The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs established a special task force to publish an investigative report on the research presented in the book.[4] The final report, titled Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, is available at an academic website. Some of the task force’s findings supported or were consistent with statements from The Bell Curve. They agreed that:

* IQ scores have high predictive validity for individual differences in school achievement.
* IQ scores have predictive validity for adult occupational status, even when variables such as education and family background have been statistically controlled.
* Individual differences in intelligence are substantially influenced by both genetics and environment.
* There is little evidence to show that childhood diet influences intelligence except in cases of severe malnutrition.
* There are no statistically significant differences between the IQ scores of males and females.

5. It may be true that Chinese norms for intellectual property are different but it does take intelligence to copy at the rate they do, does it not? Why are foreigners investing there? Are they all stupid? It would be shortsighted to conclude that Chinese are only clever but not innovative. They are traders and are buying up American companies (eg. Hummer from GM). In the present day economic and military prowess are closely tied together. You cannot have a strong military without the supporting economy and technology.

6. Last point. All other things being equal, within a racial and gender group, healthy (tall and strong) individuals are more intelligent, on average and longer lived than individuals who are shorter and weaker. By the way, that fast food example was not hypothetical (I actually saw the high IQ kids outcompete a normal group by a large margin..I was there as a volunteer parent)

@ SN –

I think you are not viewing the statistics part of this discussion correctly – maybe, you do not have a background in statistics, and hence the confusion on what is the key sample/population to consider and what is Significant (key word in statistics) Correlation and what is not. If you are trained in statistics, then you are deliberately confusing the issue.

RE: Pt. 2 – When you do a single variate analysis, with IQ as the independent variable (given) and National productivity as the dependent variable, and run a regression analysis – a 56% prediction capability is very poor, statistically. In the sciences, you would not give any credence to such a model. I am not familiar with testing methodologies in social “sciences” (more appropriately called, humanities or liberal arts, rather than science) and I do not know if the bar is so much lower in these streams.

So, since single variate analysis fails to come up with a robust model, then the author moves on to adding free markets and natural resources. Now, the value of natural resources is determined by trade and demand-supply gaps of the said resource at a particular point in time – it has no intrinsic value by itself. So, how can you ascribe any kind of “physical values” to natural resources at a point in time and how can you call it an independent variable – your analysis will be seriously flawed.

And, free markets? How do you assign numbers/values to that? I would be interested in knowing this methodology. And, what is a free market? One that allows free trade in goods? How about services and allowing free immigration as part of free markets? Too random and complex a variable to be even considered as an independent variable.

So, that is as far, as this captioned study is concerned.

RE – Aspirin – I do not know where you get your data from – but, Aspirin was approved as a blood thinner by the US FDA, after a series of tests in populations with this SPECIFIC problem. Maybe, the correlation is only 10% with the entire US population, but that is IRRELEVANT. For the affected population, with significant blood clotting history, it was proved with a 97.5% confidence interval, that use of aspirin helps this problem. This hypothesis was further substantiated by the use of control groups, who were given placebos. So, please, do not compare the statistical quality of drugs testing procedures with “social experimental” regression analysis. The former is significantly more rigorous.

RE – Seatbelts – have you head of the series of tests carried out by US and Japanese car manufacturers using crash-test dummies? This simulated road conditions as to the effects on the drivers and front seat passengers of head-on collisions and other types of collisions. Such tests proved, again within confidence intervals of more than 99%, that the use of seat belts can save lives or lessen injuries in the case of a head-on collision. Once again, the tests had control groups where no seat belts were used. So, this is scientifically proven data. These same manufacturers then went on to add side-impact bars in cars and air-bags to save lives in the case of a collision. Again, supported by reams of data and testing.

RE: Pt. 3 – I do hope that IQ testing moves along from its current infancy and solves this issue of design flaws, etc. It is a fascinating area of research, despite its current limitations.

RE: Pt. 4 – will read the Bell Curve – thank you for the reference.

RE: Pt. 5 – we differ a lot in our assessment of the Chinese – this can not be resolved by debate on this forum, but by time. So, I will pass on further comments on this topic.

RE: Pt. 6 – Ah, so it was not an unsupervised contest after all! Not a free market, but a nanny state, eh?

It has been good swapping ideas with you, SN.

Cheers

@ Sanjay –

In defence of LTCM, the event that brought these PhDs down was a 16-sigma event – it is not possible to model for these events.

That is why I was constantly stressing about the confidence intervals and Standard deviation scores of the quoted study.

Cheers

@ Patriot

It has been good exchanging views with you.

On a parting note, I would like to mention that both you and I want the best for India. I was always optimistic for India, before reading this data. Suddenly a lot of questions that troubled me came with a new answer. I have asked for better data here, lets hope we catch the eye of someone in a position of power/wealth.

You are pro-markets and so am I. But a free market implies lesser opportunties for people to continue in their traditional occupations as consumers’ taste shift. This flexibility and learnability is a more important variable than intelligence alone. Let’s hope we get good data here also. But SN’s comments imply an easier transition for those with higher IQs. The issue does not diminish.

I look upon this issue as a risk-mitigator. If in the next 15 years or so, India meets nutrition and literacy targets and still remains behind, then we would have lost the 15 years where we could have prepared for such a scenario.

@ SN

You’ve been a star on this thread. I just hope that more people in power understand the importance of the IQ question and get more data asap.

@ Sanjay

No one denies that better data is needed. But when studies in other countries indicate the importance of this variable, we should not turn away from what it might mean.

A parting rant
– The standard of commercial cinema and television might be a good indicator of the intelligence of an audience.
– Diasporas are self selected and are not representative of the population they emerged from. If one may say, the indian brain drain diaspora can safely be assumed to have a greater average IQ than India. Americans competing against the 99 percentile indian are afraid. they might have very little to fear from the 50 percentile indian.
– Simplicity in rules regarding value creation is a must. Bureaucrats who are themselves intelligent should create rules which can be understood by the common man.
– Libraries can be a big boost to the capabilities of the community. I wonder why philanthropy is lacking in this regard in India.

Prakash & SN & Patriot,

I have three main contentions.

i) IQ is a dependent variable and therefore one needs to understand what it depends on. It is well understood that IQ depends on education, health, awareness & exposure to ideas & concepts as well as on genes (which in turn are shaped by the environment over millenia). That education & health of a citizenry are positively corelated to a nationa’s well being is well understood, documented and researched. So what’s the big hoopla about IQ-GDP being corelated? Co-relations don’t imply causality in any case! Getting lost in discussions about models is meaningless in my view without conceptual clarity.

ii) What exactly does IQ measure? If it measures basic math and logic concepts as has been argued, it presupposes that the sample has been exposed to some education/awareness of math and logic. Is someone who hasn’t been exposed to basic math and logic, really unintelligent or “dumb” or just uneducated? The speed with which someone picks up concepts is perhaps a measure of “intelligence”.

iii) With intelligence itself being a subject matter of great debate, what with Goleman’s “emotional intelligence” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence) and Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences) being researched, I think taking an IQ test as the primary measure of intelligence is highly suspect. One has to understand how the test was constructed, the assumptions, and the sample type and size it was run.

iv) To Patriot, yes, I’m the same. And you are?

Sanjay

I have read the comments about the low of IQ of malnourished Indians which is undoubtedly going to have an impact on the national figure. If there is one thing that IITians can profitably turn their minds to is dealing with the iodine deficiency of Indians: for all the sins, acts and omissions of Indian governments this is one problem that can be quickly eradicated. Action rather than talk is going to matter on this problem.

There is one trait that is recognised by British politicians in the UK about Indians. In political matters, Hindus do not particularly have much of a view point except that which has been assiduously chanelled. The channels gate-keepers are self-styled community leaders who have used them advance themselves in to the bargain. Although the vote is personal to each Hindu, but at election times these community leaders under the arrangements will deliver up the vote in disregard of their own best interests. Because of this and in comparison with Muslim issues which the British government treads very cautiously, Foreign Secretary Milliband was able to go to India and espouse his support for Pakistan’s case on Kashmir.

The Hindu people in the UK are not malnourished in the way Hindu voters in India, unless their tendency to vegetarianism is having an adverse impact on the brain. I can afford to be totally frank because India’s vegetarian population has been reduced to 40%.

Shantanu said at his last meeting in London that those in attendance need to be role models. It would be the height of folly and a betrayal of India if you were to follow the example of the Indians I described above who choose not to think for themselves but follow blindly. This would require you to express your displeasure and thanks in a way most appropriate to your circumstances. You should bear in mind that the present government and their followers are Stalinist in all that they do. Nehru’s socialism was predicated on ensuring his rule and ideology continued after him. It may be vanishing before our eyes in the rest of the world, but in India it has found fertile ground for it to continue as long as we remain prisoners of our past.