How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

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Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).

Lynn’s national IQ estimates (source)

People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no).

I’ve followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:

First, isn’t it horribly racist to say that people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs that would qualify as an intellectual disability anywhere else?

Second, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled? You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?

But both of these have simple answers, which IMHO defuse the worrying nature of Lynn’s results. These answers aren’t original to me, but as far as I know, nobody has put them together in one place before. Going over each in turn:

1: Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?

No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this! We shouldn’t conflate advocacy with science. But if we did, Lynn’s position would make better anti-racist advocacy than his detractors’.

The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.

We know that in the US, where we do give people good IQ tests, whites average IQ 100 and blacks average IQ 85.

If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect Africans to have an IQ of 85, since American and African blacks have similar genes. This isn’t exactly right - US blacks have some intermixing with whites, and only some of Africa’s staggering diversity reached the US - but it’s close enough.

(don’t worry too much about West African vs. East African ethnic differences here - Lynn’s IQ estimates for both regions are similar).

But if IQ was 100% environmental, we should expect populations’ IQ to vary based on the quality of nutrition, health care, and education that they get. Therefore, because whites in the US have IQ 100, and blacks get on average worse nutrition, health care, and education than whites, we would expect them to have some lower IQ, like 85.

If there were some group that got even worse nutrition, health care, and education than US blacks, we should expect them (under the environmentalist hypothesis) to have an IQ even lower than 85. How much lower? It depends how bad the nutrition/health/education are.

Which gap in nutrition/health/education is bigger - the gap between US whites and US blacks, or the gap between US blacks and Malawian blacks? It’s the US/Malawi one, right? US whites and blacks eat about the same number of calories; they often go to the same hospitals and attend the same schools. Meanwhile, in Malawi, children still sometimes starve to death, 30% of the population is infected by parasitic worms, and only 40% of students graduate the eighth grade. So under the environmental hypothesis of IQ, we should expect Malawians to be more than 15 IQ points behind black Americans. If Lynn is right and Malawi has an IQ of 60, then they’re 25 IQ points behind black Americans.

If you take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief! This finding on its own doesn’t disprove a genetic component to racial IQ gaps. But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%. Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%), so this doesn’t refute anyone in particular. But it’s consistent with what both sides of the debate say, and a natural prediction of the environmentalist position.

On the other hand, if we doubt Lynn and insist Malawi must have a true IQ in the 80s, then the environmentalist argument falls apart and we should insist on a genetic one.

2: Can’t You Talk To A Malawian And An Intellectually Disabled Person And Notice That The Former Is Obviously More Functional Than The Latter?

Thanks to Emil Kirkegaard for the blog post that finally cleared this up for me.

Kirkegaard explains that when we think of intellectually disabled people we’ve met, we’re usually thinking of people with some specific syndrome - often Down’s Syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome, or severe autism. These people have abnormally low IQ. But their syndromes also cause motor deficits, executive function deficits, emotional processing deficits, and many other forms of deficit.

For example, people with Down’s Syndrome may have trouble speaking, or speak abnormally. But this is primarily because Down Syndrome affects hearing (through ear structure abnormalities) and speech production (through tongue/mouth/chest abnormalities). The cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the deficit.

Likewise, people with severe autism might be prone to violence, but this is because their sensory issues are constantly irritating them until they melt down. Normal very-low-IQ people don’t have as much of an excess predisposition to violence.

A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times. A country centered around people at this level may not win any space races, but it can certainly continue to exist.

This is a specific example of the general problem that all of these questions rely on a network of correlations. Some of these are the implied correlations between IQ and other things (like speech production) that we rarely think about or question. Others are the correlations within the concept of IQ - how well does it correlate with overall mental horsepower, versus get contaminated by a person’s level of cultural exposure to abstract thinking? Most studies have shown that - within the developed world - IQ is a pretty stable and unitary concept. Once you start looking at people with much less exposure to education and abstract problems than you ever see in the West, some of these correlations break down. It’s still not great to have a low IQ - it means you don’t have enough experience with education to solve the kinds of abstract problems that you might encounter in math, business, critical thinking, etc. But it might not be the exact constellation of deficits we would expect.

(everything about the correlation of IQ with g is extremely complicated and I don’t want to positively assert that this previous paragraph is true - just hold it out as a strong possibility)

Overall I think Lynn’s IQ data is, in some sense, reason for optimism. The large difference between sub-Saharan Africans in developed countries (eg the US) and in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates that the latter aren’t performing at their genetic peak, and that developmental interventions - again, nutrition, health care, and education - are likely to work.

There’s probably a bidirectional relationship between national IQ and development; development improves nutrition/health/education and boosts IQ, but IQ allows more advanced industries and boosts development. It’s unclear how strong each direction is, but probably the IQ → development direction is greater than zero. Even if you’re generally skeptical of charity because all good things come from development, Lynn’s IQ estimates suggest there’s lots of room for charitable nutrition/health/education interventions to work.