THAT PESKY IQ AGAIN

Chris Brand has just reproduced on his site a couple of book reviews by fellow academics -- one from Macquarie University in Australia and one from University College, London. The first supports the view of general intelligence as highly central to all mental abilities. The second supports the view that average levels of intelligence differ greatly from country to country (no prizes for guessing which continent the lowest average scores come from) and that those differences correlate strongly with economic growth and prosperity. It does seem clear that you need an intelligent population for prosperity and modernity. Both reviews are written for specialists in the field however so are not an easy read for the layman.

I am well aware that even mentioning IQ is a type of obscenity in the present politically correct era but as a psychometrician myself I know how clear the academic evidence for the importance and explanatory power of IQ is and I am not going to be put off pointing out what the evidence shows. The PC crowd have done a pretty good job of censoring out what can be said about IQ in most publicly available media (they even got Chris Brand’s book on the subject pulped) but they have yet to find a way of censoring blogs -- fortunately.

100 years ago it was obscene to mention sex but look at where we are today. Think about it. I personally am pleased to be on the same side as “dangerous” books.