—”What is the minimum average group IQ needed before civilization can independently arise? Base your answer on an IQ test normed for today’s population.”—-
RULES:
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Pareto always rules. 20% of the people always (and must) control 80% of the assets in order to organize a polity into voluntary (non slave/serf) production. Cities are markets are markets are formed by trade, and trade requires volition, and markets and volition make innovation possible if not only because the incentive exists.
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Roughly speaking you need the top 20% of your population able to calculate in whatever means of calculation is available to you, in law, in accounts, in seasons, etc.
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Empirically it appears that it’s pretty hard unless 20% is above 95 (the ability to learn by being taught without extraordinary repetition by the teacher), Above 105 to repair a system or a machine or a tool. Above 115 to learn by reading. About 122 to invent a machine or tool. A above 130 to synthesize new ideas and communicate them. Above 140 to originate an idea in the market for ideas. Although I think that limit is now approaching 150.
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It depends greatly upon the means of economic productivity available to the population. lowest IQ’s for pastoral, higher for agrarian, higher for commercial, higher for industrial, higher for technological and assumedly higher for post technological. Worse, as technology increases the value of lower IQ’s decreases. Worse, as the distribution of technology increases, the value of lower IQ’s decreases (this is the world’s next upcoming great disaster – if it isn’t already).
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If you can import knowledge of 140’s, 130’s 120’s into your group then you can benefit from the knoweldge and technollgy invented elsewhere.
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what appears today, is that it is extremely difficult to modernize a country today with IQ’s under 97, and I think the real number is 105. The reason being that the window of opportunity for those countries to modernize and develop middle class (market) behaviors because of their ability to import institutions and technologies and knowledge, has passed. (I’m almost certain of it). BTW: thank the communists for destroying that window of opportunity. If your country has an aggregate IQ under 97, and certainly if it is below 90, it will be very difficult, for the simple reason that ther eis no human capital unused in relation to the available means of producing the profitability necessary to create a voluntary organization of production (market economy and a middle class to run it.)
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as far as I know the primary competitive asset a country has going forward is a) homogeneity, b) median IQ >105, and a militia army dedicated to protecting both. That means china/korea/japan win. Europe could have but between immigration and civil war we have already (I’ve talked to the leading people about this repeatedly), lost something on the order of half to one standard deviation between 1800 and today through asymmetric reproduction. And we have lost the rest between 1965 and today through immigration.
Cheers.
Knowledge is not always pleasant.