Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

WHY ASIANS LAG : THE PROBLEM OF +106 VERBAL IQ : PARETO REVISITED

While spatial IQ is very good for workers, engineers, and scientists, we must remember that CONTRARY to Marxist and now dominant postmodern western economic intuitions that have been derived from the ERRONEOUS labor theory of value, that ORGANIZING production is what is difficult, not production itself. Organizing requires persuasion and negotiation and collaboration. We are generally compensated for ORGANIZING society into vast networks of production of goods and services, and REORGANIZING society as needed. This is the job of entrepreneurs. And it is somewhat surprising that our Austrian forbears only got it sort of half right. They corrected the Marxists, but they din’t quite solve the problem for us. It isn’t efficiency or prices that really matter, it is using price and efficiency information in order to organize production using people and capital and supplying them with incentives.

THAT IS VERBAL WORK. THAT VERBAL WORK REQUIRES A PRECISE LANGUAGE as well as precise property definitions and precise laws for the resolution of conflicts.

My argument is that this is the Pareto Principle in effect. In every nation 20% controls 80% of the capital. And there is a good reason for that. Because that capital is used to organize the production of consumer goods. It is not ‘consumed’ It is used to manage society’s dynamic and chaotic, and entirely schumpeterian means of production.

In order for those people to succeed, both they and the rest of the administrative and operations people that flow from them must be able to negotiate by expressing ideas in increasingly articulated form.

—EXCERPT FROM LE GRIFFE DU LION’s WHY ASIANS LAG—

“In market economies, per capita GDP is directly proportional to the population fraction with verbal IQ equal to or greater than 106.

“Smart Fraction Theory recognizes that smart people produce wealth. It asserts that a nation’s per capita GDP varies directly with the fraction of its population that is smart. SFT II changes the definition of “smart” by linking it to verbal IQ instead of general IQ. SFT II asserts:

“***In market economies, per capita GDP is directly proportional to the population fraction with verbal IQ at or above some determinable threshold.***

“Verbal IQ is a score derived from verbal subtests of an IQ test. The subtests measure abilities like abstract and common sense reasoning, language comprehension, short-term auditory memory, concentration, attention, word knowledge, verbal fluency and social judgment. It is the kind of intelligence that serves lawyers well. I actually prefer the term “verbal-analytical IQ.”

“Their IQ is bifurcated. NE Asians have the highest IQ of all peoples other than Ashkenazim. They owe that superior IQ, however, to extraordinary visuospatial ability, which, despite verbal shortcomings, lifts their IQ above that of Europeans.

“The bifurcation is evident in the workplace where, for example, fully-assimilated second and third generation NE Asian Americans are overrepresented in science, medicine and engineering, and underrepresented in law, social science and the humanities. According to the 1999 National Science Foundation survey of PhDs awarded to US citizens and permanent residents, Asian Americans earned 11% of the science and engineering PhDs but less than 5% of other PhDs.

“Is it that NE Asians perform less well than Europeans on verbal subtests?

“[Yes,] but there is other evidence of their verbal deficiency. Take the bar exam for example. In 1989, the Law School Admission Council commissioned a study of bar passage rates. Its report, The LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study was published in 1998, with results disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Linda F. Wightman, the project head, collected data from more than 27,000 students who entered ABA approved law schools in fall 1991. The study found that only 80.75% of Asians passed the bar on the first try compared with 91.93% of non-Hispanic whites. This corresponds to a white-Asian mean-score difference of 0.53 standard deviation or in IQ terms a verbal gap of 8 points!

“Unfortunately, Wightman put NE Asians into one big Asian box along with Filipinos, Hmong and others whose IQs are more than a standard deviation lower than Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. It is true that relatively few from low-IQ groups make it to the bar exam, but some do. Consequently, 8 points must be regarded as an upper bound to the white-NE Asian verbal gap.

“R. Lynn reviewed the literature on racial IQ in The Mankind Quarterly, 31:3, Spring 1991, 255-296. IQ averages for Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids, Negroid-Caucasoid hybrids, Amerindians and South East Asians were reported. More than 100 studies were referenced, most from peer-reviewed journals and not a small number from Lynn himself. Of these, 12 reported both general and verbal IQ averages for NE Asians. Three of the 12 indicated a white-NE Asian verbal IQ gap of about 8 points in agreement with the bar exam result, but these are at the high end. The average verbal gap was a bit less than 4 points or about a quarter standard deviation.

“Among the races, only NE Asians and Amerindians exhibit this particular kind of verbal-nonverbal cognitive split. For other races verbal and general IQ averages have similar values, making the distinction between the two transparent to smart fraction theory. In the 12 studies reporting both general and verbal IQ for NE Asians, the general-verbal gap averaged 6.5 IQ points.”