Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own

Let's just say it up front and get it out of the way: IQ matters. A lot. Both to you and your nation.There's much to like about this book. Jones does a great job of stating the case for the validity and importance of measuring IQ (the intelligence quotient) and making correlations with a wide range of educational, occupational, economic, and behavioral variables. He does this in a clinical and dispassionate way, which is very helpful and refreshing, merely presenting findings from numerous studies over decades of time (from recent to 50 to nearly 100 years ago) from a range of sources (private and public military/government). The text is very plain and understandable, almost like an article in Scientific American or The Economist. He does address how to possibly increase IQ of nations over time (the Flynn effect) and why that's important. In other words, what state-level policies might be considered to improve quality of life for a country's citizens? It's a great question but he leaves others to answer because, as the book title says, he's merely making the claim that your nation's IQ matters more than your own IQ. In other words: Better to be a below-average IQ individual in a high-IQ nation than a high-IQ individual in a low-IQ nation.This is a short book, at 168 pages, and Jones does a very nice job of going through the scientific literature to show how IQ correlates (predicts) a range of things, including brain size, education, job performance, memory, patience, creativity, cooperation, political attitudes, pro-market attitudes, handling complexity, and on and on.For example, research shows that higher IQ people tend to be more:o patiento pro-marketo cooperativeo generous/pleasanto center or center-right in their political attitudesJust from these five factors alone you can see a pattern forming already about a society built on mutual cooperation for everyone's benefit. All in all, because of these traits (and many more), higher IQ nations tend to be richer nations. The reverse obviously holds true.Fascinating stuff.The Notes, Bibliography (ten pages!), and Index are all thorough and helpful, especially if you, like me, enjoy doing your own sleuthing research online. Really helpful are the detailed indexing for entries like "IQ tests" and "IQ test scores." Here you can quickly find text for cross-country comparisons and IQ and its relationship to the wide variety of topics he covers. (To find these for yourself online, just search "IQ of nations".)The book did have its shortcomings, though. As I was reading I thought what Jones *didn't* include or talk about much or at all *just* as important and interesting. I found it odd that he would write a book about "IQ by countries" but not include much on very related (really, "intertwined") topics. Do your own sleuthing on such search terms like "IQ and race" (yes, there are differences; if race were merely a social construct, then why would race matter for stem cell or bone marrow transplants?) and "IQ and gender" (male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7 to 1) and "IQ and genetics" (yes, IQ is very heritable) and "IQ and crime" and "IQ and inbreeding," for example, and you'll be surprised by what you learn. (If you use Google Chrome, the peer-reviewed research articles appear atop your search results under Scholarly Articles.) Jones ignores or barely touches on these topics, perhaps because of where the data leads. If you want a real eye opener, cross check UN estimates for Africa's population growth to 2100 with African nation's average IQs and the world Fragile State and Corruption Indices. An unsettling picture quickly begins to form. Jones likely left all of this information out of his book for how some people would think of these topics. It's a real shame that we can't discuss scientific data in public, which would inform our public policy, but I'll leave it at that.Like other reviewers, I find it very odd that Jones closes this book with a call for more immigration of low-skilled people into rich (high IQ) countries. I find his argument here to be the same "cheap, immigrant/migrant labor" argument that got us to this point in the U.S. (Maybe it's not so odd, though. Jones is a signatory to the 2005 Open Letter on Immigration.) During his research for this book Jones must have come across studies showing that a host of social pathologies (crime, drug abuse, illegitimacy, permanent welfare dependency) occur around/below the 75 IQ mark. He must know that. Anyone can find this information on the Internet from legitimate news and peer-reviewed scientific studies in less than 1 minute of searching. And, like most people, I define "public policy" as "policy" designed to help the "public"; specifically, the public of a community, state, nation. So why would a high-IQ country want to *import* low-IQ people when there are *plenty* of native low-IQ people to go around? And why focus on low-skilled workers, anyway? Why not try to bring in "the best and brightest"? Jones tries to explain it with his own theory that shows low-skilled immigration actually *helps* the rich (high IQ) nation. It's a little convoluted, he hems and haws a bit, and in the end it doesn't work for me. And I don't think it does for Jones, either. He's doing a delicate dance here, you can tell. Some reviewers have called Jones' concluding recommendation "counter-intuitive." I'll go ahead and just call it "dangerous" and "deceptive." I'm on board with rich (high-IQ) nations helping poor (low-IQ) nations, for moral and ethical reasons, but there are limited resources to go around; and, in the end, one of a nation's top priorities are to the safety and security of its own people. Just ask Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia, or China.Still, all in all, this is an excellent book to get you started on the topic of IQ and why it matters so much in your own life, and in the lives of nations.May 30, 2017 update: Researchers find a 4 point drop in IQ in France over 10-yr period. A negative Flynn Effect in France, 1999 to 2008–9. Dutton and Lynn. Intelligence, Volume 51, July–August 2015, Pages 67–70. Review of findings at "The puzzle of falling French intelligence," James Thompson, December 5, 2015, The Unz Review.April 16, 2018 update: Sweden is learning a hard lesson about opening their borders to low-IQ legal immigrants (and illegal migrants), facing a rising number of Islamic state attacks, bombings, and grenade attacks. See Sweden's violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image, Politico, April 16, 2018.

The premise of this book is that nations with the highest test scores are about eight times more prosperous than nations with the lowest test scores. This is really nothing new but can be obtained a priori, as well as nations that score the highest (Asians) and nations that score the lowest (Ghana). The Hive Mind is a reference to "collective intelligence." Intelligence is defined as the ability to handle complexity irrespective in the area in which it is measured. Countries with hi IQ's do the following: Save more money, are very cooperative, and have market-oriented policies with highly productive team-based technology. The also reveal the human tendency to conform. The author makes some interesting correlations: national average test scores and national income per person is strong, and smarter people have bigger brains, contrary to what the social justice warriors espouse. You will also find that it is better hiring a new employee with an IQ test than references.The author then talks about IQ testing with the various IQ tests worldwide. The author spends a few chapters explaining why smarter people are more patient on average. East Asians have the highest test scores and accumulate net assets the world over, providing investment funds for countries like the United States. High SAT scores correlate with greater cooperation. Then the author talks about the economic impact of immigration. This is where I disagree with this premise. I do give the author credit for presenting this topic in a world where so many people are the victims of the nasty wealthy people. IQ is a touchy subject and the author stayed away from the biological aspects of IQ and race. Even though the latest studies show that 60 to 80 percent of IQ is hereditary (genetic).Overall the book is a general review of collective intelligence and the author sticks to the main premise. I would recommend this book if you want to get your feet wet in the IQ arena and its implication for nations of the world. It's a good introduction.

Hive Mind is an excellent book. Legislators, educators, and health policy makers across the world should read and act upon Jones’ recommendations. Jones gives plenty of references in support of his arguments. But there is, unfortunately, a dearth of quantitative data actually in the book. Jones wisely does not go where others also fear to tread. But the elephant in the room pervades every sentence, every paragraph in the book. Why, seventy years into the post colonial world, have many countries, particularly in Africa, failed to take off? Why are they plagued with corruption and maladministration that blights the lives of millions? Why do you and I permit young fathers, mothers and infants, in their desperation, to have no choice but to emigrate north, on foot, to find any hope of fulfilling life’s promise? Jones provides the answers, addresses the issues, and recommends solutions. That the world has failed to face facts, find solutions, and do what is right, is a moral failure by us all. I recommend this book to all, especially legislators and policy officials.

This book is not too in depth which is great for anyone interested in diving into IQ, differences in IQ across nations and races as well as their practical value in predicting job performance and the stability of nations. It is also quite an easy read as it doesn't introduce topics that are too challenging.My issue with the book is that it tries to make a case for more low skilled immigration with the claims that it would have minimal effect on the economy because:1) low skilled immigration would only push higher skilled workers stuck in the lower skilled jobs back up to the higher skilled jobs and so it doesn't affect the wages of higher skilled workers and2) supposing all higher skilled workers were already in the higher skilled section, low skilled immigration would only minimally reduce the wages of existing low skilled workers but not very much.#1 can be done at gun point with less consequences to the future generation and #2 is the road which leads to revolution and probably a society that no longer values a free market economy (something else the book states regarding IQ and friendliness towards free market principles).

Gerade im Lichte aktueller politischer Ereignisse sind die Hauptergebnisse dieses Buches relevanter denn je

Some interesting correlation and inferred causation studies about intelligence in the world. And some clever ways of avoiding the elephant in the room (intelligent people distribution is not politically correct across the world).There remains hope for egalitarian distribution of intelligence (this book leans on nutrition and education to solve the problem), but it is still just hope. My hope is in epigenetics and this is not discussed in this book either than some nutrition discussion.In the end they appear to be are advocating for higher intelligence countries to become less intelligence and less intelligence countries to become more intelligence to move to egalitarian future. That might work if there are no democracies ( this would require governments to do a lot of gun pointing at there own citizens).

The long, slow march of Darwinian Evolution applied to the human sciences continues. For more than a decade the work of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen on ‘IQ and the Wealth of Nations’ was ostracised and ignored; now, in Garett Jones’ new book, it is re-appraised and rehabilitated.In 2007 James Watson was, well, ‘Watsoned’ for suggesting, “[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.“ Since his views are validated in this book, I imagine his re-admission to public life cannot now be long delayed.What else do we know? From genome studies and CSI police procedurals, we know that humanity exists in genetically-distinguishable ethnic groups, both within ancestral Africa and (via complex historical migrations) in the rest of the world. We know that intelligence as measured by IQ is strongly heritable (0.75). We know that the genetic component of intelligence is polygenic, and that the (thousands of) alleles positively associated with IQ are slowly being identified (the Beijing Genomics Institute is aiming to produce substantive results in the next few years). And we expect, when we have this sequencing information, that different ethnic groups will exhibit different cognitive genotypes. It will then be clear that to elevate ethnic group (‘country’) intelligence up to (and perhaps beyond) the current East Asian level of IQ 105 is going to require DNA editing – there is a limit to how far good nutrition and iodine supplementation will take you.Naturally Professor Jones knows all this - as does everyone else who takes the trouble to enquire. Unfortunately in the present state of public discourse, it cannot all be said without the Watsoning process re-engaging. So in ‘Hive Mind’ Garett Jones had a tough task: to synthesise the current state-of-the-art through the lens of economics while not getting fired. The scientific constraint? Not to say or imply things which are actually untrue or gratuitously mislead in the process.As many have observed, the book starts well. Rehabilitating the concept and utility of IQ is not new science, it’s a defence and popularisation of what every informed person already knows but of course, it’s necessary and done well. Similarly, the detailed re-examination of national/ethnic phenomenological IQ differences (mostly from Lynn and Vanhanen) is both clear and brave. IQ is then linked with patience, propensity to collaborate and future-orientation, as Jones reviews research in psychology, political science and game theory. Applied to economics, he describes how, in complex technologies where mistakes can break the whole process (‘O-Ring technology’), there are surprising returns to pervasive intelligence. To put it crudely, high-IQ countries can do leading-edge high-tech, and low-IQ countries can’t (note that this is hardly a surprise when one observes the world).So far so good, but now the wheels begin to come off a little. As if concerned by the consequences of his argument, Jones feels the need to signal his essential liberalism and humanity. There are long accounts of the Flynn effect to motivate speculation about increasing the IQ of poorer, more corrupt and disorganised nations (really ethnicities). Here he presents intelligence (as measured by IQ) as far more plastic and environmentally-malleable than it actually is.Finally he plays with some oversimplified economic models to suggest that immigration from low-IQ countries is in the interests of the inhabitants of high-IQ countries (it’s plainly in their own interest - to a point). Naturally he equivocates (consequent damage to existing high-quality institutions). But he seems to ignore both the evidence from history and the increasingly-scary predictions of a hollowing-out of demand for low-and middle-skilled jobs. I’m sure he felt he had to write this but it breaks the rule: do not mislead the reader.Perhaps in five years or ten years, it will be possible to write a well-balanced public-policy book starting from humanity as it actually is. In such a more enlightened time, a Garett Jones revision of this book would be well-worth reading.