Improving a countries IQ score multiplies wages for everyone!

For example: A two standard deviation rise in an individual person’s IQ predicts only about a 30% increase in her wage. But the same rise in a country’s average IQ score predicts a 700% increase in the average wage in that country. I want to understand why IQ appears to have such a large social multiplier.

The story is much the same for math and science scores: A person’s individual score predicts little about how she’ll do in the job market, but the richest and fastest-growing countries in the world tend to do much better on math and science tests. If the IQ multiplier is even half as large as it appears to be, then health, nutrition, and education policies in developing countries should be targeted at raising the brain health of the world’s poorest citizens.

www.acceleratingfuture.com...

If you ask me, America needs to end its religious insanity. I see religion as the biggest impediment to science/math/IQ improvements. 60% of Americans don't even believe in evolution.. that's not because they're qualified biologists who have found flaws in the theory, but rather because their foolish religious ideals state that god created us out of mud in one day.

The right-wing fundamentalists aren't just dumbing themselves and their kids and their community down -- they're making wages worse for every American! It must stop!

I'm not sure how religion blocks learning math and I'm not sure how much religion influences school. I dont recall any when I was in school.

For the sake of not getting into some stupid argument over religion I'll just give it to you that religion hinders math and our schools are filled to the brim with it. I dont see what difference it makes because that would only be one factor. There are also these school systems who pass everyone, have dropped the possibility of failure, teach to the lowest common denominator thereby frustrating and or dumbing down the capable students, schools that invest more time and money on technology and toys rather than getting proper educators, etc...

Have you read The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America?

Then, in a global economy, where do all the smart people go? To the job in the country that will pay them the most. When employees are traded globally it would take a long, long time for the local, poor, community or country to see any return on their investment. Unless there were some incentive for the educated individual to remain in their home region but few people will rise to the level of being fought over across the world and just stay in some craphole eating rice day in and day out.

The funny thing is standards were much higher back in the early days of the republic. Students needed multiple languages, multiple disciplines and still labored their family farms. Those who could afford school anyway. Ironically, there was more of a daily religious influence on them then there is on most now. I still havent met any real person in my day to day life who caed one way or the other about religion. I dont know where all these zealots outside of television and internet complaining.

Math, by itself, is quite useless.

Science, without math, is impossible.

You need both, and even though religious people don't have any particular quarrels with math (other than thinking 1+1+1=1), they do have a serious problem with science. They are distrusting of it, and they spread lies and misinformation about all sorts of scientific theories (not that they even know what a theory is), and they teach contrarian views of the universe rooted in supernatural mumbo jumbo.

So if you think you can improve the countries science/math scores while having a fundamentalist religious base, you're living in a dream land.

reply to post by Kaytagg


Right. Okay. So you want to harp on religion. Good for you. I gave it to you that you were right in my post so this very thing wouldn't happen. So you've obviously read the first sentence of my post. The rest?

You want to raise educational standards, IQ's and sustain a high-tech work force that will raise the quality of life across the board or do you want to bitch about religion? You lose ancestors to the Inquisition or something?

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


You would be hard pressed not to find a person who didn't lose ancestors to religious nonsense. Religion is responsible for more deaths than old age.

I want to see our IQ/science/math scores improve, but first people have to realize that faith is the antithesis of all those things.

You can't pass an IQ test on faith. You can't validate a scientific theory on faith. You can't solve a math problem on faith (1+1+1=1? That's faith!).

So yes. I want to bitch about religion, first and foremost, because I see it as the biggest impediment to improving those scores. And it is.

I don't see IQ as something 'caused' by religion or poor schooling. I thought IQ was about a persons inherent logic/maths skills, which should be something from birth. I would expect that better health/diet would be a better thing to work on, as this should produce healthier children, who therefore have healthier brains.

I could see it however as the other way around, that a high IQ will potentially cause someone to be less likely to believe in religion, as they will have a more logical brain, and will make decisions based more on reason than faith or emotive arguments. Of course that alone will not determine religiosity, I think even bigger factors would be the environment. One reason I say that, is peoples religion is determined a lot by their parents/location. In the USA, most religious people are Christian, in the middle east the are more likely to be Muslim.

Here is an interesting article that includes a section on atheism and IQ:

it has been pretty conclusively demonstrated by Richard Lynn that increasing IQ is correlated with increasing likelihood of atheism.

charltonteaching.blogspot.com...

It's interesting to look at how peoples IQ effects them. It also turns out that there are some compelling correlations to voting behavior.

www.mrc.ac.uk...