A Stupid Quote

Samizdata's "Jackie D" quotes the following with approval:

How I feel about Africans is not relevant. Even if I hate them, it is not relevant. Trade barriers are relevant, and removing them is crucial.

This is quite simply balderdash, and I'm amazed that anyone could quote such vacuous cant with approbation. If people's motives didn't matter, why on earth would anyone be concerned with what, say, Islamist preachers claim to believe, just as long as they refrained from actual violence themselves? Why would Samizdata's contributors be exercised by the admission that the fox-hunting ban was motivated by class warfare?

Motives matter, and if David Duke has something to say, I have every reason in the world to be suspicious of his utterances, simply because of the views of the person making them. In this case, the person quoted, David Carr, is one who attacked others for their purely voluntary efforts to help alleviate famine in Africa, something no self-professed libertarian should have a problem with. He didn't say that he thought such aid would be ineffective, or raise another principled objection along such lines, he said plainly

"I have not lost a single night of sleep over Africa and I never will."

giving away as clearly as could be that his problem was with the very idea that people should lose "a single night of sleep" over Africa. Anyone who holds such views is a monstrous bigot, and it doesn't matter a toss whether or not trade barriers will be a much more effective means of alleviating African poverty or not. Are we really expected to believe that Mr. Carr would have been similarly indifferent to the suffering of those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, or that he would be equally quick to dismiss North Korean suffering in a post titled  "Me Love You Long Time?" Would "Jackie D" be so quick to praise such a post if he did?

Motives do matter, and rightly so, or else there would be no distinction in the law between manslaughter and murder, and expressing contempt for others for showing empathy with suffering in Africa is itself utterly contemptible. Anyone who argues otherwise is simply stupid.

PS: Something else I forgot to mention - it strains credibility to believe that anyone who can claim not to give a fig about suffering in Africa would ever put himself out in the slightest to remove trade barriers that exacerbate said suffering, so this red herring of an argument lacks even psychological plausibility.

Comments

[clark klugermann]

Abiola,

I have studied the issue of IQ and the wealth and power of human ethnic groups for several years now. Difference in mean IQ is a position I came to after reading books on the various theories that explain discrepancies between groups (Diamond's Guns Germs & Steel, Landes's The Wealth & Power of Nations, Lynn & Vanhanen's IQ & the Wealth of Nations, others). I found Diamond's, Landes's, and all of the other theories quite simple to poke holes in. But Vanhanen and Lynn's thesis -- that IQ is an important factor (but not the only factor) in the wealth of a people to be (by far) the most convincing. And I did try to poke holes in it (as I did with the other theses), but was unable to. It seems to explain the world.

I am still open to evidence showing another theory to be superior to that in IQ&tWoN. That's why I seek out websites such as this -- to find opposing views. And what I find here -- and virtually all other websites offering a position on this -- only serves to reinforce my belief that Vanhanen and Lynn are correct. Opponents of their thesis -- such as Diamond and you -- do little more than label those who are convinced by it as racists or, as you put it, "morons". As I mentioned before, such labeling, in lieu of actual debate of points and counterpoints, does not further your viewpoint.

I'll check here later for any substantive posts you'd care to make. I truly am open to being convinced -- truth is my fixed point, not ideology.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Opponents of their thesis -- such as Diamond and you -- do little more than label those who are convinced by it as racists or, as you put it, "morons"."

No, I'm simply tired of repeating the same refutations over and over and over again ad nauseum, only to have the people I'm having exchanges with ignore reason altogether as they keep pushing their beliefs. If refutations of Lynn and Vanhanen are really what you're looking for, then why not try searching my archives?

"I'll check here later for any substantive posts you'd care to make. I truly am open to being convinced -- truth is my fixed point, not ideology."

Alright, let me take you at your word: look through my archives, and read what I've already had to say about them. If you can find some substantive rebuttals of the charges I've laid against them, then by all means I'll be willing to hear it - and by "substantive" I don't mean, say, finding fault with my calling Richard Lynn a racist (which is as true a statement as they come), but actual lapses in logic or empirically falsified statements.

[clark klugermann]

Abiola,

Fair enough -- I truly am looking for holes in IQ&tWoN, because I don't want it to be correct. Since I'm new to your site, can you at least point me in the direction of, say, your rebuttal to Lynn and Vanhanen's theses? I 'm not seeing a search function on the page.

BTW, I did provide in my previous post an attempt at logical refutation of one of your points (that the existence of apartheid -- a (morally execrable) system designed by one group to keep another group down -- proves or even implies the intellectual equality or superiority of the oppressed group. I think it's a reasonable point, but you responded by calling me names instead of debating or conceding the point.

Yours, Clark K.

[clark klugermann]

Incidentally, I re-read GG&S after reading IQ&tWoN, and was amazed at how thin some of its core arguments were, and how little they did to counter Lynn/Vanhanen. For example, Diamond states that he believes New Guineans are not intellectually inferior to Europeans, but in fact likely to have superior intellect. He does not back this up with any evidence (I doubt there is any to support his point). He then provides two reasons why he believes New Guinea natives have developed superior intellects to Europeans: 1) the passive nature of Western entertainment (too much TV time, essentially) and 2) that selection pressure on the New Guinean populations has been greater than that in Europe, leading to a genetically intellectually superior people.

This second point is astonishing, since Diamond concedes in making it that IQ is largely heritable, has been raised in a group via the pressures of natural selection, and varies between ethnic groups -- yet the group he places at the top of the IQ heap -- again with no evidence (there are no footnotes in the book) -- is New Guineans. Quite a leap.

The astonishing part of this is that this is precisely Richard Lynn's thesis, but Lynn places East Asians at the top of the IQ heap, with Europeans next (a grouping virtually all IQ studies have independently found). Lynn and Diamond agree, then, that IQ is largely heritable and that selection pressure can cause the mean IQ of a group to rise. They just find different groups to be at the top -- but Lynn has hundreds of IQ tests administered over decades to back him up, while Diamond has only his own assertions.

Anyway, please let me know where to find your critiques of Lynn/Vanhanen or their viewpoint in general.

Clark K.

[Abiola Lapite]

"I think it's a reasonable point, but you responded by calling me names instead of debating or conceding the point."

Since you seem to be a reasonable person, let me offer you my apologies. Dealing with trolls has a way of wearing one's patience down. Here's a starter for you with regards to Richard Lynn's work:

http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2004/09/richard_lynn_fe.html

http://reti.blogspot.com/2003/12/east-asian-iq-myth.html

Whether or not you like the tone of the entries, I suggest you concentrate on their substance. Ideally, if you have access to a university library, I recommend you actually follow up the references mentioned in the article I quoted from in the first post - they're all within Lynn's own work.

Once you're done reading said items, I suggest giving a close look at the data at the following URL:

http://www.isteve.com/IQ_Table.htm

Assuming that you have some statistical training, look at those small sample sizes, the arbitrary "adjustments" made for various countries, and, in light of the Flynn effect,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

the sheer antiquity of a lot of the numbers, and tell me what you make of it all.

[clark klugermann]

No worries and apology gratefully accepted. I've never run a blog but I'm certain the trolls do become annoying after a while.

I'm off to read your links now.

Thanks,

Clark K.

[clark klugermann]

Abiola,

Just read the links you sent (actually I already happened to be familiar with the page on Steve Sailer's site and the Wikipedia entry on the Flynn Effect). Here are my thoughts.

I concede that some of the IQ studies in IQ&tWoN are old, and that their methodology may be suspect. I'm just an amateur in the field, but it's my understanding that the egregious examples of cultural bias in IQ testing (such as the tennis net question) are largely a thing of the past now. Indeed, such questions only test specific acquired knowledge, and a country club European would do as poorly as a Masai tribesman on a test geared to the other's specific circumstances and life.

I lack the expertise in the field to judge each IQ test administered over the decades. But what I find striking is how many of them there are, and how consistently they group people by ethnicity. Yes, some tests vary wildly from others; but the contours of their findings over the years are largely consistent. It makes me think that yes, there are problems defining exactly what intelligence is, and there are problems with measuring it accurately -- but that, through all the fuzz and statistical noise, there is something important there, and we can measure it to a certain degree.

My question for you would be this: I see nothing in the world as I have experienced it that counters IQ&tWoN. That doesn't mean that their thesis is correct; and there are alternative explanations for the economic variances they describe. It just means that I can't find anything in the world that would not fit under their theory of how human intellect developed. Is there anything you've seen or experienced in the world that contradicts IQ&tWoN's thesis?

[Abiola Lapite]

"it's my understanding that the egregious examples of cultural bias in IQ testing (such as the tennis net question) are largely a thing of the past now."

That's what they'd have you believe, but I suggest you look here:

http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2004/12/culture_free_te.html

If anything, the supposedly "culture free" tests are even more biased than those that utilize language.

"But what I find striking is how many of them there are, and how consistently they group people by ethnicity."

The question is *why* they group people by ethnicity - because they're accurately measuring intelligence, or because they've been fudged to do so? Richard Lynn is a longtime American Renaissance speaker who's on the record as advocating the "phasing out" of "inferior" peoples like blacks, so it's folly to take his work at face value.

"I see nothing in the world as I have experienced it that counters IQ&tWoN ... Is there anything you've seen or experienced in the world that contradicts IQ&tWoN's thesis?"

The fact that in Nigeria there were some 15 students in my cohort alone with IQs above the 164 mark (i.e, +4SD) would certainly go against it, considering that Lynn and Vanhanen claim that Nigerians have a median IQ of 67; theoretically, there shouldn't even be that many in the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa* ... If it were true, and Nigerian had the same standard distribution as that of Americans (1 SD = 16 points), fully one-third of Nigerians would be so stupid as to require institutionalization - see the following:

http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/flint/CGH.htm.
http://cms.psychologytoday.com/conditions/retardation.html.

And yet, in all my time living in that country, I didn't see large numbers of adults lolling about in need of supervision. In theory, this IQ of 67 figure would also imply that no more than two-thirds of Nigerians should be capable of learning how to read, but guess what you see when you look here:

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind/illiteracy.htm

Yes, that's right, amongst the 15-24 age cohort, literacy rates in Nigeria are approximately 87%, which is substantially *higher* than in godlesscapitalist's India (and in Pakistan and Bangladash). Are we to take it that Indians have a median IQ of 50 or less?

*Here "godlesscapitalist" types will tell you that "fat tails" are responsible, but that only goes to show how little they understand the construction of modern IQ tests, which are *normed* to avoid such a phenomenon. "Fat-tails" were an artifact of the obsolete versions of Stanford Binet L-M which used the invalid "IQ = Mental Age/Chronological Age" formula.

[Frank McGahon]

"I see nothing in the world as I have experienced it that counters IQ&tWoN."

Has it ever occurred to you that that is because the book is one big just-so story. Their "data" is cooked to fit the thesis and that's why it appears so "true" to the comparisons of countries wealth by gdp. This is why the problems with the data, obvious to anyone with half a brain cell - although apparently not Steve Sailer even after all that laborious trabscribing - are relevant. If the primary motivation of L&V is to prove their thesis (and not actually seek falsification) one shouldn't be surprised to see this uncanny correlation of "IQ" with gdp and/or ethnicity.

Imagine someone wished to prove that the "positive energy" of oak trees had a positive effect on the wealth of a country, this oak-ist compiled a table with dodgy data on forestation which miraculously "proved" this thesis. It would be a nonsense to continually maintain that, even though the data was suspect, "there must be something there" because his data so accurately described national wealth - that, after all, was the purpose of the dodgy data.

I suggest that the reason you are able to poke holes in Diamond and not L&V is that Diamond is intellectually honest and offers the theory warts and all, if it turns out that such "hole-poking" improves (or even falsifies) his theory all the better. By contrast L&V display no intellectual honesty and elide, or neglect to consider defects in the theory lest they undermine their proselytising for innate racial differences in intelligence.

[clark klugermann]

Abiola,

I have to work now, but I want to carry on this dialogue a bit if you're game. I'll post again this evening.

For now: if you don't accept that low mean IQ accounts, at least in substantial part, for the economic underperformance of, for instance, Nigeria, what explanation(s) would you give to explain it?

Clark K.

PS--sorry if this is territory you've already covered with other posters. I've been trying to find good conversations on this and haven't had much success, so I appreciate the dialogue.

[Frank McGahon]

"what explanation(s) would you give to explain it?"

Abiola is in a much better position to explain Nigeria's specific circumstance but I would just note that it is generally not the case that one simplistic, fallacious "magic bullet" explanation will be simply replaced by another.

[Abiola Lapite]

"if you don't accept that low mean IQ accounts, at least in substantial part, for the economic underperformance of, for instance, Nigeria, what explanation(s) would you give to explain it?"

As Frank mentions, there's no one answer that will explain *everything*, but ethnic strife actually does a pretty good job of explaining a great deal, and is historically well-attested to boot. Start by reading the following for some data on the issue:

http://econ.worldbank.org/files/284_wps1503.pdf

then take a look at Easterly's book, "The Elusive Quest for Growth":
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262550423/foreigndispat-20

Compare what you read to any history of Nigeria, and there's absolutely no mystery what is going on: the ethnic dynamics of the country are such that one group's economic gain is perceived as another's loss in power terms, so there's no incentive to enact good policies. There's nothing unique to Nigeria or even Africa in all this, as we see the same factor at work in Iraq right now:

http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2004/09/iraqs_ethnicity.html

Lynn and Vanhanen would have predicted that Iraq would be an oasis of peace and economic progress by comparison to India or South Africa, thanks to the supposedly higher IQ of its inhabitants; it only takes a look at any front cover of the daily papers to see that nothing of the sort is happening.

[clark klugermann]

You guys aren't going to let me get any work done today!

Frank, I found the opposite of what you've written about GG&S and IQ&tWoN to be more true. Diamond, I found, was not able to back up many of his assertions (such as the claim that New Guineans are intellectually superior to Europeans), while I found Lynn and Vanhanen's book backed by much data.

Perhaps some of the data was twisted to fit their thesis. It wouldn't be the first time -- indeed, I allege Diamond is guilty of it -- a scientist of any kind twisted the facts to suit the theory instead of the theory to suit the facts. Also, I have no real way to judge the accuracy of the IQ tests they cite, but I know of no accusations that they intentionally left out scores that did not fit with their thesis.

In fact, there are a few head-scratchers in their study of IQ of nations, and some of the adjustments and estimates they make -- as the authors themselves admit -- are rather arbitrary.

But again, what I can't get past, and what I'm looking for, is anything in our world that goes against Lynn and Vanhanen -- anything that contradicts the idea that different ethnic groups have different mean IQs, and that this explains in large part wealth differences.

Lynn/Vanhanen assert that East Asians have the highest IQs of any major ethnic group in the world, followed by Europeans, who are in turn followed by a group consisting of Arabs, South Asians, and Native Americans, and that sub-Saharan Africans rank the lowest. Naturally these are all groupings that have a lot of fuzz around the edges, but they're still useful.

I realize this is blunt, but is there any place in the world where these "rankings" do not hold up? Chinese merchants dominate Southeast Asian nations like the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, which have native mean IQs of about 80-85. This would be expected of a group with a mean IQ of 105.

But Chinese also do well in the States, where the majority white mean IQ is about 100. But they do not dominate economically the way they do in Southeast Asia, which would not be expected because white mean IQ is lower but still competitive.

Lebanese businessmen dominate in West Africa, since, if we believe IQ&tWoN, they have higher IQs. They do not dominate in America or Europe, since they don't have the IQ to dominate.

s-S Africans do poorly economically, relative to other peoples, almost wherever they are -- whether in Africa, Haiti, Southeast Washington, D.C., Brazil, France, Britain, Jamaica, etc. We have no examples (that I am aware of) of s-S Africans outperforming whites (or any other group) in any context.

All of this supports Lynn/Vanhanen's thesis of these group "rankings" -- and they are so darn consistent. Indians move to South or East Africa and fall between the whites and blacks. Japanese emigrate to Brazil and do very well. Chinese emigrate to Australia and outperform native whites. When two groups come into contact with each other, you can predict which will outperform the other based on which of these four groups they belong to with remarkable accuracy.

I realize all this is blunt, and that there are alternative explanations for these situations. But I would like to find some refutations of the "rankings" idea -- does anyone know of any situations in the world where the above groups do not perform as IQ would predict? (I'm aware that some nations have what Lynn and Vanhanen call "negative residuals" -- i.e. economic performance below what IQ would expect, and that some have "positive residuals". These they ascribe -- reasonably in my view -- to one of two phenomena: the chance possession of a natural resource, such as the diamonds of Botswana, the perfect beaches and close proximity to the US of Barbados, or the oil of many middle Eastern nations, can explain an unusally high positive residual (and in all examples, control of actually exploiting the resource is largely in the hands of Americans, Europeans, or, increasingly, East Asians). And adoption of communist or socialist economic policies can logically explain the underperformance of underperforming high IQ nations such as China, North Korea, and the former Warsaw Pact nations.

Lynn and Vanhanen theorize that the next 20-30 years will see a "leveling out" of these residuals to IQ-predicted expectations as these countries adopt market economies. Indeed, we are already seeing the rise of China, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, etc.

Comments welcomed.

Clark Klugermann

[Abiola Lapite]

"Lebanese businessmen dominate in West Africa, since, if we believe IQ&tWoN, they have higher IQs."

This is an urban legend. They are *ubiquitous* in West Africa, but they hardly "dominate" anything.

Frankly, it seems to me that you want us to do all the work of disproving Lynn and Vanhanen, rather than weighing all the evidence already presented to you for yourself. My free time is no more infinite or valueless than yours, and I've put myself out more than I can really afford to already: I suggest you carefully read all the references provided to you and make up your own mind, rather than expecting the onus to be on me to debunk every bogus claim made by Lynn et al.

[clark klugermann]

OK, I absolutely must go to work now, which sucks, since I am enjoying this dialogue. Abiola, I will read the links you posted tonight and post my thoughts on the articles.

For now, let me say that I agree that IQ is not the whole ball game when it comes to national wealth, only that it is a big part of the ball game; if I had to quantify it, I'd put it at 40%. Culture matters too, as do specific sets of negative circumstances, such as ethnic strife. Abiola's example of Iraq is a valid one -- I'd much rather live in lower-IQ -- well, check that. Maybe it's not such a valid example. South Africa has big poverty problems, as does India. I just scanned the list of national IQs in Lynn and Vanhanen's book for a prosperous, peaceful country with an IQ below Iraq's and I was about to write "I'd much rather live in lower-IQ [name of country] than higher-IQ Iraq," but then I couldn't find a country with an IQ of lower than 87 that's doing noticeably well.

[clark klugermann]

Abiola,

I understand that dialogues like this eat up a lot of free time (my boss is breathing down my neck, too). Anyway, I appreciate all you've written and will look at your links tonight when I get home (i.e. away from the boss). I certainly don't want you to put any work into a discussion that you don't want to do. I appreciate all you've said already, especially since you've got firsthand knowledge of the situation in Africa. Cheers, CK

[Frank McGahon]

" the perfect beaches and close proximity to the US of Barbados,"

Oh yes, those same factors which served Haiti so well.

I must say it irritates the hell out of me that the supposedly high Asian "IQ" - you still take L&V's figures as given - "explains" the success of Asian countries without reference to any other factors, but as soon as any successful Caribbean (and there are plenty more than Barbados) or African country is mentioned suddenly all these other factors are deemed worthy of consideration.

And again, acording to the creed, it's not North Koreans' "fault" that their country is a communist hellhole but any African country saddled with a similar regime or a capricious dictatorship - ironic that the h-bd-ers completely let Mugabe off the hook for Zimbabwe's current travails - is somehow directly due to the supposedly low intelligence of its citizens.

[Chuckles]

Eh?

In the early phases of the 20th century, the British not only phased Nigerian middlemen out of Import/Export businesses, they colluded with Lebanese and Syrian merchants to blockade goods moving from the Interior.
How can this be used as an example of high IQ?

There is really a simple way to put this whole nonsense to an end, one that many of my Anthropology friends have thought of and many are on the verge of doing.

There are thousands of African foreign students in the United States. Get their GPAs. Narrow it down to a country by country basis. Narrow it down to ethnic basis. Compare it with samples of US born students, or other foreign students.

If indeed the average IQ of the Nigerian is 67, it would be statistically impossible for the average GPAs of these students to come within a highway's length of National averages.

But this begs the question of how these African students got into the US in the first place. Lets have a look at the SAT scores.
On a country by country basis.
Narrow it down to an ethnic basis.
The results will be the same.

Differential performances are the results of attitudes. And attitudes are the product of the social milieu.

Have a look at this:

http://abuja.usembassy.gov/wwwhxjun04n.html

That case up there is not an exception. It happens all the time. I know kids in Nigerian schools who sat for the SAT1 in the 9th and 10th grade and came away in the 90th - 95th percentile. They are all over the place.
Abiola is right. The h-bd bunch are just a group of racists and kooks.

More and more places in the Ivy League schools are going to African students who grew up in Africa....

Saying that these folks are a selected group is just balderdash because the ones who advance this claim dont bother to apply the same standards to any other immigrant society.

Again, like Abiola has pointed out, the Illiteracy rates in Nigeria are far lower than what one finds in India, or Bangladesh etc etc etc.

When you factor in the notion that these Africans have to struggle against much greater odds than counterparts elsewhere (and still manage the results indicated), Ned Block's treatment of Heritability becomes even more relevant - The performance of Africans may actually hint at superiority - an option left out the logical constructs in the debate.

[Abiola Lapite]

So Gregory Ugwi's going to Princeton? My cousin, another Nigerian, went there as well (and yet another cousin actually *taught* there). We Nigerians are all over the place!

[clark klugermann]

Frank,

On the contrary, I believe it certainly is North Korea's own fault that it is poor, and no one else's. Communism doesn't work. The difference between North Korea and Zimbabwe, Lynn and Vanhanen would say, is that North Korea has the IQ to rapidly become a wealthy technological society when it does become a market economy (as its ethnically-identical twin nation to the south did), and Zimbabwe likely does not. As I mentioned, North Korea becoming a wealthy technological economy is one of the predictions Lynn and Vanhanen
make for the coming decades.

You're also correct that wealthy majority-black Caribbean nations deserve credit for the actions they've taken to make themselves wealthy. But it does need to be pointed out that these are all very small countries (Barbados and the Bahamas are the two largest, around 300,000 people each), and that the vast majority of their major industries (tourism and sugar) are American- or European-owned. Allowing a so-called "dynamic minority" to operate in your small, beach-blessed country and make it wealthy is smart, but it's not the same as a group of people developing a technologically-advanced economy on its own.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm shooting down your ideas. But I think the exceptions to the proposed rule (Botswana, Barbados, Bahamas) all have logical, non-strained explanations that do not disprove the theory. (Botswana, BTW, has by far the highest GDP in sub-Saharan Africa, but again, has a small population (1.6 million) and the diamond, copper and nickel mines are virtually all owned by white South Africans. The life expectancy in Botswana for blacks is 35.1 for men, and 35.4 for women. Again, not a real success story.

[Chuckles]

The interesting part of this is that the fellow didnt come out of, say, KCL or Suleja Academy, QC or ISL (whose students have a habit of colonizing foreign institutions) - He came out of a Jesuit school. Historically, Mission Minded schools in Nigeria havent been producing the "brightest" students since say, the 40s and the 50s.

[Abiola Lapite]

"the vast majority of their major industries (tourism and sugar) are American- or European-owned."

The same is true of Ireland, and Singapore; so what?

"Allowing a so-called "dynamic minority" to operate in your small, beach-blessed country and make it wealthy is smart, but it's not the same as a group of people developing a technologically-advanced economy on its own."

Yes, because Singapore is a bastion of inventiveness: someone forgot to tell Paul Krugman about Singapore's wonderful TFP when he was writing "The Myth of the East Asian miracle" ...

"The life expectancy in Botswana for blacks is 35.1 for men, and 35.4 for women. Again, not a real success story."

And the reason why? AIDS, a lentivirus with a mean incubation period of 10 years, and one which originated in Africa. Using similar reasoning, I'm sure it was the low IQ of Europeans that explains why the Black Death decimated their populations in the 13 and 14 centuries, right?

I'm beginning to feel that the generosity I granted you was a mistake - you work overtime to shoot down every exception to the Lynn & Vanhanen crap, but you take it for granted that what they have to say must be substantive. This is not the mark of an objective mind, not equating the junk data manufactured by a proven liar with the hard evidence provided to you from sources like UNESCO and the World Bank.

[clark klugermann]

Abiola and Chuckles,

Two questions I'd be interested in your thoughts on:

1) Generally speaking, what do you feel are Nigeria's prospects for the near- and medium-term future?

2) What should the West's policies be towards Africa in general, i.e. assistance, armed intervention in conflicts, benign neglect, other?

[Abiola Lapite]

"is that North Korea has the IQ to rapidly become a wealthy technological society when it does become a market economy (as its ethnically-identical twin nation to the south did), and Zimbabwe likely does not."

A classic case of question begging. If the North Koreans are so bright, why can't they see that their system is fucked up right now, even as they teeter on the edge of famine? If the Russians are so much more intelligent than South Africans, why is their country so much more badly run, and so much less free?

This is just the sort of dubious argumentation that makes me feel I've been wasting my time here.

[clark klugermann]

*Yes, because Singapore is a bastion of inventiveness: someone forgot to tell Paul Krugman about Singapore's wonderful TFP when he was writing "The Myth of the East Asian miracle" ...*

What is TFP?