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NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION

SECURITY

CURRICULUM CHARITY EXPERTS EMERGENCY NUMBERS MILITARY NEWS POLITICIANS

Economist Magazine States "Self-doomed to failure" An unsparing new report by Arab scholars explains why their region lags behind so much of the world
1) 1 in 5 Arabs live on less than $2.00 a day.
2) 1 in every 2 woman can't read or write.
3) They lack three things that doom them: Freedom, Knowledge & Women Power
The actual UN Report can be downloaded from here.
4) Unfortunately, if one actually follows the link to the actual UN report, the UN report includes in it's overview a section describing why all of the arab's problems are caused by Israel (and by implication the US), and, of course, no mention of terrorism. Why can't someone publish anything in the arab world that is at all critical unless it first blaming Israel for all of the problems. We have a long way to go.

IQ and the Wealth of Nations

All Nobel Winners - last updated in 2002

Contribution of the Muslim People:

19.6% of World's Population
1.2 Billion Muslims

Nobel Prize Winners:

Literature
1957 Albert Camus
1988 - Najib Mahfooz 1988.

World Peace
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yaser Arafat

Chemistry
1990 Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Medicine
1960 Peter Brian Medawar
1998 Ferid Mourad

Elias James Corey, Peter Brian Medawar and Ferid Mourad are Nobel Prize winners but are Arab-Christians, not Muslims.

Contribution of the Jewish People:

0.2% Of World's Population
14.1 Million Jews

Nobel Prize Winners

Literature
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
2002 - Imre Kertesz

World Peace
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
1995 - Joseph Rotblat

Chemistry
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
2000 - Alan J. Heeger
2004 - Irwin Rose
2004 - Avram Hershko
2004 - Aaron Ciechanover

Economics
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Rober Fogel
2002 - Daniel Kahneman

Physics
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1995 - Martin Perl
1995 - Frederick Reines
1996 - David M. Lee
1996 - Douglas D. Osheroff
1997 - Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
2000 - Zhores I. Alferov
2003 - Vitaly Ginsburg
2003 - Alexei Abrikosov

Medicine / Biomedical Science
1908 Ehrlich, Paul
1908 Mechnikov, Elie
1914 Barany, Robert
1922 Meyerhof, Otto Fritz
1930 Landsteiner, Karl
1936 Loewi, Otto
1944 Erlanger, Joseph
1945 Chain, Ernst Boris
1946 Muller, Hermann J.
1947 Cori, Gerty Theresa, Radnitz
1950 Reichstein, Tadeus
1952 Waksman, Selman A.
1953 Krebs, Hans Adolf
1953 Lipmann, Fritz Albert
1958 Lederberg, Joshua
1959 Kornberg, Arthur
1964 Bloch, Konrad
1965 Jacob, Francois
1965 Lwoff, Andre
1968 Nirenberg, Marshall W.
1969 Luria, Salvador E.
1970 Axelrod, Julius
1970 Katz, Bernard
1972 Edelman, Gerald M.
1975 Baltimore, David
1975 Temin, Howard M.
1976 Blumberg, Baruch S.
1977 Schally, Andrew V.
1977 Yalow, Rosalyn
1978 Nathans, Daniel
1980 Benacerraf, Baruj
1984 Milstein, Cesar
1985 Brown, Michael S.
1985 Goldstein, Joseph L.
1986 Cohen, Stanley
1986 Levi-Montalcini, Rita
1988 Elion, Gertrude B.
1989 Varmus, Harold E.
1994 Gilman, Alfred G.
1994 Rodbell, Martin
1997 Prusiner, Stanley B.
1998 Furchgott, Robert F.
2000 Greengard, Paul
2000 Kandel, Eric R.
2002 Brenner, Sydney
2002 Horvitz, H. Robert
2004 Axel, Richard

Stopped Counting

IQ and the Wealth of Nations
The Intelligence Of Nations: Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen,
Westport, CT: Praeger (2002), 256 pp., U.S.
$64.95 (Hdbk.) ISBN 0-275-97510-X
A review By Philippe Rushton

IQ and the Wealth of Nations. is a brilliantly-conceived, superbly-written, path-breaking book that does for the global study of economic prosperity what The Bell Curve did for the USA. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen examine IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 countries. They document that national differences in wealth are explained most importantly by the intelligence levels of the populations. They calculate that mean national IQ correlates powerfully-more than 0.7-with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). National IQs predict both long-term and short term economic growth rates. Second in importance is whether the countries have market or socialist economies. Only third is the widely-credited factor of natural resources, like oil.

One arresting fact emerges: the average national IQ of the world is only 90. Fewer than one in five countries have IQs equal or near the British average of 100. Almost half have IQs of 90 or less. This poses a serious problem if the book's conclusion that IQ = 90 forms the threshold for a technological economy is correct. Lynn and Vanhanen review the theories advanced over the last 250 years to explain why some countries are rich while others are poor.

These include:

  • climate theories (temperate zones are said to be best);

  • geographic theories (an East-West Axis is said to be best);

  • modernization theories (urbanization and division of labor are said to be
    good);

  • dependency theories (exploitationand peripheralization of poor nations are
    said to be bad);

  • neoliberal theories (market economies are said to be good);

  • psychological theories (cultural values like thriftiness, the Protestant
    Ethic, and motivation forachievement are said to be good).

Some of these factors no doubt play a role. But it turns out that IQ that does the heavy lifting. Next, Lynn and Vanhanen review the scientific literature and find that IQ is an important determinant of educational attainment, earnings, economic success, etc. In the United States and Britain, the correlation between IQ and earnings for individuals is approximately 0.35. (That is, cleverness is a fairly loose guarantee of economic success for an individual, but is significant across an entire population. If you bet on it at a gaming table you wouldn't win on every throw,but you would make a lot of money over an evening.) Of course, it makes sense that intelligence determines earnings. More intelligent people learn more quickly, solve problems more effectively, can be trained to acquire more complex skills, and work more productively and efficiently.

Nations whose people have high IQ levels also have high educational attainment and large numbers of individuals who make significant contributions to national life. On the flipside, nations with low levels of intelligence have low levels of educational attainment and few individuals who make significant contributions. Low intelligence leads to unfavorable social outcomes like crime, unemployment, welfare dependency, and single motherhood. Lynn and Vanhanen prove that the widespread though rarely stated assumption of economists and political scientists-that all peoples and nations have the same average IQ-is wildly wrong. Their evidence documents substantial national differences in average intelligence.The highest average IQs are found among the Oriental countries of North East Asia (average IQ = 104), followed by the European nations (average IQ = 98), and the mainly White populationsof North America and Australasia (average IQ = 98). Further behind are the countries of South and Southwest Asia, from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia (average IQ = 87), as are the countries of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands (average IQ = 86), and Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85). Lowest are the countries of Africa (average IQ = 70). Lynn and Vanhanen find that some countries do have higher or lower per capita incomes than their national IQ averages would predict. This is where having a market or socialist economy or sitting atop a sea of crude oil comes in.Some of the countries with a higher per capita income than would be predicted from theiraverage IQs are Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Denmark,France, Ireland, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, and the U.S. Except for Qatar, South Africa, and Barbados, all of these are technologically highly developed market
economies. Qatar's exceptionally high per capita income comes from oil exporting, which is actually managed and controlled by corporations and people from European and North American countries. South Africa's much higher than expected per capita income derives from the high performance of the industries established and managed by the country's European minority. Similarly, Barbados's above average wealth comes from its well-established tourist industryand financial services, which are owned, controlled and managed by American and European countries.Some of the countries with lower per capita income than would be predicted from their average IQ: Bulgaria, China, Hungary, Iraq, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and Uruguay. Most of these are present or former socialist countries. Iraq has suffered from losing the Gulf War and a decade of UN trade sanctions. The large amount of ethnic conflict inthe Philippines decreased growth.Lynn and Vanhanen provide a detailed examination how well IQ theory stacks up against its competitors. For example, two significant exceptions to the view that a tropical climate is detrimental to wealth are Singaporeand Hong Kong, which lie in the tropical zone but are rich. Conversely, Lesotho and Swaziland are temperate, lying slightly south of the Tropic of Capricorn, but poor. These differences, however, can be explained in terms of intelligence theory. The people of Singapore and Hong Kong belong to the ethnic group with the highest average IQs; the people of Lesotho and Swaziland belong to the ethnic group with the lowest. Modernization theories, according to which all economies would evolve from subsistence agriculture through to various stages of urbanization and industrialization, have worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim but have failed for the four remaining groups of nations (South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa).

IQ and the Wealth of Nations proposes that modernization theories describe Western Europe and the Pacific Rim because these countries have appreciably the same or somewhat higher IQs than in the United States. But they did not work for the other four groups of countries because average IQs are below the technological threshold. But why did the peoples of East Asia, with their high IQs, lag behind the European peoples until the second half of the 20th Century? Well, China's science and technology were generally more advanced than Europe's for around two thousand years, from about 500 B.C. up to around 1500 A.D. But in the 15th century, Chinese inventiveness came to an end and from that time on virtually all the important advances were made by Europeans, first in Europe and later in the U.S. The explanation may be that Europeans developed the market economy, while China stagnated through authoritarian bureaucracy and central planning.The failure of Japan to develop economically until the late 19th century is largely attributed to a regulated economy and isolation from the rest of the world. By 1867-68 a revolution occurred and the new rulers embarked on a program to modernize Japan by adopting Western education and technology, and by freeing up theeconomy by transforming state monopolies into private corporations. Much of the Japanese economic success in the 20th century was built by adopting inventions made in the West, improving them, and selling them more competitively in world markets. Japan thereby built up its motorcycle, automobile, shipbuilding, and electronics industries. Although it is sometimes asserted that the Japanese have not made any significant scientific and technological innovations of their own, this underestimates their technological achievements: the fiber-tipped pen (1960), "bullet" trains traveling at 210 km per hour, much faster than any Western trains (1964), laser radar (1966), quartz watches (1967), VHS video home systems (1976), flat screen televisions using liquid crystal display (1979), video discs (1980), CD-ROM (read only memory) disks (1985), digital audio tape (1987), and digital networks for sending signals along coaxial cables and optical fibers (1988).African countries are at the opposite pole from China and Japan in national IQ. This may explain why they are such a major anomaly for modernization theory. The low rate of economic growth of African countries following their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s is one of the major problems in developmental economics. During the years 1976-98, the average rate of economic growth per capita GNP of the 41 countries of sub-Saharan Africa for which data are available is much lower than in the rest of the world. Many of the African countries actually suffered negative per capita growth rate. Economists have quantified all possible factors, such as climate, ethnic diversity, geography, mismanagement, unemployment and the like, and compared the situation to elsewhere in the world, especially Asia. They concluded that these factors do not provide a complete explanation and that there is some "missing element."Some have suggested the low level of "social capital," i.e., the widespread corruption and lack of trust in commercial relationships, poor roads and railways, unreliable telephones and electricity supplies, and the prevalence of tropical diseases such as malaria. IQ and the Wealth of Nations identifies IQ as the missing link. Some of these "social capital" are actually manifestations of a low level of intelligence in the populations. Poor telephone services and electricity supplies, low agricultural yields, and the poor advice given by government advisory boards reflect low average IQ. With a mean IQ of 70, the populations of Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic growth achieved elsewhere in the world. Finally, Lynn and Vanhanen peer into the future. They predict future growth is most likely in countries with high national IQ scores but currently bad economic systems.The countries of the former Communist Bloc-Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam-are good bets.

What else can be done? Lynn and Vanhanen also list some of the factors, some environmental and some genetic, that might raise IQ scores and somewhat alleviate the disparities in national average IQ. These include: better nutrition, education and health; and ending the dysgenic fertility trends where the lowest IQ people produce the most children. (Obviously, immigration policy has a role to play too.) The take-home message of IQ and the Wealth of Nations: national differences in IQ are here to stay and so is the gap between the rich and the poor countries. Political promises that the gap is temporary, and will be remedied by aid from rich countries to poor countries, or even by poor countries adopting appropriate institutions, will not be fulfilled. Such promises assume that all human populations have equal mental abilities to adopt modern technologies and to achieve equal levels of economic development. They do not. The authors sound a clarion call for the recognition of national and race differences in intelligence.


Adapted from:
The Bigger Bell Curve: Intelligence, National Achievement, and The Global Economy, 22 October 2001, (PDF version) in Elsevier Science Journal Personality and Individual Differences
Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario and the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective 2/27/02