The object of this book is to answer the question ‘Why are some nations rich and others poor?’ The authors review answers given in the past and then present a report of testing their own hypothesis that the wealth and economic progress of each individual nation correlates positively with its national mean intelligent quotient. An explanation of the test involved is given and the results set out which prove to the satisfaction of the authors that their hypothesis is largely correct, with some exceptions however for which they supply alternative explanations which are also tested and the results reported.

The measures of the two subjects, national intelligence and national wealth, are for intelligence, primarily an individual intelligence test (mainly the Progressive Matrices) administered to samples (mostly of some thousands) of each national population. The values thus acquired require several adjustments to ensure that they are reduced to a single uniform scale for comparison. For wealth and economic progress, the value of the mean annual income of the national wage-earning population is derived from government sources such as income tax returns, World Bank’s World Development Reports and other authors’ material such as Madison’s 1995 Monitoring the World Economy1822. These values are also reduced to a common scale for comparison .No intelligence surveys have been undertaken in 104 of the 181 countries used in this investigation and no data are available from which a national mean IQ can be directly derived. For these the data of ‘appropriate’ neighbouring countries are used; this procedure was to estimate the mean national IQ of Abyssinia from the mean of the mean national IQs of its neighbours India and Iran. Comparable adjustments in other areas of this study display the admirable inventiveness of the authors but this however places a heavy burden on the reliability of their judgement and discretion.

A question in this regard arises in their estimate of the firmness and accuracy of their final results and also of their attention to removal of prejudice where a surmise instead of an attested fact has to be offered as evidence e.g, “…political leaders have wrecked their countries’ economies because they have been insufficiently intelligent(i.e. they have an IQ too low) to understand the basic principles of market economics. The authors enlarge on this as follows “In Britain under the poorly led Attlee government of 1945 to 1957” … “the effect of a series of blunders was to impair British economic growth for some 40 years”. The first of the “blunders” they refer to is the continuation of rationing food, clothing, cars etc. following the termination of World War 2. It is a very myopic view to regard the continuation of this decision to procure equal distribution of inevitably scarce vital necessities, which had served so steadfastly during the War, as blunders and to ascribe them to Attlee’s “insufficient intelligence to understand the … market economy”. Unfortunately no measured IQ to appraise this judgement could be appealed to but we can scan a few items, with which the authors find a positive correlation, such as that between educational level and work attainment with measured IQ (p.37,39).

Attlee was educated at Haileybury school and then at University College, Oxford where he received an honours degree in modern history. He was called to the Bar and later became a lecturer at the London School of Economics. In the 1914-18 War he reached the rank of major. In the Second World War he became the leader of the Labour Party and entered a deputy partnership with Churchill who was then Prime Minister. Both men retained these positions until the end of the War after which Attlee and his party were elected to government by a huge majority. (In view of the positive correlation demonstrated in this book between democratic government and national wealth it is worth noting that this election choice was a democratic decision). I doubt that any qualified psychologist would surmise an I.Q. for Atlee below the average for Britain on this evidence except as a token of derision; something which should have no place in a study of this kind. Furthermore the simple suggestion that Attlee’s “intellectual failure’ is an explanation of Britain’s low economic position following the Second World War ignores a great many considerations bearing on the question such as:

1. The immense cost to Britain of concentrating industrial power on fighting the War particularly during the two-year initial period that Roosevelt abstained from fighting in consideration of his “short of war” electoral promise not to declare a fighting war which was waived only when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour.

2. The abrupt termination of lend-lease from America to Britain immediately the War ended.

3. The decision to continue rationing food and clothing in Britain after the cessation of the War (deprecated by the authors, p.163) was rightly initiated by the government Churchill led during the War and was vital after the War for sustaining the just distribution of these scarce commodities and to curb starvation in Germany particularly in the period immediately after the cessation of hostilities.

4. The cost of government financing of the National Health Service was not included in the estimation of the Gross Domestic Product of U.K. in contrast, for instance, to the U.S.A. where the cost of doctor, nursing, hospital attention, medicines, surgery, etc, would be met by citizens and be included and magnify this statistic for that country.

The main feature of the results is the measure of the correlation of national mean intelligence quotient and gross domestic product per capita of 81 nations dating from 1820 and then adding a further group of 104 countries (where data on the intelligence quotient in the late 19^th century is lacking) making 185 countries in all. To this result is added an excellent feature; a regression analysis of the result of the findings of the above investigation with particular attention given to extreme deviance in the values of the GDP per capita1988 and of National IQ for 185 countries with a view to understanding what has caused these errant quantities. Such departures from the main theme greatly helps in broadening the appreciation and understanding of the intricacies of this general area of investigation as does the introductory survey of the history of the subject in which earlier alternative answers to the cause of coexisting poverty of some nations and wealth of others are presented and discussed. The report of the data and results is provided fully with clear tables and diagrams; access to sources and further information is facilitated by a bibliography of about 800 volumes and documents. I did not however find there a book published in 1991 written by Robert Reich (Harvard Professor of Political Economy) and entitled “The Work of Nations” and on a subject similar to that of Lynn and Vanhanen’s. Both books are observing the same landscape but seeing different pictures. Lynn and Vanhanen are dealing with the wealth of Nations whereas Reich says that Nation is economically losing significance ‘to the realities of the emerging global economy and the idea of a national economy is becoming meaningless as are national corporations, national products and national technology…’. The task of the nation to increase the potential value of what it’s citizen’s can add to the global economy’ and it would have been interesting to have encountered it perhaps in their first chapter discussing earlier hypotheses and arguments aimed to answer their main question.

David C. Watt