Counter-Currents
915 words
India, Nigeria, and Ghana are some developing countries known for the exploits of enterprising citizens. Due to the achievements of the smart fraction in poor countries, onlookers are puzzled by their relative poverty. Such an assessment is misguided, because the national IQ is more important than the intelligence of outliers. National success requires large-scale cooperation and intelligence predicts the propensity to cooperate. The future-oriented outlook of intelligent people motivates them to acknowledge the benefits of long-term planning. Beset by low IQ, less intelligent people are unlikely to appreciate the consequences of long-term reform.
Notably, this environment creates hostility to reform. However, intelligent leaders guiding smart citizens will encounter fewer hiccups on the road to reform. But highly intelligent people leading the less intelligent may reason that the costs of attempting social reform are not worth risking their political future. Hence succumbing to populist pressures instead of initiating long-term change is a feasible option for leaders in developing countries. According to the cultural mediation hypothesis posited by Woodley (2011), intelligent people are adept at identifying dominant trends in society, so as goal-oriented actors, they have an incentive to deliver populist policies to retain power.
Thinking that intelligent people are altruistic is naïve. Research indicates that intelligent people conform to cultural constructs because they are more appreciative of the benefits of social conformity. Intelligent people are unlikely to sabotage their goals to promote the long-term success of a country when it is improbable that low-IQ people will embrace reform. In this context, manipulating the unintelligent can prove to be more lucrative than exercising the political fortitude to implement controversial reforms.
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Viewing intelligent people as self-interested agents, it becomes obvious that they lack the motivation to confront problems bedeviling the population. After all, there is no guarantee that low-IQ people will respect their efforts. National IQ further impacts the trajectory of poor countries in the realm of economics. There is a link between trade openness and economic growth; however, intuitively protectionism sounds plausible. Since intelligence necessitates rising beyond instinctive thinking, low-IQ people are hesitant to support pro-market policies. In fact, studies assert that intelligent people are prone to think like economists. Moreover, market economies are better off, so the low IQ of poor countries demonstrated by their preference for anti-market policies can partly explain their relative poverty.
Accordingly, the less intelligent are more driven by charismatic authority than evidence, so it is unsurprising that the developing countries that successfully transitioned to developed status like Singapore and South Korea were led by uncompromising figures who gained the adoration of the masses. Indeed, research shows that a leader’s commitment to development is a better indicator of success in developing countries than institutions. “Poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and subsequently, improve their political institutions,” wrote economists in a 2004 paper.
On the other hand, researchers submit that “intelligence may alleviate or diminish the negative effect of weak institutions on economic growth.” A possible explanation is that intelligent people are more likely to trust others. Resultantly, they cultivate strong social capital, thus creating an environment conducive to the networks that birth entrepreneurship. Against this background, it has been theorized by Potrafke (2012) that corruption is lower in high-IQ societies because “people with longer time horizons internalize the deleterious future effects of contemporary corruption.”
Similarly, high-IQ societies possess a larger percentage of citizens with above-average ability. Studies articulate that exceptionally intelligent citizens “generate relatively more national income and are more innovative, with those that have the lowest levels of IQ being less influential on economic development.” Furthermore, related literature suggests that high-IQ countries “can offset the negative effects of weak IPR protection.” As expected, due to higher cognitive abilities, intelligent people can exhibit resourcefulness in less than ideal circumstances thereby accelerating innovation in the absence of appropriate institutions. Therefore, the innovation gap is explicable by poorer countries, on average having less intelligent people.
Likewise, smart people display traits that are linked to national prosperity. Intelligent people demonstrate lower time preference; hence they are likely to engage in long-term planning to reap future benefits. On this account, researchers opine that because high-IQ people are more patient, they are likely to save, thereby ensuring that capital is available for investments. Additionally, intelligence is linked to pro-social behavior, making smarter citizens less expensive to manage. Considering that intelligent people are less susceptible to delinquency, resources can be channeled to productive sectors like education and health care, thus enhancing living standards.
Consequently, smart people are easier to lead, so intelligent people in low-IQ countries will conclude that reforms and innovations are infeasible and instead opt to maintain power by genuflecting to the demands of the populace. For smart people to make a difference in spurring change, they must be held accountable by a discerning public. In short, highly intelligent people cannot maximize national gains when they are unable to overcome the problems posed by a predominantly low-IQ population.
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13 comments
More anti-White social and economic babbling. More intelligent people are “easier to lead” and more socially conformist? What a surprise that Lipton Matthews agrees with ‘studies’ that substitute credentials for IQ and claim the smarter people support the ‘correct’ policies. And trade ‘openness’ leads to better economic outcomes, so you ignorant populists and nationalists need to get on board. Because a black Jamaican says so.
I am going to have to seriously reconsider my planned donations to Counter Currents if they go towards paying columnists such as Lipton Matthews.
I’m not completely sure what you’re objecting to. I didn’t find anything “antiwhite” in this well-researched piece (and I’d be surprised if anyone here beyond the core editors and a few writers got paid anything; it costs money to create and maintain a site like this, which is under constant cyberattack). Of course, more intelligent people (up to a point – a crucial caveat) are easier to lead than low IQ types; compare America’s inner cities to the ‘burbs. Stupidity correlates positively with incorrigibility. And nations which engage in free trade do in fact tend to do better over time economically. This is no justification, however, for the hollowing out of American manufacturing that’s been taking place since the 70s under the rhetorical rubric of “free trade”, as there are collective/nationalist concerns that outweigh the interest big corporations have in maximizing profits through labor costs artificially lowered via outsourcing to cheaper labor countries. Free trade has advantages and disadvantages which play out differently for separate countries, that’s all.
Exactly! This article reads like an apologetic for Free Trade. Regardless of the merits or dangers of this Mercantile theory, linking it directly to IQ seems short sighted, if not downright disingenuous.
It’s for good reason men of heroic bent always despised this mentality and “nations of traders”. In this regard there is good book by Werner Sombart titled “Traders and Heroes”.
“There is a link between trade openness and economic growth; however, intuitively protectionism sounds plausible. Since intelligence necessitates rising beyond instinctive thinking, low-IQ people are hesitant to support pro-market policies. In fact, studies assert that intelligent people are prone to think like economists. Moreover, market economies are better off, so the low IQ of poor countries demonstrated by their preference for anti-market policies can partly explain their relative poverty.”
It would be interesting to read high-IQ economists like Ha Joon Chang and Friedrich List, or to read Growth report (Spence report).
I come from a country that easily and enthusiastically accepted “privatization, liberalization and stabilization” policies, it didn’t end well…
I hate to always quote Herrnstein & Murray in The Bell Curve, but they discuss the link between lower IQ & increased tendency for violence. This is the first discussion about high IQ individuals in low IQ societies that I’ve read.
It seems to make sense tho; I couldn’t imagine those types wanting to contribute to societies, who are very unlike them, out of a sense of altruism. I had no idea Lipton Matthews was Black however.
There is a link between trade openness and economic growth
All depends on how you define/measure economic growth, eh? That Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton triple their net worth, while the middle class shrinks or disappears could still be considered “economic growth” in some circles.
Economic ignorance is very strong among racial nationalists, one is forced to admit. I wonder if this might have something to do with the fact that so many (though by no means all) of the most influential economists, both great (Mises) and ungreat (Marx), were Jews. I thus wonder if nationalists get vaccinated against polio, given that the discoverers of the inoculation against that terrible scourge of my parents’ generation were … oh no … Jews!
I would remind white preservationists that one of the supreme sources of European historical success was the combination of our Faustian inquisitiveness and adaptability. Whites did not assume, unlike many other peoples and civilizations, that they were the center of existence and had all the answers. Our ancestors, the best of them anyway, were interested in what they could glean from others, and weren’t afraid to adjust themselves to foreign-acquired knowledge. We developed much knowledge and technology autonomously, but we also learned from others and then improved upon and adapted their insights to serve our own development and power. The white man did not invent gunpowder, but he damn sure intuited quickly its most effective uses!
Protectionist/mercantilist policies tend to be favored by dictatorial regimes as a mechanism to consolidate power and reward their cronies. Speaking broadly, this almost always leads to stagnation in living standards for the bulk of the populace. Open trading nations do better economically, and this can be (and voluminously has been) demonstrated both deductively and empirically. Nationalists are buying into neoliberal propaganda which hides wholesale First World deindustrialization behind the rhetoric of “free trade”. Free trade simply means the legal ability to export and import goods between nations. There is no analytical difference between California selling almonds to Texas in exchange for natural gas, and selling those same almonds to Vietnam in exchange for rice. All parties to these transactions are made mutually better off due to Ricardo’s (oh no, another Jew!) law of comparative advantage. Multiply such trading relationships millions of times, and you get much higher economic growth than would be the case under attempted autarchy (just imagine how ineffective you would be if you had to produce all your own goods all by yourself; your living standard would not be too much above the 19th century American frontier’s).
The genius of the neoliberal propagandists was to take the apodictically inarguable case for the analytical identity between intranational and international commerce, and then use that rhetoric to hide the very different and far more problematic agenda of economic globalism – ie, the theory that assumes the absolute primacy of economic growth maximization, and which lumps the entire world together as a single undifferentiated unit to be utilized. Thus, the globalist looks at the American steel industry; calculates that the same quality steel can be more cheaply produced in Brazil or China (mainly due to dramatically lower labor costs); and proceeds to argue, first, for allowing US steel manufacturers to shut down domestic mills so as to re-set them up overseas; and then, far more insidiously, for various sometimes extremely recondite tax law changes whose functional effect is to encourage US steel mills to do just that – shutter here, and reopen elsewhere (too often, that “elsewhere” was China, especially over the past two decades since China’s accession to the WTO, as well as its having been granted MFN status by, I think, the Clinton Admin).
The globalist does not consider any of the harms that his policies of industrial outsourcing might cause, either to the well-being of existent Americans (or Canadians, Englishmen, etc) and their communities – many often built up around and dependent upon the “anchor industry” being shuttered – affected by the plant closures, or to the nation itself, and this latter whether in terms of future military security, or resistance to the larger ongoing overclass campaign of ethnonational dissolution (economic globalism is part of that campaign, in fact). Basically, economic globalism over the past half century has been a parasitic enterprise whereby giant corporations, enjoying all the security – military protection, private property rights, and tax treatment – of American domicile, have been allowed (and I have read in the past persuasive arguments alleging encouraged) to shutter here and reopen in China, so that their management and shareholders can increase profitability by means of exploiting Chinese neofeudal labor conditions, which enable them to obtain a cognitively similar (and in some ways, like labor docility, “superior”) workforce at a much lower price than what they could obtain domestically.
This is not “free enterprise” at its best, whereby corporate profits are increased via R&D leading to better quality products. It is rather economic “cheating”, enjoying the benefits of being part of the collectivity called “America”, but not contributing to that collectivity’s maintenance (especially when overseas profits are kept or further invested overseas, and not even brought home to be reinvested here), and in fact weakening it, insofar as 1) maintaining a robust domestic industrial capability is ultimately a component of long term military power, and 2) this economic globalization (translation: outsourcing of American manufacturing) is another aspect of the broader “ethno-globalization” or “de-Americanization” (and ultimately deracination) agenda.
There is abundant reason for nationalists to oppose this economic globalization/deindustrialization. But don’t confuse it with “free trade” in basic goods. [It’s fine and even good to sell Kansas wheat to Japan in exchange for Toyotas.] That’s a neoliberal smokescreen. It was a key reason for the failure of Pat Buchanan’s Presidential campaigns in the 1990s. His tirades against “free trade” were really against economic globalization, but by railing against “trade”, he created a rhetorical opening for smarmy neoliberal propagandists on the payroll of the corporate donor class to ‘school’ him in basic trade theory, which happens to be correct. And because Buchanan came to be defined (totally incorrectly) as anti-free market, faux-conservatives were able to raise suspicions about whether Buchanan really was a “conservative”. I believe (and did so at the time – I was tangentially involved with the Buchanan campaign of 1996) this may have been the reason for his failure to secure the GOP nomination.
A parting shot, for your consideration: what nationalists need to develop is their own theory of political economy – one which is true to the core knowledge of the discipline but then tailored to serve ultimate ethnonationalist goals. I suggest that this theory would, simplistically, effectuate a “marriage” of Friedrich List and Ludwig von Mises.
If you’re from Russia, the economic shock therapy and voucher business suggested by outside “experts” was designed to crash the economy and make it easy for foreigners to scoop up industries for a tiny fraction of what they’re worth. I should write about that one of these days.
That reply was meant for Jimbovitch
Great article! Helped clarify a couple of things about ‘free trade’ which have long perplexed me.
And this reply was meant for Lord Shang (something ain’t working).
Excellent analysis. It’s far above my ability to critique as my background is scientific/ mathematical.
One component of growth that I’ve also wondered about. Why do we always need high growth? Particularly in the housing market where I always see (in Florida), woods or natural spots being bulldozed and turned into low end housing for pickup truck driving, non-English speaking, anti- intellectual Hispanics. A low growth but entirely white USA would still be a technological powerhouse easily able to defend itself against China. Right now China seems to be licking it’s chops. They can threaten us but calculate that we’re in decline and by simply waiting their relative strength increases.
In a non-sequitor, long comments like yours seem only possible on C-C. Other sites have gone crazy with moderation; deleting all intelligent comments for unknown reasons.
“In short, highly intelligent people cannot maximize national gains when they are unable to overcome the problems posed by a predominantly low-IQ population.”
To your point, Richard Lynn has the correlation between average IQ and income of nations at 0.63. What’s interesting is that this doesn’t match up with income within nations. Zagorsky in 2007 found the correlation between IQ and income in the US to be 0.30. The measurement of IQ is uniform, and the measurement of income is uniform, so comparing these two correlations is sensible. I would assume a similar correlation of 0.30 between income and intelligence prevails throughout most developed nations. Given this assumption, we can conclude that IQ improves life in the nation overall much better than it does for an individual within the nation. In other words, IQ lifts all boats more than individual boats above others. Furthermore, it pays more economically to be a dumb person in a smart country than a smart country in a dumb country.
However, income isn’t the measure of all things. In the US, income among African Americans varies a lot, with the typical guy having an IQ of 85 doing low-paying menial labor and likely not attracting women, and the guy with an IQ of, say, 105, who (thanks often in part to affirmative action) has a great income and has many black women trying to get him for themselves. On the other hand, income for most Jamaican men is low, and the ones at the top earn quite a bit less than African American men at the top. Jamaicans are very similar genetically to African Americans in their white admixture proportions. They have similar IQ and murder rates, perhaps as a consequence of this, but the Singles Epidemic is worse for African American men than for Jamaican men because most Jamaican men are poor and Jamaican women have a lower potential payoff for chasing rich Jamaican guys than African American women have for chasing rich African American men. As a result, I would imagine the average Jamaican man is happier than the average African American man, but African American men at the top are happier than Jamaican men at the top of their respective societies. At least with respect to women anyway.
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