Review by Kevin Baldeosingh
In his book Hive Mind, economist Garett Jones argues that the average IQ of a population is a reliable measure of the potential for that country's economic prosperity. "If education researchers can find reliable ways to raise national test scores, productivity and prosperity will rise where poverty and disease now flourish," he writes.
This is a big "if," however, which Jones underplays throughout his book. He has to, or else he would have no book or a book without a point. His argument is that "If education researchers can find reliable ways to raise national test scores, productivity and prosperity will rise where poverty and disease now flourish." He also notes that test scores do a better job of predicting an economy's performance than the number of years people spend in school.
To be sure, Jones admits his ignorance up front. "How easy is it to raise the average IQ for a nation?" he asks. "Is it merely a matter of giving kids healthy environments, good nutrition and some decent schooling?...I don't have an answer to that question–I don't know that anyone does as of this writing–but here's one piece of evidence that it's possible for average IQ scores to increase for an entire nation: it's already happened time and time again in the 20th century."
This is a reference to what is called the 'Flynn effect', after the political scientists James Flynn who discovered it–Flynn found that IQ scores in developed nations had risen steadily over the past 100 years or so. This is too fast for any genetic explanation, meaning that the cause has to be environmental. However, Jones fails to note that this effect has not been substantial and may be fully explained by children's unrealised genetic potential being expressed through better environments, whether by healthier food or more efficient schools.
Despite this, the book is full of interesting and sometimes promising ideas, especially for a developing nation like Trinidad and Tobago. Not only does Jones examine the effects of IQ on a nation's economy (which, he notes, is different from IQ's effects on an individual's income level) but he also presents evidence that high IQ correlates with social stability and progress –ie contrary to popular perception, high-IQ people are more co-operative and less prone to aggression or violence. "IQ predicts a general tendency towards liberalism–in the traditional sense of the Enlightenment, a cautious blend of social tolerance and market orientation," he writes–an assertion which, if true, bodes badly for most of UWI's most voluble commentators.
He also says that "a nation's top performers [five to ten per cent] matter for the economy than the nation's average performers." Again, such a statement in our context has to be considered in light of the high emigration rates of our highly educated and the mindset of our top students.
The biggest deficiency of the book is that Jones sidelines the considerable evidence showing that interventions to raise IQ has modest effects, if any at all. However, this does not mean that his thesis is irrelevant for T&T, where much cognitive potential remains untapped.
MORE INFO
�2 Hive Mind
Garett Jones.
Stanford University Press, 2015
ASIN: B015PS7DBK; 224 pages.