Geoffrey MillerVerified account

cc @graykimbrough @itsbirdemic @gabriel_mathy @ZakDavid Y'all wanna take this one?

Anyway here are my four biggest problems with the argument, though this of course is not an exhaustive list of problems.https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1195237958158147584?s=19 …

it's a single-factor log-linear model on "national IQ" that's taken to be completely exogenous to any treatment applied and calls its error term "productivity". A freshman term paper would have at least included a time term, since Jones' paper implies GDP is a constant.

Even if you take everything- absolutely everything, from bullshit "national IQs" to his estimates of IQ factors, at face value, the implication is that China's "national IQ" has risen from about 85 to about 150 over the past 30 years, or 4+ standard deviations in a generation.

-better nutrition in US would radically improve IQs -richer culture & media environment (& education / human capital stock) would improve IQs -By Romer’s endogenous growth model, the huge increase of productive capacity entails huge increase in production of ideas, which....

.....which are non-rivalrous: everyone gets richer by them / everyone is put onto higher growth trajectory -Maybe average IQ was important in setting up institutions and culture/rules/norms of low-corruption, high-cooperation... But those are robust now. Immigrants assimilate.

Eastern Europe and Asia certainly suggest that IQ has a limited economic benefit.