1-20-2017

Introduction

It has been argued that human intelligence is a measurable variant as stated in the book "The Bell Curve" by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. A series of intelligence quotient (IQ) studies carried out from 2002 to 2006 by Richard Lynn, a British Professor of Psychology, and Tatu Vanhanen, a Finnish Professor of Political Science, were summaried in their books such as "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", "IQ and Global Inequality" http://www.rlynn.co.uk. Based on their analysis, they argue that differences in national income are correlated with differences in the average national IQ. They further argue that differences in average national IQs constitute one important factor, but not the only one, contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth. In this presentation, I will use datasets collected from different public resources to exhibit an intuitive correlation between national averaged IQ and GDP per capita.

Data resources

Plot

The plot between national GDP/capita vs IQ. You can see the country names by hovering mouse over the plot.

Linear regression

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = GDP2015 ~ IQ, data = IQ_and_GDP_noNA)
## 
## Residuals:
##    Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
## -22645  -9211  -3763   4439  75703 
## 
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept) -60866.2     8947.0  -6.803 1.72e-10 ***
## IQ             866.1      104.4   8.298 3.30e-14 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 15100 on 168 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.2907, Adjusted R-squared:  0.2865 
## F-statistic: 68.86 on 1 and 168 DF,  p-value: 3.304e-14

Conclusion

The plot on slide 3 shows a trend of positive correlation between national averaged IQ and national GDP/capita. And this correlation is statistical significant as shown by linear regression in previous slide. This is only a preliminary demonstration, it must be interpreted with extreme caution.
Thanks!