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Do they also have a strong sense of honesty, integrity and work ethics?
It is corruption that fucks up the developing countries. I have yet to see any kind of correlation between IQ and corruptibility. The problem of Africa and LATAM is corruption, wrong ideology - some of the smartest humans of earth were communists, not lack of IQ.
Why would they steal their neightbors and country property. In such case, expect very complicated scams, Nigerian letters on another level, which would profit their country at expense of others.
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There is smart corruption and dumb corruption. Russia is also corrupt, but it's not a complete failed state like the way South Africa is heading, or Zimbabwe went. America is profoundly corrupt, and likewise, it hasn't hit the same rock bottom most African nations plagued with corruption have hit.
You can have corrupt, even nakedly corrupt governments that enrich themselves fabulously, that still understand you don't eat your seedcorn.
This is just the joke about the South Korean and Kenyan development economists. They meet at a conference, both work in government, and agree to visit each other in their home countries. The Kenyan comes to Korea, and he's amazed at how orderly and advanced the city, and his friend has a beautiful home, nice car, gorgeous wife. While they're smoking Cuban cigars after dinner he says to his host: wow you've really done well for yourself. His friend confesses; you know, just between you and me, for every $1,000 in government contracts, I stole $10. And they laugh and say, man, no one ever catches on.
The South Korean goes to visit his Kenyan friend. The airport is a mess, the road is rutted, the city is full of squalor. But then he gets to his friend's house and the place is a palace, a huge spread. And the South Korean says, Wow, you've done REALLY well for yourself. And the Kenyan says: well, you know, for every $1,000 in contracts, I stole $500.
I've heard the same joke, but during the first visit the South Korean official points at a nearby busy highway and says "for every 1000 $ spent on that highway, I took 10%", and during the second visit the African official points at a nearby untrammeled stretch of jungle and says "for every 1000 $ spent on that highway, I took 100%".
I mean, it's even more sophisticated than that.
Like, take Nancy Pelosi. Her family obviously has become fabulously wealthy off corrupt insider trading. And yet, to the best of my knowledge she's never taken money direction out of the public coffers. If anything it's been a "rising tide lifts all boats" type scenario where she knows a company is going to have their regulatory burden eased, possibly by her input, so her husband buys a fuck ton of call options. All the other investors in the company win, the people working for the company win, everyone relying on that company performing a valuable economic function wins, and of course the Pelosi's win. This is night and day from a scenario where the party that's been running South Africa just nakedly loots the funds for maintaining the power grid, and now they risk complete grid collapse after decades of neglect.
Expanding on your thought, Pelosi’s approach is also superior because the victims are far less sympathetic. The press and general public have no particular love for whatever bank or hedge fund sold those calls. Whereas the ANC’s victims are the general public.
I mean, there are downsides. It distorts capital markets, it picks winners and losers, if they do the same shit with shorts (buying tons of puts and then launching a government investigation on a company) it could be incredibly destructive. If part of it is regulatory capture, it basically grants monopoly/duopoly status to chosen companies, and then things gradually get worse.
That said, all that corruption is still better than African corruption. If smart corrupt leaders are constantly trying to figure out what is the most corruption they can get away with, while still performing their ostensible job duties, the system is still "working". If dumb corrupt leaders just go "LOL, what if I stole all of it?" because high time preference, we get the 3rd world.
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The interesting question is if you even need that if everybody has 180 IQ. I propose they would quickly notice their peer's increased intelligence, and then immediately all collectively adopt the Schelling point of "corruption ruins everything for everybody, let's just not do this".
Maybe not as a Schelling point, but at least via mechanism design? I fear there may be no level of intelligence at which everyone independently adopts pro-social individual values because the is-ought problem turned out to not be a thing, but there probably is a level of intelligence at which the creation and support of large-scale anti-corruption institutions is easy enough that corruption simply no longer pays off.
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Tiffany Henyard-style corruption will probably die down. It's just too fucking stupid.
Enron corruption on the other hand...
I suppose the "don't want to move away" stipulation will muddy the waters a lot. A lot of Third World corruption is precisely because people want to buy a lifeboat for themselves and their family in the West. Which makes it a more rational decision than American Henyardism even though it's equally brazen and destructive. But these people don't have that outlet so they'd likely be less corrupt and you can't really attribute it to intelligence.
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