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I think it's possibly a factor, I don't think that it's the dominant factor.
GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa varies from the $400s (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic etc.) to $6500-9000 (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Botswana). That's higher than some European countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia). Let's rule out Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as examples of GDP being misleading, since their actual "development" in any normal sense is pathetic. Let's also exclude South Africa as only recently an African-governed society. That still leaves Botswana as a huge outlier. Botswana is (a) overwhelmingly African and (b) its most important resource is diamonds, which is very badly correlated with development elsewhere. So a lot of the variance between Africa and the poorer parts of Europe can be explained by other factors - including Botswana's relatively good economic, political, and social policies.
Africa is a basket case, but so was China until recently, despite high IQs. Additionally, the European or East Asian genetics for IQs have presumably not undergone any massive transformations in the past 500 years, but the discontinuity in the rate economic development with all of previous economic history is huge.
At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource. That can be good! For example, Norway has been able to turn its oil into extreme economic development. Venezuela has not. Countries with very limited natural resources have done well. Botswana has done well with a low IQ level by global standards, though IIRC Botswana's IQ is rising relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the better childhood nutrition that comes with development.
I don't know of good evidence that the full awfulness of Sub-Saharan African development needs to be explained by IQ, rather than historical factors (it's hard to imagine Liberia ever being a great comparative success when you know its history) or policy factors (Africa had the misfortune to become independent in the heyday of socialism, dirigism, and Cold War power politics that led even the democratic countries to support dictators).
In addition to what @No_one said, China also has to be graded on a curve because before their recent rise the last hundred years or so had been absolutely awful:
*Great Leap Forward: tens of millions starved
*Korean War intervention: ~180,000 Chinese military casualties
*WWII (chinese theater): tens of millions killed, plus huge swathes of the country's vital agricultural instrastructure purposefully destroyed as a military tactic.
*"Boxer" Rebellion: hundreds of thousands killed/displaced
*Taiping Rebellion: tens of millions killed, tens of millions displaced, major portions of southern China depopulated - literally the worst civil war in human history that we know of.
Plus all the internecine fighting between factions, attempted/successful revolutions, several minor wars fought on Chinese soil (Russo-Japanese war, first Sino-Japanese war), and a normal dose of the floodings, droughts, and other natural disasters that have punctuated Chinese history.
China had one of the worst stretches any civilization has ever had, to my reckoning. Getting conquered by the Mongols again probably would have been significantly preferable. Honestly, I'm kindof amazed that there still is a china after all that. A lot of ruin in a nation, indeed.
So there's been a lot of instability, wars, and bad policies in China?
If these are sufficiently retarding to hold back China until the 1980s, then why aren't the instability, wars, and bad policies in Sub-Saharan sufficient to explain more or less all of its backwardness? When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation: if there's one thing that we know about economics, it's that tremendous natural resources are not sufficient for development, and in much of Africa they seem to be a curse (see the DRC or Zimbabwe).
Certain sections of Africa have had some conflict thats comparable - the postrevolutionary Congo comes to mind - but frankly I'm not aware of anything on the horrific, mind-breaking scale of what China consisfently went through from 1850-1970 (often self-inflicted). Other countries tend to get it once or maybe twice if they're really stupid (Russia's period 1905-1955 ranks up there, I'd imagine, as would Paraguay from the War of the Triple Alliance to the Chaco war). Not for a 100+ years.
That certainly could be a failure of my knowledge. Definitely African wars are a bit more difficult to find major sources on in English. Certainly open to learning more if you have suggestions.
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The answer is that none of this is true, China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa, despite value judgements of some racist whites who pooh-poohed remarkable Chinese traits as «mere» industriousness and servility or some such. China was in a very bad place very recently; but it has not been barbaric for millenia.
It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita), and claim this is an argument against HBD. This is an argument against GDP, if anything. Likewise disingenuous, only for more complex reasons, to compare China and Africa as a whole.
See what?
65 years life expectancy, 86.82% literacy, 20.8% AIDS, all economy runs on a De Beers mining contract. Botswana is maybe a big success by African standards, but that success belies the hypothesis that Africans with unusually good policies would just converge with non-Africans in all other things that matter – matter for maintaining stability, peace and good policies, too. So it will not be a huge surprise if Botswana one day just fails.
Why are you pointing out AIDS? Like, yeah, it's a problem, but I'm not sure it's in the top 10 priorities for nations to worry about. And I'm skeptical that North Korea is at 0% anyways.
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I never said that it was.
Good thing I didn't make that comparison.
Who is arguing against HBD? I never questioned it. The point is that, with respect to economic success or failure, there just isn't a lot or anything for HBD to explain once you account for bad policies and history. Bizzarely, many responses have been "Ah, but those facts you cite are due to bad policies and history."
My figures were out of date: in terms of GDP per capita, China has caught up with Botswana in the past 10 years. However, at Botswana's independence in the late 1960s, they were the same, and until recently, China was behind:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=10gui
China is ranked 31st for "Ease of Doing Business", Botswana is ranked 87th. So, even in China's catch-up, there just doesn't seem to be much if anything for HBD to explain. That doesn't mean that HBD is false, and AFAIK the evidence for HBD is psychometric rather than macroeconomic (and much the better for that fact). What doesn't do well is trying to explain differences in the wealth of nations in terms of IQ rather than cultural and historical explanations.
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Rating the Korean war as a Chinese defeat is just wrong.
They managed to save their North Korean buffer state despite a serious inferiority in heavy weapons. The amounts of Americans killed was also substantial.
I think it's being grouped not as a defeat, but just as a mass Chinese death event.
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Well, communism is known to completely break the IQ / GDP correlation. And before that, China wasn't industrial, and was under very malthusian conditions, with poorer classes in cities literally starving to death if fired from work. (see e.g. Changing Chinese on the conditions in China before it descended into civil war.
IQ affects performance at every task. It's not a 'natural resource', it's more of a multiplier, an advantage in almost everything.
Communism as a cause is naturally appealing to people in our memespace, which had an unmitigated love for markets even before it was thrown in the right-wing pit, but I don't think there is any certainty that even if this correlation is there, the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around. A story where something was already wrong with the countries in question beforehand and this something facilitated their conversion to communism when that meme was going strong - in other word, communism in the mid-20th century being yet another symptom, and having no explanatory power - seems no less plausible to me.
You need chaos for communism to take root. As much was recognized by bolsheviks themselves. Both China and Russia were in turmoil.
Communism (the planned economy kind) as a system cannot do the job in peacetime, thus leads to stagnation and discontent.
So it's both a product of discontent and chaos, and eventually causes chaos and discontent.
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The best still-extant version of that arrow is near the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula.
I was intending to respond to the common version of the theory that past communism breaks the correlation in the present. For present-day comparisons, NK/SK seems fairly inappropriate since NK is politically isolated and sanctioned to death with barely any outright allies, while SK is tightly integrated in global markets (and in particular with "communist" and at least certainly postcommunist China). On the other hand, I have seen the assertion repeatedly that up until the '70s or '80s or so, NK outperformed SK economically, and in the present day, to compare two countries without extenuating international-politics circumstances, it's not clear to me that for example median human life in Taiwan is actually better than in China.
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Yes, this is my point. IQ is a factor, but other things seem more important. And note that the issue is not IQ / GDP, it's a genetic predisposition to higher IQ / GDP.
I should have been more specific: IQ is comparable to a natural resource that can be leveraged or not leveraged, depending on the circumstances. You gave a good example with China, where communisn stopped the Chinese from leveraging any innate tendency to higher IQs that they might have into exceptional economic success.
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