Quora
India is a confusing place. It is able to send hordes of extremely intelligent and highly-motivated scientists to the USA, yet its city centres are so chaotic that tourists have to pay street urchins to throw themselves into the road just so that they can cross it. The land of the Hindus is pursuing its own space program, yet vast areas of the country lack electricity, running water, and even people who can read. What does this say about Indian IQ?
The late J. Philippe Rushton gave an answer to this question back in 2007: Indians Aren't That Intelligent (On Average). But much more evidence has since been developed.
A country’s average IQ is a massively important predictor of national accomplishment and national average living standards, as Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen showed in their seminal 2012 book Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, as well as in their earlier book IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
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It is India’s ethnic diversity which explains why it displays extremes: intellectual brilliance yet grinding poverty. This may be a problem for India, in that it is the population’s average intelligence—which predicts so much about the fate of nations. With its low average IQ, India is corrupt, unfair, and shambolic.
This is perhaps why so many highly intelligent Indians are desperate to come to the West—probably reducing India’s average IQ even further in the process, but certainly not improving the GOP’s chances.
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