A Country's IQ, Esp. in the Top Five Percent, Is a Damn Good Predictor of Economic Success

Although our egalitarian educational policies seem to spend much more on the lower half of the IQ bell curve, especially on disabled and certain minority groups with low average IQ's, under the dubious premise that all children need to be educated up to and beyond high school.

Where are the classes for gifted children? Oh, I see. Abolished in lieu of the burgeoning special ed teachers, aides, and monitors. What about vocational training and shop classes? No need, now that everyone is entitled to a four-year college degree, IQ be damned.

And people quaintly used to assert, pace Ernest van den Haag, that to benefit from college--real college not playtime--one needed to have an IQ at minimum between 110 and 120.

What we've done is water down college so that it doesn't mean much anymore, even as the costs associated with it have increased at double-digit increases every year. Time for the bubble to burst, as Instapundit keeps saying?

Let me shout it from the rooftop: Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein were right in their 1995 The Bell Curve. IQ is the best indicator of future success. In a few people, exceptional character  blazes forth.

There's been no refutation, only a Stalinist clampdown that was briefly opened fifteen years ago at the idea that race and IQ and nature--all matter. If nurture was so vital than the evidence would be in on the long-term benefits of Head Start. And there is no such benefit.

But we're going to continue funding the program, the truth be damned.

But everyone should know that in our post-industrial economy it's often the case that the smart guys (and on occasion gals) create the jobs.  Seen the movie The Social Network?

So why are we allowing people with low IQ's and minimal or no skills to emigrate here? How many leaf blowers do we need? Certainly the pool for herders from Somalia has been filled after the first 200,000 we let in in the past couple of years.

But usually this stuff is implied--like when I had a free-ranging discussion with a retiring Air Force colonel at my brother's wedding how the Chinese will leapfrog us in twenty to twenty-five years' time in terms of military technology and prowess. He all but said they are smarter. I think we both were thinking the same thing.

I was tempted, though, to do my brutally frank biology race realism presentation: East Asians, small penises, large brains; Negroes large penises, small brains; whites, somewhere in between. All the time pointing to the various anatomical areas. Does this make me an Asian supremacist?
 
And the future is bleak as college-educated women of all races don't have a replacement birth rate. Not even close. White college-educated women in the Northeast actually have a lower birth rate than some European countries like Sweden.

It's sad. Dysgenics is a bigger problem than most are willing to realize. Where's the bumper sticker that reads, "William Shockley was right"? And it's amazing to realize that the political discourse about such matters was far more serious and open in 1974, the year of the video, than in 2011. Who'd have thunk it? To compare, one can listen to this illustrative exchange between a black caller and Michael Savage in 2008 in light of the James Watson comments about race and IQ that caused a brouhaha. I love using that word.

That's why I'll never teach in the public schools. Too many children who are being prepared for college who have no business going.

The last word on education was its first, by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Chapter 14:

Another object of the [proposal] is to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people. This bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each of them to establish a school for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send their children three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it. These schools to be under a visitor, who is annually to choose the boy, of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools, of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of the country, for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually (emphasis mine), and be instructed, at the public expense, so far as the grammar schools go. At the end of six years instruction, one half are to be discontinued (from among whom the grammar schools will probably be supplied with future masters); and the other half, who are to be chosen for the superiority of their parts and disposition, are to be sent and continued three years in the study of such sciences as they shall choose, at William and Mary college, the plan of which is proposed to be enlarged, as will be hereafter explained, and extended to all the useful sciences. The ultimate result of the whole scheme of education would be the teaching all the children of the state reading, writing, and common arithmetic: turning out ten annually of superior genius, well taught in Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of arithmetic: turning out ten others annually, of still superior parts, who, to those branches of learning, shall have added such of the sciences as their genius shall have led them to: the furnishing to the wealthier part of the people convenient schools, at which their children may be educated, at their own expense.