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Notes -
Europe is a possible counter-example both to various naive forms of HBD and also to the notion that ethno-nationalism is an advantage.
Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US, yet it lags the US significantly both in GDP per capita (although I am not convinced that this is a very good metric) and also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).
Some possible counterarguments:
"The best talent of Europe came to the US." - But Germany, for example, has a higher average IQ than the US does. In any case, the IQ difference between the US and Europe, in either direction, does not seem to be large enough to be significant.
"Europe has been dealing with the aftermath of WW2." - But that does not explain why Europe had WW2 to begin with, or why the US was not comparably harmed by its Civil War. The US Civil War killed a comparable fraction of the US population to what Europe lost in WW2, but the US Civil War did not fundamentally slow the trajectory of US economic or geopolitical rise.
"Europe has been shackled by socialism." - But similarly to my objection to #2, this does not explain why Europe is, to begin with, more fond of socialism than the US is.
Am I getting something wrong? Is Europe more innovative than I give it credit for?
One model I think works is that innovation = genius + reach.
Let's clone Archimedes and put him in Sub-Saharan Africa. How much GDP will he generate as a sheep-herder in Mali? My guess is - not that much more than a normal sheep-herder.
Now put him into a computer-science class at Stanford graduating in 1990. The same genius could easily generate billions in GDP.
The United States has a more strongly-connected market than Europe. A genius in the US can impact the world much more strongly than one in a small European country. That European may not even be a native English speaker. And Facebook for Luxembourg isn't exactly going to take off, is it? Not that it matters. As you rightly point out, the best ones often go to the US anyway.
The better question, IMO, is what about China? China has more than 3x the population of the US and an average IQ that is perhaps 5 points higher. I'm not going to do the math right now but I believe this would imply that China has something like 10x as many 145 IQ people as does the U.S.
If these people can connect with each other in meaningful ways, it's possible that Chinese-language research and technology will outstrip English-language equivalents in a completely irreversible way. There is no greater reservoir of high IQ people on the planet than China. These would-be world shakers are kept back by either the CCP or some fundamental attribute of Chinese culture/genetics. I think it's probably the CCP. Overseas Chinese like Terrance Tao perform as would be expected based on IQ.
I mean a big part of it might be that a higher percent of Chinese geniuses go into things that don’t directly contribute to the bottom line(like bureaucratic ass kissing).
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