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The Intelligence of Nations

In an article based on his APS award address, Earl Hunt (2012) described the current state of research about the intelligence of nations. The article gives a broad and balanced overview and is a well done introduction for all who are until now not acquainted with this rather new research paradigm. I want to deal with the seven most important questions raised in Hunt’s article. First, what is “intelligence of nations”? Initially, it is the average result of mostly student samples in psychometric IQ (e.g., from the Raven’s test family or the CFT) or student assessment tests (PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS). These results are directly, or after corrections, generalized to the entire youth (“the coming workforce”; Hunt, 1995) and to entire country populations. There are many problems with small, old, and nonrepresentative samples and, like in all beginnings, with some errors in study selection (e.g., Hunt, 2011; Wicherts, Dolan, & van der Mass, 2010), but these teething troubles seemed to have been overcome with newer research (e.g., Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012), especially by integrating the results of student assessment studies. Second, what is the meaning of these average test results? Hunt offers a modest interpretation: the ability to use cognitive artifacts in a modern society with its many technological and abstract challenges. I would go further and plead that intelligence covers the ability to think. This includes the use of cognitive artifacts, but also the ability to solve problems in a cognitive way, to think abstractly, to reason, to infer, to comprehend and to learn. There is an overlap of intelligence and knowledge and its competent use (the three together covered by the terms cognitive ability or cognitive competence). All intelligence and student assessment tests measure only parts of this construct, but not only do they highly correlate at the individual level, as is well known, but they also very highly correlate at the level of countries. Whether they are good measures of intelligence is less an empirical question and more a question of content-based validity. However, the empirical base should be widened to include results of Piagetian measures of cognitive development, sediments of cognitive activity (as the development of important cultural or technological improvements—e.g., the invention of scripture, patents), and such indicators in everyday life as rationality or effectiveness in obtaining well-justified aims. Hunt mentioned some examples that could be used as indicators of a nation’s intelligence (e.g., having well-organized schools or a testing system). Third, why is intelligence of nations relevant? There is an empirical and a theoretical answer. To begin with the empirical, there are high correlations of a nation’s intelligence and mean knowledge level with wealth and its growth, with democracy and rule of law, and with health and human development. And there is a well-founded and empirically supported theory that cognitive ability facilitates individuals and nations to achieve such positively valued conditions (e.g., Gottfredson, 2003; Rindermann, 2012; Rindermann & Meisenberg, 2009). But intelligence is more than a useful, utilitarian tool to cope with everyday demands. It helps us to comprehend life, world, and being. Human capital, in an economic perspective, is everything that enables individuals to be productive workers, from ability to personality, usually measured and defined by formal education (its duration or the highest acquired degree). The economists Jacob Mincer, Theodore W. Schultz, and Gary Becker started that research in the 1950s. But economists failed to establish a precise and psychologically well thought-out construct. Human capital and education are misleading: Within broad and diffuse human capital (think of using “cheetah capital” for the ability to run fast), intelligence and the intelligent use of knowledge are crucial. And education itself is no positive factor—students do not produce anything and education consumes time and resources. Only the consequences of education as cognitive ability and personality attributes could become positively relevant for economics. Nobody recommends endowing every newborn with a master’s degree. The working mechanism is not knowledge itself, which frequently remains inert, but its intelligent, adapted, efficient use. The intelligence paradigm starts to be recognized also in economics (e.g., Jones, 2011). In a modern “cognitive society,” the relevance of cognitive competences is growing