Hive Mind, IQ, and the Wealth of Nations with Garett Jones HD

This podcast episode was originally published on December 11th, 2015. Garett Jones is Associate Professor of Economics and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. His book, Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters so Much More than Your Own is the subject of this episode. Hive Mind CoverThe book deals with an empirical puzzle: IQ is a weak predictor for earnings. We all know high-IQ people who live paycheque to paycheque, and lower IQ people who succeed brilliantly. And yet, when we look at the relationship between nations’ average IQ scores and their incomes, the relationship is strong. Nations with the highest average IQ scores are eight times wealthier than nations with the lowest IQ scores. How can we resolve this apparent contradiction? Garett documents five main channels for the spillover effects of IQ: 1. Smarter people are more patient, they save more and build up more capital. When economists test people’s patience, high-IQ people tend to be more willing to wait for a larger amount of money in the future rather than taking a smaller sum now. This is important at the national level because savings tend to stay within a country* and fund investments within that country. That means living in a higher IQ nation generally means having more capital available to compliment your labour. 2. Smarter groups are more cooperative. Economists use the iterated prisoner’s dilemma as an idealized scenario where cooperation is at odds with people’s individual, short-term incentives. Jones looked at the many times economists have studied this in experiments and correlated the cooperation rate in these experiments with the SAT scores of the schools the study participants were drawn from. He found that higher SAT schools produced more cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. In later research, Al-Ubaydli, Jones, and Weel (2014) found that higher IQ groups were more cooperative, but higher IQ individuals were not. A high-IQ person in a low-IQ group would not foolishly cooperate when everyone else was defecting, but high-IQ groups could coordinate on a cooperative solution despite not knowing that they were in a high-IQ group. 3. Smarter people are more informed voters and are more likely to support market-oriented policies. Caplan and Miller (2010) document the tendency for high-IQ people to think like economists. 4. Smarter groups make more productive team members. Jones uses “O-ring” technologies (drawing on an idea from Kremer (1993)), in reference to the fatal part that caused the Challenger disaster, to show how high-IQ workers can be indispensable in many sectors of a modern economy. While many economic models assume substitutability between high- and low-skilled labour (e.g. three low-skilled workers can do the work of one high-skilled worker), O-ring sectors don’t have this feature. When one mistake can completely destroy a project, low-skilled workers can have effectively negative