Verbal IQ
The latest installment of La Griffe du Lion considers why Asian incomes lag behind that predicted by their IQ’s. The math may bore the average reader to tears, but his answer is quite striking - Asians excell in the spatial reasoning portion of IQ but lag in verbal IQ, and this difference has an impact on the GDP of East Asian nations.
The relation between GDP and IQ doesn’t keep me up at night, but it surprised me to hear that verbal IQ (whatever that is) was a more important factor than the other kind. I’d have guessed that spatial reasoning, vital to engineering and physics, gave more of an advantage. Maybe this explains why the majority of students in higher education now are women, despite a lower average IQ - because women tend to have better verbal skills and men better spatial ones.
July 20th, 2004 at 8:59 am
I’ve seen data indicating that East Asians also have a smaller standard deviation than Whites. This would result in a smaller proportion of the East Asian population being geniuses.