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2. Human diversity: the ten most bizarre people on earth?
3. The economics of robots, as seen by two Democrats
4. Economies with positive rates of return, but only barely, temporarily, and with luck, Mozart and the Whale
5. How to develop Kazakhstan: salt and higher IQs
6. Brad DeLong on Alan Reynolds, I hope to write more on this.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 16, 2006 at 07:03 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Not so much me on Alan Reynolds, but rather Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez writing six years ago in an anticipatory rebuttal of Reynolds's claim that it's overwhelmingly tax shifting...
Posted by: Brad DeLong at Dec 16, 2006 11:16:43 AM
Steve Sailer wrote about the salt/national IQ issue in April 2004. Not that the Times will acknowledge that, of course.
Posted by: Peter at Dec 16, 2006 11:18:34 AM
The NYTimes wrote something acknowledging the existence of IQ? Did they consult Howard Gardner first to make sure that no feelings were hurt, or self-esteem damaged?
Perhaps iodine deficient people are merely gifted in other, more non-traditional areas.
Posted by: Ray G at Dec 16, 2006 3:48:07 PM
Here are my two 2004 articles about how adding iodine to salt (and iron to flour) can raise national average IQs in some Third World countries:
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/national_iq.htm
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/copenhagen.htm
I'm glad to see the NYT addressing this important issue, even if they are few years late. But terror of mentioning the dread letters "IQ" is prevalent in the press.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 16, 2006 4:03:44 PM
The brave, brave, BRAVE Sailer. Always mentioning the unmentionable...always
saying the TRUTH when others are too afraid of the scary PC police.
enough with the self-promotion already...Other people do talk about IQ. They
are just not as obsessed with it and its relation of to other variables as you are.
Posted by: Tim at Dec 16, 2006 5:43:26 PM
Why wasn't this Iodine article mentioned in a "Market Failures In Everything" posting?
I think this blog is missing that symmetry.
Posted by: Mike Huben at Dec 16, 2006 7:24:29 PM
Tim;
"enough with the self-promotion already...Other people do talk about IQ. They
are just not as obsessed with it and its relation of to other variables as you are."
Audio clips with the posts would be cool. Things like this above could have an alley-cat's meow like whine and hiss to go with it.
And besides, other people were not the subject; the NYTimes was, and they as a group, do not normally print such insensitive things as anything having to do with IQ.
Posted by: Ray G at Dec 16, 2006 10:08:46 PM
"Other people do talk about IQ."
Of course they do.
They just don't write about it.
Indeed, the NY Times is probably less bad than most mainstream periodicals. Economists are particularly weak about ignoring the role of IQ in human behavior (Bryan Caplan, Garett Jones, and Jesse Shapiro being among the small number of exceptions).
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 16, 2006 10:59:48 PM
Sailer makes the point, overall anyway, that for the average IQ to improve - in a third world country or a low rent neighborhood - the subject needs to be discussed honestly. This the mainstream media, of which the Times is a part, has not only refused to do, but they've actually engaged in a dishonest presentation of the topic which only adds to the overall problem.
Posted by: Ray G at Dec 16, 2006 11:10:25 PM
To tie a couple of the links together, IQ and inequality, that was one of the clear messages from the Bell Curve when I read it a decade ago, that increasing inequality is inevitable as our economy becomes more and more efficient at extracting high IQ's for commercial gain. I think we're seeing this effect in the huge bonuses at Goldman discussed here a few days ago.
Posted by: ziel at Dec 16, 2006 11:27:56 PM
I have a high IQ and no one has ever extracted it for commercial gain.
Posted by: Ronald Brak at Dec 17, 2006 4:38:01 AM
I have a high IQ and no one has ever extracted it for commercial gain.
Just wait until the robots need the brains of the workers to help their capitalist masters conquer the world!
Posted by: eddie at Dec 17, 2006 9:40:36 AM
This latest entry at Brad DeLong's blog summarizes DeLong's critique of my December 14 piece in The Wall Street Journal:
Posted by: Jared Bernstein | December 17, 2006 at 06:50 PM
We can take it from all this dredging up of old material that Prof DeLong is unable to refute Reynolds' article.
Posted by: Alan Reynolds at Dec 18, 2006 9:28:36 AM
What do economists say about the economic sof comedy and joke-stealing? That joke is usually told as a "priest and a rabbi" joke.
It's much funnier that way, too, because :
1)the pair are sneaking out to play before services and are mad because their time is limited
2)the punchline is funnier when it's delivered in a schticky Jewish accent..."the rabbi says "vhat, they couldn't play at night?"
I don't know why punchlines are fuinnier when delivered in an accent but they are. Not my rule, just the way it is. :-)
Posted by: bk at Dec 18, 2006 9:54:29 AM
