If one were finalizing ones political views in the 1980's and settling to write ones book, one would be doing so against a background in which the Chinese, the

If one were finalizing ones political views in the 1980's and settling to write ones book, one would be doing so against a background in which the Chinese, the planet's cleverest race, had suffered a truly wretched century, bringing them to misery and ruin. Do brains make a nation rich? No, brains are what makes a nation take a Great Leap Forward. The plausibility of a link between prosperity and IQ is also going to depend on one's basic assumptions about how nations work. Suppose that national prosperity is basically a battle between the good guys building and the bad guys looting. What happens when both the good guys and the bad guys are smarter? Smarter bad guys makes things worse and the bad guys generally out number the good guys, so it is no surprise that the planet's smartest race lose 30million members to a man made famine. There are rival basic assumptions, around which one could build ones political theorizing. I like "Man versus Nature". So I'm temperamentally inclined to smarter is better. But I can see how some-one who sees the world as "Man versus Man" would dismiss "IQ leads to prosperity" as not worth considering, because there is no underlying mechanism to make it work.