Why India will (probably) never catch China
The other day I linked to an interesting article and matching review on the relative growth rates of India and China. The authors concluded that India's more transparent court system and their democratic apparatus plus the existence of significant home-grown Indian industries made them more likely to catch China than most people thought.
China and India have pursued radically different development strategies. India is not outperforming China overall, but it is doing better in certain key areas. That success may enable it to catch up with and perhaps even overtake China. Should that prove to be the case, it will not only demonstrate the importance of homegrown entrepreneurship to long-term economic development; it will also show the limits of the FDI-dependent approach China is pursuing. I disagree on human biodiversity grounds.
However, I am not basing my decision primarily on the oft-quoted IQ data from Richard Lynn. Lynn cites studies in which India's mean IQ has been measured to be in the 80's, while China and Hong Kong have been variously measured to be all over the map, from 98 to 110 (!). As I've said before, the problem with IQ is that it is not measured in physical units (like height, for example), and so it is difficult to compare measurements made across space and time.
That said, I do put some credence in the Chinese measurements as being comparable to or greater than European mean scores, because of the following convergent pieces of evidence:
Chinese coracialists have built technological economies on a country-scale in Singapore and Taiwan. Related groups like the Koreans and Japanese have likewise been successful.
The Chinese diaspora in the US (and elsewhere) has been very economically and academically successful
The "Asians > Europeans" in mean IQ figure has been replicated in numerous countries
So for the Chinese, all the IQ signposts point in the same direction. As for India, I'm with Steve Sailer when he says:
The IQ structures of the two giga-countries, China and India, demand more intense study, in part because the future history of the world will hinge in no small part on their endowments of human capital. The demography of India is especially complex due to its caste system, which resembles Jim Crow on steroids and acid. By discouraging intermarriage, caste has subdivided the Indian people into an incredible number of micro-races. In India, according to the dean of population genetics, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, "The total number of endogamous communities today is around 43,000..." We know that some of those communities - such as the Zoroastrian Parsees of Bombay - are exceptionally intelligent.
But we can't say with any confidence what is the long run IQ potential of Indians overall. Their current IQ score (81) is low, especially compared to China (100), the other country with hundreds of millions of poor peasants. Yet, keep in mind just how narrow life in rural India was for so long. In 1952, on the fifth anniversary of independence, the Indian government commissioned a survey to find out if the average Indian villager had heard yet that the British had gone. The study was quietly cancelled when early results showed that the average villager had never heard that the British had ever arrived!
It appears likely that some combination of malnutrition, disease, inbreeding, lack of education, lack of mental stimulation, lack of familiarity with abstract reasoning and so forth can keep people from reaching their genetic potential for IQ.
A little more detail - the Indian mean IQ figures need further study for several reasons:
The only study since 1968 was of 569 youths in 1996
As Sailer said, the genetic stratification imposed by the caste system means that large samples of various castes need to be sampled and tested to get a true picture of India's (likely multimodal) IQ landscape.
The Indian diaspora has been spread all over the world, with varying results.
The diaspora is worth a post in its own right...suffice to say that the type of South Asian immigrant (unskilled, middle class, or professional) is quite important in predicting the prosperity of the resulting diasporic population. In other words, this outcome variability stands in sharp contrast to the relative homogeneity of the Chinese diaspora, where the descendants of the laborers shipped to Singapore built one of the most powerful economies in the world. The South Asian comparison would be the UAE, which is actually fairly wealthy even without the oil revenue. . But other countries like Mauritius and Fiji have shown only middling success for the Indian emigrants. [1]
The point is that unlike the Chinese, the IQ signposts for Indians do not all point in the same direction. However, I think it is more than likely that a simple caste-based model will explain Indian IQ stratification. After all that foreplay, then, my going assumption is that India's lower castes have substantially lower IQs than the upper castes, because they require racial quotas yet are still in abject poverty. Outside of Hinduism, we know that Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, and some Muslims have attained economic success either in India or overseas.
So, with all this in mind, I think China has many advantages over India , including:
racial and religious homogeneity
no neighbor which is as hostile as Pakistan
a higher GDP and a higher growth rate
no particularly dysgenic trends in birth rate (given the homogeneity of China)
And, of course, the ability of the Communist party to push eugenics/genetic engineering
Also, there is the question of precedent - racially similar Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese have built powerful country-scale economies. Indian diaspora accomplishments are significant, but they are mainly company-scale and individual-scale...and the individuals involved are almost entirely from the upper castes. In my opinion, India's lower castes (easily more than 50% of the population) are incapable of sustaining a technological economy, given that the features of Indian modernization: nuclear weapons, IITs, IT companies, drug companies, etc. are mainly due to Brahmins, particularly South Indian Brahmins.
So will India catch China? Probably not.
A sometimes mentioned caveat is that the measured mean IQ of the Chinese might reflect the intelligence of the coastal Chinese rather than their illiterate rural cousins. However, I doubt that the IQ of the rural population is much lower than that of the coasts, because of two things:
Genetic homogeneity (China is 91% Han) (source)
According to Jason Soon, the super successful Chinese diaspora was mostly landless peasants (e.g. the Hakka in Singapore). (source)
[1] Then again, Mauritius is 30% African, while Singapore's minorities tend to be of higher IQ, so perhaps this is a contributing factor?
Update
Interesting addendum from Lynn, though it does not mention caste, nor the fact that Indians in the UK do better than the native British (while Pakistanis do worse) on a host of societal measures. Caste needs to be included in any future assessment of Indian IQ.
The last entries in Table 1 are for the IQs of Indians derived from the Indian sub-continent, South Africa and Britain. The mean of 86 in India is derived from a review by Sinha (1968) of the results of 17 studies of children aged between 9 and 15 years and totalling in excess of 5,000. Mean IQs lie in the range of 81 to 94, with an overall mean of approximately 86. But ethic Indians in Britain obtain a mean of 96 which is within the range of other Caucasoid populations. Their verbal IQ of 89 is depressed, but this is probably because their families are recent immigrants and have not yet mastered the language. The British results suggest that when Indians is are reared in an economically developed environment their intelligence level is about tile same as that of European Caucasoids. Obviously, if bad nutrition is all that's keeping the lower castes out of jobs, then India might very well contest China. Much depends on how accurate those IQ results are, how multimodal the population really is, what the ratio of the intelligent to unintelligent is, and how many geniuses there are.
East India Company or British used to call India "Golden Sparrow"
