According to the book A Question of Intelligence by Daniel Seligman, the IQ’s of Richard Nixon and JFK were both tested in school at 143 and 119, respectively. The IQ of George W. Bush is not known, but he scored 1206 on his SAT back in the days when the test was much harder. Since the reading and math skills measured by the SAT relate closely to intelligence, psychologist Linda Gottfredson converted his SAT score into an IQ equivalent of 125. There’s some speculative information about Obama’s intelligence, but the IQ’s of Nixon, JFK, and GWB are the best established. Based on this very small sample, U.S. presidents have an average IQ of about 130 with a standard deviation of about 12, compared to the general U.S. population that has an average IQ of about 100 with a standard deviation of about 15. So although presidents tend to be much smarter than Americans as a whole, their IQ’s are less variable. In fact extrapolating from these statistics, one might expect that the smartest president in American history had an IQ of around 154 and the dullest had an IQ of around 106.
An average IQ of 130 is extremely high, putting one above nearly 98% of Americans. To put this number in perspective, Harvard, the most prestigious university in the entire world, also has an average IQ of 130. Even the dullest president in U.S. history was likely smarter than two thirds of Americans of his era. The high IQ’s of U.S. presidents demonstrates that America is meritocracy and that smart people get to the top.
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Some critical comments!
IQ testing is imprecise at the individual level – it works best as a group average. A single IQ test is also imprecise – other evidence should be marshalled. Personality needs to be controlled when interpreting exams, since conscientiousness also correlates with examination results, and C is not correlated with IQ (or if it is, it is weakly so and may be inverse).
Also, the IQ of Harvard (for example) will not have stayed unchanged through the era of affirmative action for lower IQ ethnic groups and favouring women. I would accept an average of 130 for the Harvard of say 40 years ago but not the Harvard of today (who have returned to the quota system on high IQ ethnicities – used to be Jewish quota and now East Asians and native born white men – especially those who are religious or right wing).
The average IQ for US presidents would be below 130 for sure, 125 is easily adequate, and other personality, appearance, dynastic, geographical/ ethnic origin and sheer luck factors are extremely important in getting made president.
All that aside it is clear that there is no significant advantage in being above – say – 125 IQ as president. Milton Friedman – who was in a position to know – regarded Nixon as super-intelligent, but he was unprincipled and did not implement the results of his knowledge and wittingly did arm – e.g. Nixon explicitly understood and knew that price freezes would lead to shortages, but did it anyway.
Reagan was of ideal intelligence for a president – probably in the top 5% of IQ so he was quick on the uptake, and could absorb information fast – but not alien or remote from the mass of voters – who he could understand and keep i touch with. He was a normal guy, but just a smarter kind of normal.
Very highly intelligent people (above the top 1%, but there is no sharp cut-off) are not normal on average, and cannot empathically understand how normal people see things – they can only understand them in a scientific/ animal behavioral kind of way. Very highly intelligent people make useful advisers and wizards, but bad leaders.
Having said all this, the decline of intelligence in recent generations means that it will be ever harder to get leaders of the calibre of the past – when there were plenty of high IQ people with suitable personalities to be leaders – now, it is likely we will need to choose suitable personalities despite sub-optimal IQs, since a modern person would would need an IQ of 140 plus (and therefore very likely be weird) to match the IQ of past leaders.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/meetthedefendants.html
These seem surprisingly high, but are probably the most accurate estimates of a leadership class IQ that I have seen.
Comparing modern presidents to the founding fathers is one area where you can actually seem to see the dysgenics decline as opposed to it just being a genetic phenomenon that is masked by better environment. This is especially so considering we have a much bigger population from which to select our elites & still come out short
Bruce makes some big claims which I believe are totally way off.
– Reagen as smart? He might be but where is your evidence? The fact that he was an actor is a strike in my book. Doesn’t mean an actor can’t be smart but I would think the most cerebral would have stuck with the books.
– Nixon as smart? Milton friedman might have said he’s smart but people say a lot of things because it’s public. He’s definitely not going to say he’s dumb. And, the price freeze was a consequence of his strong belief in saving Israel despite being antisemitic.
– And he said that high iq have low empathic ability? I think that iq and empathy are correlated. I think high IQ gives you the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes. To imagine an alternate system of beliefs and then extrapolate logical conclusions. That’s not easy. Whether they take advantage of it is another matter since high IQ people may tend to stay away from the average person.
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I’ve always found the subject of presidential IQ’s to be fascinating because I’ve generally expected them to be a lot higher than they are. An average IQ of 130 is not high to me at all. Another thing, there seems to be little correlation between presidential IQ and performance in office, i.e. George Bush was a dummy (relative to other presidents; he wasn’t that dumb compared to the overall population, contrary to what I thought before I found out his SAT score) and had a relatively crappy presidency; on the other hand, Reagan was probably about the same intelligence level starting out and began to decline due to Alzheimer’s, but had a relatively good presidency. Carter, along with Nixon and Clinton, was one of the smartest presidents of the last 50 years but is widely regarded to have been a failure as a president.
The most interesting presidential IQ case of all was JFK, who as you mentioned received a score of 119 (I think earlier in high school he received a 117, that’s from his biography). This is below Linda Gottfredson’s cutoff point of 120 for cognitively demanding professions and just barely north of Murray’s cutoff point for being a graduate/professional school student. This means JFK would have struggled or been at the bottom of the heap in most high IQ professions like law and medicine. Yet at the same time, many of his advisers claimed that he was one of most intelligent men they had ever met!
IQ is important at all points of the IQ range so the lack of correlation between IQ and presidential success is very surprising but maybe not impossible based on small sample size. Even so, I am beginning to believe there is possibly a negative correlation between IQ presidential success (up until a certain point). Is there any other way IQ 105 Sarah Palin could have almost become vice president?
I left out the important part. The most rational explanation is that presidential success is mostly due to luck and factors outside of the control of the president. If a president happens to be president during a time of a strong economy or relative world peace, that reflects well on him even though his personal decision-making had little or nothing to do with these fluctuating trends.
The most rational explanation is that presidential success is mostly due to luck and factors outside of the control of the president. If a president happens to be president during a time of a strong economy or relative world peace, that reflects well on him even though his personal decision-making had little or nothing to do with these fluctuating trends.
Excellent point! It’s not that IQ doesn’t help; but it’s impact is dwarfed by other factors, lowering the correlation between IQ and political success.
But that still wouldnt explain his advisers claiming him to be one of the smartest people they have met.
I think he had good executive function (probably due to a high working memory) and a ‘knack’ to pick the best idea to implement. Presidents often have tons of advisers for every issue. So they get a lot of advices’?, so a good president should know which idea to pick and which to ignore. And this knack isnt fully tested in IQ scores. And also good political (or psychological) instincts…understanding mass human and individual deep human pscyhology.
An average IQ of 130 is not high to me at all.
You need to put it in perspective. An IQ of 130 is two standard deviations above the white mean; smarter than 98% of whites, and roughly the average IQ at the World’s best university: Harvard:
https://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/the-iqs-of-academic-elites/
An man who is two standard deviations above the white mean in height is about 6’4″ which most would agree is a very impressive height. The reason IQ 130 doesn’t sound that impressive is because a great many people lie about their IQs or selectively report only their best scores, deflating the prestige of such numbers artificially.
A member of Prometheus told me that about a couple dozen people he knew supposedly had IQs around 180. His estimate for the ACTUAL average IQ of these people? About 115.
Good points.
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I don’t know how you could say that George Bush and Donald Trump is a good case for meritocracy. Bush did poorly in college, bankrupted 2 companies, caught for DUI, and still became the president. Takes 2 month vacations each year and his list of accomplishments is a joke.
Same with Donald Trump. Guy inherited a lot of money. It wasn’t a small sum. I don’t know if you realize but ny real estate has gone up 50-100 times if not more in certain areas. Given that he inherited like $100 MM ($30 MM at 25 and $300 MM later), I’d actually say he didn’t perform all that admirably over 40 years. All he had to do is hold onto his real estate and buy more as the income rolled in.
Donald Trump got a loan that he paid his father back for 1 million dollars. You need to check your facts before spewing lies all over the internet.
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Some citations seem to present very IQ measures. I wonder how the Presidents would fair on a distribution curve having 14 point standard deviations? 68 percent of the population sit one deviation + or – of the point of central tendency. My guess is many of the open ended IQ results would come back to 120s, superior but below genius. There would many academics, scientists and business leaders more intelligent than those US Presidents. Only one president has been awarded an earned PhD (Wilson?).
Only one has a PhD but tons have elite graduate degrees