Data from standardized testing suggests the average U.S. president has an IQ around 130. Since most of the data is quite old (since the presidents were quite young when tested), the scores are mostly based on white norms, since there were fewer non-whites in America in past generations and because in the past it was common to exclude non-whites from the standardization of IQ tests so that an IQ of 100 would reflect the white average (of males and female combined). According to Richard Lynn, there’s about a 5 point IQ difference between the sexes that emerges after puberty and can be explained by sex differences in brain size.
An average IQ of 130 suggests U.S. presidents (who until Obama, were exclusively white) are about 27 IQ points smarter than the average white man (IQ 103). Since the IQs of marital partners correlate 0.45, I would expect the average First Lady to be 28(0.45) = 12 IQ points smarter than the average white woman (IQ 98).
Thus the average First Lady might have an IQ around 110 (12 + 98)
Although people like James Carville have gushed for years that Hillary Clinton is the smartest woman in America and has an IQ that would make water boil, there’s no evidence than any First Lady in American history had an IQ above 140.
First Ladies are interesting because they are usually the most admired woman in America on the annual Gallup poll, however both Michelle Obama and Laura Bush were overshadowed by both Oprah and Hillary Clinton. Historically, First Ladies would go away when their husband’s presidencies ended, allowing the spotlight to be on the current First Lady, but Hillary Clinton has managed to very adaptively parlay her First Lady status into a spectacular political career, thus overshadowing her successors. In this way she is very similar to George W. Bush who turned his status as the son of a president into incredible political success of his own, or like Donald Trump who turned the wealth he inherited from his father into an even larger fortune.
I’m pretty such Hillary is around 140, not the smartest women, but pretty smart . She is at least smart enough to keep up with Bill, who is a genius, and she very knowledgeable about policy. In 1993 she created a healthcare plan, which failed but at least demonstrated her grasp of the issues far beyond what is typical of a first lady. She excelled in school, kinda like the fictional character Lisa Simpson. A score of 130-150 seems reasonable
The question is why did she lose in 2008?
She is smart but I doubt as verbally smart as Obama. Her iowa visit was entirely staged to the point where Rudy Giuliani called her scripted and stiff. Giuliani pointed out how spontaneous he was during his campaign.
Her failure to pass the health care bill shows how out of touch she was with Americans and republicans.
Obama also leapfrogged her debate after debate. Her iq is around 120 to 130.
Her verbal iq is lower than her nonverbal iq. She appears autistic.
i for one welcome president hillary..even though she’s the consummate insider…or rather, because she is such…she can say what she really thinks in the bully pulpit and her legislation will similarly reflect her convictions…she can afford to have them and push them…unlike Obama.
abigail adams was pretty smart according to david mccullough.
I thought she was a better debater than Obama actually & the media strongly agreed, but I don’t think she’s smarter. Obama has more wisdom (opposed the Iraq war) & ran a better campaign.
I think they both have IQs around 140.
or by first ladies does pp mean canadian pms?
brian mulroney was reagan’s first lady.
British PM Tony Blair was the First Lady of George W Bush & Dick Cheney who themselves were just the puppets of the neocon intellectuals
By contrast Canada’s PM Jean Chretien had the moral & intellectual superiority to oppose the Iraq war.
In general Canada has better leaders than America. Canada’s first female PM had an IQ of 154+ (higher than any U.S. president ever)
i know all that pp. and you have the french who hate everything english.
if canadians can’t take a joke no one can.
it’s not a real country anyway.
Blair (the same surname as George Orwell btw) was most famously described as GB’s poodle.
i had a giant black standard poodle.
poodles are no one’s poodle. and my experience is the same as that of all the poodle owners i’ve met.
they hate people and other dogs…unless they’re poodles.
they’re geniuses who don’t suffer fools…they bight them.
In general Canada has better leaders than America. Canada’s first female PM had an IQ of 154+ (higher than any U.S. president ever)
Seriously? You think Kim Campbell’s IQ was higher than Jefferson’s? According to Wikipedia, a group of historians ranked her as the worst PM ever!
Seriously? You think Kim Campbell’s IQ was higher than Jefferson’s? According to Wikipedia, a group of historians ranked her as the worst PM ever!
According to her teacher, she did score IQ 154 on a test, but that wasn’t accurate because she hit the test’s ceiling. Of course I don’t know the quality of the test. I suspect it was General Knowledge because the teacher said something like “I’ve never seen anyone who could absorb so much”, though that might have been an observation independent of Kim’s test performance.
To be the first woman PM ever might indicate exceptional ability, and unlike so many women who achieve power, she was self-made (she didn’t inherit her status from a powerful husband or father)
Barack Obama’s IQ is 115, (with the 10 spot). Michelle’s is charitably around 86. Find something they’ve written (if you can). A difficult task after the monumentally successful effort to bury evidence of his cerebral mediocrity.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/columbiathesis.asp
Reading over excerpts it seems false.
and though Gulf War 2.0 was sold with lies, it, like the bombing of Hiroshima, may turn out to be a good thing all things considered…or not.
the reasons given for the hiroshima and nagaski bombings may have been bullshit, and truman’s motive wasn’t what was its one indisputably good effect…
namely that the horror of the bomb was known…was publicised…
if it hadn’t been used on japan it very likely would have been used eventually…
but on a much larger scale.
so now in my cups i’m watching ollie stone’s Untold History of the United Sates…
and…
the only revelations are henry wallace and that truman was a total socialist…as long as…in his words, the society had no “niggers or chinamen”.
so you see again that the ethno-state is good for “socialism” and that the mutli-ethnic state breeds libertardianism and neo-liberalism…
and that the US since WWII has thus far succeeded in Americanizing the whole world.
i stopped it after nixon’s resignation.
it was stupid and nothing new nor even anything which made the US look that bad.
as an american i’d love to believe in the US.
sometimes i do.
sometimes i cry…really…
if only the US lived up to its hype…it really would be A CITY UPON A HILL.
and i think it’s gonna be a long long time…
like never
“money is made to be spent”, quoth pp.
pp, put the money you don’t spend in M9SZ, assuming you don’t have local brokerage accounts.
it’s an ETF which invests in Africa sans S Africa.
it includes n africa, though its biggest investment is in Nigeria.
M9SZ isn’t available on US markets. you can buy it on XETRA. you’d have to open an IB account or be ripped off.
So I’ve stumbled upon yet another thing that vindicates HBD. The Ancient Egyptians were noticeably non-African in appearance:
http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/mummy-faces-hairdos-revealed-in-3d-pictures-130125.htm
Which is probably relevant to the fact that evolution for IQ levels between races started early, and the civilizations were built by only the smarter race
yeah as if IQ were a thing which existed independently of time and place…like your Twitter followers.
are there any hbders/hereditists with iqs over 70?
hereditism’s most public figure, Murray, swank has shown to be a moron.
the only people who think the Egyptians looked like nigerians are idiots or liars.
but then Nasser and Sadat were defenitely not 100% caucasian. in america, given no other info, they’d be labeled black.
so so far as i expected america’s original sin in addition to its being a new world country and slavery is…
its intervention in Latin America…
which was TRULY EVIL.
the city upon a hill is a flea circus on a dung heap.
has it made Latin America better off? no! 100% NO!
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-per-capita-in-1950
notice argentina, chile, mexico, and brazil inter alia.
one scene is quite pathetic and profound. the Father Knows Best scene.
growing up means realizing and accepting that your parents are flawed human beings…sometimes quite flawed…and sometimes much more flawed than you wish they’d been.
and “your parents” includes the ruling ideoolgy in your country.
which makes the further…alcoholic point…that…
social reproduction and social conservatism are…fundamentally…juvenile. would that every son had an admirable father. but many fewer have such than think they have such.
the reality is that the us has maintained its ww ii winning trajectory fo 70 years…
by selling itself as anti-anti-semitic and as anti-communist both to the world and to its own citizens.
of course all investments are rather bad as they rely on the neo-liberal prophecy which will never come to pass…
the Chicoms will win.
‘mer’ca and its Euro butt boys will lose…
hoist by their own petard…crucified with their own cross.
it was exceptional, but it wasn’t exceptionally large.
a report from the bbc today on einstein’s brain.
Russians have larger brains than Greeks and Romans and Turgenev (a Russian) has the largest brain of any famous person.
yet the economic failures of the Soviet union are 100% due to its being the successor of the Russian Empire (which was backward at the time of the october revolution) and not its being Communist.
You bring good viewpoints but they are wrong.
The ussr fell because they were unprofitable like Enron. They seemed rich because they were coddled by ample resources and western technology to exploit them.
Eventually Soviets were so useless they could only sell pill and had to import wheat. The world’s largest country with ample farmland.
The countries that wanted to become communist but lacked the natural resources, like India, couldn’t afford the Arab oil needed because its industries had low returns.
Blaming the czars and wwii is dishonest. The Soviets squandered their excellent resources and bright population (especially their Jews) and it is a tragedy.
mmmmm…that kool-aid is so delish!
winnie, in the 80s some sources had E Germany with a higher per capita GDP than Austria and Australia. no kidding.
in 1917 the Russian Empire was on a par with Brazil, another resource rich country, so how did the ussr fare compared to brazil?
its economy grew much faster. it won nobel prizes. it put a man into space. etc.
the ussr was always spending too much on its military…that hurt…it got no Marshall plan after the war…unlike Germany.
in one decade, the 30s, and despite the purges, the soviet union accomplished more economically/materially than the UK had accomplished in the entire 19th c. that’s a FACT!
here’s one chart. apparently ww ii did less harm than the civil war. that’s very hard to believe, so this chart may be taken with a grain of salt…or, perhaps, as in the us, the war was a boon to industrial production per se which was easily switched from armaments to useful things.
i couldn’t find a chart for brazil from 1917 or earlier…but here’s one for argentina. In 1909, per capita income in Argentina was 50 percent higher than in Italy, 180 percent higher than Japan, and almost five times higher than in neighboring Brazil. argentina was the 12th richest country in the world in 1900. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-per-capita-in-1900
and imho that even more progressive americans referred to the soviets as “russians” up until the end of the ussr shows that…
as Niall Ferguson has quite rightly pointed out…
RACE TRUMPS IDEOLOGY IN THE 20TH C.
not to mention from stone’s docu-something that Churchill was TOTALLY STRAIGHTFORWARD AND UN-APOLOGETIC ABOUT HIS ANGLO-SAXON RACIAL SUPREMACISM…makes one rather sympathetic to the rhodes conspiracy theorists…laroucheans.
Michelle Obama = IQ 115. Smart enough to graduate Harvard Law and to get a job as a director at the University of Chicago Hospitals (as an affirmative action hiree), not smart enough to have anything intellectual to say (her thesis paper for undergrad is supposedly terrible and rife with typographical errors but I’ve never read it myself).
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I’m a statistics novice so explain to me how you got her expected IQ value by multiplying the correlation coefficient because that doesn’t seem right. The correlation indicates how scattered the plots are; it doesn’t indicate the the slope of the linear line. Can you do this in statistics? This seems crazy.
Also, you use mean to describe Hillary and I think that doesn’t mean anything since you also need the SD. Expected value means nothing without the 95% confidence level. Given the possible range, people shouldn’t be surprised her IQ to be 140. It’s quite possible.
But, even if 140 is outside the range, why is the distribution assumed to have unchanged from 100 years ago? Given the changing mores of our society, I’m pretty sure the distribution has changed significantly. Couples are now more likely to marry for love rather than status and that might indicate comparable IQs.
To be honest, she went to Wellsley and Yale. Just getting into Yale law school is impressive enough without being a legacy or donation. That alone probably makes her smarter than most of the past presidents.
I’m a statistics novice so explain to me how you got her expected IQ value by multiplying the correlation coefficient because that doesn’t seem right. The correlation indicates how scattered the plots are; it doesn’t indicate the the slope of the linear line.
When the 2 variables in the scatter plot are expressed in equal units with the same distribution, the correlstion = the slope of the line of best fit.
It also can be used to estimate the scatter around the line of best fit. The higher the correlation, the steeper the slope, the narrower the scatter
Naive. A liberal feminist, black person, Hispanic, or white progeny of wealthy alumni with IQs of 95 and LSAT scores of 145 will be welcomed by Harvard or Yale in a heartbeat. Which is why America is winning the race to mediocrity.
Hillary Clinton studied very hard and worked very hard. Brilliant? No. Diligent, yes. Recent First Ladies with innate high intelligence include Lady Bird Johnson and Rosalynn Carter,
Recent First Ladies with innate high intelligence include Lady Bird Johnson and Rosalynn Carter
Based on what?
I believe Rosayln Carter is accredited with applying the 1970s feminism/ERA movement to the job. She said she was ‘not merely a hostess’.
Hillary looked to her as a role model….
of course she could have been cliche, “in the right place at the right time”, but considering her husband apparently had an IQ of 153, I’d suspect she, because there is a spousal IQ correlation, to be quite bright.
Even their daughter married a Computer Programmer.
I would like to understand why only michelle obama is the only first lady whose iq was shown who, happens to be african american. I also question the mediocre, 86, given that average score. She attended two highly achieveable universites. I would definitely believe that she has innate intelligence.
No the person who said Michelle Obama has an 86 IQ is clearly wrong. I’d estimate her to be around 120