As I’ve argued before, there are at least three major elites who control America: The popular (those who win hearts), the intelligentsia (those who win minds), and the rich (those who win wallets). These are three fairly orthogonal forms of power.

In this post, I will focus on the popular: the most worshiped people in America.

In 2005, millions of Americans voted for the greatest American of all time. Of the 100 Americans nominated by the public, only these had enough worshipers to make the top 25:

1. Ronald Reagan
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. Martin Luther King, Jr.
4. George Washington
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. George W. Bush
7. Bill Clinton
8. Elvis Presley
9. Oprah Winfrey
10. Franklin D. Roosevelt
11. Billy Graham
12. Thomas Jefferson
13. Walt Disney
14. Albert Einstein
15. Thomas Edison
16. John F. Kennedy
17. Bob Hope
18. Bill Gates
19. Eleanor Roosevelt
20. Lance Armstrong
21. Muhammad Ali
22. Rosa Parks
23. Orville & Wilbur Wright
24. Henry Ford
25. Neil Armstrong

A few observations:

Oprah is the only woman to make the top 18 most worshiped Americans. Oprah’s super-human brain size arguably gave her the smarts to become not only the richest African American of all time, but the most worshiped woman in the history of the World’s sole superpower, and by extension, the most powerful woman on the planet.

The IQs of the most worshiped Americans seem to range from about 70 (Elvis) to perhaps 170 (Bill Gates), suggesting the average IQ is about 120.

While an IQ of 120 is quite impressive compared to the U.S. mean of 97, it’s not especially high for the most worshiped Americans of all time. If we assume these people are about 5.4 standard deviations above the mean in a normalized distribution of popularity, and yet they’re only about 1.5 SD above the mean in IQ, it suggests the correlation between IQ and popularity is only 1.5/5.4 = 0.28.

Bill Gates more or less had to buy his way on the list which is kind of sad. If he hadn’t given so much of his own money to charity, I doubt he would be among the most popular Americans. This demonstrates how one form of power (money) can be traded for another (popularity), and how Bill Gates is still the class nerd trying to extra hard to fit in with the cool kids.

Blacks are over-represented. Despite being 13% of America, they are 16% of the most worshiped 25. If we limited the analysis to only the most worshiped living Americans, their over-representation would be even greater, and this despite the fact that blacks average lower IQs than other Americans. I suspect this is related to scholar J.P. Rushton’s theory that blacks evolved to reproduce prolifically: The the same traits that make blacks good at attracting mates (charisma, athletic talent, musical talent, social IQ, etc) also makes them good at attracting fame. I even suggested this to the great Rushton himself and he thought it was quite clever. Blacks may also get an extra boost in popularity from the pro-diversity media.

Although blacks are over-represented among popular elites, they are dramatically underrepresented in the two other major elite groups: The Rich and the Intelligentsia. Despite being 13% of America, blacks are only 0.25% of the 400 richest Americans, and only 2% of the most influential media pundits. So despite having a lot of popular power (including president Obama), overall blacks are still quite powerless in America.

Jews show the opposite profile. Despite being 2% of America, they are 36% of the 400 richest Americans and an astonishing 50% of the most influential media pundits (the intelligentsia). Yet when it comes to popular elites, their over-representation is much less extreme. There are very few Jews among the 25 most worshiped Americans of all time. There are likely two reasons for this:

1) Becoming popular is less dependent on IQ than becoming rich or becoming part of the intelligentsia, so high IQ Jews have less of an advantage when competing for raw celebrity status.

2) Jews probably don’t want to be in positions of visible power because it creates resentment; they prefer to let gentiles be the public face of power, while they wield influence through money and intellectual ideas. This may help explain why despite their enormous cultural and economic capital, and despite all their talents and gifts, there has never been a Jewish president.

Many times on this blog I have claimed that the correlation between IQ and years of educations (indeed IQ and academic success in general) is 0.65.  I have based many arguments on this figure which I had assumed was correct since it came from none other than the late great Arthur Jensen who cited it on page 279 of his 1998 book The g Factor.  Well it turns out the figure is no longer true, and hasn’t been true for at least several decades.  The standardization sample of adults (age 25+) on the WAIS-III revealed the correlation between full-scale IQ and years of education has sunk to 0.55. It seems back in the 1950s, when the first WAIS was standardized, the correlation between IQ and years of education was about 0.7, but by 1978, when the revised WAIS was normed, it had already sunk to the mid 0.5s.

This may not seem like a big difference, but imagine people who average more education than 99.5% of America (i.e. PhDs today) and people who average less education than 99.5% of Americans (8th grade dropouts?).  These groups theoretically differ by 5 standard deviations in education, so if the correlation between IQ and education were still 0.7, they would in theory differ by 0.7(5 SD) = 3.5 SD in IQ (54 IQ points!).  Instead, with a correlation of 0.55, they differ by “only” 0.55(5 SD) = 2.75 SD (43 IQ points!).

So what’s happening is academic elites have becomes dumber, and academic failures have becoming smarter (relative to the U.S. population average).

This is the exact opposite of what we were told by the book the The Bell Curve which argued that society was becoming more and more stratified by cognitive ability.  But it seems with respect to education, we’ve become cognitively less stratified.

This is consistent with data suggesting that the average IQ at Harvard is “only” around 122.  Don’t get me wrong, 122 is a very high IQ, and much higher than the U.S. average of 97, and the World average of 90.  But you’d expect students at the most prestigious university on the face of the planet to be at least Mensa level (IQ 128+).  The fact that they may “only” average 122, is consistent with IQ and academic success no longer being strongly linked.

Why is this happening?  I can think of two possible reasons (both speculative):

1) IQ tests are getting more accurate.  In the past IQ tests were biased in favour of educated people, but as psychologists improved the test administration so that even high school dropouts and illiterates could understand the instructions, the tests became more fair to everyone, and the gap in test scores between the educated and uneducated shrunk.  In other words, the link between IQ and academic success was spuriously high in the past, and more accurate testing has now corrected the error.

2) Getting educated is no longer the smartest thing to do.  In the past, the best way to get rich was to become a doctor or a lawyer or join some other overeducated profession.  But with the explosion of income inequality, even college dropouts can start a business and become a hundred times richer than most lawyers.  Since smart people understand the value of money and can figure out where to get it, many high IQ people decided to skip college and gamble on their own business, causing the correlation between IQ and education to drop.

I found an article about the most overrated Geniuses of all time, written by a blogger called itsnobody. One of them is Bill Gates. I think if people are talking about computer Genius, it’s likely that Gates is overrated, but I don’t think he’s overrated as a business Genius. Unfortunately a lot of people have trouble recognizing Genius outside of academia.

Another person listed as overrated is Albert Einstein. I’ve always been a huge fan of Einstein so to see him on this list was extremely painful, however if Einstein was overrated, it would help explain why his brain was allegedly so much smaller than you would expect for the greatest Genius of the 20th century.

The reason given for claiming Einstein is overrated:

many people think his ideas were original, but they were not. Einstein seems to have gotten a lot of his ideas directly from Michael Faraday, who Einstein was a fan of. Faraday who is ignored in the media tried to unify gravity with other forces long before Einstein. Faraday had long emphasized his belief that everything was unified as one (magnetism, light, gravity, etc…) primarily because of his religion. The main difference between Einstein’s ideas and Faraday’s is that Einstein added in the space-time dimension, but this idea is not original either since it had already appeared in science fiction novels.

I kind of think the whole concept of overrated Genius is oxymoronic, because being overrated is itself a form of Genius. Even if Einstein was overrated in terms of his scientific output, he was certainly a Genius at self-promotion to have gone down in history as the poster boy for Genius. Indeed the less of a Genius Einstein was in physics, the more of a marketing Genius he must have been to be remembered as one.

Digit Span is a subtest where the examiner reads a series of digits (one per second) and you must repeat those digits right back from memory. The easiest level would be repeating one digit, the second easiest would be repeating a two digit series, and then a three digit series etc. Typically, you get two attempts at each level of difficulty, and once you fail both, the test ends, and the longest series you passed is considered your digit span. So if you can repeat a six digit series but fail both attempts at the seven digit level, you are assigned a digit span of six.

A more difficult version of the test is backwards digit span, where the concept is the same except you repeat the digits in reverse order. Backwards digit span correlates twice as well with general intelligence as forward digit span, thus I was fascinated to discover that supremely influential neoconservative Charles Krauthammer obtained a backwards Digit Span of 12, despite being tested while driving “through traffic at 70 miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike”. To put a score of 12 in perspective, the average mentally healthy American (aged 45-54, which I presume was Krauthammer’s age range when tested) has a backwards Digit Span of 4.8 (SD = 1.5). So Krauthammer was 4.8 SD above the mean for his age and generation, roughly equivalent to an IQ of 172.

Of course backwards Digit Span is a very rough measure of IQ, and the figure 172 is so incredibly high that it should be treated with great skepticism. But having said that, there are several demographic details that raise the probability that Krauthammer is super smart: 1) he’s an Ashkenazi Jews, and this population has arguabley the highest IQ in the World, 2) he’s a physician who is board-certified in psychiatry and discovered a new form of manic depressive disease, 3) he attended Harvard, and 4) he’s one of the most influential people on the planet.

Indeed the Financial Times crowned Krauthammer the most influential commentator in America, saying “Krauthammer has influenced US foreign policy for more than two decades. He coined and developed ‘The Reagan Doctrine’ in 1985 and he defined the US role as sole superpower in his essay ‘The Unipolar Moment,’ published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Krauthammer’s 2004 speech ‘Democratic Realism’, which was delivered to the American Enterprise Institute when Krauthammer won the Irving Kristol Award, set out a framework for tackling the post-9/11 world, focusing on the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.”

Iconic blogger Steve Sailer writes:

Considering all the cleverness Krauthammer devoted to getting America stuck in Iraq, I’m reminded of something Maxwell Smart said after triumphing over a supervillain: “If only he had used his genius for niceness instead of evil.”

Regardless of whether you agreed or disagreed with the 2003 Iraq war, the fact that this paraplegic Krauthammer could help dictate the foreign policy of the World’s sole super power from the comfort of his computer keyboard, indicates towering intellect.

Intelligence is arguably the mental ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage. If you believe in ethnic genetic interests, it behooved Krauthammer’s gene pool to rid the World of Saddam Hussein since he was an extremely powerful enemy of the Israeli people who not only fired scud missiles at Israel, but was funding Palestinian suicide bombers, and may have had nuclear ambitions. Thus one could argue that by brilliantly rising to the top of America’s intelligentsia and persuasively arguing for regime change, Krauthammer greatly increased his inclusive genetic fitness.

This is an example of how natural selection is still operating on human intelligence. Israel has arguably the highest IQ of any country in the Middle East, and it’s territory keeps expanding, while Arab territory keeps shrinking. But it’s not because the Israelis are outsmarting the Arabs themselves, but rather it’s because Israelis have ethnic genetic links to super high IQ people in the United States who know how to adapt American foreign policy to Israel’s advantage in a subtle enough way that most Americans don’t catch on. By contrast, there are far fewer Arab Americans smart enough to influence U.S. foreign policy the way Krauthammer has, and as a result, natural selection is favoring Jews over Arabs.

However Krauthammer may have met his match with the highly intelligent president Obama, who may have an ethnic genetic interest (or at least a cultural interest) in advancing Muslims since a great many black Africans are Muslim including some of Obama’s own family. Can Krauthammer use his 172 IQ to convince Americans that Iran is an imminent threat to America, despite Obama’s arguments to the contrary?

I have previously complained that some scholars overestimate the average IQ of black Africa by using samples that have access to a lot more schooling than many people in the region. A commenter suggested I do my own estimate of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africa by correcting for this problem.

One of the best studies of black African IQ was done by the late J.P. Rushton who decided to test university students under the best testing conditions imaginable. Why university students? Because if he could show that even the best and brightest black Africans, tested under superb testing conditions, still scored very low, then he could be certain the average IQ in Africa was every bit as low as scholar Richard Lynn had claimed. Rushton describes the study here:

Rushton found that on the Raven IQ test, the average black university student in South Africa has an IQ of 84 (U.S. norms), though this might be reduced to 83 since the test norms may have been inflated by the Flynn effect (the students were tested about seven years after the Raven’s 1993 norming).

An IQ of 83 on U.S. norms is equivalent to about 79 on U.S. white norms. The reason the IQ is so much lower using white norms is that the white American mean is not only higher the American mean, but the white American SD is narrower than the American SD (see here for the math and rationale).

Estimating the average IQ score of sub-Saharans

Now if the average South African black University student has an IQ of 79, what does that tell us about the average IQ of black South Africans as a whole? Assuming the average first year university student has about 13 years of schooling (and given the high dropout rate in South Africa, the average first year university student never gets much beyond the first year) and the average South African had about 8.2 years of schooling at the time of this study, then the students Rushton tested were 4.8 years more educated that the mean of their country.

Now in the U.S., for whatever reason, educated people score higher on IQ tests, by about 3.54 points (3.66 points using white norms) per each year of schooling. Assuming the same pattern applies in South Africa, black South Africans who are 4.8 years more schooled than the average South African, should have IQs that are 4.8(3.66) = 18 points higher than the average South African. So if the black South African first year university students average IQ 79, the average black South African should average IQ 79 – 18 = 61.

Estimating the real intelligence of sub-Saharans

Now, just because I estimate the average IQ of black Africa to be 61 does not mean I believe this is an accurate reflection of their intelligence. The average South African adult (circa 2000) hardly attended high school let alone uinversity (largely for structural reasons, independent of his ability) and it is known that each year of missed schooling shaves 1.8 points off one’s IQ score (though probably not one’s real intelligence), so if South Africans stayed in school as long as Westerners, they would probably average 70 instead of 61.

Some readers might be confused as to why I’m arguing each year of missed schooling shaves 1.8 points off IQ, when above I said people with more schooling average 3.66 IQ points higher for each year more schooled. The 1.8 figure is the independent effect of more schooling on IQ, while the 3.66 figure is just the difference in IQ between people with different schooling (including both the effect of schooling on IQ and the effect of IQ on schooling)

Estimating the genetic IQ of sub-Saharans

So IQ 70 probably reflects the actual level of real intelligence of black South Africans. Of course their real intelligence could probably be higher if they had received First World nutrition, particularly during the prenatal stage when the brain is most growing. I’ve previously documented that black Africans are probably about 0.8 SD below their genetic potential for height. Assuming they are also 0.8 SD below their genetic potential for intelligence would raise their IQs by an addition 12 points, bringing them to about 82.

Comparison with white Victorians

It is interesting to compare the adult Raven IQ of 61 for black Africans with the adult Raven IQ of 70 for white Victorians. Like black Africans, lack of schooling made the Raven unfair to Victorians and correcting for the schooling effect, raises their IQs to about 78, which might be a good estimate of their real intelligence.

Also like modern Africans, even real intelligence was stunted. Victorians appear to be even much more malnourished than modern Africans, being about 1.5 SD shorter than whites today. If we assume malnutrition also stunted their real intelligence by 1.5 SD (23 IQ points), that fully explains why their real intelligence was nearly 23 points lower than whites today who score 100.

Of course if the dysgenics theory is true, it would imply that Victorians should be genetically much smarter than modern whites and thus be much higher than modern whites after correcting for nutrition. Of course if dysgenics is true, then people have probably also become genetically shorter despite becoming phenotypically taller, which means I under-corrected IQ for nutrition and doing the full correction would make white Victorians much smarter than modern Whites.

While I’m open-minded to the dysgenics theory, I think that dysgenics should have caused a major decline in a test called Digit Span given the insensitivity of this test to both nutrition and schooling, and that apparently hasn’t happened.

According to scientist Richard Lynn, on a scale where British and White Americans average IQ 100, black Africans average 67.  However a scientist J.M. Wicherts & his colleagues say the actual average IQ in black Africa is 80.  Wicherts writes:

We attribute the difference of roughly 10 IQ points between his estimate and ours to (1) our use of systematic methods and a lack thereof in Lynn’s work; (2) our use of weighting by sample size to estimate the mean IQ across samples and Lynn’s indifference to sample sizes; (3) our decision not to include unhealthy samples, which Lynn admitted; (4) our exclusion of samples in which test administration had met with problems, which Lynn attributes to low cognitive ability of test-takers; (5) our exclusion of data from the Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) for ages above 11 because the conversion from CPM scores to adult and adolescent norms for the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) artificially lowers the IQ; (6) exclusion of a number of high-IQ samples that he deemed unrepresentative; and (7) Lynn’s ad hoc downward correction of mean IQs from primary and secondary school students by two and six IQ points, respectively. Below we provide new estimates for these groups on

(1) Wicherts has a valid point that Lynn should use a systematic method for including and excluding studies, but his other criticisms are less tenable.

(2) I don’t think samples should be weighted by sample size because some of the biggest samples might be the least representative, so weighting by sample size just compounds the error.

(3) With some exceptions, Lynn is correct to include unhealthy samples because Africa is a region afflicted with poor health (malnutrition, AIDS, etc) so excluding unhealthy people largely excludes a huge percentage of Africans, making Wicherts samples unrepresentative.

(4) Wicherts is also wrong, in my humble opinion, to exclude samples where there were problems with test administration, because low IQ samples by definition are going to have more problems being administered tests, so excluding “problem testing sessions” systematically biases the numbers upward.

(5) Wicherts also excludes data from the CPM for kids older than 11.  This is one area I’m not informed on, but excluding CPM scores sounds like a bad idea if you want to measure a low IQ population, because the CPM was specifically designed to have a very low floor, thus making it possible for people to score very low.  By contrast the SPM has a high floor, causing low IQ people to score artificially high.

So even though Wicherts does a good job exposing the contradictions in Lynn’s research, he creates a bunch of new criteria that seems to bias the estimated IQ of Africans way up, and they are already biased up just by virtue of the fact that the most disadvantaged Africans are not in schools, urban areas, or professions, where they can be easily tested.  They are isolated in poor rural areas, often don’t attend school, don’t know how to hold a pencil, can’t read, and are tragically orphaned by AIDs.

Commenter Lion of the Judah-Sphere asks:

I’m not sure if I understand the point all of this discussion over African IQ samples. I would ask: do elite Africans (average IQ 100) perform as well as elite whites (average IQ 130)? If they complete, say, Calculus 1 and 2 in high school, and rigorous engineering degree programs in university at the same rate as elite whites, then we know for sure that African IQ data is bullshit, because obviously 100 IQ in Africa means something totally different than 100 IQ in Europe or America. But if 100 IQ Africans are struggling to pass pre-calc in high school and they’re completing “engineering tech” degrees that are being called engineering, then it’s likely 100 IQ in Africa = 100 in the West. Voila! Problem solved…

The debate between Wicherts and Lynn largely concerns what the average IQ is, but that’s separate from the question Judah-Sphere is asking, which is, are the tests valid for Africans.  I would say that while tests like the SPM and CPM are not as culture reduced as they appear, they do seem to be valid for comparing Africans and non-Africans with equivalent schooling.  For example, if you scroll down to figure 2 of this study by J.P. Rushton, you find that the regression line predicting grades for African and non-African engineering students is roughly parallel, suggesting the test predicts very similar academic outcomes in both populations (at least in STEM).

In honor of this glorious Canada Day, I will estimate the IQ of one of the greatest Canadians of all time and a man who was kind enough to speak to me whenever I phoned: The brilliant J. Philippe Rushton.

Rushton’s utter genius was taking the r-K evolutionary model used in the animal kingdom, and applying it to the much smaller variation between modern human races.  He elegantly lumped virtually all of humanity into just 3 races, and found that on dozens of different physical, sexual, and behavioral variables, Mongoloids and Negroids averaged at opposite extremes, and Caucasoids were in the middle.  Further, he cleverly mapped this pattern to molecular genetics and resurrected the ancient idea of progress in nature: DNA evidence showed that Negroids were the first to branch off the human evolutionary tree and Mongoloids were the last, making them the new and improved race in Rushton’s mind.

A man of astonishing scientific creativity, he created a nice, simple, elegant theory.  He was a brilliant writer who expressed himself eloquently and wrote an extremely well organized book that the great Arthur Jensen described as the most brilliant of its kind in the worldwide literature.  Scholar Richard Lynn raved that if there were any justice, Rushton would win the Nobel Prize.

About 10% of whites in America are openly racialist.  Assuming 10% of all the World’s 976 million whites, are racialist, then there are about 98 million white racialists on the planet.  Assuming Rushton is the most academically accomplished of them all, he’s 5.6 standard deviations above the white racialist mean in academic accomplishment (normalizing the distribution of course).

Assuming IQ and academic accomplishment correlate 0.65, Rushton’s expected IQ would be 0.65(5.6 SD) = 3.64 SD above the white racialist mean.

Assuming white racialists have somewhat low IQs (perhaps a mean of 93 with an SD of 15), then Rushton’s expected IQ would be 3.64(15) + 93 = 148.  To put that number in perspective, the average human has an IQ around 90.  The average American has an IQ around 97.  The average U.S. college grad has an IQ around 110.  The average Harvard student has an IQ around 122.  The average U.S. president has an IQ around 130.  Rushton towered like an intellectual giant above the most elite people in society.  Is it any wonder he was the Darwin of the 20th century?  A rare original thinker.

I found youtubes of Rushton on the Phil Donahue show.  Donahue was the unbeatable champion of daytime talk shows, until Oprah came out of nowhere in 1986 and brilliantly dethroned him, practically overnight.  Looking at this video, I can’t help but wonder why a man as liberal as Donahue would give Rushton’s racialist views such a prestigious and powerful platform.  I fear that deep down, Donahue was hoping Rushton would convince the audience that blacks were genetically inferior, and this would cause them to stop watching rival Oprah and watch only Donahue instead.

Indeed while Rushton was invited to appear on several shows, big brained Oprah may have been smart enough to know it was not in her ethnic genetic interests to have such an eloquent polished brilliant calm racialist on, and so she and Rushton would never meet.  Much wiser to have on a more typical seemingly low IQ racialist who she immediately checkmated with her “monkey business” pun: