Monday, June 28, 2010

Weingarten and National IQ's

Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Gene Weingarten uses his weekly humor column to pass on his commencement address to the Bronx High School of Science graduating class.  It's very good--first paragraph:
"I want to begin by apologizing for some of the many, many cruel things I've written over the years about this school. I was basing those comments on my time here, which was 40 years ago, and I can see right now that Bronx Science has improved enormously since then, particularly in the area of diversity. You're no longer all a bunch of Jewish nerds. Now you're all a bunch of Asian nerds"
That quote ties in with an interesting factoid from a research paper I ran across, hat tip Tyler Cowen, I think. The paper was looking at the immigration in light of the average IQ of the countries from which the immigrants came.  (I'd personally take it with a huge amount of salt--I can't comprehend how to obtain such a figure.)  According to the  table they used (in an appendix, but derived from other research), Hong Kong was 108, South Korea 106, and Israel 95.

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