Some cases involve stronger selection than I would have guessed. Nigerian male immigrants to Great Britain, 1980-2010:
low, medium, and high level of education: ” We distinguish three levels of education: primary (low skilled: includes lower secondary, primary and no schooling); secondary (medium-skilled: high-school leaving certificate or equivalent) and tertiary education (high-skilled: higher than high-school leaving certificate or equivalent).”
1980 3204 6926 1942
1985 4435 4606 4953
1990 5796 2484 7885
1995 7142 2132 3528
2000 8650 2484 22324
2005 7869 2540 26608
2010 9326 3406 42106
Nigeria graduates about 150,000 people a year, so something like 2% of modern Nigerians graduate from college.
P.S. Suppose you only took the top few percent from a population with a low average: you might end up with a mean IQ of 100, but there would be a funny distribution. Not much of a right tail.
West Hunter 
If you look at the HDI of Nigerian states, you’ll see that a lot of them have an education index >0.80 and quite a few have an education index >0.90: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nigerian_states_by_Human_Development_Index
An education index of 1.0 corresponds to an average of 15 years of education for adults and an expected average of 18 years of education for kids. These numbers do not vibe well with only 2.0% of Nigerians graduating from college. 15 years should be a bachelor and 18 a masters, for Lagos that is the average (EI>1.0).
Possibly I am misinterpreting the EI numbers. Maybe somebody with a better understanding of the HDI can chime in. Possibly the EI numbers are just incorrect aka “official statistics”.
I’m not sure where those figures come from, but the 2018 HDI report gives Nigeria’s current and expected mean years of schooling as 6.2 and 10, respectively.
Well, the numbers I saw claimed ~150,000 BS or higher ed graduates a year. I found another that says that 300,000 are admitted to colleges each year: possibly consistent with 150,000 graduates per year.
I’ve worked with data from a lot of LDCs. You can always find data, often two or three series measuring the same thing. But the two or three series purportedly measuring the same thing are often wildly dissimilar. My personal belief is that statistics collectors in those countries enjoy their comfortable government jobs, with days spent sipping tea and chatting with each other. But now and then, deadlines approach, and they have to make up the numbers.
Nigeria, back in 2014, doubled its GDP overnight, when there was political pressure to become Africa’s biggest economy: https://www.reuters.com/article/nigeria-gdp/update-2-nigeria-surpasses-south-africa-as-continents-biggest-economy-idUSL6N0MY0LT20140406
Ok, found a document that is probably the source of the wiki numbers and it specifies a wacky method that definitely does not have much to do with the way EI is usually calculated. So that mystery is solved. https://www.proshareng.com/admin/upload/reports/11633-HumanDevelopmentIndices2016-proshare.pdf
To my knowledge the only country whose immigration pattern overall increases its avg IQ is Singapore. Given low TFR in Singapore this makes it function as a sort of IQ shredder, per Spandrell’s post: https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/lee-kuan-yew-drains-your-brains-for-short-term-gain/
Australia, Canada, New Zealand probably have IQ-boosting immigration as well. Anglo countries overall get much better immigrants in terms of human capital than continental Europe.
If human capital is the goal, it might be wise for the best countries to grow their own.
It might be wise but it is not happening. Multiple studies have confirmed an inverse relationship between IQ and fertility but much more so for women. There is an absolutely stark contrast between the rates of fertility comparing women with a graduate degree as compared to women that drop out of high school, it’s been right around a 2 to 1 ratio since at least the 1980’s. Female dropouts average 3.1 children while women with graduate degrees average 1.5. One would think that the effects of idiocracy would possibly be seen right about now, gee willikers, anybody notice anything wrong?
If you have a high IQ, and your goal in life is to have a large family, is it smart spending your time going to school for advanced degrees, or is it better to get to it and have children while your can?
Having a high IQ is hell on earth, so I can’t imagine many of those with very high IQs wanting children as their primary goal in life.
I’m told it’s not.
Likewise, your children will probably have lower IQs than you and continue to decrease if you don’t plan it out correctly (a 5 year space in between children, according to studies – so maximum 4, realistically, if you ignore twins/triplets/etc., which come with a higher risk of additional problems that may further lower IQ) and provide them with more than adequate care (among other things, more stimulation and emotional maturity than the average parent provides – not just feeding them and watching them play – and planning of social/educational/sport opportunities – which cost $$$). You can see how for some woman who are also interested in advanced pursuits, and with a solid head on their shoulders, this MAY become an all or nothing question.
Most people want their children to have the best in life – some are more realistic about how much continued effort that entails.
This is silly.
@gcochran9
I heard otherwise. I know otherwise.
There are two types of women with children and graduate degrees* that I know – the ones who quit after a nice career run to take better care of their young kids, and the ones who dumped their kids onto extended family or daycare for care. The ones who put time and thought into their children now have doctors, lawyers, successful business people as children – similar or above achievements the parents. The one’s who didn’t? High school teachers, secretaries, nothing close to the original parents. And when you meet these two groups of children and later adults, there is definitely some kind of difference. A different way of playing games, understanding things, general processing. So there is something there, just untested rigorously as of yet.
*I’d say I’ve only met 2 women with graduate degrees in my field that do not have children.
You’re wrong. Genetics matters a lot, manner of rearing matters not much. Good statistical studies say so, and it’s bloody obvious: divorce soared, later illegitimacy, scores didn’t change much.
You are noticing things that fit a narrative.
I notice that D’Alembert had smart parents but was left on a church step at age two days.
I think the Kzin had the right idea.
Canada does not have IQ-boosting immigration. Only 20% of those granted permanent residency are admitted for skill/economic reasons, and each immigrant represents a net cost to the society of $5300 per year per person for life. This outlay used to be $6000/y before a “conservative” government implemented new rules to prioritize “skills-based immigration”. And legitimately high-IQ East Asian immigrants replace themselves at a lower rate than whites. So there’s definitely no boost occurring — merely a deceleration of the IQ decline relative to other European states that have admitted anyone with a pulse.
Where are your numbers coming from? We have merit based immigration, don’t let some recent news involving some border crossers and refugees fool you.
Per my Kiwi friends, Australia benefits from New Zealanders who emigrate there, making both countries smarter.
Rob Muldoon suggested that New Zealanders migrating to Australia were improving the IQ of both countries
Nigerians in the UK have a reputation as innovators.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3336011/Lonely-heart-duped-1-6m-dating-site-conmen-armed-copy-pick-artist-bible-Game-posed-wealthy-divorced-engineer-trick-handing-money.html
“A lonely heart woman was tricked into handing over £1.6million to a gang of dating site conmen who used a copy of pick-up manual The Game and posed as a wealthy engineer to win her affections. The woman in her 40s from Hillingdon, north west London, thought she was in an online relationship with a divorcee father-of-one called Christian Anderson. But little did she know she was actually being tricked by a gang of fraudsters including Ife Ojo, 31, and Olusegun Agbaje, 43, who duped her into ‘loaning’ them a staggering £1.6million, telling her the money was needed to free up inheritance so they could start a new life together.”
“Christian Anderson” – literally a fairytale romance.
Thanks for these numbers. I have posted about Africans in UK being a bi-modal population, but had not realized the effect was so big.
Hmm. So with a sufficiently selective immigration system, it’s quite possible to get a high-IQ diaspora in a given country. (If we supplement IQ tests with PGS screens, we can even avoid the first-generation regression to the mean!) Then, since immigrant communities are fairly endogamous (particularly for culturally distinct groups), you can maintain the population substructure for several generations. Given the disproportionate role played by the tails in technical innovation, this could be quite an effective way to boost the economy.
Seems quite doable, and a way to implement eugenics in a manner acceptable to liberal sensibilities. We don’t need to find the African Einsteins — we can just create them!
Does current tech allow meaningful PGS for intelligence, is it even close?
Given that the average IQ in Nigeria is around 70, that suggests that roughly 1 in 40 is capable of doing college work, which seems compatible with the 150,000 number.
But not all Nigerian ethnic groups are the same. The Igbo for example…
You have also to remind that these degrees not do not signal same ability as degrees of European univs — in Nigeria they have to set up plank lower.
Given common experience of the more devious Nigerians: what proportion of those claiming to have a particular Nigerian qualification do genuinely have it? And how many have it but bought it?
Way skewed since 2000. Somebody show this to Ron.
Not surprising. The “fit immigrant hypotheses” which is well supported empirically holds that people who choose to emigrate (regardless of the means by which they do so) are more fit on average, in almost every dimension, than otherwise comparable residents of their homeland who do not. Immigrants self-select.
Such that most come from the top few percent of their native country, in terms of education? Seldom the case in the past.
Many bright immigrants leave their countries because they are shut out of opportunities under the existing social and political structure. Wrong tribe-ethnic-religious group? Leave for greener pastures and better opportunities for yourself and your kids. Happens often enough to make a difference
Edward Alsworth Ross wrote about the selectivity of emigration in his 1914 book “The Old World in the New”, available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47954
He categorizes major migration streams, both in colonial times and during our time as a nation, as “representative, super-representative, or sub-representative of the home people.”
“When it is a fair sample, it is representative; when it is richer in wheat and poorer in chaff, it is super-representative; when the reverse is the case, it is sub-representative. What counts here, of course, is not the value the immigrants may have acquired by education or experience, but that fundamental worth which does not depend on opportunity, and which may be transmitted to one’s descendants.”
Here’s what he said about colonial immigration:
“Super-representative: English Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Scotch Covenanters, French Huguenots, German sectaries.
Representative: English of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, Scotch-Irish, Scotch Highlanders, Dutch, and Swedes.
Sub-representative: English of early Georgia, transported English, eighteenth-century Germans.”
The Nigerian immigrant of today would surely be classified as super-representative, and the Mexican as sub-representative.
I would say with almost certainty that modern Mexican immigrants to the U.S. (including undocumented and family based immigrants) are super-representative (although less so than immigration from, for example, Africa and South Asia, which is much more strongly super-representative). The terminology is interesting and makes a certain amount of sense.
So they are sending us their best? I don’t know if I should be reassured by that or not.
They’re not. Look at the numbers. ohwilleke’s intuition is incorrect.
Apropos – https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/cream-of-the-crop-geography-networks-and-irish-migrant-selection-in-the-age-of-mass-migration/7C4F20089343156624FCF09173254B65
“Using new data from Ireland in the early twentieth century, I provide evidence to the contrary, showing that the sons of farmers and illiterate men were more likely to emigrate than their literate and skilled counterparts. Emigration rates were highest in poorer farming communities with stronger migrant networks.”
Certainly the “fit immigrant” hypothesis does hold true for certain cases, but I would guess it tends to be somewhat overestimated by Western media classes, who have a disproportionate number of folk who’ve pulled up roots to move away to university and then major cities, in a rather historically unusual movement, and thus associate willingness to move with a pioneering spirit.
Sometimes “better than average” migrants move, when there is a similar lower end standard of living but a higher high end standard of living (often the case comparing major cities to smaller cities). Sometimes “lower than average” migrants move, when life is better in, say America than say Ireland, for unskilled workers, but skilled workers face more costs from unrooting their lives. There’s no rule that “better” individuals move.
Probably holds for most populations to some degree. I know HBD types like to play down the idea that any Chinese are selected (“They’re all just random, representative paddy farmers!”), but most likely they are selected, even if this does not explain all advantage.
That wasn’t the case in the 19th century when almost all Chinese immigrants to the US came from a few districts in Guangdong
How much do we know about who got on the boat from Guangdong, in the early days? I certainly don’t know much about it, but if it was some guy recruiting spare laborers to indenture vs. trading families sending out feelers, that would matter a lot.
e.g. Indians in east africa were (I believe) not only mostly from a few bits of Gujarat, but also far from random sample of people there, from particular trading castes.
How much hard data is there on the qualifications or pre-existing accomplishment of those people? Probably not too much.
But most Chinese in America today certainly aren’t descended from that wave in any case, so there’s not so much relevance to the success of Chinese in the US today.
True. But they still make up a non-trivial fraction. Even today. My guess would be 10 to 20 percent of the Chinese-American population predate the 1965 Immigration Act. Into the 1990s, I often still bumped into a lot of Chinese living and working in old Chinese communities in Sacramento and San Francisco who spoke nothing but Cantonese.
The Chinese population in the U.S. actually declined from the late-19th century to WW2 because the existing population was heavily male when the Chinese Exclusion Act passed.
The U.S. began to allow in more Chinese, including women, during WW2 because they were taking on our enemy the Japanese Empire.
I’m betting the high-achievers are Ibo, rather than Yoruba or Hausa or any of the smaller tribes.
Probably not all, but I’d be willing to bet 75-85%…
what is their IQ relative to non-Ibo Nigerians?
Nigerian kids in the UK do substantially better than White British students at GCSE level. They also benefit from having higher-IQ subpopulations, like the Igbo and Yoruba. Black Africans as a whole in the UK have an average IQ of 93-94. Nigerians probably average around 100, with a better work ethic than White British students.
Until Jihado Jamal gets sent to prison that is.
They have affirmative action in Nigeria since their subpopulations differ quite radically in giftedness. If you’re igbo or yoruba you need almost twice as high score to enter the best colleges and schools as someone from the northern states.
https://thisisafrica.me/tackling-rise-fake-qualifications-nigeria/
google “fake degrees nigeria”
Nigerians do have a reputation in UK for being very polite and quite socially conservative, and that is my experience as well.
I think the education system in third world countries is much less selective in terms of real ability or talent than the education system in developed countries as corruption plays a big role in those third world countries. This would mean that selection for immigration based on degrees is also less selective in terms of mental ability.
If you take a normal distribution 1.4 SD lower (to mimic a lower SSA IQ of about 79) and to mimic the high-pass IQ selection you use a raised error function with an arbitrary offset and width (I multiplied the original distribution by 0.5+0.5erf((x-0.1)2), not that it matters much for the right tail) then you get a distribution that’s about centred around an IQ of 100 that is half as wide, so that even in that highly selected small population you could expect as many IQ 130 Smartgerians per capita as IQ 143 in the normal white population. Oof.
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