Abstract

This paper uses cross country regression analysis to try to explain the variation in cross country cross country intelligence within the framework of an intelligence production function model. It proposes that average country intelligence is positively related to food security, healthy security, and education, but negatively related to income inequality. The empirical findings of the paper tend to provide statistical verification for each of these contentions. Intellectual ability is critical not just for the operation of modern technologically sophisticated economy, but is also essential for rapid economic advancement through innovation, creativity, the development of new and improved products, and the introduction of new means of production. Intellectual ability, as measured by average country IQ scores, varies substantially across countries. As a consequence, countries with lower average level of intelligence are at a distinct disadvantage with regard to economic growth and development relative to other countries. This paper assumes that the level of intelligence is a product of a society that can be changed through appropriate changes in environmental, institutional, and cultural conditions. If this is the case, then it is a potentially highly profitable to understand the intelligence production process, to identify important variables in intelligence production function, in society. If the variables can be identified, then policy can be designed to promote favorable factors and to downplay unfavorable ones so as to enhance average societal intelligence. The central hypothesis of the paper is that conditions, some of which if made known could actually be subject to conscious policy control, matter, are critical, for the development of the modern intelligence of the people of a country. Four potential environmentally conditioning variables are considered and are empirically investigated for possible influence on the production of national intelligence. They are f