Wrote in @thesundaytimes today about fascinating new research showing that free-marketeers really are brighter than Lefties. thetimes.co.uk/edition/commen… For those who can’t get through paywall, here’s a quick summary thread (because it's really interesting stuff)
Conventional academic view has been that, to quote one recent paper, ‘higher intelligence leads to a system of attitudes variously described as liberal, enlightened, or left-wing/progressive’. (Also greater racial tolerance.)
But as Dr Noah Carl points out, the evidence is only actually strong re SOCIAL liberalism. People’s economic views are often completely uncorrellated - two Tories may both like austerity but have sharply different views on drugs/hanging. Likewise Labour and immigration.
So for a new paper Carl mapped UK IQ against views on economics, social attitudes, Brexit and - yes - ‘trust in experts’, both region by region and for every council area in the country sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
He found that there was a mild correlation between IQ and voting Remain, and IQ and social liberalism. But a much, much stronger one between IQ and economic conservatism (and ‘trust in experts’).
Now, as Carl himself admits, this doesn’t show the direction of travel. It could be that clever people become rich, then turn Tory to protect those riches. Fortunately, another new paper tests and eliminates that hypothesis.
Gary Lewis & Timothy Bates (of Royal Holloway and Edinburgh) took two massive long-term studies of the UK population, which tested/monitored people both as kids and in their thirties. We're talking thousands of individual data points.
They found that brighter kids gave more free-market answers as adults to the standard left-right questions, eg ‘Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers’, ‘Ordinary people don’t get a fair share of the nation’s wealth’, ‘Government should redistribute income’.
In short, as the title of their paper puts it, ‘Higher levels of childhood intelligence predict increased support for economic conservatism in adulthood’. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Not only does this prove the direction of travel (bright kids -> free-marketeers) but Lewis and Bates also checked for other factors, eg wealth, education and class. They found that even if you stripped these out, the link remained: braininess leads you to become more free-market
As for the explanation, there’s a fascinating theory from two US economists. They suggest that clever people are more likely to think like, well, economists.
As Carl puts it, ‘people with higher intelligence are less likely to make certain errors of reasoning… characteristic of non-economists, namely anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias and pessimistic bias.'
'For example, people with higher intelligence are more likely to see the economic benefits of the market mechanism, and of interacting with foreigners.’
I know this will be terrible news for the Corbynites, but that they will take it in the reasoned and rational spirit that has characterised their movement.
As for the rest, the lesson is clear. If you want to show you’re a brainy type, don’t join Mensa - donate to @CPSthinktank cps.org.uk/join-us/donate/
UPDATE: For those complaining about IQ, only the Carl paper uses it. The second uses childhood general intelligence, as below. The results still come out the same... 
