"Armed with this learning “Rosetta Stone,” we revisit various well-known results, showing, inter alia, that learning differences between most- and least-developed countries are larger than existing estimates suggest."
So, it's another item linking study. The idea is to find items that have been reused across these tests, and thus one can link the scores with some math tricks. Coverage looks like this.
The results look pretty much like every other such ranking.
Unsurprisingly, the correlation of these new results with existing ones are very similar. There is a comparison to the Altinok 2018 scores, these are the World Bank ones, r = .90 or so.
These authors are very PC and only talk about vague "human capital", "test scores" and the like. Like the other PC researchers in the area, they are puzzled by the oil country results, and returns to schooling. The magic education pill is in another castle.
There is of course no mention of intelligence, nor any of the intelligence researchers who have been using these country comparisons for decades: Lynn, Meisenberg, Rindermann, Becker, et al, not even Garett Jones.
Everybody knows some topics or questions are taboo, but which ones? Do people agree? Decided to find out. We asked 500 Americans online to rate the tabooness of 29 questions, and this was the result.
Race and IQ was the winner, even beating incest, pedophilia, gay germs etc.
The results were almost entirely consistent across all subgroups: age, sex, politics, race, science knowledge. The correlations for taboo ratings across groups were >.90, close to 1.00 without sampling error.
Though note that some grounds find everything more taboo than others.
Why did we look into this? Well, back in 2021, I made fun of this paper. And now we have the published demonstration the taboo hierarchy.
Socialism attracts losers. This is also true for immigration socialism.
Attaining a reasonable outcome -- no more costs from foreigners in the country -- requires drastic measures. Even reducing 'refugees' by 90% is not enough.
To understand the fiscal effects of immigration you have to start with a plot like this one. From the perspective of the government, people below 25 are net negatives, between 25 and 75, they are net positive, and then negative again.
The reasons for this are straightforward. Below 25's cost the state money in terms of childcare and education and don't yet make much money, and thus don't pay much in income tax. Old people cost money in retirement, old peoples homes, and healthcare.
The current net fiscal effect of an immigration group thus depends on its age distribution to a large extent. Maybe a group is currently positive because it is of working age, but that is short-term thinking. You must apply a lifetime perspective -- longtermism.
Education attainment is often given as the best example of heritability not being noticeably stronger than shared environment. But this conclusion is somewhat incorrect because of the assortative mating bias. In this study of Finnish and Dutch families, heritabilities were estimated at 55% and 66%, compared with shared environment of 16% and 13%.
As usual, beware that variances are deceptive. If heritability is 60% and shared environment is 15%, this doesn't mean that genetics is 4x as important. You need to take the square root to get the path coefficients. These are 0.77 and 0.39. Thus, genetics is about 2x as powerful.
Who likes big butts? Who prefers breasts instead? @MrGeorgeFrancis and I decided to look into this in more detail using national and subnational data.
The main source of data here are Pornhub and Google searches for body-related terms. There is strong agreement across sources.
The main metric from the data is the relative interest in butts versus breasts. Behold, science.
Since such preferences plausibly relate to life history speed, and various metrics of development of a given locality, we of course checked the relationship to intelligence at the same level: national.