> And a country like Morocco has an average IQ of around 67. Average!
I don't think that this claim is credible. It comes from Lynn & Becker, who also have Nepal's average IQ at 43,[1] which is in the range where someone with that IQ would be considered mentally disabled, with limited capacity for independent life. That cannot be reconciled with the employment rate in Nepal. And according to Lynn & Becker, the average person from Nepal, Liberia and Sierra Leone has an IQ that puts them in that category.
The truth is that no study that would generate these numbers plausibly has ever been conducted. There is no country-by-country, apples-to-apples international IQ test database. IQ tests are a diagnostic measure, so if you're going out into the field looking for lots of test results, you're either drafting off large-scale psychometrics work done in and by wealthy countries, or you're pulling from mental and developmental health institutions where tests were administered to diagnose patients.
That's exactly what Lynn did: he has "good" IQ data generated for-purpose by the research communities in developed countries, and just uses IQ data from, essentially, mental health institutions elsewhere. He presents these data sets as apples-apples equivalent.
It gets worse: for what should be obvious reasons, there are lots of countries where it isn't easy to get any such data. Lynn doesn't try; instead, his team takes data from neighboring countries and extrapolates.
Thanks for clarifying that; I didn’t check my sources. For comparison, 81-85 IQ points is where the US disqualifies you four being unable to follow basic training. And 75 IQ points considers you mentally retarded. So for a country average to be way below the retard limit is unlikely.
There are no actual studies that provide this kind of country-by-country data on average IQ, only Richard Lynn's fabricated data, which has become folkloric on the Internet.
