Wealth Makes Health And Intelligence

The Economist shows a study associating intelligence with incidences of infectious diseases.

The Economist writes,

"HUMAN intelligence is higher, on average, in some places than in others. And researchers at the University of New Mexico have come up with an explanation, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Comparing the average IQ in a particular country with its disease burden (based on the reduction in life expectancy caused by 28 infectious diseases) reveals a striking correlation. At the bottom of the IQ list is Equatorial Guinea, followed by St Lucia, with Cameroon, Mozambique and Gabon tied for third last. These countries also have among the highest burdens of infectious diseases. At the opposite end of the scale, Singapore, South Korea, China and Japan show the highest intelligence scores and relatively low levels of disease. America, Britain and a number of European countries also place in the top left-hand corner of the chart."

Well, correlation doesn't imply causation. Besides, not all education can be treated as equal, as education can represent political or religious indoctrination. In addition, some people can finish traditional academic requirements but they may remain "inadequately" educated.

Instead, what we suggest as a meaningful causal link behind education and disease is capitalism.

Where capitalism allows people to generate wealth, wealth allows the financing of education and the preservation of health or disease avoidance.

The Gapminder chart above shows of this strong correlation.

As Matt Ridley writes in The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (hat tip Mark Perry)

``The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years: years of lifespan, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of traveling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout, and with more access to calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometers, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars than any who went before."