IQ and the health of states

Abstract

Epidemiologists contend that income inequality reduces the health and life expectancy of the whole population, but this argument does not make sense within its own evolutionary framework. Recent evolutionary psychological theory suggests that the human brain, adapted to the ancestral environment, has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment, and that general intelligence evolved as a domain‐specific adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. Since most dangers to health in the contemporary society are evolutionarily novel, it follows that more intelligent individuals are better able to recognize and deal with such dangers and live longer. Consistent with the theory, and replicating an earlier study of cross‐national data, income inequality has no effect on the health and longevity of the population across the American states, when the racial composition (percent black) is controlled, but the average intelligence of the population (state IQ) has a significant effect The data presented here and in the earlier study challenge the conclusion that income inequality reduces the health of the population.

Notes

Address correspondence to: Satoshi Kanazawa, Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. E‐mail: [email protected]