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Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Intelligence: A Unifying Concept for the Social Sciences. Ulster Institute for Social Research, London, England, 2013.
This book is a magnum opus. It is the climax work of a pair of social scientists who take the word "science" seriously. Lynn is a psychologist and Vanhanen an emeritus political scientist, who have labored for decades to bring light to a long taboo domain - relationships between intelligence and social phenomena like wealth and health and political institutions and such. Mindful of these taboos, and that some scholars rebel against any definition of "intelligence" much less its measurement by IQ or any other metric, the authors are rigorously and relentlessly quantitative, which makes parts of the book a tough read for those who may be allergic to correlations or numbers.
It is well worth the effort, however, because the authors are very well aware of the difficulties of definition and measurement of any psychological or sociological variable, much less the explosive IQ, and of the limitations of correlation analysis. So they use the tools of their fields as meticulously as possible. They are also extremely ambitious, setting...