مهارت شناختی و اشاعه فناوری :آزمون تجربی

Cognitive skills are robustly associated with good national economic performance. How much of this is due to high-skill countries doing a better job of absorbing total factor productivity from the world's technology leader? Following Benhabib and Spiegel (Handbook of Economic Growth, 2005), who estimated the Nelson–Phelps technology diffusion model, I use the database of IQ tests assembled by Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002 and Lynn and Vanhanen, 2006 and find a robust relationship between national average IQ and total factor productivity growth. Controlling for IQ, years of education is of modest statistical significance. If IQ gaps between countries persist and model parameters remain stable, TFP levels are forecasted to sharply diverge, creating a “twin peaks” result. After controlling for IQ, few other growth variables are statistically significant.

Recent economic research, including Hanushek and Woessmann (2007), Jones and Schneider (2006), Weede and Kampf (2002) and Ram (2007), has shown that cognitive skill scores are robustly associated with good economic performance. The authors invariably find that cognitive skill scores have vastly more predictive power than traditional schooling measures. The question of whether intelligence tests and other standardized tests are robust predictors of economic success has apparently been settled. The present paper turns to the question of why this is so. Herein, I focus on the following questions: How do differences in cognitive skills influence differences in productivity across countries? Is there a cognitive skill cutoff below which countries will fail to even conditionally converge? And after one accounts for differences in average cognitive skill in a country, which other conventional growth variables are reliable predictors of long-run productivity growth?

If national average IQ estimates are indeed “biased,” they appear to be biased in favor of productivity growth. Thus, it would be most useful for economists and psychologists to determine just why these highly abstract tests designed by psychologists are such useful predictors of a crucial variable measured by economists. As part of such an agenda, researchers might take up James Flynn's (2007) call to write the “cognitive history of the 20th century,” delving into how the human mind has adapted itself to – and how it helped to create – a high-technology, organizationally driven society.