Robin Hanson once wrote about how intelligent people tend to overestimate how smart everyone else is, and Anatoly Karlin elaborates on this, with support from PISA test scores:
Fortunately, the PISA website has sample math questions from the 2012 assessment, corresponding to each of the six different levels of difficulty, as well as statistics on the percentage of 15-16 year old students from each of the participating countries that is capable of correctly answering it.
Here is the sample question from Level 6, the hardest level:
Helen rode her bike from home to the river, which is 4 km away. It took her 9 minutes. She rode home using a shorter route of 3 km. This only took her 6 minutes.
What was Helen’s average speed, in km/h, for the trip to the river and back?
Karlin notes how few people get this right:
This problem requires a multi-step approach, an understanding of rates, and the intelligence to complete it in the correct order.
Though not especially hard, even at this level. I suspect that many of you can do it in your heads within a minute.
But a majority of all the tested teens begged to differ.
OECD average: 3% (!!). Korea: 12%, Japan: 8%, Germany: 5%. The US, Italy, Sweden, and Russia were all at 2%; the Mediterranean was at 1%.
Some countries where a big fat 100% (rounded up) were unable to do this problem: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Qatar, Tunisia, Uruguay.
The number of people at this level, the highest measured by PISA, is dwindling away into insignificance in Latin America and the Middle East.
And yet this only translates to an IQ of 120-125. We’re nowhere even near genius level yet.
This matters:
The classical definition of an economy is a system for the production and exchange of goods and services. However, I will argue that you can view it even more fundamentally as a system for generating and trading solutions to problems.
[…]
Some of these problems, such as subsistence farming and trucking, are pretty simple and can be accomplished with reasonable efficiency even by relatively dull workers. This is because problems in this “Foolproof sector” (as Garett Jones calls it) require few steps and have only a minimal threshold difficulty, so production in this sector is governed by the standard Cobb-Douglas equation. More highly skilled workers are only modestly more productive, and are thus awarded with modestly higher salaries. Labor differs by productivity, but is substitutable — one experienced waiter is worth two novice ones.
Other problems are very complex and require teams of competent workers to perform multiple complicated steps to create a successful solution. The best are paired with the best for maximum productivity. Moreover, many O-Ring problems might have a threshold limit for IQ, below which no productive work can be done on them in principle (as per the Ushakov-Kulivets model). To be commercially viable, the risk of failure on any one link of a long production chain needs to be kept low. Examples of these “O-Ring” tasks may include: Aircraft manufacturing; corporate merger planning; computer chip design; machine building; open-heart surgeries.
