IQ estimates from wordsum scores by ancestry

++Addition++The Inductivist points out that over half of those who chose the ethnicity "American" are black (I wonder if this is similarly the case with Census data). I should have suspected something was up with the remarkably low average for those of putatively "Scots-Irish" descent. Shame on me for the sloppiness. The white "American" IQ estimate from wordsum scores is 94.2, on the low end of those of European descent but higher than that of blacks or Mexicans.

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HBD chickadee has a few bones to pick with Ron Unz about his curious assertion that:

"One very intriguing pattern is that according to Lynn’s IQ data certain European populations such as the South Italians, Irish, Greeks, and South Slavs tended to have IQs much lower than other European populations such as the British and the Dutch. However, according to the Wordsum-IQ data, this pattern is exactly reversed in the United States, with the descendents of immigrants from Southern Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Yugoslavia having much higher IQs than Americans of British or Dutch ancestry."

I'm not at a point where I'm able to read the referenced posting at the moment, so I'm taking the chickadee's word for it. She also chastises Unz for failing to make public the data used to come to the conclusions he comes to. Fortunately, it's easy to tap the GSS for the data Unz presumably used and the chickadee is after, so let's turn the database sideways.

 To avoid issues with language fluency, immaturity, and senility, all respondents were born in the US and aged 25-65 at the time of their participation. All ethnic groups have sample sizes of at least 50, with most far exceeding that minimum threshold (both the ETHNIC and WORDSUM variables have been consistently employed since the survey's inception in the early seventies). Mean wordsum values are converted to mean IQ scores under the assumption that a wordsum value of 6.32 equates to an IQ score of 98 (a reasonable estimate of the US average) with a standard deviation of 15 IQ points:

Ancestry	IQ
Russian	105.2
Austrian	104.5
Swiss	103.6
Danish	102.6
English/Welsh	102.4
Norwegian	102.1
Hungarian	101.6
Scottish	101.5
Swedish	101.3
Czech	100.4
Italian	100.4
French	100.0
Irish	99.7
Polish	99.7
Greek	99.0
French Canadian	98.7
German	98.5
Other Canadian	96.2
Dutch	95.9
Spanish	92.4
Native American	91.2
African	89.9
Puerto Rican	89.9
"American"	88.7
Mexican	87.7

Just a few quick comments. Ashkenazim constitute about half of those of Russian descent. Contrary to Unz' assertion, those of English or Welsh descent outscore Italians, Irish, Greeks, and Slavs, though the Dutch do not. The Scots-Irish highlanders of Appalachia who seem to have forgotten their ancestral homelands fare about as well as blacks do. Black rednecks, anyone? Finally, hardly a novel observation here, but current immigration trends in the US portend a dysgenic future for the US.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM, ETHNIC, AGE(25-65), BORN(1)