I used General Social Survey data in an attempt to identify libertarians (sample size is around 1,000). If respondents answered yes to "Wealthy people pay way too much taxes" and "Marijuana should be legalized," I categorized them as a libertarian.
Next, based on a vocabulary quiz, I calculated IQ for people born in the US (tests may be biased against those for whom English is a second language). I set the mean at 97. (It's typically set at 100 for a white sample, but the US is over 30% non-white).
The data indicated that, according to my measure, 14% of Americans are libertarians. The mean IQ for this group is 96.2. The mean for everyone else is 96.3. For some reason, the people who asked and answered these two questions were a little lower than the 97 average. The takeaway, however, is that there is no evidence here that libertarians are smarter than others. I'm sure many of these people don't have a developed libertarian ideology: they simple want people to be able to do what they want, and they don't like high taxes even for wealthy people. I bet that ideological libertarians would have a higher than average IQ.
Are gun owners mentally ill?
Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...
The "protective stupidity" Orwell describes in 1984 as "Crimestop" is a very real phenomenon. Libertarians have a particularly virulent form posing as "Reason".
ReplyDeleteIf IQ testing weren't made so taboo by 20th century social "sciences", we would, long ago, have refined IQ testing to ferret out selective brain damage caused by the social "sciences".