Suchergebnisse

Annotation

The purpose of this article is to explore the causes of the European eurozone's serious debt crisis from one particular perspective. The idea is to clarify to what extent the eurocrisis might be causally related to the fact that the average intelligence (national IQ) of the six crisis countries seems to be clearly lower than the average intelligence of the 11 other euro countries. Besides, it does not seem to be an accident that five of the six crisis countries are Mediterranean countries whose populations are biologically partly mixed with immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. This paper focuses on the role of the Mediterranean countries. It is hypothesized that because of their slightly lower national IQs, the Mediterranean countries have not been able to manage their economic policies as well as the countries with higher national IQs. More intelligent nations have usually been able to manage their affairs better than less intelligent nations. The hypothesis is tested by comparing the relationship between the level of national IQ and several other measures of human conditions both in the group of the 17 eurocountries and in the total world groups of countries. The results of comparisons as well as correlations in the same groups of countries support the hypothesis. Consequently, it is concluded that the clear difference in the national IQs between the six crisis countries and 11 other euro countries is a factor that has contributed to the emergence of eurozone's debt crisis. Adapted from the source document.

Ethnic groups have tended to conflict since the beginning of the known human history, and the intensity of violent conflicts does not seem to have decreased during the last centuries. Why are ethnic conflicts so common across all civilizational boundaries and over time? Researchers have explained particular ethnic conflicts as being due to various political, cultural, and other environmental factors, but they have not yet been able to produce any theoretical explanation that could be tested by global empirical evidence. It will be argued in this paper that the universality of ethnic conflict can be traced to our common human nature, to our evolved disposition to ethnic nepotism. This hypothesis is tested by empirical evidence on a scale of institutionalized ethnic interest conflict (IC) and on a scale of ethnic violence (EV), which are intended to measure the degree of ethnic conflict from two different perspectives, and by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity (EH), which is used to measure ethnic nepotism, in a group of 176 contemporary countries. The results show that EH explains approximately 70 percent of the global variation in IC and nearly half of the variation in EV. These results leads to the conclusion that ethnic nepotism provides the most powerful theoretical explanation for the persistence of ethnic conflicts. Adapted from the source document.