Now that I’m back from my travels, I’ll have time to finish my copy of Noticing in peace. Here’s an interesting tidbit that everybody suspects but doesn’t have the full stats:
By any means of counting, there are quite a number of countries where Jews make up a remarkable percentage of native-born Nobel laureates. For example, among American natives, [there are] 200 prizewinners through 2009 (leaving aside the peace prize as non-intellectual). Jews made up 62 or 31%. Since Jews comprised about 3% of the adult population in the U.S.
in the middle of the last century, this gives American Jews an Achievement Quotient for Nobel laureates of just over ten. And the American AQ is fairly low by international standards. In places with very few Jews, AQs can be stratospheric, such as Switzerland (3 Jewish laureates out of 17 total laureates for an AQ of 60), Latin America (2 out of 8 for an AQ of 220) and Italy (4 out of 17 for a 320).
It’s not all Jews, of course. Nobody has explained the divergence between Ashkenazis and Sephardics but I’d be very interested to find out.
Ashkenazi Jews (ones with Yiddish-speaking ancestors) average about ten points higher than non-Hispanic white gentiles, or 110 on a scale where white Americans and Brits average 100. That would put the median Ashkenazi Jew at about the 75th percentile among whites. IQ testing in Israel suggests that the other Jewish communities trail the Ashkenazi… Sephardim score about two points less than white gentiles, or 98. The Mizrahim (Jews from the Arab world) average
around 91.
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