Achievement Quotient

~ Clarissa

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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Published by Clarissa

9 thoughts on “Achievement Quotient”

  1. No escape from wokeness: while checking out French ebooks from the library, I accidentally got a children’s book about a non-binary cat. Absolutely no indication of this in the description, of course. I did go ahead and read it because I was curious how they’d handle this in a highly gendered language (answer: not well at all.)

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      1. The cat is also friends with a gay duck couple, though they are only mentioned briefly.

        The non-binary pronoun they went with is “iel.” I don’t understand the logic there, but then again why “ze?” When there’s a gendered adjective they just put an e in parentheses at the end. How are we supposed to pronounce the word?

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        1. I want to believe you are joking. I really really want to believe you are joking.

          One day I will see something like this in Ukrainian and suffer a coronary.

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              1. Upon further investigation, I’ve gathered that this is some sort of horrible vanity press. Explains why they publish such garbage. It’s comforting to know that probably not many people are reading it.

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    2. “how they’d handle this in a highly gendered language”

      In Poland where this stuff just arrived a couple of years ago…. and though Polish is maybe the most highly gendered language in Europe, pronouns aren’t much of an issue. I think this is because Polish schools discourage the use of third person pronouns, especially as subjects and Polish writing is chock full of nouns drafted to take their place…. “the man” “the 38-year-old” “the scientest” “the clerk” etc etc etc

      The real problems come with the honorifics…. pan and pani (Mr and Ms but often used in the second person and frequently used in the third person) it’s hard to imagine Polish speech without Pan and Pani (and plural forms) showing up almost every sentence.

      The question came up with a colleague who said he’d heard ‘pano’ (which sounds…. awful) and there are apparently a few others but they all sound terrible but the idea of not using honorifics is even worse….

      I saw a document from a different university that examined a half a dozen alternatives each worse than the next….

      This will be interesting.

      And as a note… of the trans students I’ve had the mtf’s choose Polish female names while the ftm’s (the bigger group) always choose English male names…..

      Not sure what that’s about.

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      1. We also say Pan and Pani in Ukrainian. 🙂

        Not the horrific “pano” yet but who can guarantee that some facile dum-dum won’t try to popularize it?

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