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OrphanWilde comments on Suppose HBD is True - Less Wrong
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Those can be resolved but they will not make nearly as large a difference as currently expected, where current ideologies hold that all of that 3-190x per capita difference is due to environmental conditions, history, and racism. HBD implies that, just as with individual differences and the systematic failure of welfare and education randomized experiments to 'close the gap', we can expect this futility to occur on a country-level basis at some level of development. Countries like China (maybe) and North Korea (definitely) will be predicted to escape their current poverty levels with appropriate interventions... and countries like Subsaharan Africa to possibly not escape. (Which countries can be made more concrete in a HBD context by taking Piffer's country/group-level polygenic scores and looking at the residuals of a GDP/score regression for the countries which most over and underperform; the former can be predicted to not grow substantially, and the latter can be predicted to grow substantially.)
Remember how heritability works. If environments improve, genetics will explain more and more of variance. It's Liebig's barrel. Shared-environment in the USA is very small.
Yes, because those environmental factors are causally downstream and cannot be improved without the locals. As development aid has discovered again and again, you cannot force improvements on a country. Pakistan, for example, is so dysfunctional and clannish that iodization and polio programs have had serious trouble making any headway.
Yes, they do! These causal models are fundamentally different. If genetics is a major limiting factor, iodine and all other environmental factors are not going to help past a certain level of development. (You can feed some Americans or New Zealanders iodine supplements, but it won't give them +10 IQ points even though they are probably somewhat deficient). If genetics is the major limiting factor, then at a certain point, you are basically polishing a turd and this can either be accepted or more radical interventions must be considered.
They're also causally upstream, given that intelligence is the problem. Meaning the problem is one of bootstrapping. This doesn't actually change any implications.
The environmental factors will help -to- that level of development, however, and given that that level of development has not been achieved, they're still the corrective measures necessary.
If genetics isn't a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will improve things. If genetics is a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will still improve things. Given that there's a factor we have no control over, and given factors that we might be able to control although it's a very difficult problem, the factor that we have no control over doesn't matter with respect to the solutions.
Yes, it does, if you cannot bootstrap in the first place because you cannot implement the measures because of a population with low intelligence, high discounting, high crime and corruption rates etc.
You're equivocating and it is not the case that regardless of genetics, all environmental interventions are equally profitable a priori. If genetics is a limiting factor on intelligence and other traits, then an environmental intervention - if you can manage it in the first place - will be restricted to its proximate effects and will not have the huge spillovers which led to the Great Divergence. If a population is at its genetic limit already and you successfully implement, say, iodization, the benefits will be limited to the immediate effects of reducing goiters and low energy, but you will not get the spillovers to homicide, the spillovers to greater education, the spillovers to higher income, the spillovers to lower discount rates and higher capital formation, etc. The cost-benefits for iodization are based on these benefits, not merely eliminating goiters! Likewise, if you cure malaria and a population is at the limit, you'll reduce how many people die of malaria and that'll be it. Maybe that much lower impact will still be worth it, but given how close to the edge a lot of interventions already are... It is not the case that all environmental interventions are always profitable and should always be done.