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Um, no. You may want to look at what you said in the grandparent and this thread more generally. You were trying to figure how to improve the education systems and general problems of some countries. In order to do that you were trying to determine the cause of the problem. Along the way you were prepared to reject a possible hypothesis because "it would be for me uncomfortably close to racial superiority theories".
So if you really care about improving the situation in say Romania you need to figure out why it is the way it is, as in what is the true (in the absolute sense) situation. In order to do that, you can't reject hypotheses simply because they make you feel uncomfortable.
Okay, fair point. Still. If society deterioriate while their racial-ethnic make up does not change at all or very little (they are no the most tempting immigration targets and so on) there seems to be little point in dwelling on that - if you see a change in an outcome then any variable that did not change cannot really be a causal factor, now can it?
You were the one "dwelling on that" by calling Salemicus's theory "uncomfortably close to racial superiority". Whether his theory is actually "racist" (to the extent that word even has a coherent definition) is irrelevant, the point is that your first reaction was to dismiss it not for any logical reason but because of your hangup about thinking any thoughts that pattern match to "racism".
I just want to add, for my own sake, that I was in no way advocating anything resembling "racial superiority." Rather, my explanation for the relative success of some societies over others is institutional.
What do you mean by that, are you saying race isn't correlated with IQ, or anything else important?
Or are you merely saying that the subject isn't relevant to the original discussion?
I expressed no opinion on race, because it wasn't relevant.