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It peeves me when scatterplots of GDP per capita versus something else use a linear scale -- do they actually think the difference between $30k and $20k is anywhere near as important as that between $11k and $1k? And yet hardly anybody uses logarithmic scales.
Likewise, the fit looks a lot less scary if you write it as ln(GDP) = A + B*IQ.
Yes, Dickerson does point out that his exponential fit is a linear relationship on a log scale. For example, he does show a log-scale in figure 3 (pg3), fitting the most reliable 83 nation-points on a plot of log(GDP) against mean IQ in which the exponential fit looks exactly like you would expect. (Is it per capita? As far as I can tell, he always means per capita GDP even if he writes just 'GDP'.) Figure 4 does the same thing but expands the dataset to 185 nations. The latter plot should probably be ignored given that the expansion comes from basically g... (read more)