Countries With the Most Brain Power

Technically Holland is just part of the Netherlands, but okay.

It's supposed to prove what it proves. I'm not sure what you mean by ACTUAL, but I guess you learned how to capitalize words somewhere other than Finland. Everything on the above quiz is completely accurate, but I understand that some people who have a chip on their shoulder about being overshadowed by the US need to cling to something to make themselves feel better- be that marginally higher standardized testing scores for middle school students, or stereotypes that they have embraced without any scientific evidence to back them up, or random polls that only paint a narrow picture. If you feel that a few kids in high school scoring a couple points higher on their math tests is what's ACTUALLY important and can convince yourself that a vastly superior tertiary education system and by far the world's largest amount of scientific output doesn't count enough to dispel your own prejudices, and you can go on grasping to the lie that all Americans are dumb, great. More power to you.

Being a large and populous country is actually quite a big hindrance in the % of college graduates category. How does your prejudicial worldview account for that? And per capita the number of Australian universities that rank in the top 25 worldwide is still 0. Actually the USA does well in all of these categories per capita, as well, the ones that make any sense to measure that way... It's still near the top of Nobel prize winners, for instance. Though.. they only give out one prize per year in a category, so it's not as if they hand one to every smart person in the country. I am sorry if this shatters or endangers the way you like to view the world. I was told by another user that this makes me racially insensitive (stating facts that contradict others' bigotries). I'm working on that.

and... "near" the top? The US absolutely crushes in every one of these categories (and many many many others) except for the college graduates where "near" is accurate... but you're still able to say "near" the top? Futher, other industrialized countries might show up in some categories here but not others. Japan for example... very inventive people... they're just behind the U.S. in patents and scientific output, while the UK does have a few more decent colleges than the average country but doesn't hold many patents. Germany doesn't have as many good universities, but the quality of their scientific research (measured by the number of times they are cited) is quite high. and China holds the #3 spot in patents but fails to do as well in other categories. That you could believe American dominance (not just presence, but dominance) in every metric is insignificant just shows how biased you are.

and yes, I'm aware of Russia's accomplishments in sending robots and dogs into space.

Finally, the US is not the largest industrialized country. It ranks 3rd or 4th depending on how you measure in terms of land area, and 3rd in terms of population. I suppose you didn't study geography in Finland, either?

"I read recently that 42% of Americans can't point to their own country on a map"

We all applaud your ability to read, though, the quality of what you are reading does count for something. Where did you come up with that? HenryFordWasANazi.blogspot.com? If you actually believe that absurd statistic then, well... at this point I think the evidence speaks for itself.

What gave you the idea that I was upset? I know that you have trouble reading, you already confessed that in your last post, so I am not surprised that you are confused again. I know that reality really stings for people like you. Bigots who NEED to cling to their prejudices just to make it through the day because facing reality it too painful. I am sorry that it hurts so much. I am sorry that your own life is so full of frustration and despair at your own insignificance. I can only imagine what that must feel like. But my pity is not going to make me accept statements from bigots like yourself. I am more committed to fairness and honesty than I am to pampering your ego. So, while I can point to facts that actually matter, like those above, you can dig up color pieces about UFOs. By the way, the idiot who built the creation museum in Kentucky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham is Australian.

and thank you, again, for not just proving the absolute validity of the quiz through your inability to refute any part of it (I bring up universities, scientific work, patents and college education; the best you can do is point to hicks and their alien hobby), but also for demonstrating the need for its existence (to provide balance against the bigoted haters like yourself).

It's very telling that you get *so* angry just by the implication that Americans are not stupid. It really shows just how much of a bigot you are, as was clear to me from the beginning though you tried to deny it. I didn't make a quiz or any comments denigrating your country or any specific people, just wanted to show that Americans are not any more stupid than anyone else, but this is too much for you to take. You can't let it stand. It is too damaging to the fallacious and prejudiced worldview you have constructed. So you resort to insults. Very telling.

I know that. But for some of these lists they counted the countries of the UK separately, and for others they counted them collectively. For the sake of making the answers easier to get I made the answers interchangeable. In one or two cases I combined some of the UK countries together and put them under a single label if data was available.

"brain power" could be defined different ways. I just wanted a quiz that showed how different countries had made accomplishments in various fields like science, education and invention. I know that speaking to intelligence is one of the quickest and surest ways to offend people, and generally try to avoid making any negative generalizations on the subject for this reason. It's unfortunate that so many people (like the commenter I pissed off above) are not given pause by the same concerns when they accuse Americans of being stupid to satisfy their own prejudices and insecurities. Dispelling that myth was part of the impetus for creating the quiz. The intention was something positive, I didn't mean to suggest that any country not on this list was full of stupid or unintelligent people. And of course you are right, economic and industrial development play a large role, and population is another (much less important, IMO) factor.

They also don't seem to have any answer for why countries like Indonesia, Brazil, India, Iran, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Nigeria, etc fail to show up. If population was so important they would. But it's really not a big factor. A factor... yes... but a pretty insignificant one. China has started to show up because their economy and industrial and scientific development has so rapidly improved. It has little to do with population. They had a massive population in 1950 too. The USA dominates because for most of the past century they were simply leagues ahead of everyone else.

That's interesting, but I followed the link and then clicked through to the primary source, and on the World Bank's page that was linked, this statistic doesn't appear anywhere that I could find. There is a statistic for tertiary school enrollment (The Russian Federation's 77% falls far short of those at the top of the list), but no statistic for tertiary degree completion... unless I missed it.

It may be that they measured differently. I found different lists for this statistic and they didn't all match up.

Oh, another thing, it looks like the stats here were calculated based on the *work force* of the country... so this excludes both older, retired people (who are less likely to have a college degree), younger, unemployed people (who are also less likely to have a college degree), as well as children too young to have finished secondary school (who of course don't have a college degree)...

Yeah. Don't believe the hype.

Yep! Unfortunately you can find stupid people everywhere, even in any of these countries.

I'm sorry you don't under the relevance of applied brain power.

As for IQ... if properly calibrated the mean on an IQ test should always be 100. If using the same test in multiple different areas, you'll get results that would generally be dismissed as unreliable. To date, there has never been any comprehensive attempt to try and gage different IQ scores across many different countries. The closest anyone has come to that is Richard Lynn's book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, which, although often cited online by people who have never read it, is not accepted as a scholarly work and has been heavily criticized for various reasons. And there is no other source for this information.

Literacy levels might be okay to include but amongst developed nations they are all so close to 99.8% or so, essentially tied, that it would be irrelevant including this.

Yeah maybe. I found the stat interesting.

You know... Google is just a click away... not a great look to be asserting things that are easily and quickly disproven when arguing on a quiz about applied brain power.

sure