New paper out: The international general socioeconomic factor: Factor analyzing international rankings

http://openpsych.net/ODP/2014/09/the-international-general-socioeconomic-factor-factor-analyzing-international-rankings/

Abstract Many studies have examined the correlations between national IQs and various country-level indexes of well-being. The analyses have been unsystematic and not gathered in one single analysis or dataset. In this paper I gather a large sample of country-level indexes and show that there is a strong general socioeconomic factor (S factor) which is highly correlated (.86-.87) with national cognitive ability using either Lynn and Vanhanen's dataset or Altinok's. Furthermore, the method of correlated vectors shows that the correlations between variable loadings on the S factor and cognitive measurements are .99 in both datasets using both cognitive measurements, indicating that it is the S factor that drives the relationship with national cognitive measurements, not the remaining variance.

This one took a while to do. Had to learn a lot of programming (R), do lots of analyses, 50 days in peer review. Perhaps my most important paper so far.