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moments like this bring milton freidman of all people to mind. one of freidman's positions is that when a corporation tries to act ethically, it steps outside of its collective competence--which is making money--and in so doing begins making serious errors. to go after this statement requires that one step behind it and take apart the assumptions on whcih it is based (particularly the separation of economic rationality from other areas of human activity)---but putting that aside, and the political problems that go along with friedman, and just looking at the claim itself, i think it applies quite well to watson. so there's no reason to take seriously what he says as a public figure. outside his field--and even (apparently) when it comes to make extrapolations based on his research areas that run into more complicated social questions, there's no reason to take him seriously.
on the question, though, it seems that the classical chicken-egg question of context vs. abilities comes in here.
how exactly does one go about controlling for contextual factors?
much of subsaharan africa performs (in various ways) the implications left to open by european colonialism. like it or not--there's no way around it. this obtains at one level or another across a host of areas of social life, from education to organization of agricultural production, from the nature and role of the state to questions of medical policy. so much of the infrastructure remains marked by its history since 1960 (say)...if the infrastructure if a wreck, and if education is an element of infrastructure, then it seems logical that the "post-colonial" or neocolonial history of these areas is a overwhelming factor--and that attempting to develop an "intelligence test" that would erase this as a factor seems little more than running away from the legacy of colonialism itself.
just another attempt to quantify an exercise in blaming the victims of colonialism for the effects of colonialism.
this is of course a very general statement and should be broken up as the conditions it refers to in general are differentially distributed and differentially important--but i raise it to indicate a general problem with the idea ustwo puts forward in the op.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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