[yrgulation]

This is just one of the many ways of "proving" that people in developing nations are somehow inferior. The same people that grew up with poor nutrition perform quite well when relocated to other countries. While in developed regions there are people with access to food yet dumb like a kite. I think we should be careful with the conclusions we draw. Certainly nutrition, let alone disease or parasites, can lead to reduced mental performance, but deriving the fact that the developing world is somehow suffering from reduced mental power, because of food, as a whole is wrong and in my view dangerous.

[retrac]

A nice thing about the hookworm example is it applies within the United States. It was common historically in the South, but not the North. This may well account for some of the stereotypes about the lazy, stupid Southerner, as well as the gap in economic development and educational attainment. [1]

> How much credit, if any, hookworms can take for those lingering economic challenges and misconceptions, however, is nearly impossible to measure, although some have tried. Hoyt Bleakley, an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan, used early to mid-20 th century census data and records from the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission to compare educational and economic gains in places where hookworm eradication did and did not take place. He found an increase in school attendance and literacy in relation to hookworm reduction and also discovered that those effects seemed to extend into adulthood, with better-educated children growing up to be higher-earning adults. This suggests, Bleakley writes , “that hookworm played a major role in the South’s lagging behind the rest of the country.”

> “If you compare places in the South with the worst versus the least hookworm problem, you’re talking differences in income of maybe 25%,” he says. “There are lots of reasons why the South had a different developmental path than the rest of the country, and while disease is not the whole story, it was certainly part of it.”

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

Is it so wild to generalize this to the rest of the world?

[yrgulation]

Generalising about the south in the us is as wrong as generalising about the rest of the world.

Incidentally in most european countries you find jokes about the south of the same countries as in the us. Its just something we do with people far and different we look at their ways and call them dumb.

The article tho has made an attempt at proving it with science. Correlation does not imply causation.

You cant simply draw the conclusion that a mass of people are dumb and then make up the science to prove it. Sure there individual and small localised groups affected by it but not whole nations or even massive areas of a country.

Edit: even here on this forum, there is anecdata from people that grew up in poverty with little to eat or poor nutrition yet they perform well given the opportunity. Some from the west, some from asia.

[inglor_cz]

Anecdata can be a distraction from general principles.

There are disabled people who climbed Mount Everest, but that does not mean that disability is irrelevant for your chances.

[User23]

> There are disabled people who climbed Mount Everest, but that does not mean that disability is irrelevant for your chances.

More accurately, there are disabled people who have had sherpas drag them up Mount Everest. To be fair, that's what most so-called mountaineers do these days.

[User23]

It's interesting, because in Germany the southerners are observably much more technically accomplished than the northerners. But there's still that you don't speak High German prejudice.

[mlyle]

You hardly address his point.

You say:

> While in developed regions there are people with access to food yet dumb like a kite.

But he explicitly said:

> > I'm not saying this to look down on anyone. Human populations always show enormous variation, anyway, so it says nothing much about any individual.