Over the last half year at Human Varieties, Jason Malloy has been posting his exhaustive meta-analyses of IQ studies from different countries as part of his Human Varieties Global IQ project. If you are familiar with Lynn and Vanhanen’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations book from a dozen years ago, then in terms of number of studies and careful effort, Jason’s emerging encyclopedia is roughly an order of magnitude larger.

And that may underestimate what he’s undertaking. For example, Malloy’s meta-analysis of Thailand (where he has lived, by the way) includes “almost 50 studies of intelligence and scholastic achievement.” His Puerto Rican survey includes over 70 academic papers published between 1925 and 2007.

In launching his project on January 19, 2013 Jason mentioned the difficulties of finding and accurately interpreting obscure psychometric technical documents in multiple languages, but went on to rightly note:

I have, however, been tracking down world IQ studies for about 10 years now, and it’s probably safe to say that I have immediate hard drive access to more global intelligence test studies than any other person on earth. And with this website I now have a more transparent way of recording this data and a more immediate way of sharing it.

So far, he’s focused upon two regions: New World Islands and Southeast Asia. In chronological order, the 15 countries he has reviewed so far are:

New World Islands

Southeast Asia:

Following a decade of data collecting, he’s now publishing at a rate of about ten countries per year, which would put his completion date out in the 2020s or 2030s.

This is one of the heroic works of independent scholarship of our time.