Until I saw the news article, I hadn’t realized that countries are ranked by how smart their citizens are. I’m not sure whether I am pleased or insulted that Canadians rank tenth in the world.

Being Canadian, naturally my first thought was, “how do we compare with the US?” They finished 18th.

Singapore tops the list, followed by Switzerland and South Korea. the areas considered were maths, reading, science, and computational problem solving.

It is of course a silly statistic. How do you measure these things? How valid is the measurement across cultures? Does teh choice of questions affect the outcomes?

For instance, the World Population Review says Hong Kong has the planet’s highest average IQ, with Somalia the lowest. You don’t think educational opportunities come into play here? (I note there also that Canadians still rank higher than Americans, but lower than Iranians.) The gap between Canada and the US is less on other rankings, but Canada still comes out on top.

Even judging countries by most scientific research per capita is misleading. After all, some knowledge is more valuable – which is a subjective judgement.

I suspect that given the same opportunities, people would score pretty much the same on these tests. A Canadian who grew up in a war zone, or during a famine, with no access to education would be likely to have a score similar to those scored by Somalis or Afghans (to name another country with a low score).

Indices like this are published, I think, to make people in the upper echelons feel better. The science is questionable, but does that matter?