No, not necessarily the richer - I can spot a direct correlation between the quality of the education system and the IQ reported here. Finland, the country with maybe the best schools(not Universities, schools) in Europe is leading.
> No, not necessarily the richer - I can spot a direct correlation between the quality of the education system and the IQ reported here.
The first sentence of the linked post, well before the actual maps, is "Please note: Quality of education greatly influences IQ scores, i.e. a lower average IQ is more indicative of lower access to wide-scale quality education rather than innate intelligence (as demonstrated, for example, here). Also, testing conditions influence results; wealthier countries are more likely to be able to afford better testing conditions for participants."
If you were to compare a similar map from 1970 with the current one the notion of which came first would be much more clear. Before WWII IQ was pretty evenly distributed across the regions of Germany, but during the partition the IQs of children born in East Germany fell way behind those born in West Germany. And now with reunification and economic convergence IQ scores have converged too. Genetics may play a fairly large role in explaining outcomes for individuals, but if it affects measurable differences in outcomes between large groups the effect is small enough to be drowned out by other factors.
Its a long-known, well-demonstrated effect on an individual level. A more likely causal mechanism than the kind of broad social effect in the reverse direction that you suggest is that access to quality education also affects experience with, patience with, and attitudes toward the kind of assessments used to measure IQ, thus influencing results.
(There's other wealth-related -- and, on a country-level, social-support-network related effects, too, as early childhood nutrition and other social-environment factors have an effect on IQ that, again, has been demonstrated on an individual level.)
