A Hail Mary pass to figure out Obama’s IQ

Last year I expressed the hope that Steve Sailer would do his Steve Sailer thing and try to figure out Barack Obama’s IQ. He never did, and for good reason. He had nothing to work with—no SATs (which are roughly equivalent to IQ), no SAT-like tests, nothing. Obama’s entire academic record including his test scores is hidden away from the inquiring eyes of the world. Ok, if you don’t have any data to work with, you don’t have it. But now Sailer is getting desperate. On the basis of a passing remark by Joan Didion in a 1966 article that the average IQ of pupils at Hawaii’s elite Punahou School (which Barry Soetoro entered five years later) was 125, combined with a remark by one of his fellow students that Barry was an average student there, Sailer guesses that Obama’s IQ is 125. Coming from a writer who prides himself on being data-centric, that strikes me as lame. If you don’t have the data to work with, you don’t have it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 01, 2009 12:21 PM | Send