I started with another thesis, but it didn’t pan out. Googling around, though, I came across this book. In it, he argues there is a correllation between national GDP and IQ. This would seem to make sense, although I did not even read the whole article, much less either book.
What to do about it, I will leave for another day.
Actually, I will make one comment. Africa is a continent that has many of the lowest IQ’s, as well as the many of the most corrupt governments. Moral integrity in my view is in most cases the result of enlightened self interest. You have to be able to see beyond your immediate circumstances to the longer term results of behaviors that would seem only to affect you. If you cheat others, but then they cheat you, nobody wins in the end, except the very few at the top, and they are prone to getting shot.
Moral order leads to political and then economic order, and it, in turn, depends on the imaginative capacity to visualize an operating whole, in which denying short term gratification enables long term success. Both nations and individuals which fail tend to be populated by people unable to do this. This is the part which matters. The ability to program computers or design them is secondary to this basic truth.