In Countries Where People Have High IQs, Less Software Theft

Apps & Software

Published: June 19, 2016 8:42 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 6:39 am

Software companies have a great deal to fear in terms of theft from the people who live in nations in which the average IQ is low. One the other hand, nations with high IQ residents present a much smaller problem

A new study from the Munich Personal RePEc Archive entitled “Intelligence and Crime: A novel evidence for software piracy” shows:

The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that software piracy rats are lower in more intelligent nations. Thus, we econometrically estimate the effect of national IQ on software piracy rates, using data for 102 nations for the year 2011.
Our findings offer strong support for the assertion that intelligence is inversely related to the software piracy rates. After controlling for the potential effect of outlier nations in the sample, software piracy rate declines by about 5.3
percentage points if national IQ increases by 10 points.

And:

In this article we utilize cross national statistics on the software piracy rate, to offer a novel estimate of the association between intelligence, proxied by national IQ scores, and 16’softlifting’. We find that intelligence has statistically significant negative impact on piracy rates. We also conclude that the estimates remain robust when we address potential endogeneity of IQ and for the existence of outlier countries in the sample.

On the other hand, it is crucial to highlight that albeit our findings suggest that more intelligent societies are inversely associated with the software piracy rates, this should not be taken as universal evidence that society with higher intelligent quotient is a requirement to alleviate software piracy. Our findings indicate that if ruling elite enforces policies to decrease software piracy, intelligence provides a credible proxy of the degree of consent of such policies. Indeed, agents with higher cognitive abilities are more politically active

Because almost all of these nations are under-developed, presumably law enforcement, particularly for something as complicated as software theft does not exist, and there may be no rule of law at all.

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