Apps & Software

In Countries Where People Have High IQs, Less Software Theft

Douglas A. McIntyre

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.