Like newhavenct, I'm not a professional neuroscientist, though I did study it long ago. My understanding is that although the genetic difference in intelligence is very much the single biggest factor in variance (note I say variance not mean), the differences that one can assign to 'origin' are really quite surprisingly small, so small that even non-politically correct scientists argue over whether they exist in amongst the statistical noise and effects due to culture and environment.
There is a growing body of evidence that there are currently practical limits to human intelligence in that the size of our heads already mean that humans lost the ability to reproduce reliably without assistance before we left Africa. Also in place like Silicon Valley we see clusters of things like autism where the populations have very high concentrations of smart people who have been there long enough to breed generations.
As for bigbadwolfs idea that we need vocational training, I see the idea, but for it to work you need a system that identifies kids abilities well, and that's viciously hard to do. Germany has achieved it a bit, but at a terrible price. It produced a good average, with fewer failures than many other countries. It also produces very very few geniuses. Remember that Germany has one of the largest populations of any developed countries. Now think of a genius in any field from Germany that is now living.
No, nor can I.
Some single schools in England beat the whole of Germany for emitting the very top grade of people.
But Germany is good at turning out very nearly excellent engineers. Thus a top grade Formula One car may have 90% of it's man hours executed by Germans, but the thought leaders of the efforts are British and Italian. But if you are stupid enough to put Brits in charge of building the car you use to get to work, make sure you have the number of a taxi firm to pick you up when it goes wrong.
That raises an awkward question for those who refer to themselves as 'liberal', since it's clear that the German process is better for the community as a whole.
The English system is in many ways a set of filters rather than a value adding process, and thus has produced more excellence that the modern French and German systems combined, but at the price that the average is almost as bad as America. It's not likely to be a coincidence that France and Germany have significantly higher GDPs per head.
So the question is whose talent do you waste ?
America wastes the talent of black people, and that of people whose parents are poor relative to other Americans. Germany wastes the talents of extremely smart people. Getting back to China, it wastes the talent of nearly everyone who lives there, but especially wastes the talent of those born in the wrong part of the country or whose parents lack the right connections. Thus it's GDP per head is nearer Africa than Europe, sure growth is good, but an economic model that is based upon the idea the your people are amongst the most worthless in the world, and thus cheaper is not one I'd be proud of as a leader.
