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We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situation is that it precludes any of the normal ways that people can sort themselves into poverty - it wasn't as if there was any huge migration in Germany that made all the smarter people end up on the west side of the divide. Can you provide a causal mechanism other than poverty->low IQ that could explain that?
Or how about all the immigrants from rural Ireland that had significantly lower IQs than the residents of the cities they immigrated into, but whose children and descendants had substantially the same IQs as other residents of those cities?
There's really a mountain of evidence that the causality here runs both ways.
Also what does "poverty" mean here? "Lack of basic resources", then practically nobody is poor in Germany due to our welfare system. Statistics use "less than 60% of average income" or something like that. Then we will never eliminate poverty, anyways.
To "solve" poverty I believe the big question is how to inspire people that it is possible to improve their situation? How to provide hope to poor people? In Germany I think it is intellectually realistic that anybody can improve, but people do not believe it. Essentially, (in the wealthy western world) poverty is not a technical problem, but rather an emotional one.
I do not care about IQ much. I do not know my own IQ. Since I am currently pursuing a PhD I am probably above average, but who really cares? Studies show that IQ predicts academic success, so it means something for high-education jobs. For creative tasks it's useless. Effectively, the IQ of a child only provides a hint about future career choices, but not about success or wealth.
Now, it might be that communism was crushing the hope of East Germans or something. That could also explain this particular difference. But we can measure social mobility and people's beliefs in social mobility across countries and see if it makes a difference. And as far as I can tell it doesn't, since social mobility and believe in social mobility are lower in most places today than they were in 1960, but the Flynn effect[1] continues to march on.
Having beliefs is nice and complex beliefs like those put us humans way above the vast majority of the lifeforms on this planet. But as someone pursing a PhD I would hope that you would examine the implications of your beliefs and test those implications against reality.
And IQ does have predictive power with respect to income[2], though not as strongly as other factors.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
