I'd say the extent and duration of the disruption between Latin America and the counties you mentioned are quite different.

LATAM started from the get go being awfully disrupted from the 1500s and in catastrophic ways. Also, we don't call any of those areas Latin X. It shows how much impact the conquerors had that it even defines how we can the region to this day.

Its crazy he thinks that learning physics is the solution: I believe that in the improvement of the technical ability, thus the productivity, of the people of Latin America lies the source of real economic advancement.

and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.

It’s not that surprising that many successful people seem to be strong fans of heritability, or more broadly, of the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value. To do otherwise requires living one’s life in cognitive dissonance; how could they be worthy of such riches while others struggle to just pay the bills? Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame.

Ironically IQ is also popular amongst people in a very different situation, that is, people that aren’t actually successful “in the real world” but score highly on aptitude tests. Their high scores serve as an identity pedestal to look down upon others and set themselves apart from the masses. This seems to be the primary demographic of IQ-requirement organizations.

Now of course there are scientific studies on this topic, but let’s not pretend like this is a cultural meme because writers like Cremieux are just tirelessly searching for the truth, no matter what ideological consequences that may have. They quite obviously have a viewpoint first and then work backwards from there to justify it.

As a meta comment: the whole obsession with IQ as a kind of unchanging permanent quality seems very much out of tune with how biological systems actually work, and is kind of a remnant of a Platonic worldview. That is, it’s not dynamic/process/system oriented in the way that nature actually works, but instead is in search of eternal qualities á la Plato.