For most people, moving to a country that’s better for them creates orders of magnitude more value than any plausible cost of an IQ test that would need to be covered, so it’s an irrelevant consideration.
It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it’s hard to find a good number, but I’ve seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you’re right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
It is interesting to look at how the US already handles IQ testing on this scale. The United States Military Entrance Processing Command administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to 460,000 people “during fiscal year 2011” at exam sites around the country, plus “658,000 high school students [...] under the Department of Defense Student ASVAB Testing Program during the 2010-11 school year.”
So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone
I can’t find quotes for how much administering the ASVAB costs nowadays, but a 2002 report from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment quotes a cost of “about $20 per administration”. There’s also a 1976 report to Congress by the Comptroller General of the US, which says on p. ii that the DoD “spent about $4.7 million during fiscal year 1974 to support its high school recruiting and testing program, testing about 1.1 million students for enlistment eligibility”, or $4.27ish per testee. The former estimate is $25.96 after inflation, the latter $20.23. Pessimistically rounding up the bigger estimate to $26, and multiplying by 9 million, suggests a total cost of $234 million.
It occurs to me that this cost could be defrayed by charging potential immigrants. The US charges hundreds of dollars in visa fees as things stand, so adding a $25 testing surcharge ought not prove unduly punishing to the huddled masses.
For most people, moving to a country that’s better for them creates orders of magnitude more value than any plausible cost of an IQ test that would need to be covered, so it’s an irrelevant consideration.
It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it’s hard to find a good number, but I’ve seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you’re right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
It is interesting to look at how the US already handles IQ testing on this scale. The United States Military Entrance Processing Command administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to 460,000 people “during fiscal year 2011” at exam sites around the country, plus “658,000 high school students [...] under the Department of Defense Student ASVAB Testing Program during the 2010-11 school year.”
I can’t find quotes for how much administering the ASVAB costs nowadays, but a 2002 report from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment quotes a cost of “about $20 per administration”. There’s also a 1976 report to Congress by the Comptroller General of the US, which says on p. ii that the DoD “spent about $4.7 million during fiscal year 1974 to support its high school recruiting and testing program, testing about 1.1 million students for enlistment eligibility”, or $4.27ish per testee. The former estimate is $25.96 after inflation, the latter $20.23. Pessimistically rounding up the bigger estimate to $26, and multiplying by 9 million, suggests a total cost of $234 million.
It occurs to me that this cost could be defrayed by charging potential immigrants. The US charges hundreds of dollars in visa fees as things stand, so adding a $25 testing surcharge ought not prove unduly punishing to the huddled masses.