Drudge has been making a pretty big deal about this comment from Gwyneth Paltrow:

“I like living here because I don’t fit into the bad side of American psychology. The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans.”

Let’s take an objective look at the assertion, starting with “civilized.” It’s debatable.

It’s true that Britain has a lower murder rate than the U.S. does (though violent crime as a whole is actually higher), but that’s largely because Britain hasn’t dealt with the racial issues America has — more than half of U.S. murder arrests are of minorities. The UK is 92 percent white. I doubt “less diverse” is what Paltrow meant by “more civilized,” but at least she wasn’t completely wrong.

Heck, even if you take the Hollywood liberal cause of the Iraq war, Britain took the same “uncivilized” stance the U.S. did. I would suspect that, for whatever reasons, it’s simply easier for Paltrow to isolate herself from the commonfolk in Britain, though I wonder how that can be hard here. Has she ever met anyone unlike herself in either country to make a comparison?

On intelligence, she is pretty much just wrong. In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen estimated many countries’ national IQs. The UK had 100 (by definition, as the estimates were normed to the UK scores) and the US had 98, a negligible difference of about one-eighth of a standard deviation. Again, racial differences between the countries, not any European cultural superiority, explain the difference: Several of the States’s large ethnic groups test below the average.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.