There are numerous factors that can go into what makes empires rise or fall or nations grow or decline in power, wealth, and influence vis-a-vis other nations, and it is not my goal here to discuss all of them; rather, what I hope to do is focus on just two of the biggest and most important ones — ones that dwarf virtually all of the others, those being the quality of a nation or empire’s human capital and its cultural institutions, which together largely determine to what extent that human capital can live up to its full potential. As my STEMACI (STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] and cultural institutions) theory of national power shows, these two elements largely determine national or imperial power. Not that such power is everything—this theory in no way argues that it is—but since here on earth, power is ultimately what determines whether or not a country will survive and in what form, it’s hardly something even we, who care about the long-term preservation of our people, can neglect.

In the history of empires, the rise of the British Empire provides the best illustration of the power of high-quality human capital (for which STEM-level IQ scores serve as something of a proxy). That a tiny Island nation could bring such a large percentage of the world’s landmass under its rule is remarkable: most empires throughout history (the Persian, the Khazar, the Aztec, etc.) never managed to place under their rule an amount of land that was so much greater than that controlled naturally by those who served as the empire’s ethnic core. But technology is a force multiplier, and the British, who were the first nation on earth to industrialize, had enough of a technological advantage to multiply their power far beyond what any empire had before. Just a few of the major battles between Brits and non-White natives attest to this:

Battle of Kambula: Part of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, the battle marked the end for determined military resistance to British rule—hardly surprising, given how badly the Zulus were defeated: despite having an absolutely massive army of around 20,000 warriors (compared to 2,086 for the British), they not only lost but sustained casualties of anywhere from over 700 to 2,000 killed, while their White enemies only lost 29 (and only 54 were wounded).

Battle of Assaye: Fought in 1803 during the Second Anglo-Maratha War in India, it witnessed the badly outnumbered army of the East Indian Company (which had both British and Indian soldiers) under the command of the Duke of Wellington (yeah, the guy who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo) overcome the massive army of the Maratha Confederacy: despite the latter having over 10,000 European-trained Indian infantry, plus 10-20,000 irregular infantry, plus 30-40,000 irregular cavalry, compared to a total force of 9,500 for the Brits and their Indian allies. The Maratha Confederacy suffered 6,000 casualties while its enemies incurred only 428 dead, 1,138 wounded, and 18 MIA.

Battle of Abu Klea: Immortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” which depicts a British common soldier’s admiration for the suicidal bravery of the attacking Mahdists (those supporting the self-proclaimed Mahdi—an end-times figure who, according to Islamic eschatology, will appear and rid the world of evil before Jesus makes his return). During this 1885 battle in Sudan the Mahdists briefly managed to break the square formation of some British infantry before being defeated; despite their bravery (or foolhardiness) and their outnumbering the British 3,000 (14,000 if you count the total that could have engaged the Brits) to 1,400, they ended with 1,100 killed and an unknown number wounded vs the British suffering only 76 killed and 82 wounded.

And to be clear, I am not saying here that technological supremacy was the only thing making the British soldier (and Western man in general) victorious on the battlefield. There is also courage, stamina, individual intelligence, and discipline, which Western soldiers in general and (at least at that time) British ones in particular possessed in relative abundance; contrast them with the 20^th-century revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s observation about the state of so many African soldiers (he had traveled to the Congo to try to jump-start a communist revolution there, but gave up in disgust for obvious reasons after less than a year[i]):

[C]amp life for the men meant carrying out no military operations or even undergoing training, confident in the enemy army’s inactivity and relying on the peasants for supplies. The peasants had to bring them food and were frequently humiliated and mistreated. The fundamental character of the People’s Liberation Army was that it was a parasitic army that did not work, did not train, did not fight, and demanded provisions and labor from the local population, sometimes with extreme brutality. The peasants were at the mercy of groups who came on leave from the camps to demand extra food, and who repeatedly consumed their poultry and little luxury food items they kept in reserve.[ii]

However, it is unlikely that the British alone should have risen to the imperial heights that they did relative to both non-Whites and their fellow Europeans without the technological advantages they enjoyed in time and in degree relative to them, as can be seen from the very non-lopsided casualty figures in European vs European wars, such as the Second Boer War in which the British, despite utilizing hundreds of thousands of troops, suffered about 99,000 casualties compared to about 51,000 for the Boers; in fact the only reason the British were able to defeat the indomitable Boers was that British economic and technological superiority combined with huge numbers of non-British auxiliary troops that their empire provided to gradually wear them down. That that same empire would later have to call on America’s help to overcome the might of highly industrialized Germany in both World Wars is only further proof of that truth.

And the reverse, though less obviously, is equally true, as the genetic history of the Roman Empire shows; as Edward Dutton, Emil Kirkegaard, and Davide Piffer reveal in their analysis of the genetics of skeletons from the Roman heartland in Italy through the various periods:

We analysed 127 Ancient Roman genomes with a view to understanding the possible reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. Taking the polygenic score for educational attainment . . . as a proxy for intelligence, we find that intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era . . . to the Iron Age . . ., declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period . . . and increases in Late Antiquity . . . and is approximately at the same level today. . . . We show that this is congruent with a cyclical model of civilization based around intelligence, with the documented history of Rome, and also with patterns of immigration into Rome.[iii]

In other words, the average IQ of the general population increased from the earlier ages up to the time of the Iron Age and the Republic, then decreased during the imperial period, before recovering in later ages following the Western Roman Empire’s fall.

Furthermore, historical documents (many of them cited by the authors) basically convey the same message, albeit more indirectly. From Ovid’s comment on rich young men not fathering children, to Caesar Augustus’s attempt to tax the childless among the upper classes to compel them to have more children (which didn’t work, as large numbers simply paid the tax), there is ample evidence that during the imperial period the smartest Romans were having fewer children relative to their less cognitively gifted brethren (to say nothing of the non-Romans coming to the Roman heartland as slaves or workers) and that this decline in all likelihood contributed to the destruction of the empire renowned in the ancient world for its siegecraft, civil engineering feats (aqueducts, roads and the like), and other signs of mastery of high (for the time) technology.

As two of the godfathers of intelligence research Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen show in IQ and the Wealth of Nations, there is a strong correlation between a nation’s average IQ and its wealth per capita. As they write in Chapter 4, Section 3. Intelligence and Per Capita Income across Nations:

From these studies showing that intelligence is positively and causally related to earnings among individuals, it can be predicted that this association should also be present across nations. The earnings of nations are generally expressed as per capita income. The results of studies confirming that national IQs are positively related to per capita income are summarized in Table 4.3.[iv]

George Mason University professor Garett Jones is not brave or foolhardy enough to openly endorse the race realism of a Lynn or Vanhanen—though he never denies that heredity plays a part in determining a person’s IQ. Jones gives far more weight to environmental factors than most Dissident Right types ever would (though this hardly matters, given that he’s measuring the effects of national IQ levels, not the ultimate causes of those levels), but he comes to basically the same conclusion in his book Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, in which he shows that while for individuals an increase of 1 IQ point would lead to on average about 1% higher wages, for nations an increase of 1 point in average IQs leads to a 6% increase in GDP.

What are the implications of this for the US? Well, let’s consider a hypothetical situation. The average IQ of America is currently 98,[v] and its demographic makeup is, according to the United States Census Bureau’s 2022 estimate, 59.3% non-Hispanic White,[vi] and its GDP in 2022 was $25.74 trillion.[vii] Yes, I know the numbers can be pretty skewed for political purposes, but that doesn’t affect my example.

How much higher would that number be (remember, the proportion holds even if that nominal GDP figure is not the true amount) if the US were as White as it was at the height of its wealth and power, say the eve of World War II? Well, let’s find out!

Going by the numbers from 1940, the country was 89.8% White—which we’ll round up to 90% for our example. What U.S. states are about that White still? Well, let’s go with the current ten Whitest states:[viii]

Maine: 93.0%
Vermont: 93.8%
West Virginia: 92.8
New Hampshire: 92.6%
Idaho: 92.6%
Wyoming: 92.3%
Utah: 90%
Iowa: 89.8%
Montana: 88.7%
Nebraska: 87.5%

We see that their percentages average 91%, or very near what the entire US was in the early ‘40s. Now let’s average their IQ levels: when we get the average of all of them:[ix]

Maine: 103.4
Vermont: 103.8
West Virginia: 98.7
New Hampshire: 104.2
Idaho: 101.4
Wyoming: 102.4
Utah: 101.1
Iowa: 103.2
Montana: 103.4
Nebraska: 102.3

It comes to 102.39, which we’ll use as our estimation of what the nation’s average IQ would be if it were that White. The difference—4.39 (102.39 minus 98)—shows how much higher our GDP would be, were we still as White as we had been in those prewar days.

So, since it’s about a 6% increase per IQ-point increase, and since GDP is nominally currently (that is, in the first quarter of 2025) $29.98 trillion:

At 99 points, it would be: (.06 x $29.98 trillion) + $29.98 trillion = $31.78 trillion.
At 100 points, it would be: (.06 x $31.78 trillion) + $31.78 trillion = $33.69 trillion.
At 101 points, it would be: (.06 x $33.69 trillion) + $33.69 trillion = $35.71 trillion.
At 102 points, it would be: (.06 x $35.71 trillion) + 35.71 trillion = $37.85 trillion.

Taking our 37.85 trillion figure as our new GDP, let’s see what avenues would open up for the US were its demography to improve to that level, driving its economy to follow suit; that is, what intelligent uses the US regime could put that money to? I say could, as there’s no guarantee that the average intelligence of the US ruling class will improve, though it might, given that smarter people are less likely to be fooled by fantasy promises than dumb ones.

Let’s start by talking about the national debt. Currently, it stands at about 36 trillion, or 121% of GDP.[x] Were the economy to become as productive as a 102-IQ population would allow, that figure (assuming for the sake of argument it didn’t increase in the interim) would shrink to being only about 95% of GDP. Beyond that, interest on the debt would become far easier to service: last year the US spent $881 billion on interest payments alone, equivalent to about 2.9% of GDP; had US GDP been at our 102 IQ figure, that payment would have constituted 2.3% (still not good at all, but less horrific). Moreover, in 2024 the federal government’s tax-revenue-to-spending stood at $4.92 trillion vs $6.75 trillion (and thus a deficit of $1.83 trillion): in other words, that year it was able to collect 16.4% of GDP in tax revenue; and thus if GDP then had been at our calculated levels, revenue collection of 16.4% would have brought in $6.21 trillion and the deficit would have been only $54 billion (again, not good, but far, far less horrific than $1.83 trillion).

And before going on, let me make one thing very clear: I am in no way whatsoever defending the current level and specifics of the feds’ spending; it is beyond wasteful, being outright counterproductive, given that most of it comes from smart productive Whites (the genetic seed corn) of a strong economy, while an inordinate amount goes to a relatively small numbers of dumb Whites (White trash, if you will) and a large number of feral Blacks. As with the Roman Empire discussed earlier, which toward the end had a welfare state almost as bad as our own, we are destroying ourselves by paying the dumbest (and in the case of Blacks, the most violent as well) to breed, which further hurts the birthrates of the intelligent via the higher taxes needed to pay for the welfare state. That said, I am merely trying to demonstrate the economic power of eugenic policies in terms that even a brain-dead bureaucrat can understand.

And, of course, that power is not economic only, since such intellectually driven economic power is the key to long-run military power—whether that power be used for purely defensive purposes or for (as is our case) imperial purposes is another matter altogether. But it’s indisputable that all peoples, being fallible, evil-prone mortals, have the temptation toward avarice and empire, and thus it is critical that all those who wish to remain free be at least able to fight a great war, if only to defend themselves. This is doubly true for nations without large amounts of natural resources such as Japan, whose GDP figures are predominantly the result of advanced production techniques: the more you siphon off from your normal production into military tech, the less you have for other purposes, as the huge shortages of consumer goods in the U.S. during World War II vividly illustrate.

Speaking of World War II, let’s give an empirical illustration of the formula behind how it can be the case that average IQ/STEM numbers = economic power = military power at work. Consider that from 1941 through 1945 (inclusive), the US spent through the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 a total of $11.3 billion,[xi] or 1.19%[xii] of GDP total for those years, on creating the vast war machine that saved the Soviet Union, as Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov admitted; “[Stalin] stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.”[xiii] Zhukov stated that “the Americans sent us material without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war.”[xiv] As the Louis Simpson poem about America’s industrial war-might put it, “For every shell Krupp fired/General Motors sent back four”)[xv] Regarding the defeat pf Germany, I should mention the great sorrow of those who know the true history of World War II and how Germany’s defeat led to our present evils.

Now we take our estimate of how much higher the current US’s nominal GDP would be if the entire nation were White and use that difference in inverted fashion. (again, I’m well aware these numbers can be manipulated). That is, use the percentage difference to estimate how much lower total US GDP would have been for 1941 to 1945 (inclusive), the years during which the US gave the Soviet Union $11.3 billion under the Lend-Lease Act, had the country then been 59.3% White as it is today with an average IQ of 98 (see note 5, above), we can estimate that GDP then would have been only $168.67 billion[xvi] rather than $190.16 billion (average of 1941/129.3; 1942/166; 1943/203.1; 1944/224.4; 1945/228).[xvii]

Assuming the percentage which the US spent to prop up Russia’s war machine was the maximum it could afford to (1.19% of GDP), its new Lend-Lease figure would be only $10.03 billion (1.19% of 843.34 billion) rather than the actual $11.3 billion (1.19% of 950.8 billion); or 91% of the actual $11.3 billion sent. What kind of changes would that make? Well, let’s look at what that original figure bought; in the course of the war, the US sent to Russia under Lend-Lease:

As the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Russia puts it on its website:[xviii]

Even before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, America sent arms and equipment to the Soviet Union to help it defeat the Nazi invasion. Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in today’s currency, the Lend-Lease Act of the United States supplied needed goods to the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 in support of what Stalin described to Roosevelt as the “enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy — bloodthirsty Hitlerism.”

400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food

Had its people been that much less White and its economy that much weaker, those figures would have been 70% of the actual number sent (for the sake of argument, we’re assuming that the proportion of each type of war hardware would be bought):

280,000 jeeps & trucks
9,800 airplanes
5,600 tractors
9,100 tanks
1,050,000 blankets
10,500,000 pairs of army boots
74,900 tons of cotton
1,890,000 tons of petrol products
3,150,000 tons of food

How would that have affected the outcome of the war? Well, let’s take a look at one of the pivotal battles, the Battle of Kursk, which along with the more famous Battle of Stalingrad was one of the most pivotal in the entire war. (I chose to use the former rather than the latter for my example since at the time of Stalingrad the full flow of US Lend-Lease money and equipment had yet to take effect; by the time of the Battle of Kursk it had.) During that titanic battle, which lasted a full month, two weeks, and four days and was the largest and deadliest in human history, both sides threw everything they had into the fight, making use of record numbers of men and weapons of all kinds:[xix]

Germany:

2,928 tanks
7,417 artillery pieces
1,800 aircraft

USSR:
5,000 tanks
31,000 artillery pieces
3,500 aircraft

Had Lend-Lease been from a less-White America and Britain (the only nations lending the USSR large amounts of war equipment), those numbers would have been 30% less; that is, if the US and Britain had had the capacity to produce, and thus to lend—though diminished by the amounts calculated above—they would have been able to send in the course of the war only 6,720 artillery, 8,103 tanks, and 13,127 airplanes: according to official Soviet historians (whose figures seem to largely line up with US numbers). On its own the USSR produced during the course of the war “489,900 artillery pieces, 102,500 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 136,800 aircraft”[xx] while receiving from the US and Great Britain “9,600 guns, 11,576 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 18,753 aircraft”[xxi]; and thus if the US/British proportion of the total were only 70% percent of what was in reality sent, their absolute totals of internally produced weapons plus Allies-supplied ones would have been 496,620 artillery guns, 110,603 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 149,927 airplanes or 99.4%, 97%, 96.3%, respectively, of what was actually sent.

If we assume a proportionate reduction of such equipment at Kursk, the new German/Soviet figures would be:

Germany:
2,928 tanks
7,417 artillery pieces
1,800 aircraft

USSR:
4,850 tanks
30,814 artillery pieces
3,370 aircraft

Would that change have been enough to affect the battle’s outcome? Most likely not, given that the Soviets had such an overwhelming numerical advantage that the reduction barely brought the two sides into an equality of force. But what if Russia itself had been that much less White and that much more filled with low-IQ non-Whites, such as from, say, Chechnya? For although the USSR as a whole had large amounts of non-White peoples, the Russian heartland where the engineers designed and the factories churned out supplies for the war was overwhelmingly White. Just assuming for the sake of argument that the USSR had the same reduction in its White population and economic power that we’ve calculated with regard to the WWII-era US (that is, a 30% reduction in war output). Would that have affected the outcome of Kursk? Well, let’s figure it out.

Let’s assume both the US/Britain and the USSR suffer the same White/production loss, bringing the absolute totals of their war implements to: 349,650 artillery (342,930 in house + 6,720 from US/Brits), 79,853 tanks and self-propelled guns (71,750 in house + 8,103 from US/Brits), and 108,887 airplanes (95,760 in house + 13,127 from US/Brits)—or 70% of the original figures in all cases. This would mean that the new proportionate numbers for Kursk would be:

Germany:
928 tanks
7,417 artillery pieces
1,800 aircraft

USSR:
3,500 tanks
21,700 artillery pieces
2,450 aircraft

As you can see, although the USSR still has a numerical advantage, it’s no longer particularly huge. In fact, given the relative casualty rates in the most important German/Soviet battles of the war, for example, at Kursk, according to Sky HISTORY:

Although specific numbers are still debated amongst historians, it’s estimated the Battle of Kursk caused around 800,000 Soviet casualties and 200,000 German casualties.[xxii]

And Stalingrad, of which Encyclopedia Brittanica writes:

The Soviets recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses in and around Stalingrad, and total Axis casualties (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been more than 800,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured. Of the 91,000 men who surrendered, only some 5,000–6,000 ever returned to their homelands (the last of them a full decade after the end of the war in 1945); the rest died in Soviet prison and labour camps. On the Soviet side, official Russian military historians estimate that there were 1,100,000 Red Army dead, wounded, missing, or captured in the campaign to defend the city. An estimated 40,000 civilians died as well.[xxiii]

Thus, in all likelihood the Germans would have won both the Battle of Kursk and the war itself, at least on the Eastern Front, which in turn would have allowed them command of the resources and territory that might have made possible, if not likely, their ability to continue the war until war-weariness would have induced the Allies to offer them a non-Carthaginian peace. Extremely ironically, this might have prevented the US and Europe from become as non-White (and their regimes as anti-White) as they are today: if Germany had de facto won, the history books would not be filled with tales of inhuman Nazis killing lamb-like Jews via roller coasters of death and other implausible Rube Goldbergish methods; in fact, had all that blood and treasure not been spent in vain (on nothing more than a negotiated peace), US citizens might have turned inward, subjecting their lying leaders to extreme scrutiny and thus been able to see just how little the World War II propaganda differed from the lies peddled to get them into World War I. A hypothetical reality in which Germany fought the Allies to a standstill would likely also have witnessed Jewish propaganda being intellectually shredded and Jewish control being upended. In that way, a German victory might have spared the collective West the pains that it has suffered since. Such is the power of economic might and such is the power of the demographic as well as cultural (but that’s a story for our next essay)—reality that underlies it. For that matter, Western victory in a future (defensive, hopefully) war that it might find itself in depends heavily on those same factors.

And for those of you who might be inclined to argue that the nature of war has changed since then, that nuclear weapons and the emphasis on smarter, deadlier weapons over number of weapons—quality over quantity, as it were—make my example nonrepresentative, let me point out something: war and its evolution is always and everywhere essentially the same, best described as a kind of lion vs unicorn series of alternations between the triumph of quality and the triumph of quantity. While an advanced weapons technology might give a nation a decisive advantage for a time, the ability of other nations to partially catch up or steal that technology means that the tech-creator nation will maintain its advantage only if it can either move on to an even newer and better technology (the quality solution) or use superior economic power to produce the same tech in numbers its rivals could not match (the quantity solution). Beyond that though, even weak and outdated subsonic missiles can overcome the most advanced missile defense systems in the world if you throw enough of them at the enemy to simply overwhelm those systems: quantity has a quality of its own, as Stalin pointed out. In either case, high-quality human capital in large numbers is the sine qua non to maintain that edge.

Hence, the greater their production ability, the smaller the amount of their economy a nation would have to subtract from their export industries and/or their own consumption while maintaining the same amount of military power. Thus, it can be said that the higher the average IQ of the nation (and, hence, the more STEM types per capita it has), the more powerful a military it can maintain without straining its economy and impoverishing its citizenry—other things being equal, of course, which brings us to the second part of our STEMACI theory: the CI (cultural institutions) component, which will be the topic of the next and final essay in this series.

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[i]Newsweek Staff. “How Che Saw Kabila.” Newsweek, Newsweek, 13 Mar. 2010, www.newsweek.com/how-che-saw-kabila-171416.

[ii]Guevara, Ernesto Che. Congo Diary: Episodes of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, files.catbox.moe/mxxpki.pdf. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

[iii]Dutton, Edward, et al. The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores, Open Psych, 23 July 2023, openpsych.net/files/papers/Piffer_2023a.pdf.

[iv] Lynn, Richard, and Tatu Vanhanan. IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Jan. 2002, www.researchgate.net/publication/289962908_IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations, p. 75.

[v] “Average IQ by State 2023.” Data Pandas, www.datapandas.org/ranking/average-iq-by-state. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

[vi] “Whitest States: White Only Percentage 2023.” Data Pandas, www.datapandas.org/ranking/Whitest-states. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

[vii] O’Neill, Aaron. “United States GDP and Real GDP 1929-2022.” Statista, 4 July 2024,

[viii] “Whitest States: White Only Percentage 2023.” Data Pandas, www.datapandas.org/ranking/Whitest-states. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

[ix] “Average IQ by State 2023.” Data Pandas, www.datapandas.org/ranking/average-iq-by-state. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

[x] U.S. Office of Management and Budget and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product [GFDEGDQ188S], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S, July 9, 2025

[xi] U.S. Mission Italy. “America Sent Gear to the USSR to Help Win World War II.” U. S. Embassy and Consulates in Italy, 2 May 2023, it.usembassy.gov/america-sent-gear-to-the-ussr-to-help-win-world-war-ii/#:~:text=From%201941%20through%201945%2C%20the,and%20services%20to%20the%20Soviets.

[xii] GDP historic figures (in billions): 1941/$129.3; 1942/$166; 1943/$203.1; 1944/$224.4; 1945/$228 = $950.8 from: O’Neill, Aaron. “United States GDP and Real GDP 1929-2022.” Statista, 4 July 2024, www.statista.com/statistics/1031678/gdp-and-real-gdp-united-states-1930-2019/.

[xiii] U.S. Mission Italy. “America Sent Gear to the USSR to Help Win World War II.” U. S. Embassy and Consulates in Italy, 2 May 2023, it.usembassy.gov/america-sent-gear-to-the-ussr-to-help-win-world-war-ii/#:~:text=From%201941%20through%201945%2C%20the,and%20services%20to%20the%20Soviets.

[xiv] Coalson, Robert. “‘We Would Have Lost’: Did U.S. Lend-Lease Aid Tip the Balance in Soviet Fight against Nazi Germany?” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, RFE/RL, 7 May 2020, www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balance-in-soviet-fight-against-nazi-germany/30599486.html.

[xv] Lofgren, Mike. “Why Can’t America Build Enough Weapons?” Washington Monthly, 24 June 2024, washingtonmonthly.com/2024/06/23/why-cant-america-build-enough-weapons/.

[xvi] Starting with the 1940s IQ of 102.3 via extrapolation above and 1941-45 inclusive average GDP of $190.16 billion, drop the $190.16 billion figure by 6%, for each 1 IQ point change down to an IQ figure of 98.39 which is close to the 2023 average US IQ figure of 98 (see note 5, above): IQ 102.39/GDP $190.16, IQ 101.39/GDP $178.75, IQ 100.39/GDP $168.02, IQ 99.39/GDP $157.94, IQ 98.39/GDP $148.46, using compounding as per personal correspondence with Dr. Garett Jones, then calculate average GDP of $168.67 billion.

[xvii] O’Neill, Aaron. “United States GDP and Real GDP 1929-2022.” Statista, 24 July 2024, www.statista.com/statistics/1031678/gdp-and-real-gdp-united-states-1930-2019/.

[xviii] US Embassy and Consulates in Russia. “World War II Allies: U.S. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945.” US Embassy and Consulates in Russia, 10 May 2020, ru.usembassy.gov/world-war-ii-allies-u-s-lend-lease-to-the-soviet-union-1941-1945/.

[xix] Beyer, Greg. “Battle of Kursk: The Largest Tank Battle in History.” The Collector, 31 Jan. 2024, www.thecollector.com/battle-of-kursk/.

[xx] Samsonov, A. M., et al. “History of the USSR in Three Parts. Part III: From the Beginning of the Great Patriotic War to the Present Day.” Translated by Maximilian Schlossberg, Internet Archive, 14 Dec. 2020, archive.org/details/historyussrthreeparts3/page/1/mode/2up?q=102%2C500, p. 65.

[xxi] Samsonov, A. M., et al. “History of the USSR in Three Parts. Part III: From the Beginning of the Great Patriotic War to the Present Day.” Translated by Maximilian Schlossberg, Internet Archive, 14 Dec. 2020, archive.org/details/historyussrthreeparts3/page/1/mode/2up?q=102%2C500, p. 65.

[xxii] “The Battle of Kursk: The Largest Tank Battle in History.” Sky HISTORY TV Channel, www.history.co.uk/article/the-battle-of-kursk-the-largest-tank-battle-in-history. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.

[xxiii] “Battle of Stalingrad.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 31 July 2025, www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Stalingrad.*