>IQ
That's not relevant. There are no controls for black IQ because they almost uniformally exist at a socioeconomic strata beneath the average white. The concentration of the majority of the African-descended US population is in economically depressed areas. The culture is heavily controlled by white influence, and while it's not necessarily intended to undermine their image it certainly doesn't help it. Lil Wayne is not a good role model, Lil Wayne is not good PR he is a poor emissary to represent the majority of the black population. So what do we have as a product? We've got a population that is at a disproportionate disadvantage because their image has been smeared, because they grew up in the wrong cities, and they had bad role models elected for them. And there's people who break the mold despite that.
And since you can't grow a baby in a vacuum, the data is inexorably tainted. Not to mention that it decorrelates once you move out of the range of people with serious cognitive deficits, at least in terms of monetary success, with outliers showing 140IQ and $30k income per annum. And in terms of productivity there's too many arguments to be made to even begin considering how lackluster that argument is. Like productivity being tied to income, and that income isn't correlated with IQ, thus IQ can't be determined to have a correlation with productivity, right?
>liberal free-market utopia
We're a psuedo-fascist democracy. Since the first time the government elected to choose a company to even acknowledge we departed from the liberal ideal. Corporations being people? Big fascist move there. But yeah, you keep laboring under that impression.
>growth, innovation, future-oriented
Maybe we've figured out, collectively, that shit is fucked. That the finite world can't provide each generation consecutively with the same allotment of resources and the tangible decline in quality of life that we're already suffering is enough to push most everyone out of the reproduction cycle, voluntarily or not. Maybe people are (literally) sick from the constant goading we receive from our "culture" which is little more than emotionally appealing marketing in the vast majority of cases. It's a dissatisfying and vacuous sphere of garbage.
To the point of innovation, we're hilariously stagnant in every aspect. Always have been.
Future orientation is what allowed the communist revolution to justify the killing of millions. Future orientation is what the Nazi party used to justify their actions. We need to look to the now.