But even if they were the latter, that's no guarantee that they would be a good way of measuring intelligence.
If I keep you up and prevent you from sleeping for 5 days straight, and then give you an IQ test, I didn't test your intelligence in its actual potential. And if I pitted you against a well rested person, the IQ difference doesn't necessarily measure any real difference in intelligence.
Similarly, if one kid A is brought up in a nurturing family, loved, well fed, well treated medically, educated, surrounded by people reading books etc, compared to a kid B from a poor family, with absent parents working all the time, starving occasionally from lack of money, with no intellectual stimulation and role models, etc -- measuring their respective IQ doesn't tell you whether kid A is inherently smarter than B, nor does it tell that kid B is poorer because it has less IQ...
Actually, they were meant to be both consistent with "Inverting cause and effect" and in my position's favour.
My position isn't that poor areas can't possibly fare lower in IQ tests than richer areas.
It is that (1) IQ tests are not good indicators of human potential (or even of intelligence), (2) IQ tests are biased against poorer people and cultures, (3) poorer people aren't poor because of low IQ, if anything it's the opposite (both in that such tests are stacked against poorer people with less education, and because poverty related stress, lack of nutrition etc, can stall development and thus make you fare worse in cognitive tests, in ways that the exact same person, genetics-wise, wouldn't if they had a richer upbringing).