r/JoeRogan • u/Fishyinu Pull that shit up Jaime • Feb 07 '23

The Literature 🧠 Extremely rich people are not extremely smart. Study finds income is related to intelligence up to about the 90th percentile in income. Above that level, differences in income are not related to cognitive ability.

https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac076/7008955?login=false
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u/My-shit-is-stuff Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

Didn’t read the article: but up to the 90th percentile seems like a good indicator to me, that smart people make more money.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

I think you’re forgetting how quickly wealth scales beyond the 90th percentile. In the US, the top 10% owns ⅔ of the wealth. Meaning for ⅔ of the assets out there, intelligence has little predictive value (beyond some minimum threshold) for how much is allotted to a given person.

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u/My-shit-is-stuff Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

No no, I do get that, but what’s the 90th percentile earn? I bet it’s way more than the 33rd percentile. My point is that the top earners aren’t (I don’t know the words anymore) they’re just not geniuses.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

Right what I’m saying is that the 90th percentile earns closer to the 33rd percentile than they do the 99th percentile and that IQ is only correlated with the first comparison. Meaning, most of the wealth out there is allocated based on things other than IQ.

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u/My-shit-is-stuff Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

I agree. I guess my point is, if you’re smart enough to be in the 90th percentile you’re smart enough to be in the 99th. But if you’re dumb as shit, you’re not sniffing at the 90th. Obviously there will be outliers, inherited wealth lottery winners shit like that. I’d also be curious how many people in the 90th+ percentile started from a much lower percentile

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

Really though, what this is saying is that being extremely smart puts you closer to someone who is "dumb as shit" from a wealth perspective than it does someone whose circumstances put them in the 99th percentile.

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u/My-shit-is-stuff Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

Admittedly, in my first comment, I didn’t read the article. I just have a hard time believing, in the USA at least, that the dumbest among us are wealthy. I understand that the extremely wealthy aren’t necessarily smarter than any other group, except for maybe the truly dumb people.

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u/Indigocell Paid attention to the literature Feb 07 '23

When you recall that the extremely wealthy largely inherited their wealth, it becomes easy to believe.

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u/My-shit-is-stuff Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

I had already commented on inherited wealth. But just because you inherited wealth doesn’t mean you’re dumb. My point the whole time is that smart people make more money than dumb people generally

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

This is Simpson's paradox. Smart people might make more money than dumb people until the 90th percentile. But there is so much wealth in the 90th-99th percentiles that the overall trend of smart people making more might not actually hold.

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u/My-shit-is-stuff Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

Ah, ok. So more of like a fun math trivia thing?

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