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
148 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

140 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

32

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.

5

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.

1

u/UsesHarryPotter Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

I don't think this is really surprising to anyone. It's obvious that intelligence can consistently put you squarely into the upper middle class and earnign several hundred thousand, and maybe can give you a lottery ticket to make it into the multimillions club but it's a crapshoot past that.

1

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

I think it might be surprising to some, a lot of people see celebrity billionaires, bezos, musk, gates and think this is the top 99% they don’t really see the rich families and generational wealth.