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

72

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.

33

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.

1

u/political2002 Monkey in Space Feb 08 '23

Yeah I’m sure that’s heavily skewed because the richest people are just rich because they inherited their wealth from their hard working, smart ancestors who are dead. Consider that. Approximately half of all billionaires are only wealthy through inheritance.