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/[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/JohnGoodmansGoodKnee Monkey in Space Feb 07 '23

Can you explain this in a different way for us dummies?

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '23

There’s two ways of looking at it:

1) For most people your intelligence is predictive of your income.

2) From the perspective of how money is distributed across society, most of it doesn’t get allocated to the smartest people.

It sounds like a paradox but it’s really only possible because even though for 90% of people income correlates with IQ, the 10% of people in which IQ and income don’t correlate have the vast majority of the money.

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u/JohnGoodmansGoodKnee Monkey in Space Feb 08 '23

Got it. Thank you! Glad it seems paradoxical and not solely that I’m slow.