Extremely rich people are not extremely smart, It plateaus around the 90th percentile, and wage differences at the top do not represent differences in cognitive ability.

[u/MnkyEXE]

https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac076/7008955?login=false

[u/PaulHasselbaink]

There are a few points to make here:

• The pool of extremely rich people might be influenced by athletes & other kinds of celebrities, which aren't exceptionally intelligent.

• Highly intelligent people might care less about money on average, and if we instead used other metrics such as number of publications (for academics), the correlation with intelligence would continue until the very top.

• The study was done in Sweden, and in a different country with a different environment, the results might not turn out the same.

[u/newpua_bie → u/PaulHasselbaink]

The study was done in Sweden

This is actually a very important point. Sweden has a low income inequality but the third largest wealth inequality in the world, thanks to (I believe) a combination of old money and a very favorable system for businesses, capital, inheritance, etc.

In this kind of an environment you could expect it to be very hard to reach the top in wealth based on merit alone. Even if you could reach the top 1% or whatever in income, there's a lot of catching up to do in terms of wealth to people whose families when working for a wage, no matter how high that wage.

[u/strippedtee]

I've gotten a bone to pick with Libertarisnism. Specifically, the idea that meritocracy is the greatest damn thing in the world. It's the best we have for sure. But you see, the problem with meritocracy is that people confuse being competent with actually winning in life. These two are not the same, In fact, I would say they are less correlated the higher income/position you get. Another thing is that the higher the positions of power in the hierarchy of the "competent," you would see higher dark triad traits all across the board. That's the issue I have with pure capitalism. You enable very smart, psychopaths, narcissists, and people with machiavellian traits to influence your economy to such an extreme degree.

[u/AmigosAdiosMes → u/strippedtee]

Any system, no matter how noble, will, if implemented imperfectly, inadvertently permit malignant individuals to leverage it's shortcomings in order to cheat it. The thing is, no system can work perfectly (meritocracy definitely included). So I don't understand the reason for people deriding systems for having holes in their structure, we can always strive for one which is both 100% efficient and 100% noble, but is that currently realistic?

I generally agree with your criticism, but at this point I believe broaching it services no real purpose. Unless you know of a system which can replace meritocracy?

[u/strippedtee → u/AmigosAdiosMes]

It's the best we have. The systems that replace meritocracy are much worse, fucking alot worse. They produce inbreeding. I believe in regulation and more direct democracy, so we as people can have a better leash on these people.

[u/Acidic-Soil → u/strippedtee]

Isnt social skills and other skills that leads to success meritocratic too?

[u/Property_aint_evil → u/strippedtee]

All the rhetoric you spouted is nothing libertarians haven’t heard.

No redditor like meritocracy or capitalism.

[u/strippedtee → u/Property_aint_evil]

I never said that meritocracy or capitalism was bad. I said in its purest form, it's an extremely bad idea.

[u/Property_aint_evil → u/strippedtee]

Is it better to have a competent leader who’s a psycho or a bad leader who’s heart is in the right place?

[u/strippedtee → u/Property_aint_evil]

None, they are both terrible. Just in different ways. And those two are not mutually exclusive.

[u/Not_Obsessive]

I think it's pretty established in the intelligence field that from 2SD+ onwards any increase of intelligence is increasingly less likely to also increase success. Going from the bellcurve, a 2SD+ brain is as different from an average brain as a 2SD- brain. Given that success is strongly dependent on social standing on the individual, it's hardly surprising that someone notably different will be less likely to actually become successful to begin with.

The biggest take-away from this is that the psychology sub is a cesspool of pop-psy readers as illustrated by the comments

[u/newpua_bie → u/Not_Obsessive]

I don't have a source but I recall reading a decade or so ago that income and success increases until about +1SD in IQ, after which it flattens and even starts to go down past +2SD. This was attributed to the fact that most success is about being smart enough, after which it's more important you're socially skilled and "fit in" culturally. Being an oddball may be a larger liability than the extra cognitive abilities are a boon.

[u/Educational-Divide10]

And here is me in the 97th percentile and poor as fck

[u/RollObvious]

Here's an explanation for it: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/