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Competence is the ability to do something (a goal) successfully or efficiently. IQ measures the ability to perform abstract reasoning tasks successfully. Consc

Competence is the ability to do something (a goal) successfully or efficiently. IQ measures the ability to perform abstract reasoning tasks successfully. Conscientiousness measures the willingness and desire to perform one's duties well. Additionally, among people that earned their wealth, the fact that they are wealthy demonstrates that they achieved their goal of becoming wealthy. These all indicate competence to me. Wealth, in general, can also be imagined as a state where one's needs are met, which is (for people that earned their wealth) almost always closely related to having achieved certain goals. I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively. Bear in mind that this is talking about populations as a whole- correlations are something we can tease out via sociological studies, and experiments are few and far between. There are facts about human nature that we will never prove conclusively, but to be an effective agent in the world, you should try to learn things about people that cannot be proven. Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.

JohnFen 7y ago
> I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively. The line of reasoning makes sense. My only doubt comes from my own personal observations: I've never personally noticed a correlation between income and IQ.
- __s 7y ago
  You may have a selection bias towards some level of IQ. Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's? It's hard to say -- I'm basing this on my lifetime experience. Across that time span, the bulk of the people I knew have ranged (at various times) from "dirt poor" to "the 1%". Memory can be a tricky thing, of course, and I'm naturally speaking subjectively (and therefore not with statistical significance), but I never noticed a smaller percentage of high IQ people in the dirt poor group, nor a greater percentage in the wealthy group. The breakdown has always seems pretty constant across socioeconomic levels to me. But it also depends on what you count as "intelligence". I have noticed that the higher you get on the socioeconomic ladder, the more "socially intelligent" people tend to be. But specifying IQ as a measuring stick excludes most of the other forms of intelligence, including social intelligence.

JohnFen 7y ago

> I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively. The line of reasoning makes sense. My only doubt comes from my own personal observations: I've never personally noticed a correlation between income and IQ.

__s 7y ago
You may have a selection bias towards some level of IQ. Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's? It's hard to say -- I'm basing this on my lifetime experience. Across that time span, the bulk of the people I knew have ranged (at various times) from "dirt poor" to "the 1%". Memory can be a tricky thing, of course, and I'm naturally speaking subjectively (and therefore not with statistical significance), but I never noticed a smaller percentage of high IQ people in the dirt poor group, nor a greater percentage in the wealthy group. The breakdown has always seems pretty constant across socioeconomic levels to me. But it also depends on what you count as "intelligence". I have noticed that the higher you get on the socioeconomic ladder, the more "socially intelligent" people tend to be. But specifying IQ as a measuring stick excludes most of the other forms of intelligence, including social intelligence.