10 ms·

Why Aren't More Highly Intelligent People Rich?

49 points by RickJWagner 7y ago

motohagiography 7y ago
Wealth is just responsibility, and if outlier intelligence people are underrepresented among those who choose to accumulate responsibility, this should come as no surprise to anyone. Most extra-intelligent people choose the freedom to solve problems and to be stimulated intellectually, which is an orthogonal concern to taking responsibility, risk, credit, command, and dividends. I divide intelligent from smart as the difference between a capacity for abstraction and the ability to get what one wants. Lots of smart people are of medium intelligence, and lots of highly intelligent people are not very smart at all. What I wish I could teach is that, smart is an outcome, intelligence is an attitude, and genius is an effect.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Wealth is just responsibility I don't understand what you mean by this.
  - motohagiography 7y ago
    It just means you are responsible for assets. When you choose to take responsibility for things, you become wealthier. It's the same thing.
CJefferson 7y ago
I have read the article, and I feel is missed one obvious possible thing. Maybe highly intelligent people don't care about being rich? Certainly reaching a "comfortable" income has value, but beyond that there is a limit. I am an AI researcher in University, so I guess under some measures I might come up as "highly intelligent" (whatever that actually means). I'm fairly sure (based on emails I keep getting) I could go into industry and earn much more money. However, the cost/benefit ratio to me isn't worth it.
- Stubb 7y ago
  Bingo, we have a winner! Speaking for myself, I'm at a point where I'm making enough money and have been making decisions to increase my free time. Things like working 100% from home so that I don't waste time commuting and turning down job offers that would pay more because they'd cut into leisure time. An extra $50k/year (or whatever) wouldn't be worth an additional hour of work per day to me.
  - surething123 7y ago
    Your time must sure be valuable, at roughly $192 an hour ;)
    - rocmcd 7y ago
      Time is the most valuable thing there is.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - Stubb 7y ago
      The marginal cost of my time when I'm already making enough money is expensive as fuck.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        This entirely. For context, I’m not referring to SV software engineer salary just normal big city America. I know a guy who probably now makes a little more than I do on his main job, is my age, but has been saving and investing much more consistently. He’s always doing side gigs for $50 - $70/hour. Which is really nothing for a software engineer even in my city and much less than he would be making as a full time contractor. When an opportunity like that comes up for me to “make extra money”. I always turn them down even at much higher rates. Anything we can’t get with my relatively average salary and my wife working we don’t need. I enjoy my time way too much. I don’t think I would work a contract that paid the equivalent of twice my salary as a side job.
thorin 7y ago
It's quite probable that they are interested in things that don't directly relate to making money. I know many senior researchers with Phd's in the UK who get paid something like 30-40K GBP - I don't know the exact figure but that's about right. They could probably earn at least 4 times that if they worked in banking or accounting but that doesn't interest them. Often they aren't even aware it is a possibility. So it's more a question of motivation rather than intellect as with many things in life.
ArtWomb 7y ago
Conversely, it seems, only the world's richest are some of the world's smartest https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/ https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/
- paganel 7y ago
  Not so sure about that. Apart from George Soros I don’t know of any multi-billionaire with whom you could have an interesting conversation about the pre-Socratics, the whys and whens Antiquity “fell” (my bet is on the early 600s in the time of Heraclius) or how interesting some of the Huguenots were when they were writing about killing tyrants. Most of the billionaires are rightfully more interested in expanding or at least keeping their wealth, and that is orthogonal with knowing and talking about really interesting stuff. But that is old news already, Plato had written about it ~2,400 years ago.
  - tomp 7y ago
    You've just highlighted some historical facts. There's people (e.g. myself) that find most history profoundly boring, and instead are interested by future, politics, psychology. The conversation between Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein on the latter's podcast was extremely profoundly interesting and hugely elevated Thiel as a deep thinker in my mind. Just an example.
  - orbifold 7y ago
    The smartest people I know are mathematicians or physicists most of them couldn’t care less about any of the historical narratives you‘ve just mentioned.
    - paganel 7y ago
      Maths and physics is just “techne” stuff, it has been here for ~13 billion years, they’ll probably still “be” here for another 13 billion years after we’re gone, while on the other hand humans are a lot more interesting. Again, read your Plato or start getting to know more interesting people, not only “technicians”.
- 7y ago
hyper_reality 7y ago
The crux of this article is just repeating some researchers finding that: > Innate intelligence plays, at best, a 1 to 2 percent role in a child's future success. Instead, financial success is correlated with conscientiousness: Self-discipline, perseverance, and diligence. Which is interesting research, but the article doesn't mention the huge role that being born to a rich family and having good opportunities plays. By framing this as "hard work pays" rather than "talent and intelligence pays", they are missing the elephant in the room.
- humanrebar 7y ago
  The article prominently mentions partner choice, which is different than hard work. If your partner is on meth or likes to commit felonies, you probably won't become rich soon.
  - turk73 7y ago
    Highly intelligent, but partner choice is what cemented our wealth. I'm not sure being super smart is anything but a liability, honestly. I had terrible social anxiety for most of my youth and into my 20s. I managed to mostly break out of it by recognizing the bad patterns and working to break them. Demons? I got 'em. But am living proof that people can change.
  - Broken_Hippo 7y ago
    Even drug abuse - or felonies - seriously differs depending on if you are rich or poor. A poor person needing rehab might only have NA to rely on because it is free and allows both parents to watch children: A rich person can likely pay for an inpatient facility and child care. Even before rehab, the poorer person's meth habit is going to take up a larger percentage of the family finances, adding additional stress. The effect of a meth habit really depends on how rich one is when it starts. A similar thing happens for felonies. IIRC, simply being poor makes it more likely that you commit felonies and more likely that you get caught for others. The richer person can do their cocaine in relative privacy, even if they are outdoors in their own yard. The poor apartment dweller doesn't have such luxuries. Divorce is also an issue: I've met multiple folks that stayed married to their partner simply because they couldn't afford the fees to get divorced, let alone think about a lawyer if they felt they needed one. Both have stress, but they have vastly different tools available to help them out with the situation.
malux85 7y ago
Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean industriousness, by my observation many highly intelligent people are (almost by definition) curious and lack the focus required to monazite in a capitalistic society. And I know this will get downvoted, mostly by the people I'm talking about : If you're still working a day job where you swap your time for money, you are not highly intelligent, maybe intelligent, but not highly. Jobs are for suckers, automate your wealth generation.
- barrkel 7y ago
  What if you enjoy what you do and get a sense of gratification from working alongside other people and being paid for it? When I spend my time at work, I don't actually feel like I'm selling my time; I feel like I'm actualised as who I am, what I am, and doing things that matter, and the company shows its appreciation via my bank account. Some of my coworkers are wealthy from previous employment in finance industry, but they still work here because they enjoy it, it keeps them connected with everything. One guy in particular implemented hedging and arbitrage strategies over various cryptocurrency exchanges - he automated his wealth generation - but he's still with us working on machine learning when he's not out sailing.
claudeganon 7y ago
Fixation on money seems more something people obsessed with individual power pursue versus those driven by a desire for knowledge or understanding. Einstein was famously a socialist who refused an offer to become prime minister of Israel, for example.
julbaxter 7y ago
Being rich has more to do with inheritance (cultural, societal, material, financial and biological) than intelligence.
pablooliva 7y ago
How about why are not more rich people intelligent? From my limited experience I have found that the most outstanding characteristic of those who I have met/crossed paths with that are rich is not intelligence, but a lack of ethics/morals.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I wouldn’t go that far. I think it’s a combination of luck, demographics and being willing to sacrifice other things in life to become rich.
- fredsanford 7y ago
  My experince is close to yours but I would add empathy before ethics.
huherto 7y ago
I thought it was pretty much accepted that IQ is very important for success but it is not enough. Among the Big 5 personality traits, Conscientiousness is very important too. Conscientiousness includes (Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement striving, Self discipline, Deliberation). So it makes sense. You have to be Smart, Conscientious and Lucky.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I thought it was pretty much accepted that IQ is very important for success I don't think so. I think it's orthogonal to "success" (I'm assuming that by "success" here, you mean wealth). There are tons of people who are wealthy but not terribly bright, and there are tons of people who are bright but not wealthy. From my personal observation, it looks like the intelligence distribution is about the same in the set of "wealthy people" as in the set of "not wealthy people".
lolc 7y ago
Funny how the article doesn't even question the premise that all people want to get richer.
dschuetz 7y ago
Why are many rich people dumb? Because many of them just inherited their fortunes. That article isn't worth any time.
- icedchai 7y ago
  Inheriting a fortune takes luck. Maintaining that fortune takes skill. Look at many lottery winners.
mech1234 7y ago
This article is extremely brief and contradicts the more nuanced reality of a lot of published research. For people with higher intelligence, their income is generally higher. The correlation is strong, the effect size is large, and the research has replicated very well. Conscientiousness also correlates strongly positively with income in a similar way. This article seems to start with a baseline assumption of what "rich" means, but doesn't state what that assumption is. I imagine it is a pretty high bar and the article is essentially saying "successful moonshots come from all walks of life/ all IQ levels." Taleb has written on this topic and when he did it prompted a lot of discussion. He notes that above a certain IQ threshold, the correlation becomes lower, and uses this observation to dismiss the whole correlation. However, if you look at the scatterplots he uses in his own article, you start to realize how strong the relationship really is. I can't find his article yet, might be able to find it soon... https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... https://danielmiessler.com/blog/how-nassim-taleb-is-both-right-and-wrong-about-iq/ https://danielmiessler.com/blog/how-nassim-taleb-is-both-rig... >How important is intelligence to financial success? Using the NLSY79, which tracks a large group of young U.S. baby boomers, this research shows that each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year after holding a variety of factors constant. Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. Financial distress, such as problems paying bills, going bankrupt or reaching credit card limits, is related to IQ scores not linearly but instead in a quadratic relationship. This means higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.
- huherto 7y ago
  Yes, the article lacks clarity and detail. It almost makes you think that IQ is not important. When we know it very important. Necessary but not sufficient.
muki 7y ago
Maybe it's because the claim that the smartest, toughest, bestest people win in capitalism has little to no grounding in reality. The article is basically begging the question of what capitalist markets prefer in terms of "properties" its actors should "hold". I don't know of any evidence that contemporary capitalism rewards "intelligence" apart from pop cultural and ideological claims. In that sense, the conclusions presented are in no way "new" or "informative". It's just a restatement of a deeply seated wish that we could somehow explain away the largely immoral differences in the standard of living with some property suposedly outside of moral consideration (intelligence, gender, race - it doesn't really matter).
cityzen 7y ago
Maybe highly intelligent people aren’t as insecure as this self-proclaimed “influencer” author?
mdszy 7y ago
Maybe because the path to getting rich has literally nothing to do with intelligence and is 100% about being lucky?
- efdee 7y ago
  So all luck and nothing else? Do these people just sit in the grass all day waiting for luck to deliver the money into their laps?
  - mdszy 7y ago
    That's literally what happens to those whose riches are the result of inheritance, which is the source of a great many rich people, so yes.
    - efdee 7y ago
      You're saying that's the only way to be rich. That's incredibly shortsighted.
      - krapp 7y ago
        They're saying that's the most common way to be rich, which is true. Even among entrepreneurs, many were either born with access to wealth, married into wealth or both.
        efdee 7y ago
        No, they're saying it's the only way to be rich. That's what 100% means.
      - mdszy 7y ago
        It's the absolute easiest and probably most common way to be rich.
        efdee 7y ago
puranjay 7y ago
This article assumes that the pursuit of wealth is a universal trait and not, you know, a byproduct of culture and upbringing
- oerpli 7y ago
  I think it is more some innate drive some people have and (most) other people don't. In my family I was always the only one that placed any importance on pursuing wealth. I would say that my upbringing wasn't that vastly different from my sisters. Also from what I gathered at lunch with my colleagues, most of them don't really care about a few k more per year and would prefer benefits like "flying business".
fallingfrog 7y ago
When I was in my 20’s I went to interview for a job as a carpet cleaner. They gave me a spiel to learn (everyone needs the “deep fiber treatment”) and then some paperwork to sign. But, reading the fine print, I discovered that I was to use my own car, I was to pay for the gas, I was to pay to rent the equipment, I was to pay for the cleaning supplies, I was to do all the work, and at the end of the day I was going to get a ten percent commission. That was the moment I understood capitalism. Intelligence is not what makes you rich; neither is hard work. What makes you rich is skimming a large percentage of the value of the labor of a large group of people. That’s how you end up with billions of dollars. Not by being smart (although I’m sure it doesn’t hurt) and certainly not by being scrupulous. By having leverage. By owning the means of production. Now as developers or techies we own a little bit of the means of production in the form of skills we have in our heads. But believe me when I say that they’re coming for that too in the form of intellectual property, software patents, and noncompetes. All of those things depress wages because they take the means of production out of our control. It’s really important to be able to see this. Money is a form of power and power is about leverage. Not intelligence or hard work.
- cvwright 7y ago
  What owning the means of production gets you, typically, is debt. Leveraging that debt to create something of value to others — that is what can make you rich. Otherwise you just go broke in a big way.
nils-m-holm 7y ago
As my sociology professor noted, "These are the three most common ways to become rich, in order of decreasing probability: fraud, inheritance, luck. In particular note the absence of hard work." -- Or intelligence, I would like to add.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Yeah but your socialism professor is approaching that topic with a certain amount of bias, aren't they.
  - bediger4000 7y ago
    That's not really in evidence. "Sociology" and "socialism" aren't even close, so you're kind of doing some propagandizing without examining the facts.
chunkyslink 7y ago
My guess without reading the article is, that money bores them ?
Radle 7y ago
I am repeating smart comments from other people but there are some reasons why such astounding results happen: Let's look at the article >Like how much the difference between my income and yours, for example, is based on our relative IQs. ... >But Heckman's research reveals something else entirely. Innate intelligence plays, at best, a 1 to 2 percent role in a child's future success. Intelligent people might have a different understanding of success than the author. Further down in the article: >But what you can control is how conscientuous you are. How diligent you are. How persistent you are. > >How hard you work. And there's one of our Elephants. For me it seems obvious that working hard can only make you happy if you love your work. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that smarter people tend to optimize for their own happiness, health, well being etc. Or of that of their family and friends instead of "working hard". Or to put it like @CJefferson > Maybe highly intelligent people don't care about being rich? Another Elephant was pointed out very well by @hyper_reality >but the article doesn't mention the huge role that being born to a rich family and having good opportunities plays We live in a time of income inequality like no other generation ever before us. Having the right parents is responsible for most of your success. Overall the article seems to have only one message. "Work harder or you don't deserve success." That's terrible and terrifying because it implies that if you are not successful. Then it's your fault for not working hard enough. At this point we should go back to the start. Smart people are more likely to understand how incredible rigged this whole thing is. So smart people avoid playing this rigged game. They don't compete with you over financial success, they are playing a different and more fulfilling game. I don't know if you guys had this, but when i was in school there were always these stupid "games" in the break, where the bullies would call anyone who didn't participate as a looser in terms of the game. It never made any sense to go to other people do something and say "I got your", "You lost", when they didn't even play the game. This didn't change when we grew up and it makes sense to handle authors of articles like this one like we did back in school. Ignore them, play our own games, don't invite them for it.
- mapcars 7y ago
  >We live in a time of income inequality like no other generation ever before us Income inequality always been there, I don't think we are in some special situation compared to let's say ancient Egypt or something. >Having the right parents is responsible for most of your success Was it not like this pretty much all the time?
petra 7y ago
It kinda makes sense. There's a personality trait that measures "working hard" called conscientiousness. It's stable and hard to impossible to change among adults. But it's possible that's it's learned in childhood. So a smarter child will need to exert less/little work in getting good enough grades. So he may develop less of that personality trait, and become less hardworking. And that shows. BTW, choosing a more interesting job instead of a higher paying one - like many mentioned here - is directly related to that trait: it's about choosing play over work, basically.
jokoon 7y ago
1. Because wealth depends on your social network. Humans are a social species, the more social you are, the better status you have. That's how business works. Intelligence is often the inverse of being social. 2. Even if one is more intelligent, he/she is not that much more intelligent. Of course intelligence matters, especially in certain fields, but overall intelligence will not allow people to gain an edge, or at least not an edge that will make a big enough difference. 3. Wealth and status stems rather from certain moral values, rather than abilities. Of course modern society tends to value new ideas and innovation, but human societies, in general, still favor a certain set of traditional values that make it harder for intelligent people to get favors. And in general, innovation breeds change, and change always brings its share of problems. You can look for anti-intellectualism. Not to mention that intelligent people don't really seek wealth at all, they know it's much preferable to seek recognition from their peers.
- arberavdullahu 7y ago
  I don't agree completely with you regarding 1. You don't have to be the most social person in order to get a job at say FAANG and after that your resume talks for you.
- rofo1 7y ago
  Why is it preferably to seen recognition from your peers? If anything, money buys more than simple recognition. Also about 3): which moral values are you referring to, regarding to wealth?
- bediger4000 7y ago
  > but human societies, in general, still favor a certain set of traditional values that make it harder for intelligent people to get favors. What set of values is that? Is this across western developed economies, or as you seem to imply, across all societies?
beardedman 7y ago
Because money is not the only worthy cause.
social_quotient 7y ago
Should we be thinking about this a bit more broadly? Why aren’t more highly intelligent people more accomplished? The emphasis on money is fine but I think a more productive conversation is why do we find super smart/intelligent people not doing notable things? I think as a society we owe it to each other to push the boundaries of what we are gifted at/in as a way of contributing and building some concept of legacy. Again money is a single metric which many people either don’t care about or hit a local maximum on but what about the other possible metrics? Thoughts?
roenxi 7y ago
If intelligence was enough to build modern society then we wouldn't have needed years 1AD thru 2020. We could have skipped straight to the internet age when the likes of Socrates and Confucius walked the earth. Assuming we reward people in fashion correlated to their material contribution it is clear that intelligence isn't the critical measure. We do and should reward based on a best-effort guess to estimate how much someone materially improved the lives of others. An intelligent person might be able to do a better job but it isn't obviously better than any other personality attribute.
huffmsa 7y ago
Because you need to have the capacity for intelligence, and the capacity and desire to be good at business (accumulate wealth). No one asks why there aren't more highly intelligent people with massive "successful" families. It's non-transitive
Apreche 7y ago
Because we don't live in a meritocracy where we give more power and wealth to the smartest people (by whatever flawed measure of intelligence). We give more power and wealth to the luckiest, most selfish, and most ambitious people.
krn 7y ago
At least in Europe, people enjoy living in a society where everyone is more or less economically equal, and there are relatively few benefits of trying to become a multimillionaire. Unlike in the US, wealth usually brings more social isolation than public admiration. When people think they want to be rich, what they actually want is to have more freedom and certainty in their lives. In such an environment, there is much less pressure to take risks. Especially, for highly intelligent people who feel safe about their jobs and happy about their work-life balance.
- linuxlizard 7y ago
  That sounds marvelous. Is Europe hiring?
mfer 7y ago
I was recently reading about intelligence and intelligence tests. Who defines what as things that make someone intelligent? For example, we have a separate category for emotional intelligence because that's not traditionally been considered intelligence. What's measured and pushed for in intelligence isn't really the full range of intelligence. Lost in there are things, like emotional intelligence, that enable people to more easily move toward their goals. Someone can be wicked smart with general knowledge, spacial relations, and other more common things measured with intelligence but lack in the people skills needed to make their ideas a reality. Intelligence is complicated. What we measure isn't all their is to intelligence. What we prize in IQ isn't everything that's useful for intelligence. /rant
icedchai 7y ago
More folks need to read "The Millionaire Next Door." I read it in my early 20's and it was an eye opener. Becoming "rich" (upper middle class, single digit millions, don't have to worry about working, not "billionaire" rich) is more of a matter of living below your means, saving, and investing consistently. You can take luck out of the equation if you have time. Unfortunately most people are too old before they realize this (if ever)...
dominick 7y ago
People with the highest levels of intelligence are generally autistic. In my area of the world, all the software companies are terrible. The quality of the staff and the quality of the software are both terrible. This really doesn't just apply to software, it applies to everything. Cars before Tesla were so bad at everything. It is clear all these companies don't have particularly good staff in high positions. I don't know about car companies, but in terms of the software companies here, the process goes like this: 1. A manager in a particular industry commissions the building of software to solve a problem in that industry 2. The manager has a lot of industry knowledge due to their position and the time they have spent in the industry 3. The software is made, a company is then spun out of that software 4. The founder doesn't really even know much about software. As they were a manager, they were more about social connections and people 5. They hire more social people There is nothing in this process that relates to intelligence. The intelligent person could theoretically create much better software, but they have no industry knowledge, and can't even get hired because they are not social.
Hnrobert42 7y ago
This article largely espouses the bs that wealth reflects hard work. The corollary is that the poor are just lazy. While the author throws in a few scientific studies, do not be fooled by the veneer of rigor. Is hard work the primary determinant of success? Maybe. But this article offers no real support for that position.
krisroadruck 7y ago
Having worked in digital marketing for over a decade, I've been exposed to hundreds of business models. The percent of them making someone rich on the back of selling scammy bullshit to stupid/gullible people is disturbingly high. I've long privately lamented that apparently to have a good shot at being rich, you must be perfectly ok with being a shitty person. I feel like highly intelligent people probably have a harder time talking themselves into making unnecessary piles of money by screwing people over. Note: This seems far more prevalent in the B2C non-software non-vc-backed space. But then I expect there are a lot more individual millionaires being minted from those types of businesses than from silicon valley SaaS startups.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I've long privately lamented that apparently to have a good shot at being rich, you must be perfectly ok with being a shitty person. It's broad-brushing, of course, but I think there's more than a little truth to this.
payne92 7y ago
For the subset of highlight intelligent people that care about being rich (not all do): there's also luck. The luck vs skill ratio of life is often skewed toward the "luck" side more than many of us want to admit.
ScottFree 7y ago
Calvin Coolidge said it better: "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
JohnFen 7y ago
I have never noticed a correlation between being wealthy and being intelligent. I think it's clear that intelligence is not necessary to obtain wealth, and being intelligent is not sufficient to obtain wealth. What's needed (as the article dances around) is a strong desire to become wealthy. It has to be your overt goal. Most people (of any intelligence level) don't have that desire or goal.
- Ambele 7y ago
  What correlation have you noticed?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I'm not sure that I understand what you're asking. I was saying that I don't see a correlation between wealth and intelligence. I also stated that I do see a correlation between being wealthy and making attaining wealth your primary goal. Are you asking about something else?
    - Ambele 7y ago
      Hey John, I was providing you with an opportunity to share some of your wisdom regarding correlations you have noticed. Presumably a number of intelligent readers are curious about wealth given they clicked on the title of this article. Correlations do not always establish causations but causations sometimes require expensive studies to establish.
paulus_magnus2 7y ago
The same reason why intelligent people don't win lottery jackpots? [can explain my reasoning if needed]
chriscatoya 7y ago
Nassim Nicholas Taleb would argue this isn’t even relevant: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
floppiplopp 7y ago
Being rich has nothing to do with intelligence. It is a matter of luck, luck to be born in the right family, in the right country, at the right time, luck to have the right connections, and luck to have a lot of starting capital.

49 points by RickJWagner 7y ago

Wealth is just responsibility, and if outlier intelligence people are underrepresented among those who choose to accumulate responsibility, this should come as no surprise to anyone. Most extra-intelligent people choose the freedom to solve problems and to be stimulated intellectually, which is an orthogonal concern to taking responsibility, risk, credit, command, and dividends. I divide intelligent from smart as the difference between a capacity for abstraction and the ability to get what one wants. Lots of smart people are of medium intelligence, and lots of highly intelligent people are not very smart at all. What I wish I could teach is that, smart is an outcome, intelligence is an attitude, and genius is an effect.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Wealth is just responsibility I don't understand what you mean by this.
- motohagiography 7y ago
  It just means you are responsible for assets. When you choose to take responsibility for things, you become wealthier. It's the same thing.

CJefferson 7y ago

I have read the article, and I feel is missed one obvious possible thing. Maybe highly intelligent people don't care about being rich? Certainly reaching a "comfortable" income has value, but beyond that there is a limit. I am an AI researcher in University, so I guess under some measures I might come up as "highly intelligent" (whatever that actually means). I'm fairly sure (based on emails I keep getting) I could go into industry and earn much more money. However, the cost/benefit ratio to me isn't worth it.

Stubb 7y ago
Bingo, we have a winner! Speaking for myself, I'm at a point where I'm making enough money and have been making decisions to increase my free time. Things like working 100% from home so that I don't waste time commuting and turning down job offers that would pay more because they'd cut into leisure time. An extra $50k/year (or whatever) wouldn't be worth an additional hour of work per day to me.
- surething123 7y ago
  Your time must sure be valuable, at roughly $192 an hour ;)
  - rocmcd 7y ago
    Time is the most valuable thing there is.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Stubb 7y ago
    The marginal cost of my time when I'm already making enough money is expensive as fuck.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      This entirely. For context, I’m not referring to SV software engineer salary just normal big city America. I know a guy who probably now makes a little more than I do on his main job, is my age, but has been saving and investing much more consistently. He’s always doing side gigs for $50 - $70/hour. Which is really nothing for a software engineer even in my city and much less than he would be making as a full time contractor. When an opportunity like that comes up for me to “make extra money”. I always turn them down even at much higher rates. Anything we can’t get with my relatively average salary and my wife working we don’t need. I enjoy my time way too much. I don’t think I would work a contract that paid the equivalent of twice my salary as a side job.

thorin 7y ago

It's quite probable that they are interested in things that don't directly relate to making money. I know many senior researchers with Phd's in the UK who get paid something like 30-40K GBP - I don't know the exact figure but that's about right. They could probably earn at least 4 times that if they worked in banking or accounting but that doesn't interest them. Often they aren't even aware it is a possibility. So it's more a question of motivation rather than intellect as with many things in life.

ArtWomb 7y ago

Conversely, it seems, only the world's richest are some of the world's smartest https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/ https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/

paganel 7y ago
Not so sure about that. Apart from George Soros I don’t know of any multi-billionaire with whom you could have an interesting conversation about the pre-Socratics, the whys and whens Antiquity “fell” (my bet is on the early 600s in the time of Heraclius) or how interesting some of the Huguenots were when they were writing about killing tyrants. Most of the billionaires are rightfully more interested in expanding or at least keeping their wealth, and that is orthogonal with knowing and talking about really interesting stuff. But that is old news already, Plato had written about it ~2,400 years ago.
- tomp 7y ago
  You've just highlighted some historical facts. There's people (e.g. myself) that find most history profoundly boring, and instead are interested by future, politics, psychology. The conversation between Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein on the latter's podcast was extremely profoundly interesting and hugely elevated Thiel as a deep thinker in my mind. Just an example.
- orbifold 7y ago
  The smartest people I know are mathematicians or physicists most of them couldn’t care less about any of the historical narratives you‘ve just mentioned.
  - paganel 7y ago
    Maths and physics is just “techne” stuff, it has been here for ~13 billion years, they’ll probably still “be” here for another 13 billion years after we’re gone, while on the other hand humans are a lot more interesting. Again, read your Plato or start getting to know more interesting people, not only “technicians”.
7y ago

hyper_reality 7y ago

The crux of this article is just repeating some researchers finding that: > Innate intelligence plays, at best, a 1 to 2 percent role in a child's future success. Instead, financial success is correlated with conscientiousness: Self-discipline, perseverance, and diligence. Which is interesting research, but the article doesn't mention the huge role that being born to a rich family and having good opportunities plays. By framing this as "hard work pays" rather than "talent and intelligence pays", they are missing the elephant in the room.

humanrebar 7y ago
The article prominently mentions partner choice, which is different than hard work. If your partner is on meth or likes to commit felonies, you probably won't become rich soon.
- turk73 7y ago
  Highly intelligent, but partner choice is what cemented our wealth. I'm not sure being super smart is anything but a liability, honestly. I had terrible social anxiety for most of my youth and into my 20s. I managed to mostly break out of it by recognizing the bad patterns and working to break them. Demons? I got 'em. But am living proof that people can change.
- Broken_Hippo 7y ago
  Even drug abuse - or felonies - seriously differs depending on if you are rich or poor. A poor person needing rehab might only have NA to rely on because it is free and allows both parents to watch children: A rich person can likely pay for an inpatient facility and child care. Even before rehab, the poorer person's meth habit is going to take up a larger percentage of the family finances, adding additional stress. The effect of a meth habit really depends on how rich one is when it starts. A similar thing happens for felonies. IIRC, simply being poor makes it more likely that you commit felonies and more likely that you get caught for others. The richer person can do their cocaine in relative privacy, even if they are outdoors in their own yard. The poor apartment dweller doesn't have such luxuries. Divorce is also an issue: I've met multiple folks that stayed married to their partner simply because they couldn't afford the fees to get divorced, let alone think about a lawyer if they felt they needed one. Both have stress, but they have vastly different tools available to help them out with the situation.

malux85 7y ago

Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean industriousness, by my observation many highly intelligent people are (almost by definition) curious and lack the focus required to monazite in a capitalistic society. And I know this will get downvoted, mostly by the people I'm talking about : If you're still working a day job where you swap your time for money, you are not highly intelligent, maybe intelligent, but not highly. Jobs are for suckers, automate your wealth generation.

barrkel 7y ago
What if you enjoy what you do and get a sense of gratification from working alongside other people and being paid for it? When I spend my time at work, I don't actually feel like I'm selling my time; I feel like I'm actualised as who I am, what I am, and doing things that matter, and the company shows its appreciation via my bank account. Some of my coworkers are wealthy from previous employment in finance industry, but they still work here because they enjoy it, it keeps them connected with everything. One guy in particular implemented hedging and arbitrage strategies over various cryptocurrency exchanges - he automated his wealth generation - but he's still with us working on machine learning when he's not out sailing.

claudeganon 7y ago

Fixation on money seems more something people obsessed with individual power pursue versus those driven by a desire for knowledge or understanding. Einstein was famously a socialist who refused an offer to become prime minister of Israel, for example.

julbaxter 7y ago

Being rich has more to do with inheritance (cultural, societal, material, financial and biological) than intelligence.

pablooliva 7y ago

How about why are not more rich people intelligent? From my limited experience I have found that the most outstanding characteristic of those who I have met/crossed paths with that are rich is not intelligence, but a lack of ethics/morals.

scarface74 7y ago
I wouldn’t go that far. I think it’s a combination of luck, demographics and being willing to sacrifice other things in life to become rich.
fredsanford 7y ago
My experince is close to yours but I would add empathy before ethics.

huherto 7y ago

I thought it was pretty much accepted that IQ is very important for success but it is not enough. Among the Big 5 personality traits, Conscientiousness is very important too. Conscientiousness includes (Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement striving, Self discipline, Deliberation). So it makes sense. You have to be Smart, Conscientious and Lucky.

JohnFen 7y ago
> I thought it was pretty much accepted that IQ is very important for success I don't think so. I think it's orthogonal to "success" (I'm assuming that by "success" here, you mean wealth). There are tons of people who are wealthy but not terribly bright, and there are tons of people who are bright but not wealthy. From my personal observation, it looks like the intelligence distribution is about the same in the set of "wealthy people" as in the set of "not wealthy people".

lolc 7y ago

Funny how the article doesn't even question the premise that all people want to get richer.

dschuetz 7y ago

Why are many rich people dumb? Because many of them just inherited their fortunes. That article isn't worth any time.

icedchai 7y ago
Inheriting a fortune takes luck. Maintaining that fortune takes skill. Look at many lottery winners.

mech1234 7y ago

This article is extremely brief and contradicts the more nuanced reality of a lot of published research. For people with higher intelligence, their income is generally higher. The correlation is strong, the effect size is large, and the research has replicated very well. Conscientiousness also correlates strongly positively with income in a similar way. This article seems to start with a baseline assumption of what "rich" means, but doesn't state what that assumption is. I imagine it is a pretty high bar and the article is essentially saying "successful moonshots come from all walks of life/ all IQ levels." Taleb has written on this topic and when he did it prompted a lot of discussion. He notes that above a certain IQ threshold, the correlation becomes lower, and uses this observation to dismiss the whole correlation. However, if you look at the scatterplots he uses in his own article, you start to realize how strong the relationship really is. I can't find his article yet, might be able to find it soon... https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... https://danielmiessler.com/blog/how-nassim-taleb-is-both-right-and-wrong-about-iq/ https://danielmiessler.com/blog/how-nassim-taleb-is-both-rig... >How important is intelligence to financial success? Using the NLSY79, which tracks a large group of young U.S. baby boomers, this research shows that each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year after holding a variety of factors constant. Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. Financial distress, such as problems paying bills, going bankrupt or reaching credit card limits, is related to IQ scores not linearly but instead in a quadratic relationship. This means higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.

huherto 7y ago
Yes, the article lacks clarity and detail. It almost makes you think that IQ is not important. When we know it very important. Necessary but not sufficient.

muki 7y ago

Maybe it's because the claim that the smartest, toughest, bestest people win in capitalism has little to no grounding in reality. The article is basically begging the question of what capitalist markets prefer in terms of "properties" its actors should "hold". I don't know of any evidence that contemporary capitalism rewards "intelligence" apart from pop cultural and ideological claims. In that sense, the conclusions presented are in no way "new" or "informative". It's just a restatement of a deeply seated wish that we could somehow explain away the largely immoral differences in the standard of living with some property suposedly outside of moral consideration (intelligence, gender, race - it doesn't really matter).

cityzen 7y ago

Maybe highly intelligent people aren’t as insecure as this self-proclaimed “influencer” author?

mdszy 7y ago

Maybe because the path to getting rich has literally nothing to do with intelligence and is 100% about being lucky?

efdee 7y ago
So all luck and nothing else? Do these people just sit in the grass all day waiting for luck to deliver the money into their laps?
- mdszy 7y ago
  That's literally what happens to those whose riches are the result of inheritance, which is the source of a great many rich people, so yes.
  - efdee 7y ago
    You're saying that's the only way to be rich. That's incredibly shortsighted.
    - krapp 7y ago
      They're saying that's the most common way to be rich, which is true. Even among entrepreneurs, many were either born with access to wealth, married into wealth or both.
      - efdee 7y ago
        No, they're saying it's the only way to be rich. That's what 100% means.
    - mdszy 7y ago
      It's the absolute easiest and probably most common way to be rich.
      - efdee 7y ago

puranjay 7y ago

This article assumes that the pursuit of wealth is a universal trait and not, you know, a byproduct of culture and upbringing

oerpli 7y ago
I think it is more some innate drive some people have and (most) other people don't. In my family I was always the only one that placed any importance on pursuing wealth. I would say that my upbringing wasn't that vastly different from my sisters. Also from what I gathered at lunch with my colleagues, most of them don't really care about a few k more per year and would prefer benefits like "flying business".

fallingfrog 7y ago

When I was in my 20’s I went to interview for a job as a carpet cleaner. They gave me a spiel to learn (everyone needs the “deep fiber treatment”) and then some paperwork to sign. But, reading the fine print, I discovered that I was to use my own car, I was to pay for the gas, I was to pay to rent the equipment, I was to pay for the cleaning supplies, I was to do all the work, and at the end of the day I was going to get a ten percent commission. That was the moment I understood capitalism. Intelligence is not what makes you rich; neither is hard work. What makes you rich is skimming a large percentage of the value of the labor of a large group of people. That’s how you end up with billions of dollars. Not by being smart (although I’m sure it doesn’t hurt) and certainly not by being scrupulous. By having leverage. By owning the means of production. Now as developers or techies we own a little bit of the means of production in the form of skills we have in our heads. But believe me when I say that they’re coming for that too in the form of intellectual property, software patents, and noncompetes. All of those things depress wages because they take the means of production out of our control. It’s really important to be able to see this. Money is a form of power and power is about leverage. Not intelligence or hard work.

cvwright 7y ago
What owning the means of production gets you, typically, is debt. Leveraging that debt to create something of value to others — that is what can make you rich. Otherwise you just go broke in a big way.

nils-m-holm 7y ago

As my sociology professor noted, "These are the three most common ways to become rich, in order of decreasing probability: fraud, inheritance, luck. In particular note the absence of hard work." -- Or intelligence, I would like to add.

huffmsa 7y ago
Yeah but your socialism professor is approaching that topic with a certain amount of bias, aren't they.
- bediger4000 7y ago
  That's not really in evidence. "Sociology" and "socialism" aren't even close, so you're kind of doing some propagandizing without examining the facts.

chunkyslink 7y ago

My guess without reading the article is, that money bores them ?

Radle 7y ago

I am repeating smart comments from other people but there are some reasons why such astounding results happen: Let's look at the article >Like how much the difference between my income and yours, for example, is based on our relative IQs. ... >But Heckman's research reveals something else entirely. Innate intelligence plays, at best, a 1 to 2 percent role in a child's future success. Intelligent people might have a different understanding of success than the author. Further down in the article: >But what you can control is how conscientuous you are. How diligent you are. How persistent you are. > >How hard you work. And there's one of our Elephants. For me it seems obvious that working hard can only make you happy if you love your work. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that smarter people tend to optimize for their own happiness, health, well being etc. Or of that of their family and friends instead of "working hard". Or to put it like @CJefferson > Maybe highly intelligent people don't care about being rich? Another Elephant was pointed out very well by @hyper_reality >but the article doesn't mention the huge role that being born to a rich family and having good opportunities plays We live in a time of income inequality like no other generation ever before us. Having the right parents is responsible for most of your success. Overall the article seems to have only one message. "Work harder or you don't deserve success." That's terrible and terrifying because it implies that if you are not successful. Then it's your fault for not working hard enough. At this point we should go back to the start. Smart people are more likely to understand how incredible rigged this whole thing is. So smart people avoid playing this rigged game. They don't compete with you over financial success, they are playing a different and more fulfilling game. I don't know if you guys had this, but when i was in school there were always these stupid "games" in the break, where the bullies would call anyone who didn't participate as a looser in terms of the game. It never made any sense to go to other people do something and say "I got your", "You lost", when they didn't even play the game. This didn't change when we grew up and it makes sense to handle authors of articles like this one like we did back in school. Ignore them, play our own games, don't invite them for it.

mapcars 7y ago
>We live in a time of income inequality like no other generation ever before us Income inequality always been there, I don't think we are in some special situation compared to let's say ancient Egypt or something. >Having the right parents is responsible for most of your success Was it not like this pretty much all the time?

petra 7y ago

It kinda makes sense. There's a personality trait that measures "working hard" called conscientiousness. It's stable and hard to impossible to change among adults. But it's possible that's it's learned in childhood. So a smarter child will need to exert less/little work in getting good enough grades. So he may develop less of that personality trait, and become less hardworking. And that shows. BTW, choosing a more interesting job instead of a higher paying one - like many mentioned here - is directly related to that trait: it's about choosing play over work, basically.

jokoon 7y ago

1. Because wealth depends on your social network. Humans are a social species, the more social you are, the better status you have. That's how business works. Intelligence is often the inverse of being social. 2. Even if one is more intelligent, he/she is not that much more intelligent. Of course intelligence matters, especially in certain fields, but overall intelligence will not allow people to gain an edge, or at least not an edge that will make a big enough difference. 3. Wealth and status stems rather from certain moral values, rather than abilities. Of course modern society tends to value new ideas and innovation, but human societies, in general, still favor a certain set of traditional values that make it harder for intelligent people to get favors. And in general, innovation breeds change, and change always brings its share of problems. You can look for anti-intellectualism. Not to mention that intelligent people don't really seek wealth at all, they know it's much preferable to seek recognition from their peers.

arberavdullahu 7y ago
I don't agree completely with you regarding 1. You don't have to be the most social person in order to get a job at say FAANG and after that your resume talks for you.
rofo1 7y ago
Why is it preferably to seen recognition from your peers? If anything, money buys more than simple recognition. Also about 3): which moral values are you referring to, regarding to wealth?
bediger4000 7y ago
> but human societies, in general, still favor a certain set of traditional values that make it harder for intelligent people to get favors. What set of values is that? Is this across western developed economies, or as you seem to imply, across all societies?

beardedman 7y ago

Because money is not the only worthy cause.

social_quotient 7y ago

Should we be thinking about this a bit more broadly? Why aren’t more highly intelligent people more accomplished? The emphasis on money is fine but I think a more productive conversation is why do we find super smart/intelligent people not doing notable things? I think as a society we owe it to each other to push the boundaries of what we are gifted at/in as a way of contributing and building some concept of legacy. Again money is a single metric which many people either don’t care about or hit a local maximum on but what about the other possible metrics? Thoughts?

roenxi 7y ago

If intelligence was enough to build modern society then we wouldn't have needed years 1AD thru 2020. We could have skipped straight to the internet age when the likes of Socrates and Confucius walked the earth. Assuming we reward people in fashion correlated to their material contribution it is clear that intelligence isn't the critical measure. We do and should reward based on a best-effort guess to estimate how much someone materially improved the lives of others. An intelligent person might be able to do a better job but it isn't obviously better than any other personality attribute.

huffmsa 7y ago

Because you need to have the capacity for intelligence, and the capacity and desire to be good at business (accumulate wealth). No one asks why there aren't more highly intelligent people with massive "successful" families. It's non-transitive

Apreche 7y ago

Because we don't live in a meritocracy where we give more power and wealth to the smartest people (by whatever flawed measure of intelligence). We give more power and wealth to the luckiest, most selfish, and most ambitious people.

krn 7y ago

At least in Europe, people enjoy living in a society where everyone is more or less economically equal, and there are relatively few benefits of trying to become a multimillionaire. Unlike in the US, wealth usually brings more social isolation than public admiration. When people think they want to be rich, what they actually want is to have more freedom and certainty in their lives. In such an environment, there is much less pressure to take risks. Especially, for highly intelligent people who feel safe about their jobs and happy about their work-life balance.

linuxlizard 7y ago
That sounds marvelous. Is Europe hiring?

mfer 7y ago

I was recently reading about intelligence and intelligence tests. Who defines what as things that make someone intelligent? For example, we have a separate category for emotional intelligence because that's not traditionally been considered intelligence. What's measured and pushed for in intelligence isn't really the full range of intelligence. Lost in there are things, like emotional intelligence, that enable people to more easily move toward their goals. Someone can be wicked smart with general knowledge, spacial relations, and other more common things measured with intelligence but lack in the people skills needed to make their ideas a reality. Intelligence is complicated. What we measure isn't all their is to intelligence. What we prize in IQ isn't everything that's useful for intelligence. /rant

icedchai 7y ago

More folks need to read "The Millionaire Next Door." I read it in my early 20's and it was an eye opener. Becoming "rich" (upper middle class, single digit millions, don't have to worry about working, not "billionaire" rich) is more of a matter of living below your means, saving, and investing consistently. You can take luck out of the equation if you have time. Unfortunately most people are too old before they realize this (if ever)...

dominick 7y ago

People with the highest levels of intelligence are generally autistic. In my area of the world, all the software companies are terrible. The quality of the staff and the quality of the software are both terrible. This really doesn't just apply to software, it applies to everything. Cars before Tesla were so bad at everything. It is clear all these companies don't have particularly good staff in high positions. I don't know about car companies, but in terms of the software companies here, the process goes like this: 1. A manager in a particular industry commissions the building of software to solve a problem in that industry 2. The manager has a lot of industry knowledge due to their position and the time they have spent in the industry 3. The software is made, a company is then spun out of that software 4. The founder doesn't really even know much about software. As they were a manager, they were more about social connections and people 5. They hire more social people There is nothing in this process that relates to intelligence. The intelligent person could theoretically create much better software, but they have no industry knowledge, and can't even get hired because they are not social.

Hnrobert42 7y ago

This article largely espouses the bs that wealth reflects hard work. The corollary is that the poor are just lazy. While the author throws in a few scientific studies, do not be fooled by the veneer of rigor. Is hard work the primary determinant of success? Maybe. But this article offers no real support for that position.

krisroadruck 7y ago

Having worked in digital marketing for over a decade, I've been exposed to hundreds of business models. The percent of them making someone rich on the back of selling scammy bullshit to stupid/gullible people is disturbingly high. I've long privately lamented that apparently to have a good shot at being rich, you must be perfectly ok with being a shitty person. I feel like highly intelligent people probably have a harder time talking themselves into making unnecessary piles of money by screwing people over. Note: This seems far more prevalent in the B2C non-software non-vc-backed space. But then I expect there are a lot more individual millionaires being minted from those types of businesses than from silicon valley SaaS startups.

JohnFen 7y ago
> I've long privately lamented that apparently to have a good shot at being rich, you must be perfectly ok with being a shitty person. It's broad-brushing, of course, but I think there's more than a little truth to this.

payne92 7y ago

For the subset of highlight intelligent people that care about being rich (not all do): there's also luck. The luck vs skill ratio of life is often skewed toward the "luck" side more than many of us want to admit.

ScottFree 7y ago

Calvin Coolidge said it better: "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

JohnFen 7y ago

I have never noticed a correlation between being wealthy and being intelligent. I think it's clear that intelligence is not necessary to obtain wealth, and being intelligent is not sufficient to obtain wealth. What's needed (as the article dances around) is a strong desire to become wealthy. It has to be your overt goal. Most people (of any intelligence level) don't have that desire or goal.

Ambele 7y ago
What correlation have you noticed?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I'm not sure that I understand what you're asking. I was saying that I don't see a correlation between wealth and intelligence. I also stated that I do see a correlation between being wealthy and making attaining wealth your primary goal. Are you asking about something else?
  - Ambele 7y ago
    Hey John, I was providing you with an opportunity to share some of your wisdom regarding correlations you have noticed. Presumably a number of intelligent readers are curious about wealth given they clicked on the title of this article. Correlations do not always establish causations but causations sometimes require expensive studies to establish.

paulus_magnus2 7y ago

The same reason why intelligent people don't win lottery jackpots? [can explain my reasoning if needed]

chriscatoya 7y ago

Nassim Nicholas Taleb would argue this isn’t even relevant: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

floppiplopp 7y ago

Being rich has nothing to do with intelligence. It is a matter of luck, luck to be born in the right family, in the right country, at the right time, luck to have the right connections, and luck to have a lot of starting capital.