I've often seen it said on Hacker News that programmers could clean up in many other occupations because writing programs would give them a huge advantage. And I believe Michael Vassar has said here that he thought a LWer could take over a random store in SF and likewise clean up.

(This makes some sense to me. Programmers have some good tools which don't see much use outside programming - source control comes to mind. Writers ought to use it, but don't. Architects are constantly modifying highly detailed plans, but apparently don't use real source control etc.)

Economics tells us there is no free lunch. The occupations mentioned might seem like free lunches because they pay so much, millions & millions. So of course, the no-free-lunch comes into play with low probability of success. Most lawyers don't make millions, most would-be CEOs stagnate in The Office. The expected-utility is evened out that way. And worse, those are socially prestigious occupations, so one might expect an additional penalty via no-free-lunch in exchange for the prestige. (I think that may be one reason there are so many would-be lawyers.)

This would imply that other areas without prestige or high variance might have higher expected utilities because high IQ types shun them and ignore their comparative advantage in them. What areas are unprestigious and don't offer lottery tickets? Selling to small businesses seems like such an area. (Look at GroupOn. Why wasn't that already done in 2000?)