A 2012 Jones followup: "Will the intelligent inherit the earth? IQ and time preference in the global economy"

Social science research has shown that intelligence is positively correlated with patience and frugality, while growth theory predicts that more patient countries will save more. This implies that if nations differ in national average IQ, countries with higher average cognitive skills will tend to hold a greater share of the world’s tradable assets. I provide empirical evidence that in today’s world, countries whose residents currently have the highest average IQs have higher savings rates, higher ratios of net foreign assets to GDP, and higher ratios of U.S. Treasuries to GDP. These nations tend to be in East Asia and its offshoots. The relationship between national average IQ and net foreign assets has strengthened since the end of Bretton Woods.

...And time preference differs across countries in part because psychometric intelligence, a key predictor of patient behavior, differs persistently across countries (Wicherts et al., 2010a,b; Jones and Schneider, 2010)....John Rae (1834) provides a precursor of the approach presented here: Chapter Six of his treatise (cited in Becker and Mulligan, 1997, and Frederick et al., 2002) focuses on individual determinants of savings, including differences in rates of time preference, while his Chapter Seven draws out the cross-country implications...A recent meta-analysis of 24 studies by Shamosh and Gray concluded: “[A]cross studies, higher intelligence was associated with lower D[elay] D[iscounting]...” Their meta-study drew on experiments with preschool children and college students, drug addicts and relatively healthy populations: With few exceptions, they found a reliable relationship between measured intelligence and patience. And recent work by economists (Frederick, 2005; Benjamin et al. 2006; Burks et al, 2009; Chabris et al., 2007) has demonstrated that low-IQ individuals tend to act in a more “behavioral,” more impulsive fashion when facing decisions between smaller rewards sooner versus larger rewards later.