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Stefan_Schubert comments on How much wealth is produced by high IQ people? - Less Wrong
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One notable fact in this regard is that even though the population of Israel is nearly half Ashkenazi jews, the most intelligent ethnic group on Earth, scoring .5 to 1 standard deviation above Europeans, Israel is not incredibly rich but actually poorer than many European countriespercapita). Even though Israel of course is a rather special case - e.g. it has had to fight a number of wars - this casts some doubt on the notion that one can infer from the fact that intelligent people in the US are generally wealthy to the notion that intelligent people are the ones who create wealth.
I do think, though, that intelligent people do in fact contribute enormously to progress and wealth (a related argument to this effect by me can be found here). However, I don't think that wealth is a very strong proxy for productivity or contribution to progress. Consider John von Neumann, for instance, who contributed spectacularly both to science, to the American war efforts in the 2nd world war and the cold war, and to the economy via, for instance, his contributions to the development of the computer. If people would have been awarded in accordance with their contributions, he would have died one of the wealthiest men on Earth.
That said, I do think that people who contribute more generally are better paid, but the relationship is not as strong as some people seem to believe. The economists' notion of "productivity" according to which higher-earning people are by definition more productive is highly misleading in this regard, since people tend to conflate this notion of productivity with the ordinary language notion of a productive person as someone who contributes a lot to wealth-creation.
You forget how poor Israel used to be. It started in 1948 with a Third-World level GDP. Since then, its economic growth has been among the highest in the world -- if I remember correctly, second only to South Korea. Catching up to the level of many European countries is quite an achievement.
That Wikipedia article you cite says that about half of Jews are Ashkenazi Jews. Jews are only about 75% of Israel. The article also describes some errors in the data it presents. Also, there is a lot of intermarriage between Ashkenazi and other Jews, to the point that the categories described in that chart represent arbitrary designations based on partial ancestry.
Drawing conclusions from studies about Ashkenazi Jews to the intelligence distribution of population of Israel is a stretch. Trust me, we've got a fair share of non-geniuses around here :-)
Hehe...well it wasn't meant to be a knock-down argument, but an indication that the correlation between intelligence and wealth is not as strong as the OP indicates.
P.J. O'Rourke makes a relevant comment on this question:
You're right that the article says proportion of Jews, not proportion of Israelis; I was doing things a bit too fast.
[citation needed]
Institutions matter for the production of wealth. Laws matter. Customs matter. Get those wrong, and you'll be boiling stones for soup.
If only these things were correlated with the IQ of the population... :-)
The average IQ of Israel is supposedly 95, not that high.
There are other complicating factors in the Israel example. About 10% of Israel is ultra-orthodox (charedi) (source) and a large fraction of them are on essentially perpetual welfare with the men staying inside yeshivot all day studying and not generating any economic productivity. Also note that by some intelligence metrics other ethnic groups outscore Ashkenazim (especially Han Chinese). This is however a minor quibble and your essential points seem correct.