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 countries_per_capita). 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.
Diaspora to homeland is not a valid extrapolation, as noted below.
Cognito Mentoring aims to help high potential young people self-actualize. As a part of our investigation of where the greatest leverage points are, I've been investigating the aggregate wealth of high IQ people as a class. There's a paucity of good data, and it's very difficult to reason about these things in absence of it, so I'd appreciate any thoughts.
The SAT as an indicator
The Relationship Between the Scholastic Assessment Test and General Cognitive Ability found a correlation of 0.82 between IQ and SAT scores based on 1979 data. Some people have claimed that the SAT has become less g-loaded in recent years, but a large fraction of the most intellectually impressive people who I know in my age group scored 1600 on a scale of 1600.
Longitudinal studies of high IQ children
Who Rises to the Top? Early Indicators (2013) find that people who scored at the 1 in 10k level on the SAT for < 13 year olds had median income of $80k at age 33. This is about 2.5x median income for Americans in general (of all ages), and at the 90th percentile of income for 33 year olds (). There's a confounding factor which is that plausibly people who took the SAT before age 13 came from unrepresentatively wealthy and well-educated families.
The maximum income reported out of the sample of 225 was $1.4 million. I wasn't able to find information on how this compares with other 33 year olds. The income is at about the 99.9th percentile for Americans in general (all ages). On the face of things this doesn't seem impressive, but maybe income of outliers rises dramatically over time.
Tech entrepreneurs
This is broadly consistent with "top tech entrepreneurs" having IQ ~145+ (99.8th percentile).
Gates made ~ $100 billion, Jobs would have been ~$100 billion with 20% equity in Apple. Ellison ~$48 B Page $32.3 B, Bezos $32 Brin $32 B, Zuckerberg $28 B, for about $400 billion total. At present, US tech billionaires are worth $355 billion.
Total Wealth of US is $118 trillion. So if it's true that 50% of wealth of tech billionaires is concentrated in those who are of IQ 145+, then such people's wealth just about accounts for the share of wealth (~0.2%) that one would expect the IQ 145+ population to have if wealth were uniformly distributed.
By itself, this isn't very informative. What about people of net worth between $100 million and $1 billion? Between $10 million and $100 million? Do IQ ~145+ people have 0.4% of the world's wealth? 2% of the world's wealth? Is 145 the right IQ threshold to be looking at? What about IQ ~130 people (98th percentile)?