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
- Bill Gates famously scored 1590 on the SAT, at a time when many fewer people scored 1600 than people did in subsequent years. He also solved a notable problem in combinatorics as a a college sophomore.
- Jeff Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in computer science
- Zuckerberg took a graduate course in computer science as a high school student.
- Drew Houston (Dropbox founder) started programming at age 5 and scored 1600 on the SAT.
- Steve Jobs tested at the 10th grade level in 4th grade.
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)?
To get a meaningful answer I think you also have to look at all of the high-IQ people that don't generate a lot of wealth. What you really should look at is the correlation between IQ and wealth generation on average. My intuition says that there is a correlation but not a super duper strong one. (For instance I doubt having a 180 IQ results in more wealth generation than a 150 IQ.) I think cognitive empathy, or the ability to understand others' feelings and how they would react in a given circumstance, is just as important for wealth generation, if not more so. There are and have been functional autistic savants with very high IQ but low cognitive empathy that have not generated a lot of wealth.
I believe the ability to delay gratification, or think long-term, or whatever you want to call it, is more important than IQ for self-actualization. If you can't override your impulses and force yourself to follow your rational conclusions, what good is your reasoning faculty? To put it in Daniel Kahneman's terms, if you have difficulty getting your System 1 to use or go along with your System 2, it doesn't matter how powerful your System 2 is. The Marshmellow Test experiment is a good indicator of this. The children that had inherent abilities to delay gratification did better later in life by many different measures, including wealth generation.
Are you just saying that there are also other important things besides IQ, or that those things are anticorrelated with IQ?
I'm asking because it seems to me that people often say the former, but silently imply the latter. For example, having good impulse control is probably more important than the difference between 180 IQ and 150 IQ, but unless there is anticorrelation, it does not change the answer to question whether 180 IQ is better than 150 IQ.