Your money example is a linguistic trick. It uses nominal wealth. 3. simply does not hold for nominal wealth. If "all else equal" meant "interest > inflation," then it would say that real wealth is growing exponentially, in which case 3 would indeed always hold. The example as it stands just doesn't prove much, other than nominal wealth is not real wealth.

More significantly, wealth is purely socially determined; it has no objective value. Intellect has objective abilities. Chess is a terrible example. If you use something non-relative, like, say, deriving general relativity, or building a rocket, or catapult, or what-have-you, higher intelligence will result in a better/more-quickly-made end product. In some cases, the end product won't exist without a certain level of intelligence; if no human had ever had an IQ over 75, I sincerely doubt we'd have general relativity (or electricity, or, well, pretty much anything).

There may be a bit more complexity to the issue of recursive self-improvement, but I really don't see the distinction between contextual and concrete values being nearly as significant as you have claimed.