You Don’t Have to Be Smart to Be Rich

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/05/01/you-dont-have-to-be-smart-to-be-rich/

by skyream • 11 years ago

7 8 11 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

skyream2• 11 years ago

This is the part in the article that I can relate to the most when people try to correlate richness with intelligence:

“Intelligence is not a factor for explaining wealth,” he said. “Those with low intelligence should not believe they are handicapped, and those with high intelligence should not believe they have an advantage.”

skidoo• 11 years ago

Inheritance generally has jack to do with IQ points.

pmiller2• 11 years ago

Maybe you don't need to be smart to be rich, but I'd be interested to know if you need to be smart (in the IQ/book smart sense) to get rich. You'd have to measure the IQ of people like successful small business owners, etc. who built their own wealth rather than being born to or inheriting it.

hatmatrix• 11 years ago

"One of the most surprising discoveries for me in researching my book Richistan was that many of today’s rich didn’t do that well in school. In fact, many of them didn’t go to college — or if they did, they quickly dropped out."

Does he go beyond Bill Gates, Mike Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs et al.? I think it's widely known that a lot of tech founders left college or grad school so I suspect it wouldn't have come as a surprise to most people.

weisser• 11 years ago

What does doing well in school have to do with intelligence?

yen223• 11 years ago

You need a certain measure of intelligence to be able to pass the tests, or to game the system so as to appear to pass the tests.

jerrytsai• 11 years ago

I went to the Intelligence journal's website and could not find the study. My two cents: I think we should look at the methodology of the study before trusting its conclusions.

To me, the conclusions don't meet the sniff test. Drawing causal inferences from social science data is tricky, and I think it's more likely the study is flawed in one of the many ways observational data analyses are often flawed.

Regardless, IMHO we as a society should praise hard work and effort rather than lauding those who "win" the "intelligence" lottery.

skyream2• 11 years ago

Well it's available but you have to purchase the study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607...

Here's anther another similar study I found that cites the intelligence journal study and can be read without a paywall: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/cprc/conferences/2008/cfrg...

You Don’t Have to Be Smart to Be Rich

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