http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070424204519.htm
Science Daily - It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a lot of money, according to new research. A nationwide study found that people of below average intelligence were, overall, just about as wealthy as those in similar circumstances but with higher scores on an IQ test.
Furthermore, a number of extremely intelligent people stated they had gotten themselves into financial difficulty. "People don't become rich just because they are smart," said Jay Zagorsky, author of the study and a research scientist at Ohio State University 's Center for Human Resource Research.
"Your IQ has really no relationship to your wealth. And being very smart does not protect you from getting into financial difficulty," Zagorsky said. The one financial indicator in which the study found it paid to be smart was income. Those with higher IQ scores tended to get paid more than others.
[WS:] Two observations.
First, it probably reflects the fact that IQ is a rather poor measure of what it purports to measure - human "intelligence" (whatever that is.) The IQ score mainly reflects the ability to take paper-and-pencil tests devised by schoolmasters - so there is no reason that this should be anything but marginally related to real life ability. The so-called "social intelligence" - or the ability to interact and empathize with others - is a far better predictor of success than IQ score.
In short, the IQ testing is pretty much worthless. I suspect that the only reason it is getting so much attention is that it is easy to administer, and people like easily available off-the-shelf numbers supposedly saying something about ourselves, not to mention making the work of college admission officers easy. Moreover, IQ testing has became a multi-million dollar industry, well entrenched in the institutional structure of the academia. It is like a tumor, useless at best, but difficult to be gotten rid of.
Second, wealth or rather income distribution is mainly a function of the industry in which people work rather than cognitive skills. For example, a secretary in a corporate law office can earn more than a college professor simply because she works in a job market that pays more (cf. the segmented labor market theory.) It is even more so for the minority of people with very high incomes. Their earning are almost exclusively a function of their strategic position in the money flow.
I once dubbed it the Mosquito Intake Theory of Executive Compensation (MITEC.) Mosquitoes do not have lungs so they cannot suck blood. How much blood they take in depends solely on the blood pressure in the vessel to which they manage to tap. Ditto for fabulously paid executives.
This is NOT to say that these people have no skills. Au contraire, they have to have good social and professional skills to be able to function in those high paying jobs. And they have to work hard too. However, their compensation is not commensurate with those skills. In other words, a person with similar skills and work ethic but working in a different position would earn significantly less.
In sum, there is no reason to believe that intellectual ability alone, let alone the IQ score which is a rather inferior measure of that ability, is a predictor of a success, financial or otherwise, in real life.
Wojtek