Having a high IQ still requires you to rely on luck by rolling the dice at investing (knowing to buy bitcoin is more gambling than intelligence), squeaking past super selective all-or-nothing societal gateways like Ivy League admissions, FAANG interviews, YCombinator, etc. against very stacked odds, tenacity whenever life randomly and inevitably decides to punch you in the gut, and tremendous sacrifices in terms of hard work, time, MORALITY (screwing people over and fighting hard to prevent others who are actively working against you from doing the same to you), and personal health.
I think the fact that you can solve puzzles really well on a test doesn't really lend itself well to money making at all. There's FAR too much of a chance/luck component to making money to attribute it to IQ alone. Any time I've ever made money, I came back thinking wow, I was very lucky -- even though everyone is still biased towards themselves in terms of their own personal attributes or qualities (intelligence, hard work, savviness, hustling, etc.) when they make money, I can still recognize that yes, buying and selling crypto at the right time was almost entirely luck -- so was teaching myself how to code when I was 8 years old growing up in a rural area where everyone else thought it was a waste of time. Hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make money -- same applies to IQ. Often you'll find people who had the exact same amount of "talent" or worked just as hard doing exactly the same things as someone who has a lot of money but don't have anything to show for it. Right place, right time.
Meanwhile, having money handed to you on a silver plate by virtue of your birth family means being able to accomplish all of the above without doing or sacrificing anything at all, and you even still have a free pass from society to still have an ego about it. Even worse, many people somehow see having money as a moral characteristic while selectively ignoring the very often immoral cost of acquisition.
It depends how one defines wealth. If the choice is framed as choosing between $10 million lump sum with no taxes or any conditions vs. an IQ of 130, then maybe the $10 million and an IQ of 100 is the better bet. However, these studies define 'wealthy' (assuming they even quantify it at all) to be merely upper-middle class, which is much less, and this this wealth is further diluted by number of siblings and other factors.
>. Hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make money -- same applies to IQ.
That's my point and I agree. But many of these articles downplay or ignore the role of IQ. IQ is still necessary but it may not be sufficient.
I only found this one chart [1], and the mean averages seem to be lower than 130. I have no idea how reliable this is. I can't speak to San Francisco at all, but I can't find the data.
I'd also include "web developer" with software engineer, and everyone with no knowledge of CS theory, just all software developers in my opinion.
https://www.electronicproducts.com/News/Engineer_vs_engineer...
Google and Facebook engineers even push 140 IQ when you look at how selective they are. For example, many Top 10 university graduates work there, and just based on SAT score acceptances alone, the average IQ at a top US university crosses 140-150 easily.
It is still a questionable proposition -- "10x engineers" are a thing, and brilliant singular insights that unlock billions of dollars in productivity like the concepts of convolutional neural networks and MapReduce are the brainchild of rare chart-defying individuals, rather than a product of the masses working in tandem. The Pareto Principle still seems to hold, even for software engineering (just ask any Bay Area software company's HR department).
Regardless, as an appeal to intuition, there is some sort of minimum bar (software engineers are still a VERY scarce commodity, as evidenced by market dynamics), suggesting that the average individual (100 IQ) is ill-equipped to take on the sort of abstract reasoning and novel thought processes so readily discarded by billions of years of prior evolution (indeed, knowing C++ would not have helped you as a primordial human fighting off that hungry sabertooth tiger) needed to comprehend and write robust code wading through some of the most complex systems (the Linux kernel is millions of lines of code) ever fathomed by humankind. This is the whole premise behind IQ theory, which really just boils down to a simple statistical argument.