You Don’t Have to Be Smart to Be Rich

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.

"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.

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.

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.”

Inheritance generally has jack to do with IQ points.