Has the IQ-Wealth Relationship Completely Changed in the Last 20 Years?
A generation ago, the richest people came from real estate, retail, and traditional businesses where grit, people skills, and risk-taking mattered more than being a genius. Today, the billionaire class is dominated by tech founders, quant finance, biotech, and Al/ML fields where the baseline is high IQ, elite education, and competing with MIT/Stanford/Harvard types. There's still a "normal smart" path to being rich through content creation, e-commerce, lifestyle brands, and real estate, but those routes rarely lead to generational wealth anymore. The result is that social mobility is more IQ-gated, elite colleges act as pipelines, and SF/ NYC/Boston concentrate the biggest opportunities. The question I have is whether extreme wealth is now mostly reserved for the top 1% cognitively, and whether someone with normal intelligence who could've built a big business in 1985 is effectively locked out today.
What do you think ?
It is a false assumption that all tech billionaires are geniuses, or more specifically, any more intelligent than past elites. You can't prove that one way or another. It is also a false assumption that if a tech billionaire is a genius, their genius is specifically what made them a billionaire, as opposed to other factors, such as the same risk tolerance of entrepreneurs in the past. Are Zuckerberg or Ellison or Gate or Cuban wealthy because they are "geniuses" or because they are ruthless businessmen who defeated other similarly-intelligent people? You also don't have to be a billionaire to have generational wealth. If you don't think your grandkids can't live off the $50M or $100M you made, get a vasectomy now just in preparation.
But the biggest thing I want to respond to is the idea that "a generation ago the richest people came from real estate, retail, and traditional businesses where grit, people skills, and risk-taking mattered more than being a genius" because—and this may be a false assumption on my part, but stick with me—I assume you are young. Because technology didn't start 20 years, or however you define a generation, ago. 20 years ago I was playing highschool football and finger banging girls in the backseat of my stepmother's car. I had a cell phone, flatscreen TV, PlayStation 2, and cable internet. Tech dominance in business is not a new thing.
Did you just decide to leave out the rest of the globe in your analysis. Do you think the Billionaires of the future from Lagos and Mumbai, from Jakarta, to Rio, aren't going to be hard hustling, well networked, dynastical commoditiy, real estate, and low value add manufacturing titans with strong state support and guns+thugs on call?
I agree for the US, but my opinion isn't well researched.
I don't like this post. Mostly because you are just throwing numbers and stats around with a sort of generalized logic that isn't specified.
First you mention "Has the IQ-Wealth Relationship Completely Changed in the Last 20 Years?" and then when you open your paragraph you don't describe exactly what relationship you're talking about or if they are correlated and how much they are exactly correlated. You didn't state what the relationship was 20 years ago, so how do we know how much it has changed?
Then you pose this question "The question I have is whether extreme wealth is now mostly reserved for the top 1% cognitively" and we don't really know if this was actually the case 20 years ago or now or ever.
I think your best bet is to find some studies that survey IQs among wealthy people and find another study more recent to discover any changes. To put a blanket statement out there like the top 1% richest people have a top 1% IQ would likely be data you never find. I for one don't think that statement is true.
Also, a big part about being an extreme outlier in wealth is the ability to take risks. Take 100 people who are wealthy already and take risks and a small percentage of those people will become billionaires. Some people accumulate millions and don't want to take risks anymore. Maybe they have a 180 IQ and like to live in a log cabin doing remote work. There is a lot more to the story than just IQ and wealth.
You keep posting absolutely fucking awful takes on this same broad subject, and the answer is going to be the same every time.
Nothing in particular has changed. You aren't well informed, you aren't curious or thoughtful enough to learn more on your own, and as a result you post the same dumb question based on the same faulty assumptions over and over, wasting everyone's time.
Maybe it is time to learn a little bit more about the world pre-1985, not to mention the world as it exists today. It's like some monkey asking about why lottery winners are so low IQ, and wondering if maybe the world rewards stupidity.
I’m more curious about ASPD and the relationship to becoming a billionaire than IQ. Also, could see it moving up a couple points in average but not enough to completely flip the dynamic. High IQ doesn’t always guarantee good grades. Also, not everyone in the elite institutions is a genius. Does it help their odds, maybe, but there is a fair chunk of luck involved (ranging from where you were born to opportunities you got along the way).
I'm going to depart from the critical and frankly somewhat close-minded tone of the previous commenters.
I agree with your overall point, which, though you may not have expressed in these terms, hones in on the fact that we live in an increasingly complex society. Technology - especially if you define it broadly - may have been around for a long time, but it grows more sophisticated as time goes on. A world of greater complexity rewards those who understand it and can navigate it. In this case, that means the intelligent. Increasingly we are entering a world where return on intelligence grows, and return on physical traits decreases - an entire subfield of developmental economics is predicated upon this fairly uncontroversial fact. So despite the flak thrown your way by Ozymandia and CRE, I believe your point to be directionally correct.
I also don't think we need to be engaging in any rigorous study of history to recognize how the current generation of billionaires – Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jim Simons, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Thiel/Karp – are technologists. They are perceived, for good reason, as being nerdy, awkward, neurodivergent. In contrast, think about the billionaires of the past. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan. These are business moguls, manufacturing and industry tycoons, known for being charismatic and cunning.
We are in a novel age where we push epistemic boundaries via the steady advancement of the empirical sciences – and they have shown staggering success, especially in recent years. Progress will only continue. Those who can participate in it are bound to win.
You need to show that he's also correct that a generation ago (so... maybe around the year 2000, the height of an internet boom?) most wealth came from "real estate, retail, and traditional businesses where grit, people skills, and risk-taking mattered more than being a genius." You then need to show that isn't the case today, which I think is pretty obviously untrue.
I think this displays such a fundamental lack of understanding that it borders on the laughable. What was the basis of Andrew Carnegie's wealth? Technology! His licensing of the Bessemer Steel process (invented in the 1850s) and his investment in labor saving technology at Edgar Thompson Steel Works. Rockefeller? Cracking oil and fractional distillation, which allowed for the refining of crude into petroleum products. Vanderbilt? The steam engine (Vanderbilt himself as an accomplished steamship engineer).
You don't think these men based their careers on technology, because the technologies they mastered are very much ancient history at this point. But of all the people you mention, not a single one is actually involved in the technologies they have profited from (except maybe Mr Gates, some two generations ago). Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have absolutely no particular technological skill. They are business magnates, much as Carnegie or Rockefeller were. Jim Simons was a mathematician - he's a genius, but not in mastering technology. I don't know enough about Peter Thiel but I get the impression he too is a businessman. How you can say that Carnegie was "charismatic and cunning" to try and differentiate him from Elon Musk, a man whose entire career is based on his charisma, is just wild.
This is how the world has always worked. The problem with the idiot OP is not that he's wrong that being intelligent is important for success, it's just that that is such a tautological thing to say that it is simply a waste of all our time. And what's more, he's said the same fucking thing over and over.
Has the IQ-Wealth Relationship Completely Changed in the Last 20 Years?
The Most Common Industries for Centi- Millionaires
Should I change my academic path ( french student ) ?
What happened to young people founding hedge funds?
Is it a recent phenomenon that those who become wealthy (get rich) are nerds, or has it always been thus?
How do self-made billionaires actually get into “boring” industries like food manufacturing or packaging?
Is getting rich young only for celebrities now, not entrepreneurs?
These are the posts he's made in the last week or so. Why did we need yet another crappy, thoughtless, insensate barrage of self-masturbatory verbal diarrhea on the subject?
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stop sucking my dick bro
Those with raw IQ horsepower have a bigger advantage today than 100yrs ago, yes.
Does that reduce opportunity for those without? No, what a misguided statement. Why are you pushing this sad narrative in every post?
Technological progress is by default incremental. You are viewing the world as a limited pie, it's not. Tech makes the pie grow. The overwhelming portion of tech growth gains are captured by tech companies.
But tell me, what stops you from creating an HVAC company? Or a small business servicing components that go into hardware systems? Or developing a real estate empire? These paths are available today, just as they were 100yrs ago. So stop complaining and do something instead of moping around wondering why you didn't found NVIDIA
Take a look at which industries are actually creating new wealth today. The fastest-growing opportunities aren’t HVAC or other boomer-era small businesses, they’re in high-scale tech. Acting like those are the same level of opportunity in 2025 just isn’t realistic. I’m simply pointing out where new wealth is being created, not “moping.”
Those older paths can make you comfortable by age 60, sure, but the point is to build wealth while you’re still young.
IQ is bullshit
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f13…
for anyone who threw monkey shit, I've tested between 130-140 consistently, and I still think it's bullshit
Business, and life, is game theory. How good you are at playing it determines how successful you are. People less intelligent, but more savvy, can outpace those with higher IQs. There are many ways to achieve generational wealth, and there are plenty of mediocre IQ people doing it through real estate, small businesses, and other avenues. Maybe there's a correlation between IQ and earnings, but I think that extreme wealth is not reserved only for those with higher IQs. In my line of work (energy trading), it is a zero-sum game. Thankfully, life is not this way. There is infinite opportunity and an infinitely sized pie. You can take a piece of it, and that piece will be as big as you want it to be. Pessimism about lack of available opportunities is really not your friend. Your future is what you make it. The more value you can learn to create, the higher compensation you can command. Don't let excuses hold you back.
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