Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Innumeracy in Gifted Education Advocacy

Thanks, kcab-- I was shooting from the hip in this instance, comparing only those disciplines for which I am most familiar-- that being STEM fields, and then "humanities" as an indifferentiated genre.

Point remains the same, however. Those fields that draw highest IQ's within subpopulations do not also correspond to best monetary compensation.

An interesting question occurs to me, however, in light of this along with Val's data (from that paper) about wealth and IQ.

Are higher IQ's correlated with better financial management of the income that the family unit does have?

That is, maybe income is averaging only 110K for people with IQ's in that 130+ range, but does wealth also plateau? Or does it rise out of proportion to the income?

Wealth only depends on the percentage of money that you are saving and the rate of return the savings.

Is now a good time to give you the bad news on how much money that you have to save in order to *ever* retire and not outlive your money?

LOL. No, I think that I've mentioned before that my spouse, Wil. E. Coyote, and myself have worked out our retirement plan...

{disclaimer... I am SO kidding here, but if I didn't, I'd cry. So pthhhhhht.}


Sure. We're going to knock off liquor stores. Either we get away with much-needed cash, or we get nabbed for our crimes, in which case, we get four hots and a cot plus good medical care. Winning!



How's that for a pair of HG+ people thinking creatively?

Yes, I agree here.

Just read this in the Methods section of the paper: the study didn't report income accurately. If a subject was married, family income was divided by 2. So if I had been in that study, my income would have been inflated and if my husband had been in it, his would have been cut by a lot. Without knowing about income differences or similarities in a marriage, it's basically not possible to report income-by-IQ accurately.

This brings me to something I was thinking about during lunch. People with high IQs and a lot of education have many more options than people with little education and average or below-average IQs.

I think we have a number of people on this board who are examples of this idea. Specifically, a lot of people here can afford to be one-income families. I suspect that this is an easier option for educated people. This option isn't available to a lot of people who aren't educated. In my situation, I was able to turn down a highly paid job last year in favor of a low-paid job. The lucrative position would have made my brain rot. The low-paid job runs on funding I have but is really, really interesting, and I can even afford to hire an RA.

Val, that's more or less what I was also getting at. It's just not always about the money for all people. The assumption here is that "smarter people all pursue the best possible financial compensation for their talents." As soon as that is untrue (and obviously it IS, or nobody would ever work in a STEM field in the public sector), then the correlation becomes flawed at the high end.

So the correlation can't possibly really be that simple at the tails of the distribution-- either of earning power or of IQ, I suspect. Mind-numbingly boring work doesn't pay as poorly as it probably should using this construct, because it SHOULD theoretically only draw persons who truly cannot do any other sort of tasks, and should pay accordingly. Also not exactly true-- most of those people doing "icky" or boring jobs do them because they pay well, not because they cannot do anything else.

I also agree wholeheartedly with the "choices" argument, as well. Our income could be about 180% of what it actually is, even accounting for gender inequity (DH and I both happen to have fairly well-compensated subspecialties within our discipline). Which makes our daughter's education about as expensive as the most obnoxiously over-priced private colleges anywhere on earth, more or less. {sigh}


LOL kcab, I think you're right. At least my parents were a GLORIOUS warning to others there. I haven't made any of the really obvious mistakes that I saw them make, anyway.

I did highly paid icky work for two years precisely and only because it paid well. But they paid me way more than anyone who was doing the same job precisely because I was faster and better than other people.

I was, quite honestly, happy to turn down more icky work six months ago. Sure, I would have liked the money, but I have enough and would rather have my brain in the condition it's in right now.

Looking at http://map.deed.state.mn.us/chameleon/tables/stateranks/Female%20Labor%20Force%20Participation%20Rate,%202010.htm , there appears to be a negative correlation between the education level of a state and female labor participation rate. Places with lots of high-paying jobs for college graduates often have high housing prices that make it hard to
afford a home on one income.

The working paper

http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/IITE.pdf
"Will the intelligent inherit the earth?: IQ and time preference in the global economy"
by Garett Jones states that

'Psychologists have known for decades that higher IQ is associated with greater patience, which they often refer to as
lower “delay discounting.”'

and provides references for this assertion.

A paper

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1441512
IQ and Stock Market Participation
Mark Grinblatt
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Finance Area; Yale University - International Center for Finance; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Matti Keloharju
Aalto University
Juhani T. Linnainmaa
University of Chicago - Booth School of Business
October 9, 2010
Abstract:
Stock market participation is monotonically related to IQ, controlling for wealth, income, age, and other demographic and occupational information. The high correlation between IQ, measured early in adult life, and participation, exists even among the affluent. Supplemental data from siblings, studied with an instrumental variables approach and regressions that control for family effects, demonstrate that IQ’s influence on participation extends to females and does not arise from omitted familial and non-familial variables. High-IQ investors are more likely to hold mutual funds and larger numbers of stocks, experience lower risk, and earn higher Sharpe ratios. We discuss implications for policy and finance research

suggests that IQ is positively correlated with the ability to invest well.

In general, IQ is positively correlated with good outcomes. Anecdotes and speculation about the tails should not obscure this pattern.

Economic analysis and market timing are pretty much my only hobbies.

However, I wouldn't call my performance since 2010 "investing well".

I wonder what the prevalence of technical analysis is among those surveyed.

JonLaw, I know you'll get this.

But more generally, I would want to know how the analysts controlled for the effect of financial advisors and, in cases where outside advisors were consulted, the quality of the advisory services.

Also, with securities markets best modelled as a random walk plus drift, I don't know that stock portfolio performance is really indicative of anything at all to do with intelligence. It's a random variable, per JonLaw's results.