Originally Posted by Dude
Now, if we want to talk about wealth versus IQ: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2007-08-12-smart-not-rich_N.htm

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"Being more intelligent does not confer any advantage along two of the three key dimensions of financial success (income, net worth and financial distress)," Zagorsky finds, looking at the data with statistical tests. Income does weakly correspond to intelligence test scores, he finds, where "a one point increase in IQ test scores is related to an income increase of $346 per year. But at most, that same one-point increase in IQ leads to "a net worth increase of at most $83, but probably zero."
Since wealth depends on cumulative income over the years, it is implausible that the slope of wealth vs. IQ is much smaller than annual income vs. IQ. It should be larger. I think the following slope estimates are more plausible. If one SD of IQ corresponds to an income differential of $30K, that is $30K/15 = $2K per IQ point.

Income, Wealth and IQ
by Stephen Hsu
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I'm occasionally asked about financial returns to cognitive ability. As a rough rule of thumb, judging from the graphs below (obtained here), I would say:
On average, an increase of IQ by one SD corresponds to ~ $30k per annum of additional income. (Somewhat less than 1 SD in income; the distribution is far from normal.)

By early middle age, individuals > 90th percentile in IQ have, typically, more than twice the wealth of individuals who are of average IQ.