Our society's obsession with IQ is partially due to the widespread assumption that high IQ guarantees financial success. This is simply not true. Of course, there are a lot of highly successful high IQ entrepreneurs: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, the Google founder and Jeff Besos immediately spring to mind. There are, however, also a lot of high IQ people who struggle with holding a typical 9-5 job. Einstein wasn’t even very good at his job in the patent office, but it did provide him with ample time to think about the things that mattered to him. Tesla died in abject poverty.
I always get annoyed when I read that IQ predicts financial success because it is both banal and misleading. Of course, it does statistically as there is and obviously positive correlation between IQ and financial success. However, as Lewis Terman’s study showed predicting financial success on the basis of IQ alone is almost like playing roulette. He assembled the highest IQ children he could find followed their careers. 45 years later half of the 200 surviving participants were financially highly successful (doctors, lawyers, etc.), the other half was underperforming and had jobs like technicians and pool cleaners.
In any case, there is no straightforward linear function between IQ and financial success. Most high school math teachers would probably be earning much more money then. Interestingly there seems to be a law of diminishing returns. People with extremely high IQs tend to be university professors, rather than entrepreneurs and people with even higher IQ are often so idiosyncratic that they don’t even earn or want to earn money. Case in point: Grigori Perelman, who even rejected the Clay Millennium Prize
The reason is that few geniuses are interested in money per se, but in their “special interests”. In fact, interest in money and genius are almost mutually exclusive. If you are interested in making money you have to follow the mainstream (trends, jobs that make a lot of money, etc.). This is exactly what geniuses do NOT do. Following the mainstream and coming up with something highly creative do not easily go hand in hand.
It takes a special mindset to do this. As I have argued before, this kind of mindset is typical for hunter-gatherer minds. Farmer minds programmed by evolution to be interested in productivity. Geniuses aren’t interested in productivity, but in finding out more about reality. You risk wasting years and years following something that might not exist. And even if it exists, you might end up being burned, like Giordano Bruno. No economic model can describe his behaviour. He paid for spreading his ideas (travel expenses, etc.) and in the end, he paid for them with his life.
Fortunately, these times are gone, but high IQ people occasionally still lose money rather than earn it. E.g. when they pay for publishing their ideas in prestigious scientific magazines.
Read more about geniuses in my ebook on Amazon kindle:
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