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Indeed, one can see here for an example that Steve Hsu wrote about.
As Hsu remarked: “No evidence of diminishing returns in the far tail of the cognitive ability distribution.”
Even when range-restricted to the top 1% of 13-year-old test-takers on the SAT math, the four quartiles among The One Percent follow a rank-order with respect to any doctorate, STEM publications, STEM doctorates, patents, whether-95th-percentile-income eventually attained.
Note Hsu’s blog post and the linked underlying Nature article are coming up on 10 years old in a few months, yet things remain unchanged with regard to blank slatism and hopium as to the diminishing-to-zero returns of IQ.
Yes, IQ and its proxies predict academic success. That's what I said. Our economy is set up to award higher incomes to those with higher education, thus the income. But this is just circular logic. High paying jobs are mostly gated behind advanced degrees, which require at least an average IQ to fudge and a high one to excel at. Give out jobs based on who is the best basketball player, and height would predict income just fine.
One would need to find a similar explanation for patents. In any case, your head canon is at odds with the evidence.
Using AFQT scores as a decent but imperfect proxy for IQ: In a regression with net worth, education, and eight other factors as covariates, IQ was still a very significant predictor of income. Even controlling for net worth, education, and eight other factors, each additional IQ point was found to provide $346 to $616 worth of income across four regressions. That is, someone who has an IQ of 125 would be predicted to make about $5,190 to $9,240 more a year than someone with an IQ of 110, when the two have the same net worth and education. Mean income was about $43,700 in this dataset, so that's a solid chunk of change.
Across these the four regressions with the same specification (they differed in their estimation methods), both IQ and net worth were significant at the 0.01 level in all four. In contrast, education was only significant at the 0.01 level in three of them and not significant at the lower bar of 0.10 in the fourth. This would at least suggest circumstantially that education was the weakest strongman at the circus here. Plus, in any case, this is "over"-controlling and understating the effect of IQ, since IQ allows one to attain higher education levels. IQ also allows for better wealth preservation, holding income constant.
With the endogeneity problem of IQ and education in mind (the over-controlling), this article wanted to take a further look. It appears the author may have used the same data source as the first one, given its relative availability, but his was limited to those with children and he made slightly different design choices here or there (such as taking log income for regression analyses). Nonetheless, the author similarly found an association between IQ (AFQT score) and income that persisted after adding the controls of "marital status and presence of a live-in partner, education, number of children, employment status, employment history, hours worked, and age. Measures of race/ethnicity and sex are also included."
The author then moved onto to evaluate the IQ (net of education) -> Income vs. IQ -> Education -> Income pathways. The first is the direct or "partial" effect of IQ ("extent to which it affects income, net of differences in educational attainment"), the second the "indirect" effect of IQ ("the extent to which AFQT increases income by increasing education"). He calculated a value of 0.505 for the standardized regression coefficient of AFQT on income (a one standard deviation increase in IQ increasing income by 0.505 standard deviations). He found that if you split this 0.505 between the direct effect and the indirect effect, the first would get slightly more than half of 0.505 and the second slightly less than half of the 0.505. That is, not only is the indirect IQ -> Education -> Income pathway unable to fully account for the IQ/income relationship, this indirect pathway actually gets edged out by the direct pathway of IQ (net of education) -> Income.
Even in a severely range restricted dataset (the Terman set of individuals who identified as children to have estimated IQs of at least 140), IQ was still found to directly contribute to lifetime earnings, independently of the indirect effect through education. Like the previous article, this one that uses the Terman study found that for men, more of the impact of IQ upon income was direct rather than indirect through education. Additionally, among men with a BA or less, a standard deviation of IQ was worth about $160K of lifetime earnings. Among those with an MA or more, a standard deviation of IQ was... also worth about $160K of lifetime earnings.
All in all, the evidence points toward a robust IQ effect upon income that exists independently of the indirect effect of IQ upon education (and in turn upon income). Not only that—if anything, the independent, direct effect of IQ upon income exceeds the indirect effect of IQ through education upon income.
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You could probably see if there's signal by controlling for education level and seeing if the income outcomes still hold. I'm not sure if anyone's done that (or if there's enough data -- almost every recent study of this sort I've seen uses the SMPY cohorts, because there aren't too many other choices)
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