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Agreed.
This doesn't seem to mesh with the data I've seen from Kirkegaard and others. I simply don't trust academics in the area of IQ research. Nor would I trust Soviet economists.
Looking at the 10 richest Americans, it's clear that all 10 have extreme outlier IQs on the high side. I'd say that all 10 have an IQ of at least 145, but even if we say they are "merely" at 130, the odds that this would happen through luck are less than 1 in a trillion.
I will grant that the presence of career academics might lower the average wage of high IQ people somewhat. This is far outweighed by doctors, lawyers, and software engineers who all (until recently) had to pass through an IQ filter.
In my personal life, I see a clear and obvious relationship between IQ and income. It's going to take a lot of high quality data to convince me to ignore the obvious data in front of my face. You may call that availability bias, I'll call it passing a shit test.
I don't disagree with your point, but arguing that rich people clearly have high IQ without any actual testing data is kinda circular, n'est pas?
I worry when we start getting into iq correlates with verbal indicators of intelligence which correlate with success academically which correlate with success professionally. It gets a little bit like front squat correlates with vertical jump correlates with volleyball talent so a 400lb front squat qualifies you for volleyball. You start to create errors.
Sure and I’ve seen data that strongly contradicts the claim that IQ is unrelated to income/wealth. I just don’t want to play the “here’s a study” game in a field that is deeply ideological and corrupt. So I revert to the evidence that is directly in front of my face.
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It's probably worth looking at the purported data, to convince yourself that you aren't being fooled by availability bias. Zagorsky is doing his sleight-of-hand pretty much out in the open. I've mentioned a few things in other comments. He also has a table with a range of less than +/- 2SD.
The claim "Almost all high-IQ people earn less than $60,000 a year, which is below the U.S. national median household income" doesn't appear in the study; it's misleading in two obvious ways. One, it's comparing per-capita income to household income. Two, the income figures are for 2004; median household income in 2004 was $44,000. And a less obvious joker -- the per-capita incomes are not individual incomes, but household incomes for single people and half that for married people.
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