

You Don’t Have to Be Smart to Be Rich - skyream
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/05/01/you-dont-have-to-be-smart-to-be-rich/

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jerrytsai
I went to the Intelligence journal's website and could not find the study. My
two cents: I think we should look at the methodology of the study before
trusting its conclusions.

To me, the conclusions don't meet the sniff test. Drawing causal inferences
from social science data is tricky, and I think it's more likely the study is
flawed in one of the many ways observational data analyses are often flawed.

Regardless, IMHO we as a society should praise hard work and effort rather
than lauding those who "win" the "intelligence" lottery.

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skyream
Well it's available but you have to purchase the study:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607000219)

Here's anther another similar study I found that cites the intelligence
journal study and can be read without a paywall:
[http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/cprc/conferences/2008/cfrg...](http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/cprc/conferences/2008/cfrg-
october/cole-shastry-rich.pdf)

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hatmatrix
"One of the most surprising discoveries for me in researching my book
Richistan was that many of today’s rich didn’t do that well in school. In
fact, many of them didn’t go to college — or if they did, they quickly dropped
out."

Does he go beyond Bill Gates, Mike Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs et al.? I think it's
widely known that a lot of tech founders left college or grad school so I
suspect it wouldn't have come as a surprise to most people.

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weisser
What does doing well in school have to do with intelligence?

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yen223
You need a certain measure of intelligence to be able to pass the tests, or to
game the system so as to appear to pass the tests.

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pmiller2
Maybe you don't need to be smart to _be_ rich, but I'd be interested to know
if you need to be smart (in the IQ/book smart sense) to _get_ rich. You'd have
to measure the IQ of people like successful small business owners, etc. who
built their own wealth rather than being born to or inheriting it.

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skyream
This is the part in the article that I can relate to the most when people try
to correlate richness with intelligence:

“Intelligence is not a factor for explaining wealth,” he said. “Those with low
intelligence should not believe they are handicapped, and those with high
intelligence should not believe they have an advantage.”

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skidoo
Inheritance generally has jack to do with IQ points.

