The Complex Relationship Between Intelligence and Income: Why Less Smart People are Richer
Has ever surprised you that people who aren't that intelligent make more money than people who are very smart? This happens all around the world, and it looks like the world favors people who are dumb than people who are smart and intelligent.
According to a study titled "The Plateauing of Cognitive Ability Among Top Ten Earners" showed that people who are less intelligent got more income than people who were intelligent. This isn't to say that people who are intelligent do not earn well. The basic truth is this, intelligent people earn well but in the average of $60,000 annually, but when we are going to look at the 1% of the wealthy, it looks like intelligence doesn't cut it.
Before you start to rack your head on why this happens, one of the reason is that intelligent people who are well educated prefer to fill in high prestige jobs that do not have high pay but this is not the same with dumb people. Academic people, professionals at the end of the year do not fall into the 1% who earn above $597k and averaging $1.4M annually. People who earn this are business owners, and there is less educational intelligence with being a business owner compared to being a surgeon. While business owners need to be smart, they do not need to be as smart as people who are professors or surgeon.
Highly paid professional career people will prefer to be in that position as they will not want to risk what they have to creating a business and this means that they cannot earn up to people own the business. So people who are not in this professional careers will be willing to take the risk. While most people who are in the 1% are smart people, what would you say about people like the Kardashians, or that YouTube or TikTok content creator with really no premise on their video but they just rake up $100k+ monthly by people clicking.
The perplexing phenomenon of individuals with seemingly lower intelligence outearning their more intellectually gifted counterparts underscores the nuanced dynamics at play within our socioeconomic landscape. While intelligence undoubtedly confers advantages in various spheres of life, including career success, the correlation between cognitive ability and income appears to plateau among the upper echelons of earners.
Ultimately, the interplay between intelligence, income, and success is a multifaceted phenomenon that defies simplistic explanations. As we grapple with the complexities of socioeconomic mobility and opportunity, it becomes imperative to recognize the myriad factors influencing individual trajectories and to foster a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of success in our society.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha