George Soros is part of the Silent Generation, one of the 58 million Americans born from 1925 to 1945.  In 2013 it was estimated that Jews are 3.3% of U.S. adults, if Jewish is defined as having at least one Jewish parent or being raised Jewish, even if you now have another religion.  Only 55% of this 3.3% is Jewish by religion.

We don’t know how many Americans were Jewish in Soros’s day, but in 1957, 3.2% of Americans 14 or older were Jewish by religion, and assuming even back then, Jews by religion were 55% of the Jewish population, then the total Jewish population was 5.8% of America.

Assuming they were also 5.8% of the Silent Generation, that’s 3.4 million U.S. Jews. Before giving away the bulk of his fortune in 2017, Soros was the second richest Jew in his entire generation behind only Sheldon Adelson, putting Soros at the one in 1.7 million level.

On a scale where all Americans average IQ 100 with a standard deviation of 15, White Americans average 102 to 103 (goes up with the very immigration Soros endorses) and an SD of 14.5 and Jewish Americans about 10 points higher than whites. The top one in 1.7 million is 4.87 SD above the mean on a normal(ized) curve so if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and life time earnings, we’d expect Soros to be 71 IQ points smarter than the average U.S. Jew so 113 + 71 = 184.

However since the correlation between IQ and life time earnings is “only” about 0.5, we’d expect him to be 113 + 71(0.5) = 149 which is about where I’d expect him to be based on listening to him talk.

Of course with a correlation this imperfect, we can expect a huge band of error around this estimate. For example, Soros is not just rich but exceptionally well educated so guessing his IQ from only money and race may underestimate him. But then most Jewish decabillionaires are highly educated so including this statistic was too redundant to justify the effort.

You can get a good sense of a person’s IQ by watching them on Charlie Rose because Rose asks complex g loaded questions that inspire his guests to rise to the cognitive challenge. Soros shows high IQ by predicting the internet would be as revolutionary as the printing press (I don’t recall many old people being that prophetic in 1995). He also says “that’s right” in response to many of Rose’s comments which shows he can quickly digest and evaluate ideas.

Advertisement