Because intelligence can be defined as the ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage, rich people should be smarter than poor people.  I came up with the theory that in America, for every ten fold increase in money, average IQ jumps about 10 points (give or take).  So:

Homeless people: Average IQ 76

Four figure income earners: Average IQ 86

Five figure income earners: Average IQ 96

Self-made millionaires: Average IQ 106

Self-made decamillionaires: Average IQ 116

Self-made centimillionaires: Average IQ 126

Self-made billionares: Average IQ 136

Self-made decabillionaires: Average IQ 146

Now Donald Trump claims to be worth $10 billion, but as a master of self-promotion, that figure might be wildly exaggerated.  Authoritative Forbes magazine (the gold standard for wealth valuation), recently put his net worth at $4 billion.  However New York Times journalist Timothy O’Brien claimed in 2005 that Trump’s net worth is a measly $200 million, though Trump sued O’Brien for claiming this.

I’m going to go with Forbes magazine and assume Trump is worth $4 billion.  This might suggest an IQ around 136.  However Trump inherited a huge chunk of his fortune and brand from his father, who was a 20th century centimillionaire (equivalent to a billionaire today).  So perhaps it was Trump’s father who might have been around 136 IQ.  Since the father-son IQ correlation is 0.45, Trump’s IQ might only be 45% as far above the U.S. mean of 96 as his dad was, giving him an expected IQ of:

0.45(136 – 96) + 96 = 114

However Trump multiplied his inheritance many times over, so his IQ is likely higher than an inheritance billionaire (IQ 114), but lower than a self-made billionaire (IQ 136).  I’m guessing his IQ is around 125, which is higher than 95% of White America, but even that isn’t always enough.

Trump recently got severely criticised for minimizing John McCain’s war hero status, which was a colossally stupid mistake for someone running as a Republican.  Trump has been surging in the polls because he was willing to insult anyone, but I suspect he miscalculated in this case, and it will hurt him, and it’s a mistake I don’t think he would have made had his IQ been 10 points higher.  IQ is much like money.  No matter how much you have, you never get to a point where you don’t need more.

As the great J.P. Rushton once explained to me, all of us have successes, all of us make mistakes, but high IQ people tend to get further ahead in life, partly because they make fewer mistakes.

Meanwhile here’s rare footage of Trump contemplating the presidency way back in the 1980s on Oprah:

The brilliant Charles Murray is finally wrong about something.

Iconic blogger Steve Sailer recently blogged about the following comments by Murray:

The results are always the same: The richer the parents, the higher the children’s SAT scores. This has led some to view the SAT as merely another weapon in the inequality wars, and to suggest that SAT should actually stand for “Student Affluence Test.”

It’s a bum rap. All high-quality academic tests look as if they’re affluence tests. It’s inevitable. Parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ everywhere. In all advanced societies, income is correlated with IQ. Scores on academic achievement tests are always correlated with the test-takers’ IQ. Those three correlations guarantee that every standardized academic-achievement test shows higher average test scores as parental income increases.

What Murray is saying, obviously, is that rich kids do well on the SAT because they have high IQ genes and the rich environment they were raised in has little effect. I’d hate to throw Charles Murray under the bus, because he along with Steve Sailer really paved the way for people like me to talk openly about behavioral genetics, but in my scientific judgement, he’s wrong.

On the combined verbal and math section of the new SAT, kids from homes earning over $200 K a year average 1157 while kids from homes earning less than 20 K a year average 895. On a scale where the U.S. mean is set at 100 (SD = 15) these scores are equivalent to IQs of 118 and 100 respectively (note only the most academic third of America tends to take the SAT so scores are high). That’s a difference of 1.2 standard deviations in kids coming from homes that are 3.07 standard deviations apart in normalized income. 1.2/3.07 = 0.39, suggesting the correlation between SAT scores and the income of your parents is about 0.4.

But even 0.4 is an underestimate, because among rich kids, taking the SAT is very common, but among poor kids with little hope of affording college, it’s largely the best and brightest who take the SAT, so if everyone took the SAT, the correlation between SAT scores and your parents’ income would be well above 0.4.

But 0.4 is widely cited as the correlation between IQ and one’s own income (see Jensen, 1998). One would expect IQ to correlate much less with your parents’ income, because a teenager’s IQ correlates no more than 0.6 with the mid-parents’ IQ; thus the correlation should be 0.4(0.6) = 0.24. Instead, if the SAT is used instead of an official IQ test, it’s almost double that.

Clearly, the SAT is culturally biased in favor of kids from rich homes (and probably educated homes) and biased against kids from poor (and probably uneducated homes). And this is not the first time we’ve seen this effect. In the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, black kids adopted into white professional homes scored the equivalent of IQ 95 on measures of scholastic aptitude and achievement, but scored an IQ of only 84 (about the same as black Americans raised by their biological parents) on the WAIS (an official IQ test).

What this suggests is that the SAT probably underestimates the ability of kids from low SES homes, and overestimates the ability of kids from high SES homes. I’ve even noticed this with celebrities. Bill Cosby, Howard Stern, and Rosie O’Donnell have all come from low SES homes and have all claimed to have scored poorly on the SAT, but all strike me as highly intelligent. By contrast George W. Bush did well on the SAT and comes from an extremely high SES background, but does not strike me as intelligent. The SAT would probably better reflect IQ if scores were corrected for SES, but one must be careful not to over-correct, because over half the test’s correlation with such measures is probably genetic.

Although IQ and income are positively correlated at a value of about 0.4, commenter Mugabe feels this is mostly just an artifact of education, writing:

as LotB has mentioned: high IQ leads to high educational attainment and to connections and this really is more than sufficient to explain all of the correlation.

that is:

smart people get good grades and get into good schools and are socialized and etc.

the effect of IQ ceteris paribus is positive but not by much.

I agree that if you controlled for education, the correlation between IQ and income would be greatly diminished, probably going from 0.4 to less than 0.2. The Lion of the Blogosphere sometimes goes even further, suggesting that if you control for certain forms of education, the correlation between IQ and income might even be negative.

Way back in the 1990s, even the book The Bell Curve (which really popularized the link between IQ and money) admitted that among graduates of Harvard, there might even be a negative correlation between IQ and income if the brightest students go into research where they earned a modest living, while the dullest went into business where they might get rich.

But what if anything does this tell us about the independent effect of IQ on income? Does it prove that smart people get rich primarily because they have the right credentials, and not because they are better at adapting to the real world?

The problem with controlling for education is you’re not comparing different IQ levels with all else being equal, because when an IQ 110 and an IQ 150 both have an AB in English from Princeton, the lower IQ person probably has non-cognitive advantages (i.e. strong work ethic, rich well connected family, affirmative action, etc) that allowed him to achieve the same degree as someone 35 IQ points smarter, and those same advantages will help him make a high income when he leaves Princeton.

Similarly, when an IQ 67 and an IQ 107, both have only a 10th grade education, the IQ 107 must have non-cognitive liabilities (i.e. extreme laziness, low socioeconomic background, mental illness etc) that explain why he has the same education as a mentally retarded person despite having above average IQ.

Given this, we might expect lower IQ people to do relatively well economically when you control for education and higher IQ people to do relatively poorly, because controlling for education causes the lower IQ person to be advantaged in many non-cognitive domains.

Thus the ideal way to compare the independent effects of IQ and education on income is to take a random sample of American kids ranging from IQ 50 to 150, and send them all to Princeton, and instruct the professors to give them all a Magna Cum Laude AB in English, and instruct all the other students to network with them all equally, and then send them all out into the world to see who makes the most money with their fancy credential.

I have a feeling that if you controlled for education under these experimental conditions, you might even get a higher correlation between IQ and income then the 0.4 in the uncontrolled general population, because almost everyone with an IQ below 115 would be incapable of even doing the jobs their fancy degrees qualified them for, and would have nothing left to fall back on. And because the experimental sample has a wide range of IQs, we also don’t get the problem of range restriction that normally limits correlations in educationally homogeneous groups.

But even among those capable of doing the jobs, I would expect only a small decline in the IQ-income relation, because having assigned random people of different IQs the same degree, we don’t get the phenomenon of the lower IQ person having compensatory assets that normally occurs when people of different IQs obtain the same degree.

Alternatively, if we took a random group of Americans ranging from IQ 50 to 150, and denied them any formal schooling at all, it would be interesting to see the correlation between IQ and income. Once again, I think the correlation could possibly be even higher than in the uncontrolled general population, because with no schooling at all, high IQ people would be far more likely to acquire the basic literacy, numeracy, and social skills required to hold a job, while low and mediocre IQ people would simply end up unemployed, in jail, or homeless.

Sometimes I get really depressed by the evil of human nature. It seems like for a lot of middle income youths, beating the crap out of some poor defenseless homeless person is entertainment.

This shows that if you don’t have money, society looks at you as subhuman, worthy of being kicked around and in some cases even urinated on.

But there’s also something Darwinian about it. Those who can’t adapt to the environment (i.e. earn money) are victimized by those who can. We see this all over the animal kingdom but humans are unique in that they are one of the few animals that victimizes the weak just for the sheer sadistic pleasure it gives them, while other animals victimize only for food.

Some people like to talk about how the rich are evil because they make their money by exploiting the middle income earners, but it’s the middle income earners who go around beating up and urinating on the homeless. You don’t see millionaires going around beating up and urinating on average Americans. Nor do you see billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet beating up and urinating on millionaires. I suppose Marxists would say they do it metaphorically.

A lot of middle income people adopt the self-serving philosophy that the poor are poor because of stupidity and the rich are rich because of evil, and only they, the middle income people, have both brains and morality. But I think this only half true. Yes, the rich are probably more evil than middle income Americans (on average), but they’re also probably a lot smarter. And yes, the poor are probably a lot dumber than middle income Americans, but they are also probably a lot less evil.

So just as middle income Americans look down at the homeless for being stupid, the rich can also look down at the middle incomes for being stupid. And just as the middle incomes can look down at the rich for being evil, the homeless can look down down at the middle income for being evil. Occam’s razor implies that whatever positive or negative traits associated with money probably apply about as much as to those who are richer than you as to those who are poorer than you.

The video below, where a homeless person offers a middle income person a hug after getting beat up, demonstrates the superior morality of the homeless over the middle-income Americans that torment them.

I had once stated in the comment section of this blog that the correlation between IQ and income was higher in the U.S. than in the rest of the developed world. I had based this claim on various studies I’ve seen reported, but on page 103 of this book, it states that a meta-analysis showed the IQ-income correlation is no higher in the U.S..

I would have expected the IQ-income correlation to be higher in the U.S. because the U.S. is a country where you can get ridiculously rich. Understanding the value of money more fully, I would have expected high IQ Americans to be more motivated to pursue it, considering there was so much more to be made and that this would have increased the correlation between ability and income, but the studies fail to confirm this theory (though I doubt business income is well captured by such studies). I also would have expected the generous social safety nets in other developed countries to have disincentived a lot of smart people from working hard, making the IQ-income correlation lower in other developed countries.

But one of the commenters here has long argued that elites outside North America are more selected for IQ because the colleges recruit more based on test scores than on other criteria. This argument is ironic because while other countries do test for academic knowledge acquired in school, the college system in the U.S. is unique in that it uses the SAT, which was specifically intended as an IQ test according to a FRONTLINE article:

The design of the SAT was based on the IQ test (see historical timeline) The French psychologist Alfred Binet created the first test of intelligence in 1905. It was to be used to identify slow learners so that teachers could give them special attention. This test would later be known as the IQ test–IQ standing for “intelligence quotient,” or the ratio of mental to physical age.

Because the SAT was devised as a tool to identify talented students from underprivileged backgrounds, it was thought of as a test that would measure an innate ability referred to as “aptitude,” rather than abilities that these students might have developed through school.

“When these tests were originally developed,” said Harvard social policy professor Christopher Jencks, “people really believed that if they did the job right they would be able to measure this sort of underlying, biological potential. And they often called it aptitude, sometimes they called it genes, sometimes intelligence.”

You would expect the country that deliberately tried to recruit their elites using an IQ test to have a higher correlation between IQ and income than other countries that simply tested students on how much they learned in high school, but since how much you learn in high school is largely determined by your IQ, colleges in other countries probably did a good job screening for IQ in spite of themselves.

This demonstrates that societies end up selecting their elites for IQ whether they intend to or not. Even a society that was actively hostile to IQ, would still need elites with important skills to run their institutions, and since important skills are highly correlated with IQ, it’s almost impossible to recruit useful skills without also recruiting IQ.

Indeed the fact that brain size roughly tripled as apes evolved into people shows that nature itself was selecting for intelligence, millions of years before tests or even schools were invented.

Smart people tend to get to the top naturally.

It’s interesting that now that IQ testing is controversial, the college board wants to deny that the SAT is an IQ test. The frontline article reports:

According to the College Board, the SAT now does not measure any innate ability. Wayne Camara, Director of the Office of research at the College Board told FRONTLINE that the SAT measures “developed reasoning,” which he described as the skills that students develop not only in school but also outside of school. He pointed out, for example, that students who read a lot, both in and out of school, are more likely to do well on the SAT and in college. The College Board says that the best way to prepare for the SAT is to read a lot and to take rigorous academic courses.

Elite colleges get to have their cake and eat it too. They are benefiting from a test format created by IQ researchers in recruiting high quality students, yet maintaining their liberal street cred by denying IQ. But if they really believe the SAT is only measuring developed skills, then they should use tests that directly measure academic knowledge like other countries do. But they don’t, perhaps because deep down, they believe the SAT is a better measure of IQ than tests used in other countries, even though tests used in other countries still measure IQ despite not being designed for that purpose. But since the SAT is a more efficient measure of IQ, they are able to give test scores less weight, which allows elite colleges to give more weight to subjective criteria while still keeping the average IQ of their students high.

Given that Bill Cosby rose from humble beginnings to become one of the richest, most beloved, and most influential people in America, during an era of great racial discrimination, it’s interesting to ask what his IQ is. An article in tvguide.com provides a clue (emphasis mine):

Though Cosby is a prominent education advocate, he was a terrible student in school, opting to be the class clown instead of studying up. Because he never opened his geometry book, Cosby, who had the highest IQ in his grade, once took 12 pages to work out one of four problems on a test. He ended up getting that one right, but failed the test because he didn’t have time to attempt the other questions. The SATs? He scored a 500 total.

Critics of IQ tests (and even supporters like the Lion of the Blogosphere) often claim that IQ correlates with success, not because high IQ people behave intelligently in real life, but because you need to score high on the SAT (a disguised IQ test) to get into a good college to get into a successful career. In other words, test scores become a self-fulfilling prophecy, skeptics charge.

But Cosby is an example of someone who had the highest IQ in his grade and went on to become the richest and most popular African American of his generation despite flunking the SAT and attending a crappy college. In other words, he did well on the IQ test that didn’t matter, yet flunked the IQ test used for college admissions, yet still achieved spectacular success. This would indicate that IQ scores predict success because they predict intelligence, and not because they predict all important SAT scores.

An interesting study would be compare the future incomes of kids who flunked their SAT but did well on a regular IQ test with kids who flunked a regular IQ test but did well on the SAT. If the SAT > regular IQ test group was not more successful, then the “IQ scores are a self-fufilling prophecy” theory is debunked.

Here once again is Bill Cosby talking about his SAT scores:

Evidence continues to debunk the popular idea that IQ is largely irrelevant to success above 120, and my less successful readers are going absolutely ballistic. The reason this idea is so popular (and its debunking so threatening) is that the internet is crawling with people who are either only moderately intelligent or only moderately successful; and they take comfort in believing they achieved their modest success by being way smarter than the homeless guy on the street, but hysteria ensues if you suggest that some gazillionaire pizza mogul is richer than they are because of brains. Thus, these self-serving elitist snobs want IQ and money to be correlated, but only up to either their level of money or their level of IQ (whichever comes first). This allows them to feel intellectually superior to the poor who they view as too dumb to meet basic needs, while also feeling morally superior to the rich who they view as greedy and ruthless.

This is reminiscent of the white supremacists of old who believed that IQ and brain size were only correlated at the low end, because tropical people had small brains, but irrelevant at the high end, since Mongoloid races had the biggest brains. Stephen Jay Gould mocked this as an unbeatable argument: “Deny it at one end where the conclusions are uncongenial; affirm it by the same criteria at the other.”

Unfortunately for the hypocrites, statistics seldom work that way.

The median income (in 2014 dollars) of seven different IQ levels:

In the above chart, the income for IQ 153 people was documented here. The incomes for all the other IQ levels was documented here, but because those were in 1993 dollars, I converted them to 2014 dollars using this calculator. The below scatter plot shows how linear the relationship is, well above IQ 120:

Because income can be quite skewed at the extremes, it also makes sense to convert raw dollars into normalized Z scores. This was accomplished in the below chart by converting the above dollar values into income percentiles for Americans in their early 30s using this calculator. The incomes are then assigned Z scores based on the Gaussian distribution. When this is done, the correlation between IQ and income continues to be beautifully linear well above IQ 120:

Earlier, I talked about this chart showing SAT scores of kids from different household income levels:

In this post, I will estimate the IQ of the adults of various income levels from how their kids score on the SAT. Now the first step is converting the combined SAT scores of the kids of all ten income levels into IQ using this formula I created:

IQ = 39.545 + 0.068(SAT score)

This gives the following IQ’s for the ten income groups: 100, 104, 106, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 114, 118

One problem is mostly the brightest kids tend to take the SAT. For example, the average SAT taker has combined score (reading + math) of 1010, equivalent to an IQ of 108 (8 points higher than the national average). If we very crudely assume that at every income level, the ones who take the SAT are 8 points above the norms for their income group, we should correct these IQ’s by subtracting 8 points. Thus the IQ’s for the ten income groups become: 92, 96, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 106, 110

Of course I’m not interested in the IQs of the kids from different income groups. I’m interested in the IQs of their parents since they’re the ones who earned the income. In order to estimate the IQ’s of the parents from the IQs of the kids, we note that the IQ correlation between both parents and their kid is 0.6 (by late adolescence/adulthood). This means that the children of exceptional parents will be only 60% as exceptional as their parents, so to estimate the IQs of the parents, we simply divide the number of IQ points the kids score above or below 100 by 0.6 to determine how far above and below average their parents are. This gives the following IQ’s for the parents in the ten income groups: 87, 93, 97, 102, 103, 107, 108, 110, 110, 117

The following chart shows the IQs of the parents of all ten income groups along with the income percentile of each income group calculated here:

It is interesting to ask how linear the correlation between IQ and income is. In an absolute sense it’s not linear at all because IQ is normally distributed and income has an extremely skewed distribution, especially at the high end. But what happens when we convert income into the same scale as IQ (a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15)? This is easily done by taking various income percentiles and assigning them MQs (Money Quotients) based on their position in a normalized distribution with a mean of a 100 and and SD of 15. So the median household earning over $200,000 a year is at the 97 percentile and thus is assigned an MQ of 128. Households earning around $0-20K a year are at the 11 percentile, thus assigned an MQ of 82. Thus we can graph the the average IQ of earners from various MQs and note how linear the graph is: