100 would be an IQ of an average person.
130 is a rather smart person. Remember that guy in your class who could solve the problem in his head before it was written on the blackboard? That's probably him.
IQ of 85 is the lower limits for getting into the US army.
IQ of 70 is the official definition of being mentally retarded.
Does being smart correlate with economic success? Yes, up to some extent. Being too smart? Well, there's a chance most people around simply won't understand you, which is rarely good for career advancement.
> each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year after holding a variety of factors constant
From: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960...
I appreciate the information!
No one wants to hear it, and with good reason, but there is simply no proof of this, and substantial evidence to the contrary. We know intelligence is strongly heritable, for example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Life is unfair. But our modern academic institutions are beating around this bush, I think because on a base level, empathetic people are fearful of the consequences of scientific research that may effectively justify certain racist ideas. But that makes for bad science and, possibly, bad policy, if different people require different solutions to different problems. It also makes it hard for me to trust academia, because the bias is so entrenched.
I think you can boil it down to both IQ and culture as being the main drivers of economic success. Culture can be split further into ethnic cultural modifiers and socio-economic cultural modifiers/multipliers. You can do pretty well if you have positive points in 1 of 3 of these areas. We all start relatively equal but having one of these three modifiers can propel you to the top, with few exceptions.
I can't find a reference right this moment. Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot so it should be in 1 of his videos on Youtube.
It’s easy to imagine that people at the highest end simply weren’t available to be selected for the study.
If I'm summarizing correctly, the Terman survey includes a group of 856 boys and 672 girls born around 1910 and selected in 1921-1922 who were followed until 1991.
Chances of someone from this thousand people being among the highest end are indeed pretty small.
That being said, it's been my impression for a while that IQ scores at least are mostly irrelevant, and not well correlated with economic performance. Is that a mistaken impression? I fully agree with the rest of the factors you bring up as positive influences, it's just the connection to IQ that I have a concern with.
I would argue, also, that the "equal competence" premise could be better stated as "that we all have an approximately equal potential for competence". I'm curious if you think this alternate premise would also be bad for business and society?
Thanks for prompting me to challenge my own assumptions and biases, btw