Just going off the abstract, they did find that cognitive ability correlated strongly with earning ability. The hook is just that it's not a monotonic relationship.

It is a monotonic relationship, monotonic just means that it doesn't change directions. The word for this is "convex."

They said the top 1% of earners performs less well than the group below, a change in direction.

I wouldn’t be sure about that. A lot of very smart people go on to great success in academia, earning decent but non-noteworthy salaries

"earning decent but non-noteworthy salaries"

I think that's sort of the point though. And even the "decent" salaries (whatever that means exactly, relative to industry) is arguably limited to a relatively small number of tenured faculty at a relatively small number of elite schools--concentrated in certain fields.

Don't get me wrong. Being a tenured professor, especially with an endowed chair, at an Ivy or equivalent, is a pretty good gig if you're cut out for it. But, in the scheme of things, there aren't a lot of those positions.

I’d add that there’s also somewhat of a random evolutionary walk in the way an individual’s intrinsic qualities end up aligning (or not) with the skills, values, temperaments and opportunities of their environment. Even how they match the needs and values of their historical time and culture can matter.

This is beyond just plane nature-nurture, but stressing the importance of random “right place right time” dynamics across the whole “production value” process.

If you’re intrinsically capable but never quite work out what you “want to do” or what works for you, for example, no matter how conscientious or committed, you will easily find yourself not as “productive” as those who’ve taken clearer paths.

It's a good point. Also being slotted into the proper path when your capabilities are still forming and you know very little about the world. I know a lot of extremely smart and capable people that ended up stuck in dead end jobs because they were pursuing the wrong thing as a young adult (often, their "dreams"), and by the time they realized it no one was interested in giving them a chance to prove themselves in another field.

Some eventually lucked out and were at the right place and time where someone gave them the opportunity, and were eventually able to minimum wage jobs to high-paying executive jobs in the span of a few years. Others never got that shot and were stuck where they were.

I've heard people lament that they worry about all the Einsteins out there who will never be able to reach their potential because they're plowing fields in underdeveloped countries. But in our own society it's likely that most Einsteins would never make it out of the patent office.

Yep, agreed. Kinda alluded to in my "random walk" metaphor.

On the "Einsteins", you could go further and ask what happens to the ones that just lucked out and couldn't get the patent job? What if they needed to eat and therefore took whatever job they could get which happened to pay well? It feels trite to me to point out life vagaries like this, but as we're all stressing, it really is fundamental, IMO, to understanding the lack of correlations between "success" and "intrinsic quality".

Finding and getting on a good path for yourself is tricky, and, on the personal side of things, sure as hell was not stressed nearly enough in my youth.

As Warren Buffett famously said, he's so wealthy because he happens to be born into a society with a well-developed but modestly inefficient stock market, and that's the area he likes to obsess about. He reckons that less than 10% of historical humanity has had such a chance.

Would Bill Gates be anywhere near his earnings if his dad made him go to law school and he had a good time suing people? Would Carl Icahn just been a happy doctor if he wasn't so afraid of germs to drop out of medical school?

Value production is tricky when you start influencing large numbers of people. A witty one liner a day may only be worth say 10c/month to you but * 1 million people that’s 1.2 million dollars a year.

Actually extracting that value is a different story.

If the earth has only a single witty one liner writer, he might bring 10c/month to people. 100000 of them and in aggregate, they probably bring negative value to society (spam).

To put it other way, you are more likely to bring value to society if you want, and focus on bringing value to society. Your will goes first, your ability then enable you to do so. Cognitive ability affects the latter more than the former.

In the rare instances when we've been forced by circumstances to corral truly brilliant people and make them participate in large-scale organized production efforts, we got the atomic bomb, radar and rocketry in a span of less than a decade. Maybe it's good that we don't do this very often.

There's a lot of truth in this. Some of the most classically brilliant people I went to school with ended up being homeless drug addicts or shut-ins. Meanwhile, the unassuming Ukrainian guy who built my deck is a secret multi-millionaire from his house flipping business. You can literally walk around the neighborhood and pick out the houses he's remodeled and modernized.

There is a book about this called “The Millionaire Next Door” that may be of interest to people looking to build wealth this way.

> A brilliant world observer who tweets their witty one-liners all day produces probably less value

Musk?

Another take is that at the top earning brackets, it matters who you know more than what you know

> It's not a surprise that cognitive ability (the paper seems to define it as relatively close to classical IQ) is not highly correlated with earning ability or even value production for society.

Did you look at the same chart I did? It um, goes very obviously up and to the right. There's a ridiculously strong correlation, just not a linear one.

The correlation coefficient is actually about 0.23 according to the paper. It just looks really correlated when they bin it by deciles but that's a visual artefact.

If you plotted individual people in a scatter plot this is what 0.23 correlation looks like: http://www3.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/distribution/correlations/cor... i.e. you can barely tell any positive relationship visually.