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13 Dec 2013
Billionaires Really Are Smarter Than The Rest Of Us, Researcher Finds
It's common knowledge that success is two-
parts hard work and one-part
luck. But what about smarts? Are
the world's richest people really
the most intelligent people
around?
Pretty much, yes, according to new
research by Duke University's
Jonathan Wai, sent to Business
Insider and first reported by
CNBC's Robert Frank.
Wai found that within the top one
percent of smart people, the
smarter you are, the richer you
are.
Overall, billionaires tended to be
the smartest people. Some 45% of them are
part of the top 1% of smart people. That
compares to 39% of not-billionaire Fortune
500 CEOs; 41% of Senators, and 40% of
federal judges.
Tech billionaires and those who made their
money from investments seem to be the
smartest of all. Wai found that 63% in tech
and 69% in finance were among the
brainpower elite.
Billionaires who made their money in
fashion and retail, food and beverage
weren't as brilliant. About one-quarter of
them were brainiacs.
Wai came to these conclusions by looking at
the colleges these people attended. If they
went to one of 29 "elite colleges," there were
considered to be among the top 1% of smart
people. These schools require high test
scores for admittance and that indicates
very high intelligence, he reasoned.
You can argue that this is a pretty flawed
way to measure intelligence. It
automatically filters out smart people who
didn't attend elite colleges and
automatically assigns a high IQ to those
were accepted because their parents were
alumni, or they got an athletic scholarship.
Wai acknowledges that flaw but says those
two exceptions balance each other out.
Interestingly, this research runs counter to
a study done in 2007 by Jay Zagorsky, at
Ohio State University.
Zagorsky's study found no correlation
between wealth and IQ. It looked at people
who did well on the Armed Forces
Qualification Test and how their wealth
grew over time. While smarter people did
earned bigger salaries, they were no more
likely to become super rich over time than
those with an average IQ.
So maybe the answer to the question of
wealth and smarts is this: It won't
automatically make you a billionaire but it
certainly helps.
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