Social class amongst the intellectually gifted

Those are weak examples.

You want to take base-rates into account. Of intellectually gifted people outside of academia, what fraction do you think have high technical proficiency in a quantitative subject? How does that compare with the fraction of super-rich people who have such proficiency?

What "major disadvantages" do you have in mind? Brilliant mathematicians are rarely wealthy or enjoy high social status.

No, but to a large degree, that's not what they're motivated by. If you look at revealed preferences, the most intellectually capable people do math disproportionately. Gauss is the one who developed the theory of linear regression and p-values, and he described math as being the queen of science and number theory as the queen of math. Alexander Grothendieck wrote:

I well recall the power of my emotional response ( very subjective naturally); it was as if I'd fled the harsh arid steppes to find myself suddenly transported to a kind of "promised land" of superabundant richness, multiplying out to infinity wherever I placed my hand in it, either to search or to gather... This impression, of overwhelming riches has continued to be confirmed and grow in substance and depth down to the present day.The phrase "superabundant richness" has this nuance: it refers to the situation in which the impressions and sensations raised in us through encounter with something whose splendor, grandeur or beauty are out of the ordinary, are so great as to totally submerge us, to the point that the urge to express whatever we are feeling is obliterated.

All else being equal, wouldn't you want the option to feel that way? :D

Those who do decide that they want to do something outside of math often do very well (again, Simons is virtually the only elite mathematician to have left academia), there just aren't very many of them.

Agreed that statistics > anecdotes. That said, the list here leaves me wondering about the direction of causation. I'm less interested in current-net-worth than average annual-change-in-net-worth (both % and $) in the years since graduation.

I don't think this list tells you much.

The most obvious reason why the list might look this way is that there are simply more people getting MBAs or engineering degrees. So of course there would be more of those becoming millionaires than there are math students etc.

I'm also not sure if the study actually measured how many people with a given degree actually got this level of wealth by themselves or if they also asked those who had wealthy parents. I don't have statistics on this but it does sound reasonable (not to say that it necessarily is) that wealthy parents try to direct their children towards those degrees which are 'useful' - in their opinion - in a business environment. Since most of these people have a very poor concept of what math actually is, math probably won't be among that class.

People who study math, theoretical physics or theoretical computer science are also much more likely to stay in academia than do those who studied engineering etc.

For all I know those people who did become millionaires by themselves who got the degrees they got might actually have done much better if they had studied math or theoretical physics.

So a statistic which would really be telling here would be one which measured how many of those getting a certain degree and going into the market are becoming rich.

I'm worried that math and physics and theoretical CS are just nerd-snipery

No way, especially not physics. We as a civ need to do more of this stuff, not less, compared to what we are doing now.

I can't think of any category of human activity that did more to improving the world than the hard sciences. Maaaaybe some religions in the "convince people to stop killing each other and cooperate long enough to get science off the ground" sense.

Hehe, it's rare that intellectual satisfaction is called a 'low' value.

Yes, there's also the theory that success in hard math/science fields are strong signals of intellect, and thus smart people flock to them to signal their intelligence.

As someone about to start a CS degree and figuring out what to do with his life, this is a sobering line of thought.

My view is that some degree of technical facility helps a lot. As I recently wrote, I think that learning to read very carefully and not make unwarranted assumptions is a very important skill, and one way to get it is by studying proof-based math. I don't have strong views on how much studying pure math and TCS help after the first 1-2 years. I think that the case for learning advanced statistics & machine learning is much stronger.

Separately, I benefited a huge amount from reading and interacting with elite mathematicians. Even though they weren't thinking about the things that I'm doing now directly, I was able to transfer what I had learned from them to the things that I'm currently focused on. That's the peer group effect.

http://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/what-subjects-did-the-worlds-most-successful-entrepreneurs-study

Yes, that might be a good nontechnical counterpart. I grew up in San Francisco and live in the Bay Area where the wealthy / privileged people tend to be in tech, and my perceptions are correspondingly skewed. I added a footnote linking your comment.

Well law includes a lot of logic, in the form of verbal reasoning. Bertrand Russell formalised how math can be reduced to logic...kinda. I pray for the haters of a lawyer who can substantiate his reasoning with hard data. Imagine a lawyer who can substantiate an argument for legalising assisted suicide by referring to quality adjusted life years and grounding his/her reasoning in some kind of felsific calculus.

On second thoughts, the poor reception that hedonic calculus (according to that one Charles Dickins book at least) got from the world is evidence against this line of thinking.

:/

edit 1: evidence that lawyers aren't great at quantitative evidence and by extension, some applications of logic.

Sure, that's plausible. Gates had other advantages as well. But even if those do dominate, his involvement in math is still (weak) Bayesian evidence for my claim.

There are so few people who do publishable TCS research as college sophomores that it's very unlikely that the wealthiest person in the world is one of them by chance :D. I acknowledge that the correlation may be entirely spurious, but it still warrants a Bayesian update.

there are many accounts of the genius theorists told to stay out of the labs, or else.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect

What do you mean by "technical ability" ? I intended to include everything in math / physics / TCS / statistics under that umbrella, not just computation / engineering.

The most significant thing to my mind is actually the peer group – even if one doesn't become quantitatively sophisticated oneself, just being around people who are can make a big difference.

Social status is relative to a particular subculture. In certain circles startup founders have higher status than math professors.

Great, thanks for letting me know.

I was describing a general trend – one can often find some examples that are in the opposite direction of a general trend.