How much wealth is produced by high IQ people?

How good a metric is money for wealth creation? I'd assume that some money goes to people who create wealth, and some goes to people who succeed at zero or negative sum competition.

Garett Jones' work seems relevant here. See this and this paper for instance. Short story: IQ has a modest effect on individual earnings but average national IQ has a large effect on a nation's GDP. He cites spillover effects as the cause, which, if true, renders the question in the OP a bit difficult to answer.

I have not read these papers carefully enough to comment on the statistical work contained therein.

Some relevant citations: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_2011/4r01

Ideas are what smart people are good at. Ideas often have tremendous value, but are difficult to monetize in themselves.

These IT guys are good at ideas, and at organizing other people to make money. I'd guess that the top guy running the show is generally not the smartest guy in the room, and in fact, his likely intelligence is limited to a standard deviation less than the general level of smart guys he can put around him. Not that you have to be stupid to be in charge, but that you can't effectively manage people too much smarter than you are, though you do want people smarter people around you.

One notable fact in this regard is that even though the population of Israel is nearly half Ashkenazi jews, the most intelligent ethnic group on Earth, scoring .5 to 1 standard deviation above Europeans, Israel is not incredibly rich but actually poorer than many European countries_per_capita). Even though Israel of course is a rather special case - e.g. it has had to fight a number of wars - this casts some doubt on the notion that one can infer from the fact that intelligent people in the US are generally wealthy to the notion that intelligent people are the ones who create wealth.

I do think, though, that intelligent people do in fact contribute enormously to progress and wealth (a related argument to this effect by me can be found here). However, I don't think that wealth is a very strong proxy for productivity or contribution to progress. Consider John von Neumann, for instance, who contributed spectacularly both to science, to the American war efforts in the 2nd world war and the cold war, and to the economy via, for instance, his contributions to the development of the computer. If people would have been awarded in accordance with their contributions, he would have died one of the wealthiest men on Earth.

That said, I do think that people who contribute more generally are better paid, but the relationship is not as strong as some people seem to believe. The economists' notion of "productivity" according to which higher-earning people are by definition more productive is highly misleading in this regard, since people tend to conflate this notion of productivity with the ordinary language notion of a productive person as someone who contributes a lot to wealth-creation.

Turn the question on it's head. How many low IQ people have generated (not been given or inhereted) wealth? And of those with low IQ who did generate wealth, how many kept it or expanded it?

It seems likely some low IQ people generate wealth. For example, the gold of the California hills in the 1800s was there for whoever found it first. I know many who found it spent it quickly for little gain or had it tricked away from them no matter what their IQ. I don't imagine many low IQ people who found gold were able to keep and expand their wealth.

My guess: high IQ can sometimes co-occur with wealth generation while low IQ wealth generation is rare. High IQ people can fall from great heights. Low IQ people fall from lower heights when they fall.

The relevant studies all seem to be behind paywalls, but the graphs from this one looked promising.

Jay L. Zagorsky (2007): "Do You Have to Be Smart to Be Rich? The Impact of IQ on Wealth, Income and Financial Distress." Intelligence, 35 (5), 489-501.

Is 145 the right IQ threshold to be looking at? What about IQ ~130 people (98th percentile)?

What do you mean by this? The right threshold for defining someone as high-IQ? Maybe there is a correlation but it plateaus at a certain point.

Also, I'm curious, do you believe you can increase your mentees' IQ?

Also also:

Bill Gates famously scored 1590 on the SAT, at a time when many fewer people scored 1600 than people did in subsequent years. He also solved a notable problem in combinatorics as a a college sophomore.
Jeff Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in computer science Zuckerberg took a graduate course in computer science as a high school student. Drew Houston (Dropbox founder) started programming at age 5 and scored 1600 on the SAT. Steve Jobs tested at the 10th grade level in 4th grade. This is broadly consistent with "top tech entrepreneurs" having IQ ~145+ (99.8th percentile).

How so? Seems like it's only consistent for Gates, Houston, and maybe Jobs... For the rest, that just demonstrates cool but non-standardized facts about their programming prowess. Maybe Zuckerberg's class was easy. Maybe Bezos bribed the dean. Probably not, but right now the argument looks like "they got rich because they were talented computer scientists... and therefore they must be smart... and therefore being smart makes you rich."

I suggest that looking at extreme outliers is likely to be misleading or un-informative. To get Bill Gates/Steve Jobs levels of wealth, you must, as the saying goes, not only be good, but also lucky. The counterfactual Bill Gates who has the same amount of brains, drive, and other personal characteristics as ours, but who didn't get the fantastically lucky break of IBM offering him a hugely lucrative contract to "develop" DOS, would no doubt still be a wealthy man. But he would not be a byword for wealth. You would be better off looking closer to the center of the wealth distribution and seeing what the correlation (if any) is in a lot of unspectacular cases.

To get a meaningful answer I think you also have to look at all of the high-IQ people that don't generate a lot of wealth. What you really should look at is the correlation between IQ and wealth generation on average. My intuition says that there is a correlation but not a super duper strong one. (For instance I doubt having a 180 IQ results in more wealth generation than a 150 IQ.) I think cognitive empathy, or the ability to understand others' feelings and how they would react in a given circumstance, is just as important for wealth generation, if not more so. There are and have been functional autistic savants with very high IQ but low cognitive empathy that have not generated a lot of wealth.

I believe the ability to delay gratification, or think long-term, or whatever you want to call it, is more important than IQ for self-actualization. If you can't override your impulses and force yourself to follow your rational conclusions, what good is your reasoning faculty? To put it in Daniel Kahneman's terms, if you have difficulty getting your System 1 to use or go along with your System 2, it doesn't matter how powerful your System 2 is. The Marshmellow Test experiment is a good indicator of this. The children that had inherent abilities to delay gratification did better later in life by many different measures, including wealth generation.

I would like to see this study in full. I think it was cited in Pfeffer's Power when he claimed that IQ is only a weak predictor of success.

Bowles and Gintis found [edited] lots of different things that contribute to intergenerationally transmitted wealth--inherited IQ was only a small part and not even most of the genetically transmitted advantage.

[deleted] Also, how might you see these questions being actionable?

I suspect there is a high expected value in testing if brain training games raise the intelligence of high IQ young people.