There must be some correlation between smarts and wealth.
I’ve always heard that higher college degrees match higher income averages.
What’s the hard data look like?
Are the odds of doing well (not the lottery, just enough to need estate planning) really much better for smart people?
Advanced degrees do not necessarily equate to ‘money’. And intelligence does not necessarily equate to ‘smart’ or, for that matter, anything else. Ted Kaczynski is ‘smart’. He has an advanced degree in mathmatics. But he fell over the edge backwards. Some people fall over the edge forwards. I just jumped off and never looked back.
The stock answer is that having a Ph.d. will allow you to make more money than someone who does not. It isn’t necessarily true because things are not that simple.
Look at a list of the 100 richest people in the world starting with Bill Gates. Look at politicians, sports figures, movie stars. Look at inventors who changed the world. The people who are most successful are either very charismatic (like Bill Clinton), or people are willing to screw someone else to claw their way up.(like Bill…either one).
If you were so backward socially that you could never work up the nerve to leave the school environment, you are probably going to end up a professor of something (or hoping for tenure someday) and you will make almost a much money as a Deputy Sheriff or Firefighter in Los Angeles County who has been in that job since you started graduate school.
Another facet of it is that smart/educated folks may not even feel that strongly about money. Within a decade, God willing (probably about 5 or 6 years), I’ll have a Ph.D. to stick after my name. The reason I’m pursuing it is not to make more money: If that’s what I wanted, I wouldn’t be going into theoretical physics in the first place. I could easily make more money with less of an investment in some other field, but I’m in it for the knowledge itself. If I have enough money to keep food on my table, and to eventually raise a family, why do I need any more?
Who says a lot of people on this board aren’t rich? I’m doing very well myself, due to:
I attribute my ability to do these things successfully, relative to my peers at work, to my greater intelligence. But attitude and emotional intelligence are a large part of it - I know people who are extremely smart otherwise yet never have any money because they do stupid things, or buy things they don’t need on an impulse. There is a certain discipline to managing money, and it’s hard to do for some people.
The worst examples are this couple I know - their combined gross salary is $20k more than mine, yet after 7 years of work my retirement savings is roughly 10 - 15 times theirs, they have a credit card debt of about $20k, and they owe a tremendous amount more on their house and cars than I do (I could pay off my freaking house and car if I wanted to). The reason these smart people are in this position?
Smart people with no emotional maturity. Enough said.
Einstein reputedly offered the following three part refutation to the question put in the thread title:
Tris
Well, my household income has increased nearly 1000% in 14 years. I am getting there 
This is going to sound a little snotty, but I don’t mean it like that. Just reporting the conclusions I’ve arrived at. YMMV.
I think I’m doing pretty well in the smarts department, if I may say so; one of the things that I think I’ve done that’s smart is decided to content myself with not much money. I don’t and hopefully will never want to own a house, car, or expensive entertainment shit.
Right now, I have very little money, but dammit, I’m living like a king. I have lots of food, a great little apartment that looks nice and contains everything I need; I’m well taken care of. There are some nice things I want that I don’t have, but that’s OK. I have some hefty (to my standards) cheques coming in this month for my translation work that’ll keep me in incense and Oreos for a good deal of time to come. I might even be able to go to Europe this autumn - on the cheap, of course.
My parents, on the other hand, have a house, a 34’ yacht, a cottage, etc, etc. They have taken two vacations so far this year, to the Bahamas and to Italy. Interestingly, for people so vastly much “better off” materially than I, they seem to spend more time worrying about money.
Forgive my naiveté, but is this one of the things that changes as you get older? I hope not. I like being happy with my 1 1/2 on the Plateau and a bus pass every month whether I need it or not.
I have a warm bed, a great apartment, a good amount of space, and basically everything I need and a great deal of what I want.
I have three friends whom I suspect would score in the highest percentiles on any “smarts” test. All of them have at least a four-year degree from fairly reputable schools.
Friend #1 quit his, ahem, “government” job to become a snow-maker and paraglider in Utah. He’s teaching himself how to play the banjo in the spare time between periods of relaxation. He is not wealthy.
Friend #2 led his college band to a fair amount of success and international recognition. He spends the spare time between periods of copulation and substance abuse rebuilding tractors and motorcycles, fishing, cooking, and writing. He is not wealthy.
Friend #3 married the niece of a Presidential candidate, has a house and a kid, and is a lawyer. He spends the spare time bedtween periods of sleeplessness changing diapers, watching his stocks, studying for post-doctoral law classes, working at home when he’s not working at work, and vicariously living through the lives of friends #s 1 and 2. He, too, is not wealthy, but he has a minivan.
For that matter, I’m still two paychecks away from poverty, too, but we’re all happy and doing what we want to do, even Friend #3. That of course, is the measure of success, not wealth.
Yes and no. But to answer your question. Smart people generally get what they want more than dumber people. But not all smart people necessarily has wealth as their top priority.
Some smart people want to be the tops in their field, i.e. history, science, etc. Some people want fulfillment as in theological, social, personal.
For some people, money is the ends. For some money is the means to the end.
If you read anthracite’s post, you’ll see that money is his “end”. Everything he has listed for his friends and himself has only to do with money. Anthracite is obviously a smart person, but is he smart enough to realize that money is not the “end”? It should only be the means to something, and that something is not retirement.
Money is only a means to an end. As an end to itself, it’s no more than a pile of paper or digital garbage – and can be addictive at that. Having said that, it can be quite positive in achieving other goals, if and when they are worthwhile ones.
Smarts and money are not related. I have personally known 3 very wealth people. All 3 of them were not smart, just average, but they all had making lots of money as their number one priority in life. Happyness, kids, family, health all came second.
Intelligence is only one attribute involved in making money. Ruthlessness, or at least a single-minded motivation (i.e. “I can’t go out this week because I want to save a certain amount and not a penny less”); good luck; family wealth; good timing; maybe even a ‘flexible morality’ (“I don’t think this is right, but if you’re paying that much…”).
Sure, intelligence is involved in recognising good timing and the like, but you don’t need top-of-your-class-honours-degree intelligence to be smart enough for that.
Easy. You have to like money & respect it. Seems simple, doesn’t it?
Not entirely true. People with bachelors and masters degrees in Engineering fields, for example make a LOT more money than people with PhD’s in Engineering fields. PhD engineers tend to be college professors, which while not being poor, make no where near the cash that professional engineers do. So to with business degrees, where an MBA makes far more dough than does the average PhD in a comperable field.
That being said, it’s fairly obvious why. People who get PhD’s do NOT do so for the sake of increasing their earning potential. Most PhDs are gotten for the sake of joining academia, while most bachelor’s and master’s degrees are “professional” degrees, gotten for the sake of increasing ones earning potential. Contrary to what anecdotes of the Information Age may tell us, most rich people got that way because they come from rich families. If you were born middle class (and who isn’t these days) then there is little opportunity for you to become fabulously rich. Oh, there’s enough opportunity for you to make you THINK you can become fabulously rich, but then again, you can also buy a lottery ticket.
I should add that good brains and cold, hard cash do go hand in hand on occasion. Stephen Hawking hints that Newton used his position as Warden of the Royal Mint to his considerable personal gain.
Sounds almost like there’s a moral here: being good with numbers is like having a license to print money.
A couple of points, Major Feelgud: First off, Anthracite is a woman. Secondly, I don’t see where you get the idea that making money is her “end”. The impression I got is that, like all people, she just considers having more money as being preferable to having less money. She has enough to live comfortably, due in large part, she says, to things like staying out of debt on credit cards and not falling for scams. These are marks of a sensible person, not a person who’s obsessed with wealth.
Firstly: Anthracite writes like a man. Have you ever met him/her and verified his/her sex? Anthracite is a man, trust me.
Secondly: Last time I checked, I’m still allowed to have an opinion. If you don’t see something, it’s your problem, not mine.
When I die, I want to have $0 left in my bank account. What’s the use of accumulating mucho de bucks when it all goes to the IRS? What’s better? Having a negative account balance.
well, Anthracite has stated that she is a lesbian. Most lesbians I have met are women. If you missed her airplane adventure, you missed something worth reading.
What do you mean writes like a man?
Intelligence is like a college degree, it comes in a thousand varieties. A person can be a brilliant artist but have no “head” for business, numbers, science, politics, or anything else. The smarter a person is (IMHO) the more focused that person is in one area. While some geniuses, such as Oppenheimer, were brilliant in more than one field (he spoke 8 languages), no one is brilliant in every field. Success in business (and I’m talking Bill Gates/Donald Trump/Rockefeller success) requires a special kind of brilliance along with the ruthlessness to use it. Some people can see all the angles. That is, they can see every way that people can turn a profit off a particular business. Whether it be computer software, gambling, oil, or any other business, it takes a special “gift” to do it better than anyone else. Some arrogant rich guys have tried to branch out into fields in which they were ignorant (can you think of any billionaires who tried to become politicians) and made fools of themselves. Just because someone is a brilliant scientist does not mean he has a head for business, or even a basic understanding of how to run a company. It has been pointed out that all of the great economists of our age (with a few exceptions) died in poverty. It would seem that even people who understand money better than anyone else aren’t necessarily any good at making it.