If You're So Smart, Why Are You So Poor?
If you are so smart, why are you so poor? It's the question that burns through every ' Actually...' you've ever typed in a comment section. It has the glitter of a trap: either you admit you're not that smart, or you admit the world is not that fair. People hate both answers. They were promised that the mind was a ladder. They were promised that intelligence was convertible into currency. They were promised that if they memorized the right facts, they could command the future by name. Instead: debt, a dead-end job, a dashboard light blinking check engine, and a mind that won't turn off.
Here's a number that should make you vomit: IQ explains about 21% of income variation. That's it. Four fifths of why someone makes bank has nothing to do with their brain. Nobel economist James Heckman ran the numbers harder and found IQ accounts for 1-2% of income variance when you factor in everything else. One to two percent. Your SAT score is basically a rounding error on your paycheck.
We begin with the dull truth: being smart is not a unitary asset. It's a bundle of tendencies: pattern recognition, verbal fluency, working memory, novelty seeking, introspection, suspiciousness, perfectionism, stitched together by temperament and mangled by the environment. Some people get the version of intelligence that spits out hedge fund algorithms and coordinates on a golf calendar. Some get the version that notices every crack in the sidewalk and then writes poetry about how all sidewalks are moral failures. Both are "smart." Only one pays.
