The wealth-IQ perception disconnect (why being wealthy seems so much rarer than being smart)
Most people if surveyed will vastly overestimate the rarity and difficulty of being a millionaire and underestimate the rarity of high IQ.
Online, Mensa-level IQs are a dime a dozen is seems, but, astonishingly, having $1 million dollars net worth is more common by a factor by a factor of 5 than merely having an IQ of 132, which is the Mensa cutoff.
As a caveat, this is average household net worth, which is inflated by ultra-wealthy outliers on the far-right tail of the distribution. The median is somewhere in the ballpark of $200,000 for the 50-60-year-old age bracket.
But, still, approximately 11 million American households, or about 10% of all households, have a net worth of at least $1 million. This is even more surprising when one factors in large populations of generally low-income groups such as Blacks and Hispanics. It’s not just wealth wealthy immigrants either: they are too small of a percentage of the population.
In 1996, “The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy,” by Thomas J. Stanley, was a big deal when it was published, and at the time $1 million was still a relatively uncommon amount of wealth. Not anymore, even in spite of media headlines about poverty and college-educated baristas, as well as Covid, the 2008 crisis, the 2000-2003 market crash, and so on. It goes to show the disconnect between the media narrative and reality.
