Do High IQ People Succeed, No Matter How Poor They Start Out?

By Nicholas Stix

Does intelligence always win out? The blogger Half-Sigma doesn’t think so. He writes,

IQ is more highly correlated with life outcomes for people with below average to average IQs. Most career tracks have an IQ floor, and if your IQ isn't high enough to meet the floor level, you can't perform that job adequately. Few career tracks have IQ floors much higher than 115, so if your IQ is higher than that, your parental wealth and connections become very important.

Thus, the higher your IQ, the more important the wealth of your parents becomes (the very opposite of what most people think). People with exceptionally high IQs but inadequate parents often have poor life outcomes because of the mismatch.

(A tip ‘o the hat to Steve Sailer.)

He’s right, of course, for an assortment of reasons.

Very high IQ people tend to be more idiosyncratic than the average Joe, but as the saying goes, “If you’re rich, you’re eccentric, but if you’re poor, you’re just crazy.”

The three laws of Stixian economics are: 1. Money makes money; 2. Money helps money; and 3. Money marries money. Some genius is bound to respond, “But rich people can be very talented!” That’s true, but irrelevant to the question at hand.

Wealthy people do not like helping poor people, no matter how talented the poor schmucks are. In fact, they love hurting them. Much has been written, by Nietzsche on a bad day, self-styled “genius” Max Scheler, “glibertarians,” and others about the alleged “resentment” that the poor feel towards the rich. I’ve never seen that resentment, but I’ve seen plenty of the resentment that the rich feel towards those with less than them.

They’ll rationalize their abuse, saying that the poor but talented schmoe doesn’t know his place, and has to be “taught a lesson,” or they’ll say he lacks “character” (as opposed to them?), which as they use it is merely a euphemism for “money,” but the ultimate reason they’ll hurt him is the same reason most people hurt other people: because they can.

And most poor people resent smart people who are themselves poor, as being guilty of thinking they are better than their dull peers (perish the thought!).

Schools that are full of poor NAM (non-Asian minority) kids tend to be extremely violent, racist, and anti-intellectual, and have incompetent, racist, anti-intellectual teachers, not exactly a recipe for success for a brilliant kid who’s as poor as a church mouse.

Most teachers are on the dull side. People tend to think of the “teacher’s pet” as being really smart, but a lot of teachers hate really smart kids because they remind them of their own shortcomings, and instead reward sycophants and bullies, who are often one and the same. Thus, if a kid is really smart, he’d better have well-to-do parents whom sadistic teachers and administrators will not dare anger.

Likewise, liberal arts professors prefer to support students who are upper-middle-class or richer, talent be damned. (And 40 years of affirmative action practices and the imposition of multicultural dogma have caused the intelligence level among liberal arts professors to collapse.)

There are relatively few jobs for very high IQ people. The more scarce and prestigious a job is (e.g., tenured university professorships, full-time journalist), the more connections come into play in its distribution. And affirmative action has made such jobs increasingly scarce since 1964, as the proportion of affirmative action group members, who get such jobs based on the qualifications of being utterly unqualified for them and black or Hispanic (and in some cases, female and/or homosexual) has risen dramatically.

Outsourcing and offshoring have further reduced the number of jobs available to really smart people.

Most supervisors don’t like having very high IQ people around, unless the high IQers are forced on them by their bosses (see teachers).

Most people resent really smart people, and if the really smart people don’t have a pot to pee in, there is nothing to keep the ordinary folks from acting out on their resentment.

Once upon a time there was a metropolis that had lots of high IQ people who were as poor as church mice. The municipality built a shining city on a hill just for those impoverished overachievers—the greatest college in the nation. When the poor overachievers graduated, they were hired to run the municipality’s public offices, or accepted at the most renowned private universities for graduate studies. But other groups who completely lacked the talent of the overachievers then threatened to burn down the metropolis, unless it surrendered the city on a hill to them. The municipality capitulated, handed over its city on a hill to the mob, and the impoverished overachievers became pariahs in the metropolis their forbears had made hum.

Unfortunately, this is not a fable.