But again that is not power. That is just smart people getting paid better when and if there are enough jobs around where intelligence is actually useful. I think it is a very big jump from the fact that there seem to be relatively lot of those jobs around to saying it is a general world-changing, outcome-generating power. I cannot find it , but I think income could just as well be correlated with height.
If I understand, you are attempting a “proves too much” argument with height, however, this is irrelevant, if height is predictive of income then this is an interesting result in itself* (maybe tall people are more respected) and has no bearing on whether IQ is also predictive of income. I agree that IQ probably doesn’t scale indefinitely with success and power though. The tails are already starting to diverge at 130.
More helpful than single data points, here is a scatterplot of IQ vs income in Figure 1.
But again that is not power. That is just smart people getting paid better when and if there are enough jobs around where intelligence is actually useful. I think it is a very big jump from the fact that there seem to be relatively lot of those jobs around to saying it is a general world-changing, outcome-generating power. I cannot find it , but I think income could just as well be correlated with height.
If I understand, you are attempting a “proves too much” argument with height, however, this is irrelevant, if height is predictive of income then this is an interesting result in itself* (maybe tall people are more respected) and has no bearing on whether IQ is also predictive of income. I agree that IQ probably doesn’t scale indefinitely with success and power though. The tails are already starting to diverge at 130.
*there is a correlation
It’s useful but it’s about comparing people between IQ 100 and 130. If we want to look at the power in society it’s worth looking at the extremes.