I find the mostly linear relationship between IQ and income to be surprising. If we use the odds of winning a Nobel as a proxy for “ability to make an important scientific discovery”, doesn’t the lack of average-IQ winners imply some kind of exponential relationship between IQ and scientific productivity?
If both the linear income relationship and the one described above are true, it implies an exponentially decreasing ability of high IQ people to capture the value they create.
doesn’t the lack of average-IQ winners imply some kind of exponential relationship between IQ and scientific productivity?
Something like that. A straight line on log odds charts in SMPY, IIRC.
it implies an exponentially decreasing ability of high IQ people to capture the value they create.
Oh definitely. This is a point Gensowski and others make: part of the reason that the income relationship does bend is that it’s hard to capture all your positive externalities even though the patenting rate etc increases. You can invent the transistor or antibiotics, but you won’t capture anywhere remotely close to 1% of the total surplus. Also part of the country-level story for why IQ looks so powerful: individuals don’t capture anything remotely approaching their full contributions (in the same way that people on the other end of the spectrum do not internalize anything remotely like the harm they do to everyone else), so the country-level correlations can be much stronger than individual-level ones.
I find the mostly linear relationship between IQ and income to be surprising. If we use the odds of winning a Nobel as a proxy for “ability to make an important scientific discovery”, doesn’t the lack of average-IQ winners imply some kind of exponential relationship between IQ and scientific productivity?
If both the linear income relationship and the one described above are true, it implies an exponentially decreasing ability of high IQ people to capture the value they create.
Something like that. A straight line on log odds charts in SMPY, IIRC.
Oh definitely. This is a point Gensowski and others make: part of the reason that the income relationship does bend is that it’s hard to capture all your positive externalities even though the patenting rate etc increases. You can invent the transistor or antibiotics, but you won’t capture anywhere remotely close to 1% of the total surplus. Also part of the country-level story for why IQ looks so powerful: individuals don’t capture anything remotely approaching their full contributions (in the same way that people on the other end of the spectrum do not internalize anything remotely like the harm they do to everyone else), so the country-level correlations can be much stronger than individual-level ones.