WSJ: You Don’t Have to Be Smart to Be Rich

En el blog "The Wealth Report", administrado por Robert Frank en el Wall Street Journal On Line, apareció este interesante artículo, copiado íntegramente a continuación. Demuestra, con numeritos inclusive, que no es necesario ser un cabeza caliente para ser rico:

In an information economy, getting rich comes from being smart. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom. Ideas are supposed to the new currency, with brainy billionaires such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the Google guys are celebrated as the new IQ elite.

But do smarts really equate to wealth? And more importantly, are the wealthy really smarter than everyone else?

One of the most surprising discoveries for me in researching my book Richistan was that many of today’s rich didn’t do that well in school. In fact, many of them didn’t go to college — or if they did, they quickly dropped out. Granted, that doesn’t mean they weren’t smart. It just means they wouldn’t be considered good students.

But what about IQ? Aren’t today’s rich more likely to have higher IQs than the general population?

Apparently not. At least not according to a new study by Jay Zagorsky, a research scientist at the Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research, which found that the wealthy aren’t more likely to have higher IQs than the general population.

Mr. Zagorsky studied data from 7,403 Americans who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a representative sample of Americans funded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rather than participating in just a one-time survey, the people on the panel have been interviewed repeatedly since 1979 and the Zagorsky study is based on information through 2004.

In combing the data, Mr. Zagorsky found no meaningful correlation between large wealth and high IQ scores.

“Intelligence is not a factor for explaining wealth,” he said. “Those with low intelligence should not believe they are handicapped, and those with high intelligence should not believe they have an advantage.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Zagorsky joked that my definition of wealth and his definition were probably different. Indeed, his survey covers a broad base of people worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the sample size really thins out at the millionaire level. So it remains to be seen whether these results are sustained higher up on the wealth ladder.

Yet the most-fascinating part of the study is the disconnect between wealth and income as it relates to IQ. Wealth and income are fundamentally different measures: Someone can have a high income and low accumulated wealth (if they don’t save) or they can have a high net worth and low income (if their wealth is tied up in a business or illiquid assets, for instance).

Previous studies have found a tight link between people’s intelligence and incomes: i.e., smarter people are more likely to have higher incomes. In Mr. Zagorsky’s research, each point increase in IQ scores was associated with an additional $202 to $616 of income per year.

But the link breaks down with wealth.

Why? Mr. Zagorsky’s not sure. One reason, he says, may be that smart people are just as likely as others to make bad financial decisions with their money, like taking on too much debt or failing to save. So just because people have high incomes and high intelligence doesn’t mean they are better at managing their money.

“It was a surprise to me that highly intelligent people don’t have a superior ability when it comes to generating wealth,” he says.

The Wealth Report is a daily blog focused on the lives and culture of the wealthy. The blog is written by Robert Frank, a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal and the author of "Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich," to be published in June. His column appears every Friday in The Wall Street Journal. Criticisms, comments and tips can be sent to: wealth@wsj.com.