Research results that rich people are not necessarily smart



People who are socially successful are often asked how they have extraordinary talent. A study that focused on the relationship between an individual's cognitive ability and annual income found that when an individual's annual income exceeds a certain level, their cognitive ability plateaus.

plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners | European Sociological Review | Oxford Academic

https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac076/7008955

Mark Kuschnik, who belongs to the University of Linkoping, Sweden, collected data on cognitive ability, wages, and occupational status from the Swedish Statistics Bureau and investigated the relationship between ability and fame. The study included 670,203 citizens between the ages of 18 and 60 who were employed between 1991 and 2003. All subjects were male, as cognitive performance scores were available only for men subject to conscription.

Swedish men must serve in military service at the age of 18 and undergo physical, psychological and intellectual tests at the age of enlistment. A low score is not an excuse to avoid enlistment, so Mr. Cuschnick and others conducted the survey without thinking that the motivation to participate in military service would affect the score. We compared the score of the target at the time of enlistment and the wages, etc. after the target entered the labor market.



The results show that Swedish men with high cognitive ability can expect to earn more money than others with low ability. However, even the men with the worst grades earn more than one-third of the men with the highest grades, so the real difference is not large, Kuschnick and others say. . On the other hand, we found that the best-performing men could not be expected to make significant financial returns.

When we examined the cognitive ability of men working at high wages, we found a relationship between cognitive ability and income up to a certain level, but the annual wage is 600,000 Swedish krona (about 7.5 million yen) threshold. It seems that it was found that beyond (Ichi), there is no significant relationship between cognitive ability and income. For this reason, above a certain wage level, high income may not necessarily mean high cognitive ability, Kuschnick and colleagues argue.

Also, even when using occupational status instead of wages as an indicator of career success, it seems that the results were similar to wages. ``Although the relationship between cognitive ability and wages is strong overall, cognitive ability plateaus when wages exceed a certain level. We find no evidence that people in high-ranking jobs who receive exceptional wages are worth more when it comes to cognitive abilities than those who earn half as much. The main outcome of our analysis is that we have identified two hierarchical structures in the labor market, both theoretically and empirically.'

in Science, Posted by log1p_kr