The Motley Fool website (a website that provides stock and investing advice) has a little article titled "Are You Too Smart to Be Rich?" in which the author goes over the reasons for why "smart people" (aka Big Brain/High IQ types -- I think that's a Jungian category :-) do badly at getting wealthy. Although skimpy on details (e.g., Michael Lewis wrote about the collapse of Long-Term Captial Management, an investment house with a couple of Nobel prize winning economists and heavy duty quantitative modelers and the collapse was not as simple as presented here; Lewis' article appeared in the NY Times and I provided a link to in a previous post to TiPS, so one should be able to search the archives for it).
For more, see: http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2009/09/28/are-you-too-smart-to-be-rich.aspx To provide a sense of the presentation consider the following quote: |Economist Jay Zagorsky ran a study to determine whether |brains translate into riches. His conclusion? "Intelligence is not |a factor for explaining wealth. Those with low intelligence should |not believe they are handicapped, and those with high intelligence |should not believe they have an advantage." | |In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explored example |after example of how the successful became so. He concluded |that "once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, |having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any |measurable real-world advantage." I'm not a fan of Gladwell so I haven't read "Outliers" but I presume some Tipsters are fans and wonder if they can confirm that Gladwell actually says that one doesn't get a benefit for having an IQ over 120. Some people seem to believe in this as shown in the following quote: |Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) (NYSE: BRK-B) billionaire |Warren Buffett seems to agree: "If you are in the investment business |and have an IQ of 150, sell 30 points to someone else." Anybody know where one can sell some excess IQ points? ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
