I suggest that looking at extreme outliers is likely to be misleading or un-informative. To get Bill Gates/Steve Jobs levels of wealth, you must, as the saying goes, not only be good, but also lucky. The counterfactual Bill Gates who has the same amount of brains, drive, and other personal characteristics as ours, but who didn’t get the fantastically lucky break of IBM offering him a hugely lucrative contract to “develop” DOS, would no doubt still be a wealthy man. But he would not be a byword for wealth. You would be better off looking closer to the center of the wealth distribution and seeing what the correlation (if any) is in a lot of unspectacular cases.
The extreme outliers are relevant (as indicated by the fact that their wealth alone constitutes ~0.2% of world wealth: perhaps on the same order as the fraction of the population that have the same intelligence as them). The correlation between wealth and income will drop as one looks at lower income percentiles (e.g. the Study of Exceptional Talent cohort is at the 90th percentile in wealth).
I suggest that looking at extreme outliers is likely to be misleading or un-informative. To get Bill Gates/Steve Jobs levels of wealth, you must, as the saying goes, not only be good, but also lucky. The counterfactual Bill Gates who has the same amount of brains, drive, and other personal characteristics as ours, but who didn’t get the fantastically lucky break of IBM offering him a hugely lucrative contract to “develop” DOS, would no doubt still be a wealthy man. But he would not be a byword for wealth. You would be better off looking closer to the center of the wealth distribution and seeing what the correlation (if any) is in a lot of unspectacular cases.
The extreme outliers are relevant (as indicated by the fact that their wealth alone constitutes ~0.2% of world wealth: perhaps on the same order as the fraction of the population that have the same intelligence as them). The correlation between wealth and income will drop as one looks at lower income percentiles (e.g. the Study of Exceptional Talent cohort is at the 90th percentile in wealth).