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The 1 per cent are not as clever as they think
The brainiest people and the biggest earners are two largely separate groups, says new research
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Up to wages of about S86,000, cognitive ability did predict income: the cleverer you were, the more you earned.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Simon Kuper
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I used to know an investment banker who went around saying he was writing a novel. Obviously, this was self-marketing, but he also genuinely believed he could write a better novel than actual novelists. After all, he reasoned, he must be smarter than they were, because he earned more money.
This man was suffering from the Davos Fallacy: the notion that very high earners are also very clever.
