Top earners not necessarily best and brightest, research finds
Source: Sputniknews 10.2.2023
While salaries at the very top tend to be more than twice the average in the bracket below, the highest earners appeared to do even worse in cognitive tests than those who trail them in wages. This, according to the researchers, should fuel the debate about inequality.
Are the best-paying jobs with the highest prestige held strictly by those with the greatest intelligence? Recent research has indicated that this is not necessarily the case.
While high earners, indeed, tend to perform better on aptitude tests, this is only the case up to a point. Most strikingly, people with the highest salaries even appeared to pass the cognitive test with worse scores than those below them, a new study by Linkoping University in Sweden has found.
To investigate this matter, it drew on Swedish registry data containing measures of cognitive ability and labour-market success for 59,000 men who took a compulsory military conscription test, which, among other things, measures word comprehension, logical thinking and spatial perception.
"The extensive amount of data allows us for the very first time to test whether extremely high incomes are also associated with extremely high intelligence," Linkoping University professor Marc Keuschnigg told Swedish media.
While, indeed, establishing a strong correlation between cognitive abilities, such as analysis and planning, and salary for most people, the research team found that above a certain level, the connections weakens, and higher pay no longer indicates greater measurable mental aptitude.
At an annual income of approximately SEK 680,000 ($65,000), the differences appeared to even out. The one percent top earners even passed the tests with worse grades than those in the income bracket below.
According to the research, this discovery may be crucial for the escalating debate about income inequalities, since the salaries at the very top tend to be more than twice as high than the averages in the bracket below. In this perennial debate, the top earners often tend to justify their earnings with their "unique" abilities. When assessing their cognitive aptness, however, the study found "no evidence that those with the best-paid top jobs are more deserving of their income than those who only earn only half as much."
"While most people have normal salaries that clearly correspond to their individual intelligence, this is not the case for the top tier," they concluded.
Similarly, the research found no connection between intelligence and the various degrees of prestige some professions such as accountant, doctor, professor, judge or member of parliament enjoy.
In a final assessment of the plateauing intellectual capacities, the researchers mused that "precisely in the part of the wage distribution where cognitive ability can make the biggest difference, it ceases to play any role."
"As the wages of the top earners steadily rise in the Western world, an increasingly large part of the accumulated assets may be distributed in a way that is not linked to the factor of cognitive ability," they concluded.
