Highest-Paid Aren't Necessarily the Smartest

In the debate over income inequality, one view is that people who make the most earn it by being the smartest people in the room. A new study out of Sweden, however, casts doubt on that, reports Fortune. Researchers looked at about 60,000 men who took standardized intelligence tests as part of mandatory military service, then tracked their careers and earnings. They found that higher intelligence did translate to higher wages, but only up to a threshold of about $57,000. After that, the correlation weakened. In fact, the researchers discovered that the top 1% of earners typically scored lower on the intelligence tests than those making significantly less in the income groups below them, per StudyFinds.

Something else beyond intelligence is propelling them to those lucrative paychecks, the researchers conclude in the study in the journal European Sociological Review. Two factors might be luck and family connections, they suggest. "We find no evidence that those with top jobs that pay extraordinary wages are more deserving than those who earn only half those wages," write the researchers, who were led by Marc Keuschnigg of Linkoping University in Sweden. A post at Big Think has a similar takeaway from the study: "The highest earners in society are often revered, but they are by no means more intelligent, or deserving, than the rest of us." (More intelligence stories.)