Let's call it a proposal.
Since happiness plateaus at income of $80,000/yr, I doubt any average wealth gains 160 IQ people have over 130 IQ people have is largely irrelevant in that measure. My source is a study I saw once.
I'd be stunned if 160 IQ people didn't have more criminality, psycho behavior, etc than 130 IQ people, per capita. Idk where to get stats on that.
Got it. You made it up.
And yet my anecdotal information is less worthwhile for this discussion than your imagination.
Fun rules of your game.
(BTW I actually found a study regarding earnings, which showed that in very high IQ individuals, in this case >140, IQ was correlated with greater earnings. It wasn't as highly important as other traits, but it was a positive correlation. I didn't post it, because it didn't include standard deviation on the earnings so it wouldn't have told us whether there were higher incidence of negative outliers in that population which might support your argument, so I determined it wasn't conclusive to our discussion.)
Is this a true statement?
A vastly wealthy person COULD have an income of $80 K if he wanted of course.
I'd opine I was happier making more than that than when I made that.
Of course, that was not the sole factor.
I do appreciate that vast wealth brings its own set of unique problems.
It is a pretty well-known study. It's a few years old, and when I first saw it, the threshold was $75K. Not sure if they've redone the study or if wherever OAM quoted it, they indexed the previous study to inflation and now the equivalent is $80K. But I'm familiar with the research he's quoting.
It doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't a lot of advantages to having higher income than that. And I'm sure there's a difference between $80K where he lives and $80K where I live--I'll bet the threshold is higher in SoCal due to cost of living.
Beyond that you can have definite improvements in standard of living, but I think there are often compensating negative factors, like work/life balance, stress, etc. So happiness basically plateaus after that point. Mo' money mo' problems, yo.