Garett Jones: evaluation

Transcript context

…Hire stupider people? Yeah, yeah. I think the correlation is just high enough for you to keep it on your radar, but it’s just low enough that you should always do the job interview and not just hire on the SAT score. Especially, the link between IQ and income is weaker when you just look at IQ and wages. A lot of the numbers that people look at are often looking at the link between IQ and total income for people in late middle age. And by that time, a lot of people, at least in the sample, have some nonwage income, some financial flows coming in. And that’s driven by intelligence as well, to some degree. Smarter people seem to be paid better in the stock market, for instance. So yeah, when you look at the link between IQ and wages, the market just isn’t paying all that much for it. The boss will pay something for it, but there seems to be a lot of other things that are worth more. I think part of this is that the way jobs are constructed is that jobs are constructed to be, in many ways, foolproof, so that a person can’t screw it up that much. So being the very smartest person in a particular job category might not make you that much more productive than being the worst person in that job category, but that’s partly because that job category was created so people couldn’t screw it up that much. Let’s say I do interviews, and I’ve decided I will weight intelligence less. What should I weight more instead?…

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