The World Is Ruled by "C" Students

It may be widely thought that the most intelligent people are not the most successful. To put it another way—assuming that grades in school are a good measure of intelligence, which I admit may be a faulty assumption—the world is ruled by the B (or C, or C-) students.

When George W. Bush was president we often heard that he had been a C- student in school. Whatever you think of that man, being President of the United States has to be considered being successful.

I belong to Mensa, the high-IQ society. In Mensa we often talk about the fact that having a high IQ is no guarantee of success and that intelligence (or, again, I'm using grades as a proxy for intelligence) does not correlate with success (as measured by income, I believe). I've seen a graph published in Mensa publications that showed grades plotted against some measure of success (again, I surmise it was income). Success increased with grades, up into the average grade of B; and then it declined for those earning A's.

One might want to think about the reason for this. One probably simple and unarguable way to put it might be that success requires a kind of "smarts" that does not and never will correlate with simple IQ or book learning. Or, in a more contemporary lingo, the people with the good grades or high IQs may have one kind of intelligence but they may lack "social intelligence." In fact, IQ (as measured on IQ tests) and social intelligence are quite different attributes of an individual and may not correlate very well with one another.

One last word on intelligence and public office. Of course Dubya was not the only person in politics whose smarts might not have been of the highest. In the Bill Maher film Religulous, there is an interview with a Congressman from a Southern state who admits that there is no intelligence test for public office. On the other hand, Bill Clinton supposedly is very smart, and I don't think anyone doubts that Barack Obama is smart--both exceptions to the generalization stated above. I wonder if it can be coincidence that both of these men, highly intelligent presidents, are Democrats.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein