From Lion: iq and- getting ahead he writes:
whereas in 2014 college graduates are likely to only find work at crappy service jobs unless they have connections (usually from family but extroverted college grads often find their own connections) or they graduated from the most elite colleges (and even then, connections are important).
Lion believes extroverted people make more money because they have better abilities to make connections, so they get promoted while introverted engineers toil away and make little. But this is wrong on a couple counts: very few people relative to the total company employee count will get promoted to a very high position, which means a lot of high-EQ people will be in the bottom rungs and, secondly, the data from actual wages shows that careers (engineering, quant) associated with high-IQ make more money. Most high-IQ folks making super-high salaries at Google and Facebook, on Wall St. and in web 2.0 are introverted, and especially with immigrant software engineers, I imagine the majority don’t have tons of connections. Connections and a high-EQ can get a mediocre person a foot in the door, but skill and hard work wins in the end. Office politics becomes a bigger issue for larger companies, but is much less so for tech companies and start-ups. In today’s economy, high intellect is more valued than ever. The fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world such as Tesla, Google, Snapchat and Facebook all hire on skill and qualifications, so unless you’re in the cognitive elite, getting in is not going to be an option (with very few exceptions).
This reality angers liberals very much, because they want to believe that IQ is not important and the only way people are successful is through string-pulling and corruption, not talent. Just more who is me, playing the blame game, painting fingers, class warfare, and so on.
Liberals seek failure and crisis to soak the rich and spread their wealth under a redistributionist economic agenda. Crisis, such as in 1929 or 2008, acts as a conduit to reset the playing field to a more egalitarian one. The left fans the flames of crisis to get people to vote them into office such as in 2008 when Obama, with the help of the NYT and other liberal media, exacerbated the financial problem so that McCain would lose. That is Obama’s biggest crime: making the financial problem worse to get himself into office. The second worst offense would be taking credit, which belongs to Bush, for killing Bin Laden while secretly mourning his death.
Doom and gloom liberals like Nicolas Nassim Taleb and Peter Schiff have no faith in humanity, the fed, and the great technololgies wrought by the free market, because without their paternalism and our fealty, the world is doomed. When Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature about how violence in the world has declined, the most vocal critics were from the left such as John Gray and Nicolas Nassim Taleb, the later whom infamously got his butt handed to him in an online exchange with Steven Pinker. To the left, Robert Malthus is their god/prophet and their eschatology is the Malthusian catastrophe.
I would write more about the stock market, but the market is pretty boring with the major indexes trading within a 2-4 percent range all year; however, the bullish thesis on the U.S. indexes and the economy is unchanged. As the rest of the world teeters on recession or high inflation, America is still the best place to invest which includes high-end real estate in the Bay Area. China is an exception, but it’s hard for Americans to invest there.
Favorite picks:
TLT – hedge against downturns with long-term upside bias
UGA – make $ off pain at the pump
SPY/QQQ – S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100
MA, V, GOOG, FB, TSLA, ZEN – huge growth, no viable competitors. These stocks will keep going up.
JNJ – always a good rebound play if it’s down
SVXY – inverse volatility fund