Increasing the Supply of Very High IQ Workers

I argued that there are on the order of 164 thousand workers with a very high IQ in the United States. How do we get more? Ian Calaway in the job market from Stanford has an interesting paper that argues that early math advisors can be a force to replicate students with high math skills. Calaway estimates that having a math advisor at school, someone who runs a math club and organizes high-level math competitions, increases the number of students who earn PhDs and pursue careers as scientists and professors. Not all schools have such a math counselor but Calaway estimates (after considering basic skills, he’s not smart) that over 27 years, math counselors identified 9,092 students for the American Math Competition (the cream of the crop) but there were 11,168 missing students. very high skill.

These 11,168 additional students represent the missing math talents who would have participated in AMC and were identified as special if they were able to find a mentor…these mentors would have increased the number of these students attending selective universities (3,017 students), especially STEM (3,465 students ), earning PhDs (1,652 students), and pursuing careers as scientists and professors (1,850 students) during this twenty-seven year period.

11,168 high caliber students lost in 27 years may not sound like much but we are talking about a very high level of talent. The footnote shows:

Sergey Brin (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Peter Thiel (PayPal), and Sam Altman (OpenAI) all scored high on the AMC (American Statistical Committee
Tournaments, 1980–2023)

People with high IQs don’t just disappear without training; they probably still have decent jobs. However, even if you have doubts about the social value of getting a PhD, the number of targeted individuals who go on to start firms or obtain patents appears to be large. Just as athletic talent can wither without guidance, it seems that intellectual talent can be underutilized without proper training, with many high IQ individuals failing to reach their full potential.