1) "Best" is subjective. What you consider best for your kid most probably will not fulfill the needs of all kids.
2) IQ has absolutely nothing to do with being rich or poor.
2) IQ has absolutely nothing to do with being rich or poor.
But being rich or poor can at least be correlated with IQ, right?
My intuition is that IQ is a greatly imperfect measure, but the correlation of high IQ to positive things and low IQ to negative things is just too strong to ignore.
Perhaps you've seen this figure: http://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/images/...
I could be wrong, but in my opinion the only thing that IQ has really proven is its ability to predict how well a person will do in school. I doubt it really does much for predicting titans of industry (or some other area) and success in general.
I think its main flaw is that in general, life isn't constrained to a limited set of multiple choice answers; it's a lot more open ended and chaotic. Not to mention that some of the questions used to administer these tests are biased... and o yeah, there are also different types of intelligence...
(Yes I have a high IQ, and high scores of other major ancient traditional testing methods.)
IQ or the way it's currently administered is just too archaic, limited, and just outdated. It needs to change.
Titans of industry, if honest, will attribute lots of luck.
The book EQ: Emotional Quotient is probably another good place to start...
I think most business "luck" is different from lottery luck
But my intuition is that you could fairly accurately rank people by intelligence, even if the quantitative number is ill defined.
People are different. Some are better than others in real ways. Many criticisms of IQ I've seen start with the a priori assumption that somehow differences mean lower worth. Reduced to absurdity, this leads to accusations of neo-eugenics.
I don't believe that any human is worth less than another, so I have no problem saying that some people are more intelligent than others when it is obvious.
Here is why it really matters: if we better study intelligence, we're well suited to learn to control it.
Significant artificial increases in human intelligence would be as important as the computer revolution.
I brought up IQ simply because the previous commenter mentioned it.