Does IQ determine Success in life?

iQ appears to have a strong predic- tive relationship to many socially relevant factors besides academic performance.
The American psy- chological Association report Intelligence:
Knowns and Unknowns (neisser et al., 1996) states that iQ accounts for about one-fifth of the variance (positive correlations in the range of .3 to .5) in factors like job performance and income. it has an even stronger relationship to socio- economic status.
There are weaker negative corre- lations with antisocial measures like criminal activity. There is a natural tendency to infer from this that iQ is directly related to being a successful member of our society, but there are reasons to question a direct
relationship. Access to various edu- cational opportunities and to some jobs depends on test scores. Access to other professions depends on completing various educational pro- grams, the access to which is partly determined by test scores. given the strong relationship between iQ and these test scores, we would expect that higher-iQ members of our society would get better training and professional opportunities. lower-scoring members of our soci- ety have more limited opportunities and often are sorted by their test scores into environments where there is more antisocial behavior.
Another confounding factor is that success in society is at every point determined by judgments of other members of the society. for instance, most studies of job per- formance use measures like ratings of supervisors rather than actual measures of job performance. pro- motions are often largely depend- ent on judgments of superiors. Also, legal resolutions such as sentencing decisions in criminal cases have strong judgmental aspects to them. it could be that iQ more strongly affects these social judgments than the actual performances being judged, such as how well one does one’s job or how bad a particular activity was. individuals in positions of power, such as judges and super- visors, tend to have high iQs. Thus, there is the possibility that some of the success associated with high iQ is an in-group effect where high-iQ people favor people who are similar to them.