Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2013, after Boris Johnson’s Margaret Thatcher Lecture, when he was Mayor of London. He later became Prime Minister (2019-2022), so the reference to his ambition to become Prime Minister is outdated.
Boris Johnson, the London Conservative politician whose ambition is to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has given his frank opinion on economic inequality and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
Economic inequality can be good, and some people simply aren’t clever enough to succeed.
When someone who wants to become a country’s president (or Prime Minister, in this case) says something like this, it is because they believe a large majority of citizens (voters) think the same.
Johnson argues that economic inequality stirs envy and ambition among the poor and therefore fosters a spirit of competition and self-improvement. Below are the main points of the speech; if you want to read it in full, you can do so in The Telegraph.
Johnson tried to draw a link between IQ and economic success, stating that 16% of our species has an IQ below 85, while around 2% has an IQ above 130. He then pointed out something he called obvious: the more intelligent you are, the easier it will be to reach the top, because we live in a globalised free-market economy where competition is getting tougher in every respect.
(Read: A former Wall Street employee’s account of how the industry corrupts you)
No one can ignore the harshness of competition, or the inequality that it inevitably sharpens.
Greed and talent are what create the income gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, Johnson says. He insisted that he does not believe economic equality is possible, repeating that inequality is essential to the competitive spirit, and that greed, too, is an important “spur” to economic activity.
(Read: Are we really robbing the poor to give to the rich?)
The speech was going well, and you could even take something genuinely true from part of it. But the moment you hint at a correlation between IQ and personal wealth, you run into reality, because many studies carried out over the years have shown no correlation at all. What’s more, we might even find that it is the people with high IQs who have generated wealth for people with lower IQs.
Warren Buffett himself said that you don’t need a high IQ to be rich, and the psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth even said that IQ matters least for success, unlike grit.
Of course… now that we know capitalism has spun out of control, would a society where we were all equal, all owning the same property and assets regardless of our effort, really be the solution? Would that kind of society be healthy?
See also: How to build resilience to failure in business and your career
Featured image: Financial Times, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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