So much of high status jobs is looking the part, and demonstrating a certain masculine/eugenic "right" to a position above others. It has been repeatedly shown taller people out-earn and rise to higher ranks than their shorter peers. Same goes for more attractive, men with higher testosterone levels (which correlate and whose effects form virtuous confounding cycles pairwise with athletic ability, socialization, physical attractiveness, etc).<p>Business is all about impressions. People respond much more positively towards people on the high end of all the mentioned traits vs the low end. If a company wants to make a good impression, they'll send a 6'2" handsome athlete over a 5'8" underweight introvert. Life is the continuous compounded realization of opportunities afforded by the luck your preexisting circumstances allow you to have.<p>One simply has to browse through the headshots of C-levels and VCs vs engineers and researchers. People tend to gravitate towards the fields that affirm where they "ought" to be by our biological and cultural biases. You'll notice that even among those in more stereotypically "nerdy" fields, those who make a bigger name for themselves and gain more social status tend to be physical exceptions to the negative stereotypes ascribed to their group.
This stood out for me:<p>"In terms of industry choice, athletes are far more likely to go into business and Finance related jobs than their non-athlete classmates. In terms of advanced degrees, Ivy League athletes are more likely to get an MBA and to receive it from an elite program, although they are less likely to pursue an M.D., a Ph.D., or an advanced STEM degree. "<p>So, not so much that Ivy League athletes out earn their peers, but that they are more likely to prioritize money and <i>choose</i> careers that pay more in the first place.
> the careers of Ivy League athletes<p>At that level, student athletes are also nerds/have equal mental firepower and academic interest depending on how you want to define nerd.
I’m so tired of this false dichotomy. Athleticism and intelligence aren’t mutually exclusive.<p>Many of the sports and physical activities I participate in actually have a disproportionately high number of software engineers relative to the general population.
These plots show a persistent difference at 30 to 40 years past graduation. Society was very different when the first teams in their study, from 1970, graduated. Even though the classification of athlete vs non athlete is of course silly and it would be hard to correct for other biases well, I would still like to see a followup in 30 years starting with graduates after year 2000.
The idea that there needs to be a dichotomy between "nerds" and "jocks" is foolish anyway. Just because you're in physical shape doesn't automatically make you stupid, and just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you have to be out of shape or physically weak.<p>I won't hold myself up as any kind of Adonis, but on a philosophical/idealistic level, what ever happened to the Classical ideal of <i>mens sana in corpore sano?</i><p>Also, having served in the military and worked in the private sector, a well-functioning team will beat the brakes off a lone wolf any day and twice on Sundays. And oftentimes athletics fosters a level of sociability on that front which serves people well in other walks of life. And I say that as someone who in high school was a stereotypical "nerd" who hadn't learned that lesson yet.
This study did not control for height which other studies have shown correlates to higher wages. Id also wager that fitness plays a large role. They should have controlled for weight and height (BMI?) to really tease out causation
IMO this analysis is best done with three groups, not two. People who do well in sports, do well in academics, and third group who does neither. Any analysis that put the middle group to the other will not give right output.
I wonder how this adds up if you consider the total income of all STEM students comared to all athletics students.<p>Once someone is know from an entertainment role, maybe that enhances their ability to be admitted into MBA or similar programs.<p>But there have to be far fewer total people in athletics than in all of STEM, and I wonder how it works out when considering everyone.
The paper is not about nerds vs. jocks. It's about athletes vs. non-athletes. There are many athletes that are nerds, and many non-athletes that are not nerds.<p>However, I do give NBER full credit for scoring high on the clickbait metric. If you download the actual paper, the word "nerd" only appears in the title of the pdf.<p>(curiously, and as evidence that nerds don't really go to Harvard, they list Aerospace Engineering as an offered major, but with a participation rate of 0.00% across male/female, athlete/non.)
I had a quick skim through the paper; but I may have missed the breakdowns by sport.<p>It would be interesting to see the statistics for sports that pay extremely well (NFL, Soccer, etc) compared to the Tier-2 sports (Volleyball, Track and Field, etc).<p>Tier-2 athletes have always had to juggle the prospect of never earning enough money with their sport and hence have had to focus on education too.<p>It's not surprising that after sporting careers the skills of being at the top of your sport (ambition, adversity, etc) transfer to Business and Finance.
The "brain vs brawn" is one of the most misguiding stereotypes in our society, surely left over from an older time when training in one necessarily meant less in the other.<p>In practice, today it's all about discipline. Lots of very smart technologists or financiers are also in great physical shape. The two correlate. (And by extension, if you look at the demographics that are least physically fit, they also tend to be the least educated.)
As others have mentioned, brain vs. brawn is a false cultural dichotomy, and a particular female variant is brain vs. beauty (or if you're sexist, then you call them a bimbo instead of beautiful). Beautiful women often have to wear a nerd costume to be taken seriously in academic or engineering professions.
Is this really surprising?<p>Physical fitness, IQ and income are all positively correlated.<p>Real life isn't an RPG where you only have so many stat points to assign, being healthy or living well are going to improve all of the above.
I don't see the point.<p>To me, the revenge of the nerds is not that Ivy League athletes should become miserable. It's the fact that a lot of top brass in huge companies is now people with STEM degrees, and a practical experience of working as an engineer.<p>Let's list a few: Bill Gates (once the wealthiest person on the planet); Andy Grove and Pat Geslinger (CEOs of Intel), Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Marc Andreesen, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. All these guys achieved considerable power and real financial success by starting and working as engineers, and applying science and engineering, not MBA skills, to win a colossal market.<p>That would be hard to imagine in 1930s, and even in 1960s.