If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

[Faded bumperstick on my father's old beater...]

Jews make up roughly 0.2% of the world’s population. They’ve won over 20% of all Nobel Prizes. That’s not a small overrepresentation — it’s a 100x ratio that no other ethnic or religious group comes close to matching.

Robert Aumann won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work on game theory. When asked to explain the disparity, he didn’t point to IQ studies or modern education systems. He pointed to a marriage custom that’s been running for over two thousand years.

In most societies, wealth married wealth. A rich man’s daughter married a rich man’s son. In Jewish tradition, the rich man went to the yeshiva and asked: who’s your best student? That’s who got his daughter — even if the student was poor.

The result was a culture where intellectual ability was the most valuable currency a young man could have. Generation after generation, the sharpest minds were the ones who married, had children, and passed on both their genes and their habits. Torah study was the highest calling — and that reverence for learning spilled over into every other intellectual discipline.

It’s one of the most elegant explanations for one of history’s most persistent statistical anomalies.