Answer by Peter S. Magnusson, SVP Cloud Development, Oracle. Formerly Snapchat (VP Eng), Google (Eng Dir), and Virtutech (Founder and CEO), on Quora. As the question is stated, the answer is simply "yes". If you take a "real" IQ test (see comments below), then the result is a strong statistical predictor of multiple future life outcomes - income, education level, health, even longevity. There are hundreds of studies that confirm these correlations. So in that sense, it "predicts" your future "success". However - and it's a big "however" - be careful what inferences you draw from this answer: Don't equate "IQ" with "intelligence". It's still a matter of, at times heated, debate as to what "IQ" actually measures. And it's also a complex conversation to discuss what we mean by "intelligence". So think of "IQ Score" as simply an abstract number that is statistically correlated with a bunch of other abstract numbers (such as future annual income). And beware of any philosophical, political, personal, etc conclusions you might jump to from the "yes" answer. Pretty much none of the "IQ tests" that you have probably heard of or encountered have much validity. Online tests, apps, popular "Test Your IQ" books, etc, are almost invariably not properly designed. In fact I have yet to find a single one that is. To get a real IQ number, you need to take a test administered by a professional and licensed to that professional by one of the major test publishing companies - tests such as Wechsler or Stanford-Binet. Note also that different tests are used for children, adolescents, and adults. Most online tests and their ilk are more or less scams to generate web traffic. An IQ score correlates with success but doesn't dictate, and is a poor "measure of the man". Allow me to be politically incorrect for a moment to make my point: saying that IQ scores predict success is a little like saying that the color of your skin at birth predicts your future income. It's technically true, but you can see the problems: causality is an issue, the significance of other factors is an issue, etc. More in the abstract, what we know about IQ correlations pertains to groups of people. These are statistical measures. Their relevance for an individual is difficult to evaluate, at best. Another way of saying this, is that whereas for a large group of people, IQ is one of the strongest predictors of future "success" that we know of, for an individual, it is a weak indication. For example, in one large study correlating IQ and SES (social economic status of parents) with future income, IQ had a three times higher "beta" than SES. That means how "smart" you are is much more important than who your parents are (the US economy, in other words, is a relatively level playing field). However, the total R-squared of using both variables was only 0.14. That means, knowing your parents SES as well as the child's IQ, together only explained about 14% of your future outcome. From the perspective of the decisions available to that child, that's not a very big number. So in other words, the answer to the OP's questions is, strictly speaking, "yes". But the footnote to bear in mind is: "so what?" Source
