We like to believe that intelligence, in its pure academic form, is enough. That if you are smart enough, disciplined enough, and technically capable enough, the world will naturally make space for you. But the economy does not care how well you score on a test. It does not reward the one who understands the most, it rewards the one who can navigate people.
Economy works in the complete opposite of the education system. In school, you’re rewarded for being on top. You don’t necessarily need to learn to communicate or work in a team, all you need to do is work the hardest and understand the most.
The hardest part in school is understanding the theory, understanding the question, and formulating an answer to the questions thrown at you. The latest GPT Model-5.2 or Claude Opus 4.6 can do this too, and they are at their very base built almost entirely on matrix multiplication and can be trained in months and it has little to no problem answering recurrent problems.
To have a working economy, not necessarily a prosperous one, you have to work with everyone (or at least the people who share common interests), and I really mean having to go as far as to understand the dilemma of the students from the back of the class.
At some point in writing, it has very loosely come to my attention that there is some truth to the stereotype that the school smart students struggle to work among themselves, while the school average students are a lot more at ease when working with people. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being part of these, everyone belongs to at least one of the groups.
As literal decades are spent in the education system, the average students eventually have a better edge at politics and making connections with people, while the smart ones are busy with their reading. This of course does not apply to every single person, I do not by any means try to generalise every case, there would of course be some edge cases, a student capable of reasoning, and capable of understanding others, call it high IQ high EQ individuals, and this type is rare. I do not have the number, but I have rarely crossed paths with this type of person in my entire life.
In a capitalism-driven economy, the concept is based on a free market, and that means everyone has the right to participate. The very basic model of the economy is supply and demand, and the only way an entity can generate profit is by selling. This sounds misleading, and you might be thinking there are B2B business models that only sell to businesses. Well the answer is, if you don’t have people, the economy would cease to exist.
The economy is not as real as we think it is, it is a theory written in a make-believe book stating that there are this and that models that make money. Strip away all the abstractions and you're left with the very basic component of the economy which is people dealing with people. People are the source of demand and supply. In school, on the contrary, people are nowhere near the center of attention, the only thing that counts in school is excelling and having good marks, because that is the only thing that the school can certify you on. It doesn’t certify you on how good you are with people, or how excellent your ability is to operate as a human in an economy.
I do not, however, fully condemn it to the extent of saying that the education system we have today is completely broken. The education system we have is very good at certifying that you can be a good worker. Getting good grades means that you are disciplined and demonstrates that you can show up even when things get hard.
But do remember that the main takeaway is to not be arrogant, stay humble, learn to work with people regardless of their level of education, a person with high EQ has the upper hand in the economy compared to a person with high IQ.