3 ms·

I think you need to add a bunch of 9s to that. Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion.

by rocgf 8y ago

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion. This is pretty unlikely, given the current US population of ~350,000,000.
- adventured 8y ago
  The global economy being what it is, was a pre-requisite to Gates and Zuckerberg producing their immense fortunes. They could be considerable billionaires within just the US economy. They'd be hard pressed to produce $65b-$150b type fortunes without the other ~77% of the global economy and its mutually beneficial interaction with the US economy. We're very clearly not dealing with only the US population as a base to their fortunes. There are ten people worth $50 billion or more. It's a close enough estimate to say that the Gates / Zuckerberg type outcome is one in a billion. There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). Almost no matter how you cut it, these types of outcomes are extraordinarily rare.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). This strongly suggests that those 22 people got their wealth more from their location in the US (eleven times the world rate!) than their personal qualities. (More accurately, that without the wealth attributable purely to being located in the US, 20 of those people would not have crossed the $20 billion threshold. But since I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth that the 15th richest person in the US has more than $38 billion, the wealth attributable to location would in fact appear to be the majority of the wealth.) On the pretty reasonable assumption that this also applies to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, their correct comparison pool would be the US population, and they are not at the one in a billion level. On a more fundamental level, we can easily calculate the odds of 350,000,000 people having a certain number of 1e-9 people among them. As I make it, the odds of 0 one-in-a-billion individuals in a population of 350,000,000 are 70.47% (0.999999999^350000000). The odds of exactly one such individual are 24.66% (0.999999999^349999999 × 0.000000001 × 350000000). So from first principles the odds of a population the size of the US having two or more one-in-a-billion individuals along any given dimension are less than 5%. (And a third one, like Jeff Bezos, would eat up another 4.32% of the probability space.) It's not realistic to call these people "literally one in a billion". They aren't.

I think you need to add a bunch of 9s to that. Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion.

by rocgf 8y ago

I think you need to add a bunch of 9s to that. Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion.

> Mark and Zuck are literally one in a billion. This is pretty unlikely, given the current US population of ~350,000,000.

adventured 8y ago
The global economy being what it is, was a pre-requisite to Gates and Zuckerberg producing their immense fortunes. They could be considerable billionaires within just the US economy. They'd be hard pressed to produce $65b-$150b type fortunes without the other ~77% of the global economy and its mutually beneficial interaction with the US economy. We're very clearly not dealing with only the US population as a base to their fortunes. There are ten people worth $50 billion or more. It's a close enough estimate to say that the Gates / Zuckerberg type outcome is one in a billion. There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). Almost no matter how you cut it, these types of outcomes are extraordinarily rare.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > There are ~44 people worth $20 billion or more (one in 168 million people). 22 of those people come from the US (one in 15 million). This strongly suggests that those 22 people got their wealth more from their location in the US (eleven times the world rate!) than their personal qualities. (More accurately, that without the wealth attributable purely to being located in the US, 20 of those people would not have crossed the $20 billion threshold. But since I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth that the 15th richest person in the US has more than $38 billion, the wealth attributable to location would in fact appear to be the majority of the wealth.) On the pretty reasonable assumption that this also applies to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, their correct comparison pool would be the US population, and they are not at the one in a billion level. On a more fundamental level, we can easily calculate the odds of 350,000,000 people having a certain number of 1e-9 people among them. As I make it, the odds of 0 one-in-a-billion individuals in a population of 350,000,000 are 70.47% (0.999999999^350000000). The odds of exactly one such individual are 24.66% (0.999999999^349999999 × 0.000000001 × 350000000). So from first principles the odds of a population the size of the US having two or more one-in-a-billion individuals along any given dimension are less than 5%. (And a third one, like Jeff Bezos, would eat up another 4.32% of the probability space.) It's not realistic to call these people "literally one in a billion". They aren't.