For the individual occupations, presumably they all have enough participants to avoid a high chance of any one of them being that far off (for example, there ar

For the individual occupations, presumably they all have enough participants to avoid a high chance of any one of them being that far off (for example, there are 100,000 veterinarians [1]) [Edit: and see sanskritabelt's comment below that seems to match my intuition.] Then the question is how many different occupations are being considered here, and it doesn't seem like it would be high enough to make numbers like 96% very likely. So if we were measuring the whole population, it seems--just eyeballing-- pretty unlikely. But of course we're not measuring the whole population. The data from which this chart was actually derived might well be caused by random chance. The article's failure to cite a more specific source than the BLS generally is a bit annoying here. Edit: I guess the source is [2], but I'm still unclear on what was measured. [1] https://www.avma.org/KB/Resources/Statistics/Pages/Market-research-statistics-US-veterinarians.aspx https://www.avma.org/KB/Resources/Statistics/Pages/Market-re... [2] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm