Quote:
Originally posted by Opti@Jul 9 2003, 09:12 AM
I am surprised your estimate is so low Colin
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Hi Opti,
I just think it starts to fall off real fast.
You said:
"that should just about work using simple 80-20
2.5billion = 5000 x 500k
top 20% or 1000 people should be earning over the 500k and 4000 under it.."
From what I've seen, it is net worth that follows the 80/20 rule more than
income. I happen to know that general income in the US, for example, is distributed such that 50% of the income goes to the top 20% of the people. Quite different than 80%. Net worth probably looks very close to 80/20 because of investment, interest, etc.
Anyway, I assumed that income falls off as a power law [see Zipf's Law for reference] and also assumed that the top guy was making $6 million/month. The $6million figure I got from someone around Marc's stature. It's a few years old and I assume it was accurate then but that's an assumption. One never knows with information. Maybe Marc could comment on that guess. Using Zipf's Law with exponent set to 1 (who knows?), the 100th guy would be making about $700,000/year. I just sort of worked form there.