What's interesting is that the people who are able to predict and come up with the idea (e.g. a researcher using AI in 2021) are often not the best ones to execute on it (typically, lack of experience or capacity to handle the pain of growth while marketing).
What's most interesting is that most people aren't just "one type". In your life you go through multiple roles. Just like how most people, regardless of their income at age 20 will be earning top 35% income by age 35, people move up in their roles (and struggle at a young age to understand that this will happen to them). It's all about timing and age.
I believe some investors go for multiple teams purely because the ratio of those types is different - like a different risk profile. They invest in one with 80% AI boffins, and one with 80% business folks, and one will likely win in the circumstance of the moment (in the ChatGPT era - mostly the business folks. In the data driven AI era - mostly the AI boffins)
The general is that income, like wealth, is correlated with age, not ransom. Most workers under 18 will be making near minimum wage. Workers in their 20s are probably still starting their careers. People fall off again when they are older, as they either retire early or in some professions just become less capable.
So when you put it all together, a lot of people with an under average career will have an over average income at 35: Just not an over average income within the cadre of 35 year olds.
The lack of correlation with income at 20 comes from how many careers require training that doesn't give good early income. A future doctor, barista or AI programmer are not likely to have. a great income at 20, but their incomes and wealth diverge rapidly as some have longer training with different outcomes. The doctor will hit the 1% after residency. The AI expert might start making money earlier. The barista is probably ahead in his 20s, but it's unlikely their income grew quite as much, although many a barista is working on doing something else. So again, looking just at percentile of income at different ages is going to lead to mistakes as different life curves are being aggregated together.
Yep. I have responded in another post with some stats/surveys. Exactly, the aggregation of people hides the trends, and the fact that a 35 year old is not competing with other 35 year olds, but also with other 21 year olds working at cafes, contributes to this.
Human beings are the only creatures capable of self-evolution, using our minds to analyse the world around us and the world we have nurtured within us. Over time, we can stagnate into ossified animalistic patterns of selfishness, or we can expand our curiosity, consciousness, and, hopefully, our realization that compassion for others is the source of our own happiness. We can either find ways to better integrate ourselves into a better future for those around us, or wall ourselves off from the world around us. We would do well to remember that carpenters don't make hammers, nor computer scientists their own food, soil, packaging, tractors, or trains.
The use of the vast sums available to successful tech investors gives them a greater point of leverage than the rest of us not so endowed. And the more power is given, the responsibility is required, though few acknowledge or heed such wisdom.
At the end of the day, no matter how confident many folks are, who really has the humility and intelligence to know if a person is a genius? Very few, I guess. Very, very few, indeed.
"Most people will be earning top 35% income by age 35" seems like a patently false statement. Clearly more than 35% of the working population is over 35.
- Firstly, I admit I can't find where I heard the age 35 specific claim to reference it. I have listed two sources below and found an even stronger claim by Thomas Sowell (that most people at one year of their life in America earn top 20% income), but it wasn't that statement I was looking for, so I will keep try to find it. But income decile movement surveys in the UK supports this, as do dynamic income surveys conducted in the US, so I'll share those to you:
- Income is highly mobile. When tracking what income groups have, within groups there is great variation. Half the people with top 20% of income drop out of the top 20% over 5 year periods, with a significant proportion of those dropping out (30%) dropping to below average income. In other words 15% of the people earning the top quintile of income will earn below average income in 5 years time.
... Meanwhile, showing upwards mobility, 20% of the people earning the 20% lowest in the UK moved to the top 40% of income by just 5 years later in this study (Figure 19 / corresponding table) - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/income-dynamics-201...
- You seem to assume income goes up over time, however in western countries, income tends to peak at 30-50, hence 35 in the stat. It peaks at age 37 and stays flatish until it declines from age 44 in the UK, for example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/824464/mean-disposable-i...
- Historically, older people earned more in the 40s and 50s, but due to COVID or the simple growth in proportion of people economically inactive or in part time roles at those ages, you can see how in the UK in the last 20 years that trend disappeared: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
- Children and pensioners essentially earn nothing for the purposes of this stat, but as they still spend (or indirectly through parents consume) money, they're in this total. Pensioners are reasonably part of this stat because they are spending in the economy, but are seldom members of the "working population"
The main resource I would suggest on income mobility is "Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes" which is based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jacc.12716] - it does date to the 70s/80s, but it focuses on: can you achieve top income, can you have income security. Their major finding is that A) Most people through randomness and effort end up earning above-average incomes during the middle stage of their life, and that B) Wealth, but not income, is cumulative.
This is also historically constant, for example Thomas Sowell wrote about how most Americans at the time would be in the top 20% of income for at least one year of their life in "Economic Facts and Fallacies" and "Basic Economics". (obviously the UK quintile study notes decreased lower income exit mobility which is bad for poorer people and means dynamic income mobility is reducing).
What's most interesting is that most people aren't just "one type". In your life you go through multiple roles. Just like how most people, regardless of their income at age 20 will be earning top 35% income by age 35, people move up in their roles (and struggle at a young age to understand that this will happen to them). It's all about timing and age.
I believe some investors go for multiple teams purely because the ratio of those types is different - like a different risk profile. They invest in one with 80% AI boffins, and one with 80% business folks, and one will likely win in the circumstance of the moment (in the ChatGPT era - mostly the business folks. In the data driven AI era - mostly the AI boffins)