About the Author
Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.
Occupy Wall Street brought the concept of “the top 1%” into popular consciousness. The 1% were supposed to be the very rich.
Subsequent thinking taught those of us who were actually thinking instead of just reacting with our emotions, that the top 1% is a wildly, almost comically, diverse group when it came to wealth. In order to just barely make it into that group in the US, you need very roughly 1,000,000 USD annual income. To make it into the top 0.1%, you need around 3,000,000. Needless to say, this is trivial compared to the annual incomes of the super rich.
So, top 1% might mean 1 million a year and it might mean, say, 10 billion a year—which is 10,000 times that of 1 million. Yes, a factor of ten thousand. That’s like the difference between you making 50,000 a year and someone making 500 million a year—that’s a factor of ten thousand as well. Yeah, it’s an insane range.
The lesson was that people in “the top 1%” were almost absurdly different in how much money they made. With that in mind, it seemed pretty foolish to treat them all the same, with the category “top 1%”.
Expertise is like that, at least in many fields.