And I agree, I would suspect modern times to dominate for exactly your reasoning. The number in that one period is the key. And that seems like it is at least above average. If so, then why is it? And if it is because of the breaking of the traditional economy, then perhaps we do have that happening today, and some of us can get lucky or take advantage of the times and find some wealth! Here’s to it happening to us. ;-)

I misread the first time, and thought the Forbes list was of the 75 richest (I as assuming LIVING) people — in which case it was a reasonable thought to exclude anyone who was dead or under 25 years old, leaving only about a 50 year time bracket of births to consider.

Absent my incorrect assumption, my quick math looks quite foolish. Also, the “richest in history” list makes my inclusion of life expectancy irrelevant.

I was answering a different question than the one posed, and I was incorrect. In which case, 14/75 born within a 9 year time bracket IS higher than random chance and I think the argument might actually exist.

I happen to have enjoyed Gladwell’s last 2 books and have a preference to believe that he’s done the research right, but I think the last question to ask is: if we were to suspect a bias with regards to the distribution of birthyears of wealthy people, where might it fall?

I suspect that distribution would disproportionately favor modern times (post industrial revolution anyways) because 1. there’s more “wealth” in the world now than there was before (seemingly debatable, but i will defend the claim that real growth rates have been positive over the last 1000 years, including after any inflation adjustment) and 2. the industrial revolution made it possible for individuals to multiply their means of production and concentrate wealth into a single person’s hands that was impossible in previous generations.

The opposing and equally compelling argument might sound like: monarchies TOOK wealth and kings/emperors were wealthy in ways that would be impossible today.

However, absent that story (admittedly, a non trivial one that we can’t just ignore), I would EXPECT the distribution to be biased towards more hits near the present.

Thanks for the correction though, I was wrong.

Taylan, I know we can innovate our way out with focus.

Workpost, I think some ideas on a remake should be my next post. Why not dream a little and get some feedback?

FattyFatFat, ahhh… a lies, damn lies and statistics person, I see. ;-) Two key areas where your hypothesis is off: (1) You have to look at the number of years covered, not the possible distribution of 9-year sets of 14 out of 75 people. In this case, the period of time was recorded history. While I didn’t check the depth of the list, there are at least 1000 years covered. This would be 991 9-year time periods, not 48. (2) The geographic set was not the United States, but the world. Life expectancy across the world, across this time period varied much greater than 5 years. You are right, we don’t know the distribution, but your stats narrow the possibilities available to ranges highly unlikely, i.e., only 5 sets of 9-year periods out of a possible 991 (at least), and life expectancy of a a modern, developed country when the period is ancient to modern and the countries covered are not all developed.

Thanks, Jana

Since we don’t know what the distribution looks like, lets grind through this.

If we had no a priori reason to suspect that that particular 9 year period is different from any other, we might think that 75/14*9 ~48 years encompasses all 75 of the richest people 75 people in the country. If we expected that 9 year birth period to show more wealth creation then we should see MORE than 19% representation.

In a time where most people didn’t accumulate their wealth quite as early, lets imagine that people could even imagine to START getting rich at 25 (remember this is a time where instant wealth creation via the internet didn’t exist). Add 48 years to that, and we’re at an age of 73.

Current life expectancy is 78 in the United States and it was lower back then.

So… the claim that 14/75 of the richest people were born within a 9 year period is not inconsistent with the null hypothesis that being born in that 9 year time bracket shows absolutely no proclivity towards wealth creation than any other equivalent 9 year time period.