Arbeitspapier
Billionaires are so Predictable
Have you ever wondered what it takes to become a billionaire? Do you need rare genius? Exceptional acumen? Miraculous foresight? An uncompromising work ethic? On all four counts, the answer is no. It turns out that to become a billionaire, what you really need is the right social setting. You need to live in a society that is suitably rich and appropriately unequal. Without those things, your chances of wearing the billionaire badge are low. In this post, I’ll do the math. Using data from Forbes, I’ll show you how the billionaire headcount varies across countries. Then I’ll show you how to predict this variation. Forget about character traits and personal histories. We don’t need them. To predict how many billionaires a country has, we can get surprisingly far just by knowing the distribution of income.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Classification
-
Wirtschaft
Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill
- Subject
-
billionaires
corporation
distribution
ownership
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Fix, Blair
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
Economics from the Top Down
- (where)
-
Toronto
- (when)
-
2023
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Fix, Blair
- Economics from the Top Down
Time of origin
- 2023
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Are GDP revisions predictable? Evidence for Switzerland
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Are pain and suffering awards (un-)predictable? Evidence from Germany
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Why Are Asset Returns Predictable?
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Why Are Asset Returns Predictable?
Are GDP revisions predictable? Evidence for Switzerland
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Are emerging market currency crises predictable? A test
Are pain and suffering awards (un-)predictable? Evidence from Germany
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Were the Scandinavian Banking Crises Predictable? A Neural Network Approach
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