It's not. The flaw in that thinking is that you are equating the fact that certain actions are relatively rare with the idea that that must mean that most people do not have the capacity to perform them. That's a flawed assumption IMO.

If you were on a basketball team in which the free throw shooting percentages were awful, being in the top 5% wouldn't mean that much. And it's a good analogy in that sense b/c free throw shooting is mostly a function of shooting practice free throws. If you are committed and shoot 200 a day without fail, your FT % will be high. If you don't, it won't. It's well within the capacity of every player on the team to be at least a decent free throw shooter. It's a choice. Do you shoot the 200 practice balls a day or not?

Bottom line, being in the top 5% of a team that averages 60% from the line isn't that hard. Same with being in the top 5% of income earners in the US.

In another sense it's not a good analogy b/c as I have posted before, there is such a huge difference between the top half a percent and everyone else that the graph is extreme. It's like the basketball team has one person who shoots 100% from the line (and he shoots most of the free throws for the team) and everyone else shoots 5% and below for a team average of 60%.

When you're caught up in expressing this in terms of "the top 5%," the "top 1%," as though they are meaningful metrics it ignores how vast the income inequality is in the US because of that top half a percent and instead implies that the graph is linear.

It's not.

99.5% of the graph is.

If you were to imagine it plotted on paper it might look like a line that rose from the bottom to a height at the other end of a couple of inches. Then the last half a percent would plot pretty much straight up until it ran off the page and up the wall a few feet. That's how great the difference in the last half a percent is.

Back to the first point, there's really not a huge deal of difference between someone who makes $60,000 a year and someone who makes $200,000 except a few choices. In other words, I could take anyone with at least an average IQ and reasonable physical ability who makes $60,000 a year and if they were willing to do what I told them to do, I could get them making $200,000 a year. It wouldn't be that hard, it would just require them to probably be willing to radically alter some life choices, and be willing to spend probably some years building up to it.

The difference between those two scenarios is not the capacity to exercise abilities that only 5% of the population has, it's that it requires specific choices that only around 5% of the population make. Not because they are all that much harder choices. I guess they are somewhat harder, but nothing that is only possible for a few people to achieve.

Mostly because no one shows them the pathway. They do what everyone else does. Go to college, get a job like everyone else, etc. They could absolutely do other things and make other choices, but they don't. They could. But they don't.

This post was edited on 7/29/20 at 6:25 am