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But what about the first four things on the list? (and where do professional athletes rank?)

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Jun 2, 2022·edited Jun 3, 2022Author

The link under "selecting the sport your kids should play" reviews the sports with the best scholarship odds, and the author addresses other businesses in the top 5 here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/opinion/sunday/rich-happiness-big-data.html

Recall that the author restricts his analysis to business owners, since that is the dominant category in the 1%. Even among professional athletes (a very small group), the most wealthy tend to make more money from spin-off business ventures than from their playing salaries. [Added this last bit after reading your question again]

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I may be misunderstanding something in the beginning but I feel like there is a great deal of silent data that is being ignored in this analysis. I think what we're really saying is that, of the successful artists, the top establishments are a relatively larger group than other industries. But I could be misunderstanding.

It's always interesting to me to mix the world of innovation with the world of cause and effect. The nature of artistic creative expression is most successful when it is new--describing a mechanistic formula promising artistic success is somewhat ironic.

Still it's certainly true that those who have are given more. While those who have not lose even that which they have.

Obviously this was a good article as it sparks lots of thoughts!

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Selection bias is definitely an issue, though data including everyone who would like to be an artist would have it's own problems (how do you distinguish the ones who actually tried from the daydreamers?).

SSD mostly uses the business data as a jumping off point—he sets out to figure out the best businesses to start and incidentally discovers talented and committed artists do a lot better than he thought. This leads him to study other data related to pursuing creative success.

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