gapgapgap-ga,
I hope you won't mind a fairly brief answer to your generously-priced question.
The real challenge to your question is finding the appropriate data
sources to reflect the distribution in the population of the features
you're interested in: earnings, education, age.
Once identifying the best sources, buried deep in the bowels of the
Census Bureau and the IRS, the calculations of the odds are not that
lengthy a process.
So here we go...
There are 1,878,460 full time workers in the US in the age range
35-44 who did not graduate from high school (see source #1, listed
below).
Using the same logic as zeroaffinity-ga did for your previous
question, one-tenth this number 187,846 are full-time working men or
women who did not graduate high school.
Therefore, out of the entire population of the US of 294 million
(again, the same number used by zeroaffinity-ga), the odds of
selecting at random a person from the population that has a full-time
job and that did not graduate high school is:
186,846 / 294 million = 0.00064
This is equivalent to one chance out of 1,573.
Similarly, there are 19,102 people in the US who earned $5 million or
more in 2002 (source #2), so by the same sort of reasoning:
19,102 / 294 million = 0.000065 (remarkably similar to the above
number, except for a little thing called a leading zero in front of
the "6").
This is equivalent to one chance out of 15,384.
Multiplying (again following zeroaffinity-ga), we get:
0.00064 x 0.000065 = 0.000000042
This is equivalent to one chance out of 23.8 million.
At this point, there have been so many numbers tossed around in the
two questions you have asked, that no one could blame you if they
cause some confusion, or appear to contain contradictions.
As always, though, if you would like any additional information on
this topic, all you have to do is ask.
All the best,
pafalafa-ga
sources of information:
1. http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/earnings/call1usboth.html
Earnings By Occupation and Education
35 to 44 years
2. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/02in03at.xls
Table 3.--Number of Individual Income Tax Returns, Income, Exemptions
and Deductions, Tax, and Average Tax, by Size of Adjusted Gross
Income, Tax Years 2000-2002 |