It is often heard: 1 in 3 econometricians will become a millionaire! But where does this figure come from? And is it true? Estimator investigated this for you!
The search starts by simple Googling: key words like “1 in 3 econometricians” or “econometricians millionaires” immediately give a dozen of website that refer to 1 in 3 econometricians becoming a millionaire. Unfortunately, most are fora (even a body building forum and a forum about Marocco). This means we will have to dig a little deeper. But first of all: what is a millionaire? A millionaire is someone who has one million units of the currency of the country he or she lives in freely available. This means non-liquid assets like a house don’t count. According to the World Wealth Report (WWR) 2014 by Capgemini and RBC, there were over 170,000 millionaires in Holland in 2013, which is the most recent count available. This amounts to over one percent of our population.
We continue our research on studiekeuze123.nl, a website that helps high school students with choosing the right study and gathers data on student satisfaction, number of students and so on. According to this site, the average starting salary for a master graduate is €3087, which is not enough to become a millionaire anytime soon. Unfortunately, there are no data on average salaries later in your career.
Other websites and newspapers like NRC Handelsblad, the Nationale Beroepengids, intermediair.nl and the website of our own Erasmus University all claim that the salaries of econometricians are (much) higher than of other graduates. However, all of them fail to mention where they base this on or which sources they have for their statements. Even another hour of scrolling and clicking doesn’t get me anywhere.
How is this possible? Everyone knows the claim that 1 in 3 econometricians becomes a millionaire, but nowhere it can be found what this is based on! Therefore, we can only conclude that this claim is probably made up by someone, based on the idea that many econometricians become rich. Hence, we classify this claim as unfounded.