> Not sure about other income, but it is pretty much just the same ballpark as good doctors, lawyers, accountants at big 4 etc
Either salaries in the US are extremely higher than what I thought, you have a very idiosyncratic definition of "good" or you are significantly overestimating how much people make.
That’s a different topic, I think. So you can consider my definition of “good” idiosyncratic, or to substitute it with “highly paid” or something.
The point is that amongst people that I know who are making 500k, the majority of them aren’t having assistants. And I do think it extrapolate to the population of people with 500k income too (no proof here, just a hunch).
Don't doctors have a lot of the administrative duties, preparation of equipment, etc., done by other staff in the practice? For practical purposes, wouldn't that count as having an assistant?
In the case of this post, one could argue that collating statistics should be done by ICM staff rather than the committee chair.
Having a personal assistant has become a rarity but I know a lot of people who are paid far less than 500k and can indeed delegate this kind of work. I work in consulting and I would most likely ask a junior member of the team to do data crunching. Similarly we share an assistant in my department whose job is to take care of scheduling complicated meetings, organising business travels, making sure than the documents required for billing have been collected.
Maybe a bit of everything, though in my experience people outside the US significantly underestimate how much successful professionals in the US earn.
For example, this article [1] says that to be in the top 1% of earners in the US a family needs to make $600k or more. There are 330 million people in the US, meaning that 3.3 million people are in a household earning $600k or more. I think that's a lot!
Either salaries in the US are extremely higher than what I thought, you have a very idiosyncratic definition of "good" or you are significantly overestimating how much people make.