Thursday, March 6, 2014

50 Shades of Grey: The Reality of The Billionaire Dom (AKA fun with bad math)

Do you want to know something funny about me?
I'm horrible at math (seriously, if my phone didn't have a calculator app I'd be lost), but I really like playing with numbers. I love it. I like looking up statistics and applying them to real life or imagined scenarios. So I'm a little surprised that it's taken me this long to play with these numbers:

Disclaimer: I really do suck at math. So everything that follows could be waaaaaay off. I was just having fun with it.

What are the odds of finding a Real Life Christian Grey?

Out of curiosity I used my friend Google to find out how many billionaires there were in the USA.
Forbes most recent list from March 2013 says: 442

That's not a horrible number, it's not out of the realm of possibility that someone's Christian Grey really is out there... But unless they want the super old and crusty version, let's narrow it down a little more. How many of those billionaires are under 40? Forbes was helpful again: 11 The average age of a billionaire is 61.7 years old.

Ooo... Looks like things have just gotten a bit tougher for a submissive who's on the prowl for her very own Christian Grey.

But wait! The numbers get worse...

Estimates for the percentage of people who play kinky games occasionally is roughly 50%- So perhaps 5.5 of those billionaires like a little kink in their life.

Estimates for people who engage in regular kinky activity (frequency, not the type of play) is a guestimate and ranges from 5-20%... So from our pool of under-40 billionaires you get one or two guys who might be interested in D/s. And if you figure that out of a possible 2 guys, one of them might fall on the s side of the slash- That's one billionaire Dom in the United States. ONE... And he might already be married.

Christian Grey is a statistical improbability...
Or to be blunt- You're not going to meet him. Ever.

Well, I think most folks with any critical thinking skills could have reasoned that one out- So what if we set the bar a bit lower? What if we aim for a millionaire? There are, after all, more millionaires than there are billionaires...

The NY Times reported in 2013- "The study found that at the end of 2012, 8.99 million American households boasted a net worth of at least $1 million."

Seems a little high, doesn't it? That's because it is. Net worth doesn't reflect what you earn, just that you might be good at saving. So let's look at tax returns-

"According to the latest data from the IRS for 2010, there were roughly 268,000 tax returns reporting more than $1 million in adjusted gross income (AGI)"...

20.3% were under 45, 3.3% were under 35... So if we're looking for a slightly less rich (snort) version of Christian Grey we have 8,844 people to chose from... So far.

Only 12% of millionaires filed "single" on their taxes. Now we have about 90 people in the pool and if one third of them are women (not to disparage lady millionaires, just to increase the possibility of finding a millionaire Dom), we have 60 single guys left.

Using the 5-20% to weed out the vanillas, we have somewhere between 3 and 12 people who are perhaps interested in D/s and if only half of them are interested in being the D... 1.5 to 6 people who earn a million dollars or more in a year might be up your alley... Out of the entire US population.

But what about those folks who save and invest well? There's a lot more of them...
If there are 9M millionaires, but half are men...
4.5 million are left.
If half of those are single, 2.25M are available.
If half are under 35... a little over 1 million millionaires are still in the running.
If between 5-20% of them are interested in D/s, somewhere between 50K and 200K might qualify.
If half of those are D-types? There might be between 25,000 and 100,000 millionaire D-types running around, just waiting to be the Christian Grey's "poor" cousin.

Not horrible odds, unless you consider that with a population of 313million people in the USA, those guys make up 1 in 3,130 people, at most.

The odds of meeting these guys pretty damn slender.
Unless, you know, your best friend gets sick and you have to do her interview with an insanely rich, handsome, and eligible guy for her... Because that could happen.

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