It has been suggested that occupations where one is paid by the hour are not scalable, while scalable occupations allow one to make more money without an equivalent increase in labor and time. Non-scalable occupations are expected to have low income variance, whereas scalable ones show large income inequalities. This study examines the evidence for this suggested categorizing using personal earnings microdata for twelve candidate occupations of both types, scalable and not. We find the upper tails of all distributions decay as power laws. Moreover, we cannot reject the suggested categorizing for earnings above medians.

"13 1/2 years after The Black Swan someone formally investigated my statement about the tail difference between SCALABLE (authors) and NONSCALABLE (dentist, prostitute) occupations."

- Post by Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb 8:36AM . Sep 8, 2020