Jews: Figuring The Odds

Articles

Jews: Figuring The Odds

By Thomas Keyes
Mar. 8, 2005

Years ago I noted the disproportionate number of Jews in journalism, law, science and other professional fields, but in casually discussing this with acquaintances, I found that many people merely denied or dismissed this idea altogether, or attributed this anomaly to mere chance or random selection. So to put this on the firm ground of statistics, I devised a formula for calculating the odds.

Let G denote the size of a group of people, J the number of Jews in the group and P the proportion of Jews in the population from which group G is drawn. Then calculate O, the odds against the group's having such a composition, using the following formula (which I hope manages to get e- mailed without being garbled!):

O = J! x (G - J)! / G! x P^J x (1 - P)^(G - J) - 1

For example, the 108th Congress of the USA had 11 Jewish Senators out of 100 Senators in all, in a country where Jews make up .025 (2.5%) of the population. What are the odds against this configuration? Translating the above equation into numbers we get:

O = 11! x 89! / 100! x .025^11 x .975^89 - 1 = 28,189

This means that the odds against having 11 Jews in the Senate, if the selection had been made entirely at random, say by drawing lots, would have been 28,189 to 1. So it looks as if something other than chance is at work. Of course, if the composition of the Senate were the only instance of this bias, we mightn't have to give it another thought. But here are some other cases:

In a list of New York City department stores, 10 are named after people, with 6 being named after Jews. In a city that is 11% Jewish, what are the odds that this situation would occur by the operation of mere chance? Using the formula, we get odds of 4283 to 1. If you had bet $233 dollars on six Jews finishing, you'd be a millionaire.

Of the 20 most widely circulated newpapers in the US, each of 6 had a Jew in the top spot-- president, chairman, CEO, whatever his title. Again the US is 2.5% Jewish. The odds against this particular distribution are 150,629 to 1.

An article on the Russian oligarchs, that is, tycoons who popped up after the collapse of the USSR, identifies 7 oligarchs, of whom 5 are Jewish, in a country whose population is 0.5% Jewish. The odds are approximately 15,391,000,000 to 1.

A photograph of the Communist Party's leaders taken in the USSR in 1920, when the population was 2.5% Jewish, shows 22 Jews out of a total of 61 men. The odds are 21,330,000,000,000,000,000 to 1, that's right, 21 quintillion to 1. Supposing that a roulette wheel had 40 numbers, and you chose a single number, which is 2.5% of 40 numbers, you can see, that if they turned the wheel 61 times a day, you'd never in a million years win 22 times in one day. Even 2 wins would be good, and anything above 3 or 4 would be unheard of.

The most incredible of all is that in the period from 1901 to 2000, inclusive, one century, Jews, constituting a mere .0025 (0.25%) of the population of the world, which is 1 out of 400, received 128 Nobel Prizes out of a total of 718 awarded. The odds against this are about 9 x 10^188 to 1. For those not mathematically inclined, "9 x 10^188" means "9 followed by 188 zeroes". This number is greater than than the number of hydrogen atoms that could fit in the Universe.

I want to look into the matter of Jewish Nobel laureates a little further though, but I´ll leave that for another article called, "Jewish Nobel Prizes and the Holocaust."

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About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far.

I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents.

Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com

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