Playground bullies do prosper – and go on to earn more in middle age

This is so obvious to me.

Climbing the ladder at a company can be done purely by lifting yourself and those around you up. But often I see it achieved through a mix of of putting down others as well.

Bullies get more skilled at their craft with age. Managers that "run a tight ship" often operate by instilling fear. Either through fear of being fired or fear of not being promoted, or maybe the manager publicly shames folks in an open office and employees are afraid of the embarrassment. Regardless, those that "run a tight ship" often get noticed by upper management and get promotions.

For those not on the manager track the name of the game is sandbagging. Instead of being a team player, these folks strategically withhold information from you. Maybe they want to look smarter in the meeting, maybe they want to see you fail, for whatever reason they are uninterested in helping their teammate..

The article discusses the average, it'd be interesting to see the median given income does not have a normal distribution.

It feels likely that aggressive behavior would create a higher variance, so more top earners, but also more people in severe debts or dieing earlier. I wonder if the latter has been corrected for, else survivorship bias may play a role.

Also seems likely this would be correlated with wealth. Wealthy playground bullies earning even more than their wealthy non-bully peers, poor ones doing even worse than their peers.

This made me curious. Tried to look up some bullies from my childhood on linkedin and facebook. Bullies do prosper, and it is sad.

Maybe there is some statistical effect, but pretty sure most of the ones who bullied me in school ended up in jail or shitty jobs. They weren't aggressive in some competitive sense, they were just lazy and nasty assholes.

Would be interesting if everything is statistically solid if this applies to other populations. I imagine the United Kingdom to be somehow cut-throat from a career perspective, maybe I am wrong.

Limited scope. As if income is the only thing that matters when you grow up

No definition provided for the label "aggressive". Not all aggressive individuals are playground bullies, and not all playground bullies are aggressive. Seems like a ragebait headline at the very least.