Poll Results - Age of scripophily collectors

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Mark Twain

Are there more young people entering our hobby ? How would a scripophily population pyramid look like? These questions were the motivation to do a poll about the age of the collector.

Siemens Elektrische Betriebe Aktiengesellschaft
detail  from lower border, see below

Results of the poll

This was the question : I am a scripophily collector and my age is .. ?

• less than 25 years
• between 25 and 34 years
• between 35 and 44 years
• between 45 and 54 years
• between 55 and 64 years
• between 65 and 74 years
• 75 years or more

Here are the results :

So far, this was the best attended poll with not less than 88 votes. Thank you for your participation !



A clear winner

As you can see, we have clear winner : the category between 45 and 54 years accounts for 35% of the votes. This was not a surprise to me. In contrast with the majority of the world populations, this age category is the most represented one in the population pyramids for western countries. You can check this out on this interactive chart by WorldLifeExpectancy. On the left choose the year 2010, and on the right a country, a continent or the world.  Try the USA, Germany, the UK and Belgium. In 2011 many of the readers of this blog are located in these countries.  Now try Russia, India, Philippines, Brazil, ..

Population pyramid for Belgium and 2010.
Source : WorldLifeExpectancy

Yet also a surprise

I was convinced that many collectors younger than 35 years would have participated. Surely this category must be much more active on the Internet than the rest ? I was wrong. Look again at the poll results. You can see that more collectors participated with an age between 65 and 74 years (13% of the votes - a bravo for these "young minds") than those between 25 and 34 years (8% of the votes).  

I think these numbers can be explained by a combination of these factors :

1. The form of the age pyramid of a lot of western countries show that the 25-34 year category is relatively underrepresented.
2. Another study suggests that the 25-34 year category is certainly not the main category of users on social networks in the USA. See the chart on this Google based study on the Social Network Age Distribution .

So it looks like the "younger" ones are less active on the new social media than the older generation. Really ? It stays difficult to make any meaningful conclusions. Can I compare 88 scripophily voters to the world population ? It probably would be interesting to repeat the same poll within two years and watch how the results shift.

No doubt, this poll was fun to do.  I am curious for any opinions on this article.

F.L.

NB : My age ?  
Between 45 and 54 years.

Siemens Elektrische Betriebe Aktiengesellschaft
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