@mongo1977 Sometime after middle management and before becoming a department officer. It depends more on how the internal hierarchy is structured than anything else.

You could also say its around $350,000 +- $25,000 is when material power hits critical mass, although some have calcualted it to be much lower.

@mongo1977 About 29% ( 739/ 2473 ) of all billionaires do not have a college degree.
Only 30% of all fortune 500 CEO only have a bachelors degree.
The correlation between scholastic achievement and wealth is weak the higher you go, indicating that schooling can only earn you so much return on your investment.

Lets say there was a major promotion and you were up for it. For the sake of argument, lets say your opponent has had a slightly superior sales performance. If the opportunity presented itself to steal some of your opponents clients, thus giving you a critical edge and possibly earning yourself the new position. If you have dirt on your opponent, you might try a smear campaign to undermine their credibility to the promoting authority, or meddle in their personal affairs to attempt to weaken their performance. If you don't chose to do these things and instead stick to "moral superiority" your opponent will not hesitate to do the same to you, and then they will have the position and the power.

Superior achievement is in and of itself a resource, same as number of sales, marketing ideas, or charisma. If you lack these resources, you may be able to supplement others to achieve the same job. For another example from real life and in the post, trump became powerful by leveraging his popularity and charisma without having any former political achievement.

@mongo1977 The "dirt" could be fictitious. Suppose you sent them an email with an incriminating link, and when they clicked on it they were redirected to some shady site they shouldn't be accessing at work. I've seen this happen in real life.

If their is legitimate reason for someone in charge to be ousted, they should be removed. I guess all I'm saying here is that social Darwinism is real and doesn't always favor talent or skill, in fact in certain situations skill can actually hinder performance. When I was in the military, I observed that it wasn't uncommon for individuals with specific duties to stay in those positions if they were exceptionally good at it. Then people with less skill gained superior position. This happens all the time.

@mongo1977 I would agree that the ability to manipulate both people and the system is a skill strongly favored by social darwinism, and this can be verified accurate by the number of psychopaths in positions of power and people who are on welfare who magically get a job as soon as their term expires.

I do not have any idea what you mean by the oxymoronic " don't mind a bullshitter if they're honest" What does that mean? By definition, a bullshitter is someone who lies and an honest person is someone who doesn't bull shit.

Enough stupid people took the bait for the republican and Russian bag of dirty tricks to put them over the finish line. Republicans are Machiavellian in that whatever it takes to win is fine with them even if it’s criminal. End justifies the means.