You have to be in the top 20 out of 50,000

Nationally (US), there are 15,000 professional economists.

So let's say worldwide there are about 50,000 of them.

To outperform the 50,000, you just had to be in the 99.999%ile. Fortunately, this was not difficult.

The occupation is characterized by a low joblessness level. The unemployment rate for employees was 4% in 2006.

Hmm, I wonder what the rate is now.