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technology accelerates discontinuities, of wealth as well as everything else, allowing concentrations of wealth far in excess of Pareto (or any other) optimalit
by javert 14y ago
technology accelerates discontinuities, of wealth as well as everything else, allowing concentrations of wealth far in excess of Pareto (or any other) optimality.
It's nonsensical to talk about an "optimal" distribution of wealth.
Also, technology allows for more total production (hence more total wealth), which would be great, but social policies in the western world inhibit the general population from scaling the number of children they have to track labor demand.
- xanmas 14y agoOptimal, at least in this sense, refers to the optimization of a cost function so we can quibble about the cost function used but optimization in general isn't nonsensical. And really, the OP specified that he was using the Patero sense of optimization with a Patero cost function.
- anigbrowl 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution I should have referred to a 'Pareto distrubtion' rather than 'Pareto optimality' (which is more properly used to describe production possibility frontiers), but the underlying concept here is that it's quite natural for ~20% of the population to control ~80% of the wealth, on the basis that similar proportions recur throughout nature. I think this is 'optimal' insofar as growth is maximized by such a distribution, but of course you only get such distributions in theoretically perfect markets.