3 ms·
Honest question: are people surprised at the wealth distribution? It seems quite a few HNers are familiar with Pareto's principle & 80/20 and the current wealt
by joelrunyon 13y ago
Honest question: are people surprised at the wealth distribution?
It seems quite a few HNers are familiar with Pareto's principle & 80/20 and the current wealth distribution reflects that almost perfectly (Top 20% = 84% of wealth).[1]
I'm not saying that being in that top 20% doesn't bear certain responsibilities, but it shouldn't necessarily be surprising.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/06/this-viral-video-is-right-we-need-to-worry-about-wealth-inequality/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/06/t...
- scarmig 13y agoEven if wealth and income will roughly fall along a Pareto distribution (plausible, but needs some argument), that doesn't mean the 80/20 is universal. Only some Pareto distributions (characterized by certain parameters) display the 80/20 principle. e.g. the Gini coefficient for an idealized Pareto distribution displaying the 80/20 principle is by definition 0.60. But Gini coefficients can obviously vary a lot from that, so societies definitely can exhibit either more or less wealth inequality.