The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People Get Most of the Rewards
I love Pareto distributions but I don&#x27;t like the author&#x27;s framing of this as an inescapable law of nature. We have control over how society&#x27;s feedback mechanisms are structured, and while it is foolish to try to reverse an inevitable <i>trend</i> we are by no means required to passively accept, especially when wildly disproportionate outcomes lead to systemic weakness.<p>It&#x27;s worth considering that from the cellular point of view, cancer is extremely &#x27;successful.&#x27; But at the human level, discovering a tumor is not a cause for celebration, but for anxiety and further investigation. Some tumors are benign, and can be thought of as a mere  excess of a good thing causing only cosmetic or minor discomfort. Others are malignant, actively reproducing themselves to excess and pulling all the body&#x27;s resources towards themselves, disregarding the health of the host body but without creating any sort of value (because of the impossibility of reproducing itself independently of its originating context). A benign cancer is tolerable; a malignant one must be excised or it will kill the host.<p>(This might seem like a hand-wavey objection, but systems biology suggests that Pareto effects show up in the development of cancers just as in many other natural systems, eg <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosone&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal.pone.0013803" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosone&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal....</a> )<p>We should not fall into the trap of assuming that just because a social phenomenon instantiates some natural behavior, that it is therefore a Good Thing, aka the naturalistic fallacy. Nature is inherently fractal, and extreme outcomes may be instances of local maxima that are suboptimal from the perspective of the system as a whole.