this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

That guy clearly never heard about the Pareto Principle.

E: fuck yeah, successfully triggered all the hexbear tankies. As fun as poking a wasp nest with a long stick. If only there was an online tankie bug spray equivalent...

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If 20% of people own 80% of the land or wealth or whatever in a capitalist country then all that shows is that capitalism produces Pareto distributions. That does not mean Pareto distributions are some universal law of nature nor does it mean that non-capitalist systems are impossible.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

This. There are many families of statistical distributions which reoccur throughout human systems. We can identify them and group them together, but this is not an arbitrary decision and does not somehow mean we’re acting objectively or without bias. People will try to get by on just acknowledging that these distributions exist and allowing implication to do the rest of their arguing for them, but the only point really being made is “abstractions exist”. Congratulations, you’ve identified a group of ideas based on shared properties. Somehow this is supposed to have obvious political implications?

[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago

Why would it matter if he heard about a debunked theory only loved by reactionaries?

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago

The pareto principle was produced by guessing based on anecdotal observations it was never a serious thing

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago

You should e-mail that to the presidents of Cuba, Venezuela, and China, to show them the error of their communist ways.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Somebody hasn't heard of the Parenti principle...

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago

Looking at this thread, the PPB Principle has been demonstrated thoroughly

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago

The one that stated that 80% of the land in italy was owned by 20% of the people? I think they did hear about it and did apply it to Cuba but I might be wrong there.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m trying to understand what this means. I know the Pareto Principle from two contexts:

  1. Jordan Peterson bringing it up all the time as a vague hand wave to make his disdain for communists sound scientific
  2. My old manager who learned about it in some bullshit professional development course

Because of the latter context, I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to make this “principle” measurable and rigorous in a real business context and it’s just a fool’s errand. If you start out with a conclusion, it’s easy to map the 80/20 rule onto preexisting data, but trying to actually use it to create predictive models, I found it useless.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

The Pareto principle is an economics idea - something is considered Pareto efficient if you can make someone better off without making someone else worse off, and you are at a Pareto optimum when you can't make anyone better off without making someone worse off. Of course, because "better off" and "worse off" are entirely up for interpretation, people argue that taxing the rich to improve the lives of the poor is not Pareto efficient because you're worse off if you have less money regardless of how much money you have left. So the only Pareto efficient solution is to grow the economy until all the poor people make enough money.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago

So the only Pareto efficient solution is to grow the economy until all the poor people make enough money.

Boy is that some head stuck up their own ass economist shit.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's really dumb. the end result is literally identical, because money would have to be worth less afterwards for the math to work.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Yeah, it's not what I'd describe as a serious attempt at problem solving.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

The Pareto Principle is a bullshit theory where a crank saw a handful of statistics were similar and thus decided it was a natural law. The only reason it's still considered seriously is because economics is to mathematics what astrology is to physics.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Evolution creates a lot of crabs, and you can find the golden ratio expressed in nature all over. What does that have to do with the price of tea?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What does the productive capabilities of peas have to do with how we should structure society?