this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Lemmy might, MIGHT have a small bias towards the left (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [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.