The Pareto Principle: Why Socialism fails.

The Pareto Principle: Why Socialism fails.
@The_White_Wolf_0f_Rivia 


Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian engineer-turned-economist at the turn of the 19th century. In 1896-97, he published a book on economics: Cours d'économie politique. It included a section on the distribution of wealth in Europe. He announced his famous finding: 20% of the population owned 80% of the wealth. He examined several Western European nations, the pattern held. Economists today study wealth distribution in other nations. Pareto's law still holds.

The Pareto principle is probably the most important sociological and economic law. It defies reason and explanation. Also known as the 80/20 Rule, it states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Many academics ignore it, and no one really wants to deal with the 80/20 Rule in a scientific fashion. Pareto himself devoted the final decade of his life to a study of society, attempting to explain it, he could not. Pareto's law applies to society, it applies to almost everything in some capacity, even biology. Pareto discovered that 20% of his garden's pea pods produced 80% of the peas. Further observations have been discovered over the years.

80% of the results are often achieved by 20% of the group.
20% of your effort will often generate 80% of your results.
20% of the tasks often account for 80% of the value.

In other words, this is a true sociological law, the law of the Vital few and the Trivial many. Yet, Sociologists are overwhelmingly left-wing, this has been true for decades, thus their use of Pareto's law is highly limited despite its versatility and ubiquity, which really comes as no surprise. They use it to excoriate a nation's wealth distribution, usually in defense of wealth redistribution schemes, but they never inform anyone that this distribution applies to virtually every area of social organization or that it applies in every nation ever studied. After the better part of a century of attempts to foster economic equality via gov't and social-engineering, the 80/20 rule has not budged much beyond a variation around the mean: 80/20.

Why don't they discuss this? Simple, these facts demonstrate that plans to bring about economic equality will not be realized. Undaunted, collectivists want their reforms to work, and for them, this amounts to a matter of religious conviction, a dogmatic approach resistant to facts and evidence. Collectivists use the Pareto distribution law to criticize capitalism and wealth distribution, but omit the inconvenient parts, ie, that the suppression of the Vital few in society and economics, negatively affects the rest.

This is the chief reason why socialism always fails, it suppresses the most productive upon whom the majority depends, consigning them to the starvation and extreme poverty that we see in Socialist/Communist nations. Under the free market, the rich get richer, and so do the poor, but the rich get far richer of course. Under Socialism/Communism, the rich get a little richer, and the poor get a lot poorer, but the 'rich' in a Socialist/Communist societies are poorer than the middle class in a free market society, and will be poorer than the bottom 20% as their societies decline. The Communists in China figured this out in the late 1970s in time to change, as did the Soviets in the late 1980s, but too late. Collectivists in North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela have yet to figure it out. It is time to stop pretending that economic inequality can be cured by gov't or social-engineering.