General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Stripping away the distracting BS, this is what it all boils down to. (In my opinion.) [View all]JusticeForAll
(1,222 posts)It's actually really close to what's called a Pareto distribution. The following is stolen from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
Pareto originally used this distribution to describe the allocation of wealth among individuals since it seemed to show rather well the way that a larger portion of the wealth of any society is owned by a smaller percentage of the people in that society. He also used it to describe distribution of income.[8] This idea is sometimes expressed more simply as the Pareto principle or the "80-20 rule" which says that 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth.[9] However, the 80-20 rule corresponds to a particular value of ?, and in fact, Pareto's data on British income taxes in his Cours d'économie politique indicates that about 30% of the population had about 70% of the income. The probability density function (PDF) graph at the beginning of this article shows that the "probability" or fraction of the population that owns a small amount of wealth per person is rather high, and then decreases steadily as wealth increases. (Note that the Pareto distribution is not realistic for wealth for the lower end. In fact, net worth may even be negative.) This distribution is not limited to describing wealth or income, but to many situations in which an equilibrium is found in the distribution of the "small" to the "large".