The Pareto Distribution

A natural law governing domains of creative human production.

Background

I recently stumbled upon a lecture given by psychology professor at the University of Toronto, where he details socio-political developments of the Soviet Union after the first World War. He begins by explaining how the“peasant class” in the Soviet Union had become tremendously successful in agricultural production, ultimately supplying a large proportion of food for Russia and Ukraine. But eventually what happened was Vladimir Lenin, in his capricious leadership of the Soviet Revolution in the late 1910’s, pushed to collectivize the farms, which targeted a small number of highly successful peasant farmers, who were labelled as the Kulaks. This collectivization and disenfranchising of a just a few farms led to the eventual demise of the nation’s economy.

Why is that relevant?

The reason the lecture is prefaced with a seemingly seemingly off-topic historical qualm, is due to its association with a mathematical phenomenon known as the Pareto Distribution; a natural law that governs patterns in domains of creative human production, such as farming. Vilfredo Pareto, a famous Italian engineer, observed this very occurrence in the distribution of wealth in Italy 1898 (hence the name Pareto…