The Pareto Principle and Income Distribution (Clementi & Gallegati, etc.)

Details

Photo

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Name

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Field

Economics / statistics

Year

2005-ish cluster of papers

Core idea

Income and wealth often follow power-law distributions, where a small fraction holds a huge share of the total.

Why it stuck

Once you see a power law, you start seeing it in everything from city rents to which bodega snacks actually sell.

Read where

At my desk in a Financial District office that unintentionally illustrated the inequality charts.