

80% of financial resources in US are controlled by 10% of its population. - akarambir
http://anoncentral.tumblr.com/post/10661889735/80-of-financial-resources-in-the-united-states

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pash
Our admirably good-hearted Iranian despot was anticipated in his observation
by Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1906 noticed that about 20% of Italians held 80% of
Italy's wealth. Similar proportions have since been noticed in many societies
around the world throughout the past century, among them the United States
today. (In 2007, the wealthiest 20% of Americans owned 84.6% of the nation's
_total_ wealth, as opposed to just _financial_ wealth, says a UC-Santa Cruz
sociologist. [1])

The phenomenon of 20% of a population accounting for 80% of a quantity is
quite widespread, and not only in economics. For example, in classifying life-
forms with binomial nomenclature, about 80% of all species are in "largest"
20% of genera; about 80% of the world's oil reserves are in the largest 20% of
oil fields; about 80% of the grains of sand on a beach are in the lowest two
deciles by size; etc. This feature is so common that it's called the "80-20
rule." [2]

Though the mechanism behind this phenomenon remains in most cases a bit of a
mystery, in statistical terms the 80-20 rule arises in populations described
by a Pareto distribution. [3] The Pareto distribution belongs to the family of
power-law distributions, whose functional forms have an in-built self-
similarity; the 80-20 rule applies even to itself. So the wealthiest 4% (20%
of 20%) of the population owns about 64% (80% of 80%) of America's wealth, and
so on.

1\. See esp. Table 1 at
<http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html>

2\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle>

3\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution>

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tzs
I find these kind of statements pointless. Given any thing that is not
distributed equally, it is mathematically necessary that the top N% of the
people who have that thing have more than N% of that thing.

For instance, the fattest 10% of the population have more than 10% of the
total weight of the population. The top 10% promiscuous women have more than
10% of the total sex. The top 10% of authors by number of books published have
more than 10% of the books published. And so on and so on.

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phamilton
Best explanation I've ever read:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

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algopats
financial industry has the capacity for 10 facebook like startups - currently
its all Five big banks, five big IB/trading, wall.st banks etc.

There is huge opportunity here for innovation in finance industry, as
all(most) of its functionalities can be reduced to computation.

Obviously the Wall.St insiders dont want any innovation, they are glad earning
avg 500K-to-mil total compensation for starters. (3 years in, you could
potentially make min. mil total compensation)

Dont understand why all the startups/ventures in silicon valley go after
social networking - how many groupons, or photo/message/social do we need ?

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Hyena
This assumes that Wall Street banks are trading on ability rather than
prestige or that these things aren't in part one-in-the-same in the industry.

