Who Is Doing The Work?

Discussed in the video: Price’s Law.

Price’s square root law or Price’s law pertains to the relationship between the literature on a subject and the number of authors in the subject area stating that half of the publications come from the square root of all contributors. [4] Thus, if 100 papers are written by 25 authors, five authors will have contributed 50 papers

This seems like some kind of natural law when it comes to human effort. The Pareto Distribution is a similar function.

The following examples are sometimes seen as approximately Pareto-distributed:

* The sizes of human settlements (few cities, many hamlets/villages)[10]

* File size distribution of Internet traffic which uses the TCP protocol (many smaller files, few larger ones)[10]

* Hard disk drive error rates[11]

* Clusters of Bose–Einstein condensate near absolute zero[12]

* The values of oil reserves in oil fields (a few large fields, many small fields)[10]

* The length distribution in jobs assigned supercomputers (a few large ones, many small ones)[13]

* The standardized price returns on individual stocks [10]

* Sizes of sand particles [10]

* Sizes of meteorites

It seems that even physical nature is a fan of inequality. Congress passing laws (marijuana has no medical value) can not change nature. Which may be why welfare is an essential part of government (the Romans had it).

What is hard to figure out is how much is too much? How much welfare (and other laws) reduce incentive enough to significantly curtail production and creative destruction? When you pass that point collapse is inevitable. And governments (and people) rarely figure it out until they are well past the peak. “We can’t change. What we have been doing has worked well so far.”


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2 responses to “Who Is Doing The Work?”

  1. Man Mountain Molehill Avatar
    Man Mountain Molehill

    The root problem is that the religious right is lumped in with the conservative/ libertarian right. They really don’t have much in common.

    Traditionally the “right” being the party of individual liberty and limited government, nothing really conservative about it. The religious conservatives mostly don’t care much about either, they just want everybody to worship like themselves, by force if necessary.

    As Reagan found, he had to co-opt the Christers to get elected even though he was leaning more towards the libertarian side.
    note I’m not claiming he was any sort of raving anarcho-capitalist or anything like that. But when Virginia Postrel interviewed
    Reagan back during his governorship he had clearly read Hayek and Rand. He mostly paid lip service to the Christers without really doing much for them. For example, while governor he signed into law one of the most liberal abortion policies in the US at the time.

    And Trump seems to have forged some sort of inchoate populist libertarianism. Interesting times, as the Chinese say. Ghod nose how it all will work out.

  2. Man Mountain Molehill Avatar
    Man Mountain Molehill

    Problem is, a lot of the authors with a high publication output (especially in the social sciences and related fake fields) are abject phonies pumping out reams of bogus data and quondam statistics)

    nb: the previous comment was intended for Eric’s post, this internet connection is so slow my computer gets confused

    Anyway, back from the hospital where I had my ankle, broken in 3 places, repaired. Got to sample a nice selection of opiates. Not quite enough of any but much better than nothing.