Jordan Peterson | Pareto Distributions & Wealth Inequality

there's a good book that I would recommend reading called the great leveler by Walter shy del it's a new book relatively new book and he details out the he details out the in erotic ability of inequality so part of the problem with this process that we just described where success breeds success and failure breeds failure is that the people who are succeeding get a disproportionate share of the resource pie let's say so and you know everyone knows that about money right because the twelve richest people in the world 85 richest people in the world have as much money as the bottom 2 billion which seems well let's say unfair now it's certainly unequal now whether I believe Lord in your statistic is the eighth richest have equal to the bottom 3.5 billion yeah well it's probably worse than it was when I looked at this about three years ago so but it doesn't it doesn't matter because you get the point but it's um it's not crazy but the thing is is that this is not something that only applies to money it applies to everything that's creatively produced so the same rule applies to number of records sold by recording artists the same rule applies to number of books sold by novelists the same rule applies to number of goals scored by NHL hockey players the same rule applies to the population of cities and the mass of stars and the size of trees in the in the jungle it's like the inequality problem is way more troublesome again than mere capitalism it's a terrible problem and shy Dells work which is really really interesting he's traced back inequality ten fifteen thousand years using you can do it for example let's say you find a Neolithic burial site and there's two hundred people in it so these people would be buried with their possessions and obviously some of them decay but some of them don't and like some of them are buried with gold well hardly any of them and the tiny proportion of people who are buried with gold are buried with a lot of gold so you can even derive a Gini coefficient estimate which is an estimate of inequality from burial sites and it looks like as soon as you get a surplus you get inequality and that's a rough thing eh because you might think well even in hunter-gatherer societies where there's no surplus there's still inequality because there's inequality of friendship there's inequality of health and there's inequality of sexual access and those things are they are not trivial but when you're thinking about it purely economically you start to get an inequality as soon as you get a surplus you think oh that's interesting so there's a natural rule which is surplus generates inequality alright so how do you solve that and shy Dells book says well that's easy you just get rid of the surplus right and that's not good so like he found and so one of the things he did with statistical analysis because one of the things he might ask is well let's say you have your measures of inequality and then you can track them around the world and you can track whether or not the inequality is generated by a right-wing government or a left-wing government and then you might hope well the left-wing governments would ameliorate inequality there's no evidence for that at all it doesn't look like inequality is with it it doesn't look like the amelioration of inequality is within the purview of political organization and you'd like you should not hear that with any degree of happiness whatsoever because the social science on inequality is also clear as inequality levels increase societies destabilize and the best indicator of that I already mentioned that that was work that was done by Martin Daly and Margot Wilson at McMaster University in Canada they're really interested in what drove male homicide because most homicide is male male-on-male it's mostly young males it's mostly within race and it's mostly status competition right so and the status competitions get intense where inequality increases so where everyone's poor so if you rank order American States and Canadian provinces by inequality the poorer provinces where everyone's poor there's no male aggression and the rich provinces and states where everyone's rich there's no male it male homicide but the states and provinces where inequality is high the male homicide rate starts to climb up and it's probably the most aggressive males who get most aggressive most rapidly when inequality increases so there's a psychological component but inequality drives male homicide 0.9 is the correlation which means that you actually don't need any other explanation for male homicide maybe you throw in alcohol just just as it as an extraneous variable you don't need any other explanation for the male homicide rate than inequality it's a staggering work it's absolutely staggering work and so the the thing is that a meritocracy will drive inequality and then you have a problem because people stack up at zero and they can't get out of zero because that's what happens as inequality increases people think about when you're playing Monopoly you know the game I mean that's a perfect example of how inequality emerges everybody is equal to begin with everybody basically plays a random game because monopoly is basically a random game I mean there's some skill in it but not much so so it's a random game so what happens when everyone starts equal and you play a random game one person ends up with everything everyone else stacks up at zero ouch Adele's book basically shows the only way out of that is various forms of war including revolution and epidemics that's if that's the only thing he's been able to track that and and what happens is well you level everyone and then the inequality decreases it's like well okay like that doesn't seem like a really great solution

Channel: Simulation

Views: 87,738

Keywords: science, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Pareto Principle, Pareto, Pareto Distribution, wealth, wealth inequality, inequality, evolution, classism, speciation, capitalism, United states, Jordan Peterson Pareto, Jordan peterson pareto distribution, jordan peterson pareto principle, pareto distribution jordan peterson, jordan b. peterson, income inequality

Id: U4GMUamUjT8

Length: 5min 35sec (335 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018