Toby Moore: The Pareto Principle

There’s a concept called the Pareto Principle, which originated with the curious Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in the late 1800s. Pareto was studying wealth distribution in Italy when he noticed something strange: no matter which region he examined, about 20% of the people owned 80% of the land.

Then he looked elsewhere – income, property, even the size of pea pods in his garden – and the pattern kept repeating. Pareto had stumbled onto a principle that quietly governs everything from economics to nature to human behavior.

Economists, mathematicians and sociologists spent the next century testing Pareto’s observation, and they kept discovering the same thing: The world runs on unequal contributions. The pattern shows up everywhere – in business, biology, creative work, city populatio