Trying to be more productive? Looking for love? Want to get rich? The most sought-after gurus have one recommendation: look to the power law, the rule of thumb that says that 80 per cent of results come from 20 per cent of cases.
The innocuous productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal, for instance, advises his eight million subscribers to “think about focusing on the 20 per cent of tasks or activities that bring the most benefits”. Language coaches remind students that most conversation turns on a small portion of core words. De-cluttering influencers suggest reducing your wardrobe to the few items you wear almost all of the time.
In the more sullen world of the “manosphere”, the notion that a few men attract most women is a familiar commonplace: “80 per cent of men are average frustrated chumps,” writes the pseudonymous author of the Rational Male Substack. Jordan Peterson’s 2018 book 12 Rules for Life related how the 20 per cent of male lobsters that excelled in combat attracted the main share of the females. The implications for human relationships are obvious.
Among venture capital investors, meanwhile, the gospel of the power law has been preached by everyone from the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen to start-up investor Naval Ravikant, besides lending a title to journalist Sebastian Mallaby’s book on the industry. Its most famous articulation comes from Peter Thiel’s bestselling manual for tech entrepreneurs, Zero to One: “The best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.”
The power law, as such, is a simple mathematical relationship: y=x–n, where n is a positive constant. Plotted on a graph, this function approaches infinity at the y-axis before quickly tapering off to a low, slowly descending “long tail”, forming the shape of a curved letter L. Applied to society, it describes an unequal reality, in which the few individuals at the sharply vertical part of the L-shape generate most of the relevant material, while the large majority, lying along the L’s long tail, contributes a relatively small proportion. The actual numbers vary, but the “80/20 rule” is a convenient heuristic.
For at least a decade, the power law has been everywhere – it is as if the normal distribution, the prototypical probability function of the postwar “age of the average”, with its aim of improving life for the average citizen, was rolled off the stage, replaced by a formula better suited for an unequal age. Many applications of this distribution to everyday life are innocuous, or reflect settled science. But a certain slippage often takes place in the way many of its champions present their observations – a slippage towards thinking of society in general as immutably unequal, and recommending that people act accordingly.
Elon Musk’s management style seems based on the power law, for example in his firing of 80 per cent of Twitter’s staff upon acquiring the company. (The 20 per cent he kept, presumably, were thought responsible for the bulk of the company’s success.) Such actions help show how the 80/20 world can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: the lucky 20 per cent who survived his lay-offs, or those who own equity in the company (as many tech workers do), received rich rewards from the social media platform’s parent company SpaceX’s successful IPO on 12 June.
Musk is also one of the leading tribunes of a different kind of application of the power law – one that imagines something like a “permanent underclass”, to borrow a phrase recently popular in Silicon Valley, instead of a permanent elite. “Crime is extremely concentrated in a small number of individuals who repeatedly harm others,” Musk wrote in a post on X last November, voicing a notion that seems, longitudinal studies indicate, to contain more than a measure of truth, especially for violent crime.
But where social science does not tell us what to do about this fact, Musk does: “A second conviction for aggravated violent crime should get life imprisonment,” he writes. Headlines announcing atrocious crimes committed by repeat offenders, such as the 2025 killing of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, add to the apparent appeal of his position, shared by JD Vance and high-ranking officials in the Trump administration (even as crime rates are falling across the US). So, too, does the example of tough-on-crime leaders like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who achieved a large reduction in crime by locking up hundreds of thousands of suspected gang members without trial. Fantasies of getting rid of crime forever by eliminating the criminal fringe circulate freely on Musk’s X platform, and extend as far as the White House, if Trump’s musings on deporting US offenders to Bukele’s mega-prison are any indication.
One could call this way of thinking “Pareto politics”, after Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian polymath who first applied the power law to the distribution of wealth in society in the 1897 second volume of his Cours d’économie politique. The “80/20 rule” is also known as the “Pareto principle”.
It was John Maynard Keynes who said that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. But Pareto is far from defunct: economists still use his formula today in modelling the distribution of wealth in human societies. His influence on contemporary champions of the 80/20 rule is often explicit: Peterson, for example, cites Pareto explicitly in the “lobster” passage, adding elsewhere that the rule applies to “everything that people produce”.
This is the way things have always been and always will be, Pareto politics seems to say: a few companies make most of the money, a few men get most of the women, a few born criminals commit most of the crime. Face up to the reality or pay the price. Such claims come most often from the political right. The left-wing version of Pareto politics, if there is one – Bernie Sanders’s denunciations of the top 1 per cent, for example – seldom comes with the implication that this reflects the natural order of things; the claim is generally the opposite.
Applications of the power law to human life come with certain associations. For Vilfredo Pareto was not a mere applied mathematician – he was also a strongly opinionated writer on politics and social theory, who was convinced that elite domination is a natural law of human society. Pareto’s political views are hardly a reason to discount his formula or its application to specific domains, but a closer look at his life and output can explain why, from Elon Musk to incels, so much of the contemporary right is Paretian in its thinking, consciously or not. In many ways, in fact, Pareto is a perfect sage for the contemporary right, both as a theorist and as a man.
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was born in the stormy year of 1848 to a family of Genoese nobles who rose to political office with Italian unification. Despite their patrician status, his family were professionals of relatively modest means. Pareto’s father was an engineer, and his son became one, too – demonstrating the equal facility for mathematics and classics that would make him one of the last true modern polymaths.
Unlike his modern admirers in the tech world, Pareto was remarkably unsuccessful in the private sector. According to his biographer, he spent two fruitless decades directing an iron mine and foundry, managing to lose money for ten of those years without interruption, wiping out two thirds of the company’s capital. (Not bad numbers for a tech start-up, but terrible for an ironworks.) How he survived for so long with such results – seemingly by blaming his subordinates and Italian government policy – is remarkable in itself. Pareto capped this off by gambling away a small fortune of company money on the iron futures market, for which he was finally dismissed in 1890. With his career in ruins, his prospects seemed grim, until a friend put him up for a job at the university in Lausanne, where he began writing his major works.
The Italian thinker’s bad luck in romantic life puts him in closer company with his latter-day followers. In 1901, while Pareto was away at a conference, his aristocratic Russian wife absconded with the couple’s cook, taking with her 30 trunks of clothes. Pareto was unable to divorce Alessandrina Bakunina under Italian law until the last months of his life, when he availed himself of the services of a corrupt lawyer in the port city of Fiume (modern-day Rijeka), with its unique legal regime, to secure the separation. But after receiving an inheritance from his uncle, which he used to buy a villa in Céligny, Switzerland, Pareto also employed his means to keep himself among that lucky 20 per cent of men. After Alessandrina left him, he lived for 20 years with a French woman, Jeanne Régis, a relationship that began as what we would now call a “sugar baby” arrangement – Pareto had responded to her advertisement in a Parisian newspaper seeking a “wealthy gentleman with whom to pursue good friendship”. He married her after his divorce, thus ensuring her inheritance.
His real success came in the realm of ideas. Besides his numerous contributions to economics and sociology, Pareto became known for his polemical political views, articulated in works such as Rise and Fall of the Elites (1900). He held fin-de-siècle democracy in contempt, seeing it, in agreement with the Marxists he otherwise detested, as essentially a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which would soon fall to the rising forces of socialism. But he did not attribute this to any idea of inevitable proletarian triumph, which he saw as a religious fantasy no less ridiculous than Christian miracles or Greek oracles. Rather, the bourgeois elite – the political class and its intellectual supporters in the universities and right-thinking periodicals – would fall because it had become fatally decadent.
They permitted judges to flout the law and vagabonds to commit crimes at will, fearing the consequences of acting to stop them. They indulged in “humanitarian sentiments” towards “prostitutes, thieves, and murderers”, sentiments Pareto thought “inflated, artificial, and false”. Rather than rein in their own pillage of the state by exorbitant taxes and regulations, they sought to increase their take, even as they grew soft through pretty words and ideas, ever-less willing to defend their rule with firmness.
Elites were an eternal fact of human society, Pareto believed – an impression seemingly confirmed by his findings in his Cours d’économie politique, that the unequal distribution of wealth everywhere and in all times could be measured with the same formula. When one elite falls, another takes its place. To preserve itself, an elite should behave in the opposite manner to the West’s decadent bourgeois one: it should open themselves to talented entrants, but it should not shrink from defending its privileges, with violence if necessary. Most of all, it should resist indulging in “humanitarian” ideas that will make it fatally soft.
For violating this rule, Pareto thought, the bourgeoisie’s reign would soon end in blood: socialism would triumph, only to form a new elite out of the most privileged segment of workers. The Russian Revolution and the abortive workers’ uprisings in Italy after the the First World War seemed to prove him right. But by the end of his life, it became clear that something very different was happening: the triumph not of socialism, but of an inchoate political movement that paired elements of his own social pessimism with a penchant for violence. Pareto died in 1923, a measured supporter of Italian fascism.
The resemblances to the contemporary tech right can hardly be missed. Substitute the words “humanitarian ideas” and “socialism” in the above paragraphs with “wokeness”, and you have in outline the political philosophy of Elon Musk, or of any of a host of analogues: decadent, woke elites are letting crime run rampant while taxing us to death and indulging in false pieties about social justice. Instead, we should accept the natural law of social inequality, cut taxes, hire the most talented people at our companies, whatever their backgrounds, throw the criminals in jail and dispense with the social justice talk.
This is why Pareto’s theory of elites deserves our close attention today – as, indeed, John Gray has noted in these pages in 2024. Pareto watched the bourgeois liberalism of his day collapse in slow motion. Today we watch the established centre-left and centre-right parties that for decades have governed most of the Western world prove themselves unable to reverse a growing sense that they have lost control over the societies they rule, especially on issues such as corruption, immigration and crime. This is despite the fact that in most countries, traditional media and intellectual opinion tends to favour the established parties over their challengers.
But even as their hold on power has weakened over the past decade and a half, the social sentiments of those associated with traditional parties has intensified. Preoccupations with social justice, with LGBT rights, and with the acceptance of immigrants and racial minorities have deepened, thus seeming to confirm Pareto’s theory that an elite’s humanitarian ideas become more emphatic as its strength wanes.
In some cases, we can draw a direct connection between humanitarian sentiments and the weakening power of the old establishment: Joe Biden, for example, took the moral high ground on immigration, prompting millions to cross the US’s southern border each year of his administration, which generated a sense of weakness on the issue that helped, more than any other single factor – besides Biden’s own decline – to return Donald Trump to the White House.
Today’s Paretians, however, make the same mistake as their master when they overestimate the strength of their enemy, imagining that the groups to whom the elite’s humanitarian sentiments pander are threatening to take over. Peter Thiel’s notion of the “Antichrist” as a progressive world government or Musk’s fears of mass immigration as a conspiracy to import Democratic voters are far less forgivable than Pareto’s conviction of the impending victory of the workers. At least international socialism was a strong and organised force in the early 20th century, a plausible rival to bourgeois domination.
In political terms, groups on the receiving end of humanitarian sentiments today – immigrants and transgender people, for example – have little more than these sympathies to count on. These sympathies appear to be remarkably conditional, as the broad capitulation of American society to a reinvigorated Trump indicates: universities and law firms have been cowed, and TV critics taken off the air. Such rough treatment, of course, is precisely what Pareto counsels to elites interested in maintaining their position.
Why Pareto politics appeals to tech titans is understandable enough. Acceptance of wealth inequality, a smoothly flowing “talent pipeline”, and lower taxes all benefit them directly, while scorn for a liberal establishment that has scorn for them is a welcome garnish. But why are versions of it so popular among the online masses, from Musk’s army of social media followers to the far reaches of the manosphere?
For one thing, Paretian ideas of a permanent elite, fixed in size but flexible in composition, have a clear appeal in an age of social extremes and left-wing weakness. Inequality and segmentation in the labour market has advanced too far in developed economies for old notions about broad economic opportunity still to appeal. The reality of concentrated wealth at the top and stagnating wages from the middle down is too apparent. As economic mobility declines, it is lent a new ethos and public face by a small, very online nouveau riche – crypto investors, OnlyFans stars, Twitch streamers, and the like. Pareto politics responds to this reality – but, on close inspection, it is still too optimistic: in the aggregate, the contemporary elite is not very flexible in its composition.
It makes sense that many people are drawn in by a worldview like the version of Pareto politics that Jordan Peterson offers his audience. Wealth is unequally distributed, he admits, but that is “something like a natural law”. No one has figured out how to solve that problem, not even the Soviet Union, which had to keep pushing its kulaks back down: “As you shovel money down, it tends to move right back up.” Most of the money is in the hands of the 1 per cent – but that 1 per cent is “not the same people” year after year. They cycle through, like water through a drain. Perhaps you might even end up in it one day – start by buying my book.
Such rhetoric, deceptive as it may be given falling levels of social mobility, strikes a more convincing balance between realism and idealism than the never-kept promises of equitable growth still forthcoming from traditional politicians and media outlets. But Pareto’s economic theories, even in the hands of their most well-intentioned interpreters, serve only as a partial guide to our unequal era. Where he saw a fixed and unalterable distribution of wealth, scholars have found that the coefficient added to his formula shifts over time – for example, it has changed in recent decades as wealth has become more concentrated at the very top. The figures are well known: in the US, for example, between 1978 and 2018 the share of total wealth owned by the top 0.1 per cent of households more than doubled from 7 per cent to 18 per cent.
What’s more, Pareto’s formulas are used today only to model the top end of the income distribution, others having been found that better chart the rest – fitting for a man who had much to say about elites and little about the masses. A key weakness of Pareto’s thought more broadly lies in its inability to account for the changing social conditions of life for the majority that lies outside the top echelons. Elites may be a fact of life in all societies, in some form, but Pareto can explain neither why (in terms of wealth at least) elites shrink and grow, nor why conditions for the large majority of people outside the elite vary over time. To answer these questions, he would have had to treat the history of mass movements as something more than the history of religious ideas (as he characterised both Marxism and the French Revolution).
But today, that theoretical weakness is compensated by the fact that we live in an age, as the writer Anton Jäger has argued, of the decline of mass politics as we knew it during the 20th century. With unions and mass parties bleeding membership everywhere, few forces are left that can connect popular demands with political power in a durable way – and without such forces, hopes for achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth are dim. In other words, what Pareto left out is precisely what has been subtracted from our politics. And where he did seem to believe that change was possible, on the other hand, is exactly where the new right has placed the major horizon of its political hopes: in the treatment of the social underclass.
This is not surprising. Given the broad waning of social opportunity and egalitarian political movements, the ready-to-hand candidate for a “Pareto-optimising” change for the broad middle of society – to borrow another of Pareto’s famous concepts, the idea of a change which makes everyone better off without making anyone worse off – is mano dura, law and order. Punish the criminals, deport the migrants, sweep the homeless off the streets.
Tough-on-crime policies gain strength when people witness disorder in their everyday surroundings – or when they have reason to think that those in charge have gone soft. Established political liberalism has given them many examples of the latter – from bail reform and drug legalisation at the state level in the US, to rhetoric during the 2010s about the root causes of crime. Pareto is surely right that its “humanitarian ideas” have done much to prevent it from assuming the tough stance on crime, organised and disorganised, that voters from Sweden to Santiago now demand. Wiser leftists, such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, have seen which way the wind is blowing and made the choice that keeps their movements alive. Many elsewhere have not.
Pareto-political thinking on crime becomes more sinister, however, where it shades away from mere support for law-and-order policies and towards the creation of a social – and even legal – category of the unredeemable. Advocates often focus on the serial offenders who commit headline-grabbing offences in cities like New York, some with dozens of prior convictions. With “three strikes” laws having been rejected as racist during the 2010s, some argue for ten- or 20-strike laws, asking what seems at first blush to be a very reasonable question: at what point in a person’s criminal career should society decide they simply should not be free any more?
Commit enough crimes, in other words, and you prove yourself to lie along that diabolical portion of the criminal power-law distribution – your fate is sealed: we lock you up and throw away the key. Call it the Bukele solution. The tacit suggestion is that the status of belonging to the incurable criminal fringe, seen in Pareto politics as an inevitable presence in all societies, should be introduced into law. This marks a significant divergence from the common understanding of the connection between crime and punishment in democratic societies. While judges do take personal behaviour into account in sentencing, the law attaches specific punishments to specific crimes; it does not distinguish between the curable and the incurable. To argue that it should is quite different from arguing that punishments should be made harsher.
The strongest appeal of Pareto politics may be psychological – and here Pareto himself can help us. In his 1916 Trattato di Sociologia Generale, his most ambitious work, Pareto outlines an interesting theory of the relationship between the “psychic state” of societies, their theories, and their actions. People often think their actions are influenced by theories, when in fact these exercise a very weak influence on actions, which are determined mostly by their psychic state. Theories, however, have a relationship of mutual influence with a people’s psychic state. In other words, he writes, “In order to influence people, thought has to be transformed into sentiment.” And what a bountiful harvest of sentiments Pareto politics has to feed on: the sexual frustration of a generation of unloved men, the desperate eagerness of the socially ambitious to find any advantage in a brutally competitive age – and the status envy of fabulously wealthy tech tycoons.
By encouraging us to imagine inequality – in wealth, in the direction of society – as a natural law, Pareto presents us with the ingredients for an anti-politics that has emotional appeal both for beneficiaries and victims of the status quo. The winners can rebut their high-minded critics, bury their consciences and stave off discontent, while the many left on the losing side of the ledger, like those incels reading about Jordan Peterson’s lobsters, can take a certain cold comfort in thinking themselves the victims of a mathematical law, or strive to get on the right side of it – perhaps through “looksmaxxing”, a self-help doctrine for the TikTok age, through which men become beautiful by beating their faces with hammers.
In the last instance, Pareto, for all his patrician sophistication, was an engineer at heart, eager to find simple heuristics to tame the chaos of human life, and he had an engineer’s sensitivities. Wealthy, educated and modern, well versed in practical matters of business, he had a relationship of mutual scorn with the established intellectual class. They saw him as a vulgar reactionary and bean-counter lacking real culture; he saw them as irrational in spite of their learning, out of touch, high on their own supply of humanitarian ideas. His obsession with elites reflected his vexed relationship with status in his own society, and he found himself constantly searching for natural laws that would shock his enemies and refute their pieties.
Pareto’s contemporary tech-world followers cut their teeth as engineers as well, although they build software instead of railway tracks. They, too, have engineers’ minds, engineers’ resentments of traditional intellectuals in the universities and media – Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral” – who see them as uncultured. And at the bottom of their avowed pragmatism lies the same violent naivety, the same desperation for simple guidance amid chaos, and, yes, the same embrace of the political forces that arrive to smash the old elite and extinguish its humanitarian ideas. It is fair for us to ask them the question Pareto did not live to face: how soon will come the day when this new power, too, grows soft and decadent? What fate awaits you then?
[Further reading: The closing of the Anglophile mind]
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