Jordan Peterson is a treasure trove of philosophical insight, but there are three specific points that he continually makes that may need further scrutinizing, if they are to yield the fruits Dr. Peterson no doubt aspires for them. These are:

1) Wealth Aggregates To A Centralized Few
2) The Political Spectrum Is Primarily One Dimensional
3) Truth Value Is Attached To Evolutionary Results

This article will deal only with the first. Subsequent articles will deal with the others.

Wealth Aggregates To A Centralized Few

Peterson: So one of the problems that societies have to wrestle with constantly is the proclivity of produced goods to be held in the hands of a minority of people. It doesn't matter what the domain of productivity is, it could be money, and that's the one that people concentrate on with the one percent, but if you look at youtube views, one percent of youtube channels have fifty percent of the views. Same thing. And it's one percent of the recording artists that sell fifty percent of the records, and so forth. So you get this tremendous concentration of productive power and productive content in the hands of small numbers of people, it's like a natural law... The problem with that is that it can get so extreme that it destabilizes your whole society.

Jordan Peterson is referring to the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, which is indeed a Natural Law.

Though Dr. Peterson correctly identifies Pareto Distribution as a characteristic of anything having to do with human production, it is more than just a law of the distribution of human production.

The 80/20 Pareto Distribution can be found governing things as varied as the distribution of the size of streams in river networks to the distribution of the number of sexual partners individuals have per year.

20% of producers will always produce 80% of the product, 20% in any market will always make 80% of the money, 20% of streams branching from a river will always contain 80% of the water, and 20% of sexually active people will always sleep with 80% of the sexual partners every year.

Any attempt to combat this is an attempt to combat a Natural Law. It is futile.

The Problem Is Thus:

Peterson: The problem with that is that it can get so extreme that it destabilizes your whole society.

Dr. Peterson assumes Pareto Distribution can "get out of hand," so that all products eventually become centralized into the hands of a few, and the rest of us starve.

Yet this is obviously not a problem with Youtube views. As the top Youtubers hog all of the viewers, there doesn't seem to be any risk that the rest of us are going to be left with no views on any of our videos...

Nor is this a problem for recording artists. As the top record sellers sell more records, there doesn't seem to be any risk that the rest of the recording artists are going to be unable to sell any records...

Nor is this a concern with sexual partnership. As 20% of the population sleeps with 80% of the annual sexual partners, the rest of us are not worried that "this is going to get so extreme that it will destabilize our society."

We are not worried that those highly sexually active individuals in the top 1% of sexual partnership are going to hog all of the sexual partners and eventually create a sexual partner shortage for the rest of us so severe that it destabilizes society...

So why does Dr. Peterson identify the 80/20 rule as "a problem that needs to be solved" when it comes to money?

Of Markets And Monopoly Boards

It may be that Dr. Peterson has overlooked a vital aspect of Pareto Distribution. He rightly points out that it is associated with production, but it is also associated with Scale-Free Networks. And this turns out to be an important detail.

The Pareto Distribution is so correlated with Scale-Free Networks that it is one of their defining characteristics.

The problem seems to be that Dr. Peterson erroneously conflates the clustering found in Small-World Networks, with the Pareto Distribution found in Scale-Free Networks. For instance:

Peterson: You've all played monopoly I presume. At the beginning, everybody has the same amount of money and property, the same amount of wealth... So what happens is that as you continue to play Monopoly, more and more people stack up at zero, and fewer and fewer people have more and more money. When the game is over, everyone has nothing, except one person, and they have all of it.

It is true that this is the result of playing the Monopoly board game, but notice that the end result is not a Pareto Distribution.

If the distribution at the end is that 1% owns 100% of the wealth, then whatever happened, it was not the result of a Pareto Distribution.

The Monopoly Board Game is not a Scale-Free Network, and therefore does not follow the Pareto Distribution.

Monopoly is a closed, Small-World Network, that results in the clustering that Dr. Peterson is associating with money and markets in general.

Swinging At Phantoms With Bats

Implicit in Dr. Peterson's concern about wealth distribution in societies is an assumption of the type of scarcity one finds in a closed, fixed resource, network. If there is only a certain amount of wealth in existence, and no new wealth is created, and no new players can join, then we are playing a zero-sum game in a Small-World Network, and concerns of clustered wealth to the detriment of the rest are justified.

But this is not the case.

The Pareto Distribution arrises in Scale-Free Networks as a constant. The ratio does not wildly fluctuate, and certainly does not accelerate towards 100/1 in which one (or few) cluster all wealth, and everyone else has nothing.

The Pareto Distribution does not devolve over time into a different type of distribution.

As long as markets remain scale-free, (meaning nodes are able to be added and removed, new wealth is able to be created and old wealth destroyed, and the market is able to both grow and shrink) then we should expect the ratio of wealth distribution to always and forever remain at 80/20, just as we expect the distribution of youtube views and records sold and annual sexual partners to remain at 80/20 also.

This is not a problem that societies must wrestle with.

This is not a problem that desperately needs to be solved.

In fact, the only part that needs demands addressing are the ludicrous attempts to "solve" it by those who (wrongly) see it as a problem.

Ironically, the only instances we know about of the type of dangerous wealth clustering Peterson fears, are those instances in which the decentralized scale-free market was altered into a centralized, closed network in which wealth clustered into the hands of the "Master Node" known as The State and the Political Class that operated it, and everyone else was left with zero and depended on whatever The State had leftover to distribute manually.

• KG

(photo credit to reddit user Lorpo314)