I've just read Chapter Six from Albert-László Barabási's Linked. It's about the 80/20 rule, and it says: "Pareto's result means that 80% of the world's wealth is owned by 20% of the population", yes we can accept that, you can check this here: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/detailed-look-global-wealth-distribution
What is surprising, that he writes a couple of pages earlier that: "These nodes that have a high number of connections (i.e. people with a lot of money) are responsible for the security of the network against faults and attacks." This is a well known characteristic of a scale-free network, because even with a large fraction of nodes randomly removed that network stays well connected compared to a randomly connected network, which can become separated after only a small fraction of nodes removed. How does this translate to humanity, societies and the welfare of people?
Humanity requires rich people for stability. Poor people cannot commit philantropy. The scale-free network is similar to phase transitions in materials - scale-freeness is orderedness. If a society is unordered and unorganized, it will be a random network, and thus have a Gaussian distribution of wealth - which means most of the people will have some wealth, but very few will be poor or rich. This is similar to socialist and communist economic goals: equality of wealth. Why is this bad and why should we NOT try to "fix" this?
Partly because in case of an aforementioned random removal of nodes (ex.: a flu epidemic or terrorist attack causes people dying), which can destroy a random network of socialist economy, but not a scale-free network of capitalist-laissez-faire economy.
An other case would be when a selected part of the wealth distribution collectively commits a mistake. For example: if everyone would earn a general middle-low income then they can afford to buy or do the same things. They would all choose the same thing, even if it is a bad investment. In a scale-free unequal society the more risk people take when sacrificing a big sum of the society's resources by buying something expensive the less people there are. In a socialist society a lot of risky invetments could be made by a LOT of people instead of very few people.
My two arguements are complementary. The first one praises the few rich, the second one the many poor. Either way - nature and natural selection selects the safest strategy for keeping humanity alive.
