“What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”  This was the 2011 question posed by sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his annual survey of science and technology gurus via the online salon Edge.  Internet scholar Clay Shirky chose the Pareto distribution as a tool that could be put to better use for reducing income disparities.  When I led manufacturing improvement teams, I graphed cumulative losses by cause and used this Pareto chart* to focus my engineering colleagues on the 20 percent that caused 80% of the problems.  It seems that Christakis knew something when he put forward the Pareto early this year because, since then, the 99 Percent Project has taken aim at the 1 percent of folks from Wall Street who purportedly control all of our money.  Being a technical type I am not interested in getting into issues of elitism.  I’d rather experiment to identify the vital few factors that affect a system of interest.

Meanwhile, the United Nations declared this summer that tomorrow, October the 31^st, the 7 billionth baby will be born.  They may be overly precise on the timing, yet this is a very compelling statistic.  Breaking down the world’s wealth by this population will continue to keep economists busy, but you can be sure it will maintain a “predictable imbalance” as observed by their colleague Pareto.  Along those lines, I suggest you measure how Halloween candy gets distributed to your neighborhood population of trick-or-treaters.  If a few big kids don’t take the lion’s share, I will eat my monster mask..

*The American Society of Quality (ASQ) provides a detailing of the Pareto Chart here.