About the intro: how many more people (since Karl Marx) will rediscover the Pareto distribution and come to the conclusion that it should not be the case ...
It's perfectly natural, so many systems follow Pareto. From Wikipedia:
- The sizes of human settlements (few cities, many hamlets/villages)
- File size distribution of Internet traffic which uses the TCP protocol (many smaller files, few larger ones)
- Hard disk drive error rates
- Clusters of Bose–Einstein condensate near absolute zero
- The values of oil reserves in oil fields (a few large fields, many small fields)
- The length distribution in jobs assigned supercomputers (a few large ones, many small ones)
- The standardized price returns on individual stocks
- Sizes of sand particles
- The size of meteorites
- Severity of large casualty losses for certain lines of business such as general liability, commercial auto, and workers compensation.
- Amount of time a user on steam will spend playing different games. (Some games get played a lot, but most get played almost never.)
I will also add popularity of words in a language, and, the most popular instance: individual wealth distribution.
Given that you feel like the Pareto distribution can never be wrong I propose that we model all taxes accordingly.
After all it should be natural that very few people pay most taxes while most pay almost nothing.
Nothing about wealth distribution is natural. With the help of the Pareto distributed political power that installed the system in the first place wealth is controlling itself.
I'm 100% for progressive taxes (i.e. higher taxes on richer people). People should have decent lives even if they can't participate in the workforce/markets with great success.
It's just that the top 50% or top 10% or top 1% or top 0.1% will always hold disproportionate amount of wealth, and no system will change that. Under USSR the select few in the communist party had that wealth, although it wasn't expressed in dollars (or any other currency), but in the power and unquestionability of their decisions.
It's perfectly natural, so many systems follow Pareto. From Wikipedia:
- The sizes of human settlements (few cities, many hamlets/villages)
- File size distribution of Internet traffic which uses the TCP protocol (many smaller files, few larger ones)
- Hard disk drive error rates
- Clusters of Bose–Einstein condensate near absolute zero
- The values of oil reserves in oil fields (a few large fields, many small fields)
- The length distribution in jobs assigned supercomputers (a few large ones, many small ones)
- The standardized price returns on individual stocks
- Sizes of sand particles
- The size of meteorites
- Severity of large casualty losses for certain lines of business such as general liability, commercial auto, and workers compensation.
- Amount of time a user on steam will spend playing different games. (Some games get played a lot, but most get played almost never.)
I will also add popularity of words in a language, and, the most popular instance: individual wealth distribution.