Social Development Paradox: An E-CARGO Perspective on the Formation of the Pareto 80/20 Distribution
Haibin Zhu
Abstract
The Pareto 80/20 principle is extensively cited in discussing social distribution and is usually applied to explain phenomena in economics. However, little in the literature investigates the driving force of such phenomena. The known driving force may help decision makers be proactive in administering a society before it becomes unsustainable. The environments-classes, agents, roles, groups, and objects (E-CARGO) model and the role-based collaboration (RBC) methodology assist the formalization of group role assignment (GRA) problem, which models and solves the optimization problem for a group of agents to play a set of roles from the team’s perspective. Based on GRA, this article proposes a new way to investigate social development/distribution problems, such as the Pareto 80/20 principle, with computational social simulations. The proposed method is verified by experiments. This article reveals a social paradox: Emphasizing individual differences inevitably leads to rapid social wealth accumulation and polarization and ignoring such disparities certainly causes slow social wealth accumulation.