| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013841)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013841" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2807 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| Pareto and His Garden: 80/20 and |
| Freedom from Futility |
| What gets measured gets managed. |
| - PETER DRUCKER, management theorist, author of 31 books, recipient of Presidential Medal of |
| Freedom |
| Four years ago, an conomist changed my life forever. I's a shame I never had a chance lo buy him a |
| drink. My dear Vilfredo died almost 100 years ago. |
| Vilfredo Pareto was a wily and controversial economist-cum-sociologist who lived from 1848 to 1923. |
| An engineer by training, he started his varied career managing coal mines and later succeeded Léon |
| Walras as the chair of political economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. His seminal work, |
| Cours d'economie politique, included a then little-explored "law" of income distribution that would later |
| bear his name: "Pareto's Law" or the "Pareto Distribution," in the last decade also popularly called the |
| "80/20 Principle." |
| The mathematical formula he used to demonstrate a grossly uneven but predictable distribution of |
| wealth in society —80% of the wealth and income was produced and possessed by 20% of the population |
| -also applied outside of economics. Indeed, it could be found almost everywhere. Eighty percent of |
| Pareto's garden peas were produced by 20% of the peapods he had planted, for example. |
| Pareto's Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs. |
| Alternative ways to phrase this, depending on the context, include: |
| 80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes. |
| 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time. |
| 80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers. |
| 80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio. |
| The list is infinitely long and diverse, and the ratio is often skewed even more severely: 90/10, 95/5, and |
| 99/1 are not uncommon, but the minimum ratio to seek is 80/20. |
| When I came across Pareto's work one late evening, I had been slaving away with 15-hour days seven |
| days per week, feeling completely overwhelmed and generally helpless. I would wake up before dawn to |
| make calls to the United Kingdom, handle the U.S. during the normal 9-5 day, and then work until near |
| midnight making calls to Japan and New Zealand. I was stuck on a runaway freight train with no brakes, |
| shoveling coal into the furnace for lack of a better option. Faced with certain burnout or giving Pareto's |
| ideas a trial run, I opted for the latter. The next morning, I began a dissection of my business and |
| personal life through the lenses of two questions: |
| 1. Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness? |
| 2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness? |
| For the entire day, I put aside everything seemingly urgent and did the most intense truth-baring |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013841 |
|
|
